(Originally published in The California Aggie) If you’ve been reading this column with any semblance of regularity, then you must have figured out one thing about me: I see a ton of movies. Some are good, some are bad and a select few are great. As a token of my appreciation to you, dear readers, […]
(Originally published in The California Aggie) Experts may say the Internet is cutting down on face-to-face human interaction, but it’s also provided us with some of the greatest forums for social observation the world has ever seen. I’m talking about the dozens of websites that have popped up in the last five years that allow […]
(Originally published in The California Aggie) The Bechdel Test goes something like this: In a given movie, 1. Are there at least two female characters? 2. Do they talk to each other? and 3. Do they talk to each other about something other than a man? Think back to some of your favorite movies. Chances […]
(Originally published in The California Aggie) The way I see it, stand-up comedy comes in a couple of different varieties. There’s the family-friendly kind, which sticks to G-rated topics – the likes of which can be found on any number of TBS comedies. There’s the PG or PG-13 kind that isn’t afraid to make a […]
(Originally published in The California Aggie) A doctoral candidate at the State University of New York at Buffalo named Roberta Price applied for a grant in 1969 to travel west. She was to document the hippie communes that were springing up in the deserts of New Mexico and Colorado. Price got the grant and headed […]
(Originally published in The California Aggie) Twenty-seven times last year, I got off the couch and drove at least 15 minutes to a movie theater that was neither spotlessly clean nor particularly memorable. I stood in line to buy a $10.50 ticket, picked my way through screaming kids and empty popcorn buckets and found a […]
(Originally published in The California Aggie) What is it about 13-year-old Rebecca Black’s music video “Friday” that makes you want to simultaneously laugh, groan and cover your ears? Is it Black’s nasal, Auto-Tuned voice? The background chorus of fist-pumping middle-schoolers? The wannabe-Flo Rida limo driver? Nah. You know it’s the lyrics. The song (a bona-fide […]
(Originally published in The California Aggie) I’m a twin. I like movies. But I don’t like twins in movies. This may sound paradoxical. I rarely meet any other twins in my everyday life (though there are two other sets in my family), so you’d think I’d enjoy seeing people similar to myself represented in popular […]
Be afraid of television. Be very, very afraid. Sidney Lumet’s Network and Peter Weir’s The Truman Show must use the same crystal ball, because both have looked into the future of television and both come to that very conclusion. The question is, what should we be more afraid of […]
(Originally published by Stanford News Service) La Caricature was The Colbert Report of 19th-century France. The weekly Parisian journal may have been printed 180 years ago, but its scathing critique of the French monarchy and government officials has never felt more relevant. On Aug. 1, the Cantor Arts Center will present “When Artists Attack the King: Honoré Daumier and La Caricature, […]
Robin Migdol 