Television “Reality-television fans have high standards for artifice” Author Drew Kaplan Date 21 February 2021 Reality-television fans have high standards for artifice, which needs to seem both believable and...
Movies, Music, Star Wars “Modern fantasy began with the release of George Lucas’s ‘Star Wars’, in 1977, which paid homage to the ‘Flash Gordon’ and ‘Buck Rogers’ serials of the thirties” Author Drew Kaplan Date 13 September 2020 Modern fantasy began with the release of George Lucas’s “Star Wars,” in 1977, which...
Movies, Music “It is an astonishing cultural transformation: the “Ride” remade into an anthem of American supremacy. This displacement is of a piece with other troubling historical continuities of the postwar era: Nazi scientists migrating to America, Gestapo-style torture techniques resurfacing in Iraq, the cult of the sculpted body perpetuating Riefenstahl’s Aryan ideal” Author Drew Kaplan Date 13 September 2020 It is an astonishing cultural transformation: the “Ride” remade into an anthem of American...
Movies, Music “‘Apocalypse’ soon became a military fetish object, its Wagner scene influencing real-life behavior” Author Drew Kaplan Date 13 September 2020 The entrance of the main Valkyrie motif coincides with a wide shot of fourteen...
Movies, Music “The ‘Ride’ seems a foreordained choice for the helicopter operation in ‘Apocalypse Now'” Author Drew Kaplan Date 13 September 2020 For decades before Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now,” aerial warfare had been stirring thoughts of the...
Television “…long before the age of quarantine, kids under the age of six spent a crazy amount of time indoors, watching television, a bleary-eyed average of fifty-four hours a week” Author Drew Kaplan Date 24 July 2020 Half a century ago, before “Sesame Street,” and long before the age of quarantine,...
Movies “The only observation that feels true is that ‘Tiger King’ is what we watched two weeks into our isolation” Author Drew Kaplan Date 17 April 2020 “Tiger King” is prestige trash: narratively ambitious but self-aware. True crime is far from...
Movies View Post Author Drew Kaplan Date 17 April 2020 Chailkin and Goode are less interested in getting to the truth of the matter...
Movies Tiger King’s “choice of inspirational comparison – a mockumentary – is telling” Author Drew Kaplan Date 17 April 2020 As Goode recently told Rolling Stone, “What fascinated Rebecca and I was the ‘Best...
Books “The plague novel is the place where all human beings abandon all other human beings” Author Drew Kaplan Date 6 April 2020 The structure of the modern plague novel, all the way to Stephen King’s “The...