Movie Review: The Giver

A humanity problem sits at the heart of my dissatisfaction with the current string of dystopian YA films. This doesn’t really surprise me. By their nature dystopic visions extend contemporary concerns to their logical extreme. When Ray Bradbury is concerned that American culture is losing touch with the traditional literary canon he writes Fahrenheit 451. Anxieties about the dehumanizing effects of post-industrial capitalism fuel The Hunger Games, and similar concerns about the expansion of Marxism give rise to Atlas Shrugged (a more appropriately ambivalent gesture for such a deeply needless film cannot be imagined).

Redbox Review: Enemy

With Redbox Review it is my hope to answer a simple question, to wit: having decided not to see a particular movie in the theater, is it worth the $1.25 to rent that movie from your local Redbox?

In his 1973 monograph The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry the literary critic Harold Bloom hypothesized that in attempting to create a new work a poet must engage in a struggle with influence of those poets who have gone before. “Strong poets,” Bloom argues, are those who successfully create new and original work despite the influence of the past.