hilarious and horrifying; bracing election-year fare. it’s a great send up of producers – Dustin H in an actually kind of restrained and lovingly rendered Robert Evansesque turn. jam-packed with industry-licious detail.

I was somehow in the right frame of mind to watch this – on an airplane, and in mid-break up with (from?) someone who is more inclined to live in the desert, with creatures, than nearby to me. It is a beautiful and contemplative and sometimes extreme film. not really a popcorn movie.

Not your police procedural Henning Mankell. I found this quiet spare novel to be deeply frightening. Drenched with loneliness and the sense of impending doom that comes with the construction of intricate fictions. Not for the vulnerable.

more pictures of a screaming (and running) latke, then perhaps ever assembled in one book! great for hannukah- and xmas-celebrating households everywhere.

Is it possible to generalize about mysteries in cold northern places? Jar City is a book that lines up with Ekman and Mankell with spare language and emotional resonance and an evocative sense of contemporary social context. This Icelandic cop struggles bleakly with his own difficult relationship with his drug addicted daughter while he investigates a series of absent and missing parents and children. Dark, cool, satisfying.

I just saw Network again for the first time in years. It feels spookier than ever, now because it’s so eerily relevent even after decades of the same. What may have seemed at the time to be a sort of end of days extreme of corporate media dominance, is more norm than ever. grim grim.

This is an extremely cogent and opinionated account of US copyright history and its problematics for culture workers and creativity. Well-researched and accessible, written with clarity and studded with entertaining anecdotes. I’m a huge fan of Vaidhyanathan – and his commitment to free expression, equity, and revealing the cultural context and biases of our legal framework for intellectual property.

This book is a fascinating social history of garbage in the US. It reads kind of like a thriller – well researched, tasty anecdotes, provocative. A delicious book about waste!

Not the greatest flick ever, by far. But somehow I really appreciated it. I think it’s the over the top yet loving period-detail of it. And Owen Wilson makes Ben Stiller funnier. Plus Will Farrell folks.

No answers here, but a good range of pop culture opining on how why the N word gets used on whom at whom by whom. And a fair dose of history too. Lots of people you know, heavy on the actors, comedians, music folk but also some academics and telling renditions of Langston Hughes, Mark Twain and Saul Williams among other wordsmiths. Entertaining and engaging – not definitive – but what feature-length documentary really could be on this topic?