All the black characters in my next movie are played by Tyler Perry which proves I’m not racist!

I finger-banged a girl I met in the lobby during my first (partial) viewing of The Empire Strikes Back and stayed for the next showing because I missed all that “I am your father” stuff.

A dish with lots of ingredients is not de facto better than a dish with few ingredients. A painting with more colors is not automatically better than one with fewer. And art with multiple cultural influences and perspectives is not better than art with a more singular approach.

The list can go on forever but the essential point is that best of the horror genre refuse to define exactly what the monster terrorized the flawed humans is and allows the viewer to play the game.

On the ListServ (a prehistoric version of Faceborg and Twitter) you find a thread espousing the new GOP-driven “Contract with America.” Users with fake names espousing the “Taking Back Our Streets Act” and the “Personal Responsibility Act” and conspiracy theories about then President Bill Clinton and his “manly” First Lady.

“Who pays attention to this shit?” you ask after perusing the thread for three hours. The irony is lost on you.

Written by Martin McDonagh (a playwright and screenwriter known for dark satires like The Cripple of Inishmaan, The Pillowman, and films like In Bruges and Seven Psychopaths) Three Billboards… eschews the easy answers of a Good vs. Evil narrative and presents a comic tale of complicated humans doing complicated things for complicated reasons. Of course, it's "problematic."

As we roll into the Christmas Season, we are confronted with the dichotomy of being the fat, lazy, imperialist nation of consuming hordes that we are with the presence of unprecedented generosity of spirit that the holiday tends to bring out in the best of us. We are slapped in the jaw with the fact that we love our families even if we ignore them for most of the year. We look around and figure out ways to show appreciation to those we love and mercy for those we don't.

And we watch movies about how other people deal with this state.

I love Christmas and I love movies about Christmas. Here's my list of the movies about this time of year that I truly love.

...that if your allegiance is to a symbol rather than people, to a song rather than citizens, you *might* be a racist or you *might* not be a racist but you are definitely a jackass.

Back in college I took a film class. This wasn’t about how to make movies, but how to appreciate them as an art form and as visual literature. It was a dope course. We watched Clerks.

This academic pursuit like most required writing papers. Fortunately, it was only one.

Herr Professor needed to know you understood what concepts had been conveyed. So you could choose to apply these critical reasonings to either: a scene from a film of your choosing watched out of class or a music video.