A Curious Little Blog

I don't go to see many movies, but "Peppermint" is definitely a kind I enjoy.  I would have appreciated a lot more backstory such as "Man on Fire" had.  Even the line from the trailer, which explains the film's title, is missing from the final cut.  I definitely see the limitations of this movie, but the reaction among the literati has been predictably misguided.  According to the New York Times review , "the film plays dangerously into violent Latino stereotypes. One blood bath takes place in a piñata warehouse, where Riley mows down Diego’s unsuspecting gang one by one...All of the dead appear to be Latinos (save for a couple of Korean mob allies), but she leaves the sole white guy working there alive in order to interrogate him." (The following may contain spoilers.)  Let's start with the obvious problem:  all the dead are Latinos except the ones that aren't?  It wouldn't be credible to attack the idea of a Latino drug gang in ...

"Atlas Shrugged" by Ayn Rand I knew about Ayn Rand a long time ago, and I read "The Virtue of Selfishness" in high school. I wasn't too impressed with it, and Objectivism seemed a fringe movement, so I didn't make an effort to read her more famous works. Two things changed my position. The first was reading an article in which the author criticized Rand's followers for misreading her (he was completely wrong, it turns out). The second was the discovery that Alan Greenspan and Paul Ryan are both big fans of Ayn Rand. If major public figures are influenced by her thought, I wanted to know more about it.   So I read "Atlas Shrugged," her largest and most famous novel. The first thing you would notice about this book, whether you read it or not, is that it is extraordinarily long. It is estimated at 645,000 words. By comparison, "Les Miserables" is only 531,000 words. "War and Peace" is 587,000. The Old Tes...