An interesting take on vigilante films, such as Death Wish and for that matter, Dirty Harry: "But film critics are such inveterate moralists, directing their principled scorn on every deviation from strict correctness and crossing with the light, right? Not in any world we’ve seen. Something in the vigilante film seems to foment a strident exception to typically (and reasonably) agnostic...

I recently had one of those eye opening web surfing sessions where I find lots of new awesome stuff to explore. I was checking up on the progress of Raspberry Pi, itself a very exciting project to make and sell an ARM-based PC board for $35. They say: We want to see cheap, accessible, programmable computers everywhere; we actively encourage other companies to clone what we’re doing. We w...

I listen a lot to Radio 3, the classical music channel, especially first thing in the morning. This inevitably involves listening to BBC news bulletins, which can be quite an ordeal. This morning, as my brain surfaced into consciousness, I heard a strange item, about how the government intends to switch the subsidies it gives to the British movie industry towards more popular movies, presumably aw...

PM wants film-makers to shift their focus from art house movies to more ‘commercially successful pictures’ that can rival Hollywood

One of the Chicago Boyz, the one who goes by the name "onparkstreet", recently posted a question that I had pretty much given up asking myself at all regularly: Where Have You Been Whit Stillman? He links to this, where we encounter the news that, wherever Whit Stillman may have been for the last decade (while apparently failing to finish other movies) he is now back in business, with a new, compl...

Whether the issues are terrorism, AGW, contagious diseases, the movies of Charlie Sheen (that was a joke), today's advocates of Big Government often look to the Transnational solution. Let's have one government! No more hiding places for bad people! As readers might recall, I have written a few times about tax havens and the importance of the freedom of people to migrate not just their p...

This quiz will identify your favorite movie title, guaranteed! I found this at Joshuapundit and could not believe that anything could pick my favorite title from a list of 17 movies. Incredibly, it did! Follow these simple instructions, don't look ahead and you will be amazed that this can work. 1. Pick a number from 1-9; 2. Multiply by 3; 3. Add 3; 4. Multiply by 3 again; 5. Now add the two ...

This amazing quiz can predict which of 17 movies you would enjoy the most.. I don't know how it works, but it does. Play fair, and do the math first before you look at the list: 1. Pick a number from 1-9. 2. Multiply by 3. 3. Add 3. 4. Multiply by 3 again. 5.. Now add the two digits of your answer together. Scroll down to find your favorite movie in the list of 17 movies below and prepare to ...

There are not many TV dramas that inspire the name of a group of revolutionary socialists, but the 1969 BBC Wednesday Play does have that distinction. In these days of YouTube, DVDs and Catch Up TV, it is hard to recall how different the social context of broadcasting was back in 1969. There were just three

A clip from John Sayles’s magisterial film about the miners’ strike in West Virginia in 1920 that led to the Matewan massacre; and the subsequent battle of Blair Mountain. The Matewan battle was a key event in American labour history, as the mayor of the town, Sid Hatfield deputised a number of striking miners, and they had an