Category Archives: This Stinks
Review: Newsroom Season 1
I just finished watching The Newsroom. To the show’s credit, I watched it pretty compulsively, including the last 3 episodes in a row. But it always felt like a guilty pleasure, even though its supporters say it is serious cultural commentary.
Franzenpane
Johnathan Franzen is a New York Times best selling author who concocts delicious candy-like fiction and bills it as high literature. Freedom and The Corrections both have the taste-bud tingling excitement you would expect from really good stories but provide calories without nourishment. Franzen’s gut is right in both novels. He senses there is a struggle in the contemporary conversation to understand how to course correct a life gone wrong. It is actually the secularist wondering how confession works without god.
The Problem with Happiness
Visioneers stars Zach Galifianakis as George Washington Winsterhammerman, a middle manager at hyper-corporation Jeffers Co. He lives in a satirized version of modernity where everyone is dominated by a fear of exploding from stress (literally). The defining desire of this world is a need for happiness. Something that seems to evade every character in the movie except George’s brother [...]
