The Door to Changing Your Mind

To change your thinking, cross thresholds. This is true both metaphorically and literally. Studies have shown that when we move from one room to another, our short-term memory of our environment "resets" and dumps data on the previous room, which is no longer required. But with that goes some other stuff. This is the explanation for why we go into another room for something, and then forget what it was when we get there.

How Blue Was My Beetle

Back from The Blue Beetle, a back-to-basics superhero movie with a theme about family feeling (a motif it shares with the two Shazam films). 

It will remind audience members of both Iron Man and The Greatest American Hero (the idealistic young protagonist has an alien super-suit that he can’t quite operate).

I was surprised to see that the movie directly ties into the previous Charlton Comics and DC Comics incarnations of the Blue Beetle, a character that in one form or another reaches all the way back to 1939. Jack Kirby’s OMAC is in there as well. 

This makes for a richer story, yet manages to sidestep the pitfalls of too much clunky background baggage.

The film is surprisingly straightforward about the malignancy of class oppression and the military-industrial complex, a fact that works to make the climax thrilling and satisfying. Xolo Maridueña is appealing as the hero, and Susan Sarandon is effective as the cheerfully amoral, bright-as-a-poisonous-penny corporate CEO villain Victoria Kord.

Seated in a cinema with only two other people, I had virtually a private showing — an agreeable way to while away an August afternoon.

Comic book fans should be sure to stay for a post-credits surprise.

The Demi-Beagle Lays Down the Law

George’s Rules

1) Motor scooters and bicycles are forbidden.

2) Horses are an outrage.

3) How dare squirrels exist.

4) The pillows are mine. I have plans for them.

5) Paul may not sneeze. Others may, but not Paul.

The real George the beagador.

Re: The Perfect Film

I have a mental category of "perfect films," by which I mean movies in which every minute works, and every second ticks toward a satisfying conclusion. They don't have to be great art, though many of them are.

Off the top of my head: “Chinatown,” “Sunset Boulevard,” “The Apartment,” “Pillow Talk,” “Life with Father,” “I Remember Mama,” “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” the 1933 “King Kong,” the 1978 “Superman…”

I posted that on the TCM fan Facebook page and got an ongoing tsunami in response... hundreds of nominations from movie lovers.

'Oppenheimer:' A Breathtaking Dramatic Detonation

Bart and I just saw Oppenheimer, a staccato film composed of time-hopping vignettes that nevertheless maintains an absolutely clear narrative line. 

This is really an intellectual history, but exactly the reverse of the kind of dry didacticism that phrase suggests. Director Christopher Nolan covers the ethical, political and social implications of the creation of nuclear weapons, focused through the lens of a handful of top actors at the top of their game. 

Against the backdrop of a threat to human civilization that has never really diminished, Nolan even points us toward an ending that’s a mystery and a solution as satisfying as anything that Hercule Poirot ever showed us.

This is a movie like Chinatown, like Sunset Boulevard and a few others — a film that will live on and on.

Monkeys with Money and Guns

Those who confront lies with documented facts are branded as liars themselves by the corrupt, the know-nothings and the moral cowards who foolishly claim that truth is only a yellow line down the middle of the road.

I always hoped we might someday achieve something that we could refer to as "civilization" without laughing in derision.

When the Virgin Mary Appears in a Pancake...

Let’s give the science-vs-religion problem a shave with Occam's Razor, shall we? 

The world is chock full of claptrap religions making fantastic, contradictory, supernatural claims for which no credible witness ever sees any supporting evidence, unless you want to count the Virgin Mary appearing on pancakes and wall stains. 

What's the simplest answer? Is it more likely that all those fantastic, unseen miracles have happened, and that for example the universe actually does rest on the shell of a cosmic turtle, or that the people who make those claims are delusional and/or lying?

I'm afraid that once you let irrationality in the door — defined in this case as the ardent acceptance on "faith" of metaphysical assertions without visible evidence — you can hardly claim to be surprised about what comes in along with it. One person's "God" tells him to take communion, and the next person's "God" instructs him to kill everyone at an abortion clinic.