Tag: opinion

Ponty’s Top 3 Halloween Picks 2024

The Portly Politico19 Comments

Pickup my newest release: Spooky Season III!  Use promo code spooky to take an additional 20% off all purchases on Bandcamp!  Code expires at 11:59 PM UTC on Thursday, 31 October 2024.

Last Wednesday I posted “My Neighbor’s Halloween Movie Recommendations” to a great deal of fanfare.  It was a solid list, leaning a bit more heavily towards the classics.  Naturally, I knew our English correspondent, Pontiac Dream 39, would have some thoughts on the list.

As is often the case, I was right.  Ponty offered up his top three picks in the comments section.  Always on the lookout for easy—uh, I mean, quality—content, I asked the good bloke from across the pond to consider putting together a more extensive “explainer” of his choices.

Happily, he obliged.  Few writers put together a movie review better than good old Ponty, especially when he either loves or hates a film.  In this case, his love for these three flicks—and they are all, assuredly, classics—shines through, as does his acumen for writing a crackerjack film review.

With that, here are Ponty’s Top 3 Halloween Picks for 2024 (I’m hoping if I add “for 2024,” it means he’ll do more next year!):

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Monday Morning Movie Review: The Exorcist III (1990)

The Portly Politico16 Comments

Sequels can be a dicey proposition.  The mentality with most sequels is “the same, but bigger”—build upon what made the original film successful and lovable, but with more of it.  That formula seems to work in terms of generating cash, but tends to leave audiences leaving with the sensation that what they saw was “good, but not as good as the original.”

The Exorcist III (1990), which ignores the events of the (so I have heard) disastrous Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977), is certainly “not as good as the original,” but it is still very good.  It’s a film that takes a few viewings to drink everything in, but it’s worth the effort.  Indeed, I’d argue it is an underappreciated masterpiece.

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SubscribeStar Saturday: Our Digital Future: SATurday II

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Pickup my newest release: Spooky Season III!  Use promo code spooky to take an additional 20% off all purchases on Bandcamp!  Code expires at 11:59 PM UTC on Thursday, 31 October 2024.

Today’s post is a SubscribeStar Saturday exclusive.  To read the full post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more.  For a full rundown of everything your subscription gets, click here.

Yours portly is ready to deliver the content his readers, paid and otherwise, crave:  commentary on the new digital SAT administration.

That’s right, friends, yours portly is spending this beautiful Saturday morning in a room with kids taking the SAT.  I’m specifically in the extended testing room, which is a long administration but means more money.  The idea of being paid to sit here and write self-indulgent blog posts while three kids gawk on standardized test questions fills me with the kind of glee that only union workers and government bureaucrats feel:  the glee of getting one over on the rest of society by suckling at the bloated teat of an inefficient system.

But as I wipe the corrosive milkfat from my chubby cheeks, I must take a moment to do the unthinkable:  I must extol the virtues of this new digital administration.

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Monday Morning Movie Review: Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024)

The Portly Politico17 Comments

Yesterday I returned to the movies to catch Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024), the sequel to Tim Burton’s oddball Beetlejuice (1988), a long thirty-six years later.  I am not a huge fan of the original film, although I do appreciate its originality and its rather bleak depiction of an afterlife that consists of a tedious bureaucracy.  The idea that we go to the DMV when we shed this mortal coil is a fairly convincing depiction of Hell—or, perhaps less blasphemously, limbo.

Regardless, I’d heard good things about the sequel from friends and YouTube film reviewers, so I figured I would give it a shot.  The buzz was that the sequel is not merely a shameless cash grab based on an established, beloved IP, but was actually a good movie in its own right.  Also, all of my weird friends have seen it, and one must keep up with the Joneses, as it were.

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Monday Morning Movie Review: Blazing Saddles (1974)

The Portly Politico5 Comments

Growing up in the mid-to-late-1990s, I experienced the golden age of cable television, when you could pretty much always find some classic movie just casually screening in syndication at 2 PM on a Saturday.  I also experienced the golden age of cheap DVDs, which saw classic movies just casually released onto an affordable format at my local Target.

The first DVD I ever purchased was either O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2001) or today’s film, Blazing Saddles (1974).  My memory is hazy on the point, but they both constitute my first two DVD purchases, and I know I only paid $5—in the early 2000s!—for the films.  Those two flicks should give you some insight into the impressionable young mind of a doughy young man chubbily flubbing his way through high school.

Blazing Saddles was one of those absurd Mel Brooks flicks that had just the right amount of wackiness and ribald situations to titillate and delight a total nerd like yours portly.  As a lifelong fan of Young Frankenstein (1974) and Spaceballs (1987), I naturally couldn’t resist this send-up of Westerners (and people’s hang-ups about race).

I had the opportunity to see Blazing Saddles on the big screen last night as part of one of those Fathom Events special screenings.  The flick has hit its 50th anniversary (as has Young Frankenstein), so it seems like a great time to review this film.

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SubscribeStar Saturday: Have We Forgotten?

The Portly Politico30 Comments

Today’s post is a SubscribeStar Saturday exclusive.  To read the full post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more.  For a full rundown of everything your subscription gets, click here.

This past Wednesday marked another observation of 9-11, the events of 11 September 2001.  While there were the usual tributes to the fallen, the observation seemed quite muted.

Perhaps we can chalk it up to the anniversary falling a Wednesday, the day of the week least-suited to hosting holidays both celebratory and reflective.  I suspect, however, that there is more to our forgetful ennui than the inconvenience of Wednesdays.

Consider that President Trump narrowly survived an assassination attempt earlier this summer.  Has anything really changed since then?  Has the Left and its media toned down its murderous rhetoric?

Instead, they’ve ludicrously claimed that he brought it upon himself—or that his team coordinated a fake assassination attempt.  Given the totally lax and inexperienced Secret Service detail, as well as the peeling away of President Trump’s most accomplished agents to cover some asinine speech from “Dr.” Jill Biden, these excuses smack of lame psychological projection.

Regardless of the hypocrisy of the Left—which isn’t going to change no matter how much we point it out—it’s clear that modern Americans have a woefully short memory about major events.  If we’ve already moved on from the failed assassination attempt against a President and presidential candidate, how can we be bothered to remember a series of devastating terrorist attacks from twenty-three years ago?

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Monday Morning Movie Review: In the Mouth of Madness (1994)

The Portly Politico11 Comments

Regular readers will know that I love John Carpenter films.  Indeed, two Carpenter films featured in the Top 3 of my favorite movies of all time—Big Trouble in Little China (1986) and The Thing (1982).  I’ll watch pretty much anything Carpenter directs.  He has such a distinct visual style, his films are instantly recognizable.

One Carpenter film I’ve always struggled with, though, is 1994’s In the Mouth of Madness.  I’ve probably watched this film three times—it’s a perennial offering on Shudder—and each time I love the aesthetics of it, and the iconic lines—“Do you read Sutter Cane?”—but I’m never quite sure what to make of it.

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Monday Morning Movie Review: B-Monster Movies: The Giant Gila Monster (1959) and Gorgo (1961)

The Portly Politico13 Comments

Yours portly had a pretty lazy (yet oddly productive) Saturday.  I spent a good bit of the day at the computer, hammering out some blog posts, tweaking some assignments for the first two weeks of school, playing some old video games.  I also did a bit of composing, and listed several new pieces for sale via Noteflight.

I also watched some schlocky old movies, as I am wont to do.  Shudder had a couple of B-movies featuring giant monsters wreaking havoc, both from the late 1950s and early 1960s—the golden age of loud, alarmist monster movies.

These classic monster movies are the kind of thing that would have aired on cable television in the 1990s on a dead, lazy Saturday or Sunday afternoon, when nothing else was worth watching.  You’d stumble upon them in your idle quest for entertainment, then nod off into a fitful, sweaty nap, maybe waking up as the beast undertaking its third-act rampage.  These airings would be buttressed by ninety-minute infomercials for vinyl siding, which you (or, at least, yours portly) would endure, hoping that it’s got to end any minute now, vainly waiting for the vinyl to sidle into some crumb of afternoon mediocrity.

I could see myself drifting off into a fitful, sweaty nap with these two films, The Giant Gila Monster (1959) and Gorgo (1961).  That’s not an indictment, though; while neither film is a masterpiece, both possess their own dated, nostalgic charm.

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TBT^256: Back to School with Richard Weaver

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The 2024-2025 school year resumes this coming Monday, 19 August 2024, and yours portly has already been back on campus for the past few days, busily preparing for another school year.

Without any warning, my administration has given me two sections of World History to teach, rather than my usual US History classes.  While they should have told me about the change two months ago, I’m excited to dive into a subject I have not taught in many years (the last time I taught the class was in the 2011-2012 school year, and I taught its kissing cousin, Western Civilization, off-and-on in 2014 and 2015 at the local technical college).

Last school year was a fairly brutal slog, and I’ve been alternatively dreading this year and looking forward to it.  Perhaps the opportunity to teach World History will reignite the spark (plus, World History is just cool).

But what of our good friend Richard Weaver and his book Ideas Have Consequences?  At the time of writing I haven’t dipped back into Weaver the way I would like, but I find that his ideas always help to crystallize for me what teaching and education are all about—the preservation of civilization for at least another generation.

With that, here is “TBT^16: Back to School with Richard Weaver“:

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Monday Morning Movie Review: Humane (2024)

The Portly Politico10 Comments

The Age of The Virus may be a distant memory now, one we’ve all done our best to forget collectively, but it revealed a great deal about the compliance of Westerners to technocratic authoritarianism in their respective nations.  Yes, there were pockets of ornery resistance—thank God I live in South Carolina!—but the full might of the weaponized media, elite toadies, and cat moms came out to scold us all for wanting to breathe free and enjoy public gatherings (the latter protected, albeit seemingly only on paper, in the First Amendment).

It’s little wonder that we try to suppress the memory of that benighted time, but like all such attempts to forget the past, it only serves as an unhealthy way to deal with deep trauma.  By pushing all of those bad memories down, we avoid thinking about the unpleasant consequences that our society-wide foolishness wrought.

Of course, part of that response is that everyone got super bored talking about The Virus because, after awhile, it did get boring.  Like all diseases, it reached its critical mass and then ebbed away, each new wave being less virulent, less lethal, and less widespread.  The Left seemed eager to memory-hole the entire thing, and the Right was just glad we didn’t have to read another boring article with a lot medical lingo that we all pretended to understand.  The Age of The Virus really did reveal how shallow and gutless we all are.

One realm in which the trauma has endured is film.  Whether intentionally or otherwise, it’s hard to suppress those memories in works of art; after all, art is, at least in part, an expression of our innermost feelings and struggles.  In vino veritas, yes, but also In arte veritas est.

The Age of The Virus crystallized a number of unpleasant Truths:  the cowardice of our populous; the brazen indifference and hypocrisy of our elites; and the paradoxical grasping to stay alive at all costs while viewing millions of other, “lesser” lives as expendable.  No film more aptly captures these wretched qualities of the twenty-first century developed world better than 2024’s Humane.

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