A cult classic that has only ripened since its release in 1998, a loony Chandler-noir featuring cannabis, White Russians, and a surfeit of bowling imagery, The Big Lebowski is an unforgettable comedy whose parts are greater than the whole (which is a whirling mishmash of action, absurdity, and subterfuge). These parts, outshining alone the film as a single impression, make up its many glorious...
“One day, when in the opinion of the world one has long been educated, one discovers oneself: that is where the task of the thinker begins; now the time has come to invoke his aid—not as an educator but as one who has educated himself and thus has experience.” –Friedrich Nietzsche Like many of those suffering through the dry, endless, prosaic hours of the classroom, I struggled...
The meeting of Bob and Charlotte is the meeting of two people, straying, despondent, groping in the desert of an existence, and disoriented by the foreignness of a culture emphasizing that they are adrift. Tokyo as the setting of the story brings out the loneliness of Bob and Charlotte, a swirling storm distilling its center, which is both the characters and the hotel refuge above the city;...
The number of books in the world is staggering, absorbing countless reams of paper bearing tiny black marks like a gargantuan wading ice floe covered with gnats. One could say that every year—an arbitrary but serviceable interval of time—most of this congeries of bound paper (totaling almost 130 million books as of 2010) is shuffled toward what littérateur and Everyman alike designate as oblivion...
In his snarky and incisive polemic satirizing the American class system, Class, Paul Fussell provides a tour-de-force panorama of what most Americans, especially those marinating in our current postmodern zeitgeist, would never acknowledge in polite company: that although all citizens in this Western democracy are equal under the law, possessing rights to life, liberty, and property, they are...
A young man emerging into the world and undertaking the burdens and trials of his looming adulthood undergoes two phases of linguistic development, of earnest cognitive growth. The first is adolescence and his early university years, when philosophy and literature—a fair bit of heavy reading—begin to interest him, filling his mind with torrid fancies and grandiose visions. The second is when he...
In the wintry world of the Klondike, located in the Yukon territory of northwestern Canada, an influx of prospectors searching for gold brought timeless fame to what was to become the mecca of many pioneers: The Klondike Gold Rush. Competing for immeasurable riches, pioneers and prospectors alike embodied the dueling instincts of avarice and survival, living on the border of fabulous riches and...
As an unprecedented success overtaking Titanic at the Japanese box office and becoming the highest-grossing film in Japanese history, winning worldwide acclaim and the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, Spirited Away has since solidified its stature as the preeminent Japanese animated film—an amalgam of dreamlike Japanese myth that has surpassed what is Japanese, exhibiting a timeless...
As the whimsical and wingless angel, second class, Clarence voices the fundamental theme of It’s a Wonderful Life, embodying its spirit of undying hope and resolute buoyancy: “Strange, isn’t it? Each man’s life touches so many other lives. When he isn’t around he leaves an awful hole, doesn’t he?” In the intimate town of Bedford Falls, New York, George Bailey envisions a future of travel and...
In Playtime, Jacques Tati creates a delightful modernity satirizing urbanity, technology, and confusion, delivering a paean to a hapless humanity dwelling in Paris, regimented with absurd furniture, lookalike vehicles, and countless windows of transparent glass. This is the tyranny of a time engulfed by the history to come, sometime between the pager and the internet, when the novelty of towering...