BilmBlog500

Even though I am a liberal, I have some mixed emotions regarding the environmental movement. If we end up with a choice between the last seal in the arctic or the last un-fracked farm and keeping human civilization going for a while longer, we'll keep civilization and nuke the seals. So I'm not sure what to think of Promised Land, a film directed by Gus Van Sant which has been doing the screening circuit ahead of an opening later this month.  The Variety Screening Series Q&A had producers/co-writers/stars Matt Damon and John Krasinski along with co-star Rosemarie DeWitt. Just to back up a bit, if you're not aware, "fracking" or hydraulic fracturing is a method of getting at natural gas which involves drilling down into shale, using a combination of water and chemicals to break up the shale and release the gas that's inside of it, and then get the gas above ground.  It's made a lot of natural gas more accessible.  As with clear-cut or mountain-top coal ...

Seen at Clearview's Chelsea Cinema; auditorium #1, Sunday March 16, 2008; 2 Slithy Toads, maybe So I should have listened to Stanley Kauffmann on this one. Over the years, this long-time film critic for The New Republic has been my compadre; the one critic more than any other who speaks to my own tastes in movies. It was bitter solace when I was writing film reviews for The Michigan Daily in college, ran up in my final semester against an editor who did not appreciate me, and saw Stanley Kauffmann pick up on some of the same things in his review of Compromising Positions that I had mentioned in a spiked review of the movie. Which as I recall was replaced with one that ended with a line about seltzer in pants. And Stanley Kauffmann gave a thumbs-down on Paranoid Park. But..., the reviews were all over the map, I kind of liked the coming attraction, the release broadened from theatres where I didn't have discount tickets to one where I did, there haven't been a lot of mo...