Postmodern Renaissance Culture Revolutionary

I am not ashamed to admit that I absolutely LOVE the movie The Greatest Showman. The soundtrack sold me on this movie. I wake up every morning with a different song from the soundtrack playing in my head. The music is catchy and somewhat addictive (for me at least). If there is one song that I come back to over and again, played as loud as possible, it is This Is Me. It is performed by Keala Settle. I had not heard of her before this movie. She performs this song as the anthem of the story. The Greatest Showman is about P.T. Barnum and the beginning of his famous circus. It started out as a freakshow, according to the movie. Barnum collected those whom "polite" society regarded as freaks, oddities, and cast them out. Barnum offers them the chance to be something more. In This Is Me, the Bearded Lady (Settle) is confronted with that polite society as she sings about the life that she and her fellow circus attractions claim for their own. This song hit me hard. It came ...

I love comic books. I've been reading them as long as….well as long as I've been reading. I remember some of my earliest comic books were when I was in the second or third grade. And superhero comics are a big part of my collection. Yes, I collect comic books also. Spider-man has always been one of my heroes. And the Avengers were my favorite superhero team. But there is only one comic book series that I have collected almost every copy of and the accompanying toys (yes, I collect dolls….erm, action figures). When G.I. Joe hit the shelves in the early '80's, I grabbed the first copy. I still have it. Nope, it's not worth anything, so don't come looking for it. It is ripped and stained and frayed on the edges. It has no monetary value. But its condition should tell you where its value lies. I read and read that book over and over. This was not the story of G.I. Joe, the soldiers of World War 2. This was not the story of G.I. Joe, the toy soldier and adventurer ...

Our household is filled with Disney fandom. So when a new movie comes out, especially an animated film, we are pretty quick to go see it. Wall-E came out this last week. And if you haven't been touched by the Disney propaganda machine, then I will provide a brief plot summary. Wall-E is apparently the last working robot left on Earth to clean up the mess that consumerist Earthlings (Stuff-ans) have made while the Stuff-ans have launched themselves into space aboard a trans-galactic luxury liner. Wall-E scrounges around the urban landscape compacting the leftovers of human civilzation. He encounters the humans when he hitchhikes aboard a probe ship and causes havok among the "civilized" robots and humans. There were a lot of themes followed in this movie. Environmentalism and consumerism were the most obvious with their most catastrophic ends being protrayed. But for me, the real movement of the movie came through in the idea of becoming more than what your "directi...

If you saw the new movie list, you know that the second installment of The Chronicles of Narnia, Prince Caspian, came out this last weekend. Seeing as our boys loved The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, we made an opening weekend screening part of our plans. I didn't mess with reading any pre-reviews. I also didn't bother to read the book. The first was probably not a big issue. The second one was a mistake. I should have refreshed my memory of the original story. The foreboding doom of that last statement should not in any way reflect on the movie itself. It was a great movie. The quality of the acting was a little better. The scenery was, of course, beautiful. The story moved along at a good enough pace. And the action. Oh the bloodless violent action. For all the hacking and slashing that happened in the movie, it was truly amazing that bloodshed was kept at a minimum. Unrealistically so. But its a kids movie. Thankfully the blood was at a minimum. You have to realize ...