Sonny Bunch is managing editor of the Washington Free Beacon. Prior to joining the Beacon, he served as a staff writer at the Washington Times, an assistant editor at The Weekly Standard, and an editorial assistant at Roll Call. He has also worked at the public relations and nonprofit management firm Berman and Company. Sonny’s work has appeared in the above outlets, the Wall Street Journal, Commentary, the New Atlantis, Policy Review, and elsewhere. A 2004 graduate of the University of Virginia, Sonny lives in Washington, D.C. His Twitter handle is @SonnyBunch.
Buzzfeed’s Michael Hastings has an excellent story up on the imprisonment of John McTiernan, best known as the director of Die Hard, Predator, and The Hunt for Red October. He was sentenced to a year in prison for lying to a FBI agent, a trumped-up charge that stems from an overly aggressive prosecution … by a lawyer who, it seems, auditioned for McTiernan:
The Fast and Furious films are James Bond flicks for the Ryan Lochte set. As is the case with the Bond movies, one needn’t see every entry in the gear-head series to understand what’s happening.
Yesterday, the New York Times profiled Zack Snyder and Man of Steel, his forthcoming Superman film. The whole thing is worth reading; I want to hone in on one point Snyder makes:
Mr. Snyder recognized that “Man of Steel” did not fit neatly into his oeuvre of stylized B-movies like his “Dawn of the Dead” remake and “300,” a retelling of the battle of Thermopylae, but he said he saw overarching connections.
“I feel like my movies have always been very subversive, even when people haven’t perceived how subversive they really are,” he said confidently. “For me, what’s subversive about Superman is that it’s not subversive.”
I find this comment interesting, if only because I’ve recently been thinking about how perfectly the idea of Superman fits into the worldview of Snyder’s oeuvre. He is, in his own weird way, a filmmaker who is relentlessly optimistic about the human condition.
The Internet (and by the Internet, I mean “Twitter”) erupted into a cacophonous fit of righteous fury last night when the creator of the “GIF” file format strenuously denounced the OED for suggesting that GIF could be pronounced with either a soft or a hard g.
[Steve Wilhite] is proud of the GIF, but remains annoyed that there is still any debate over the pronunciation of the format.
“The Oxford English Dictionary accepts both pronunciations,” Mr. Wilhite said. “They are wrong. It is a soft ‘G,’ pronounced ‘jif.’ End of story.”
Of course, when someone says “end of story” it is never actually the end of the story. If it was the end of the story, you wouldn’t have to announce it; the story would be over, the fight settled, the victor declared, etc. The fight is not over. Wilhite and his ilk are losing. And they should. Because GIF is pronounced with a hard g.
I tend to leave the rap-blogging to Mr. Charette; that’s his scene. But I cannot abide the latest silliness from the American Enterprise Institute’s Stan Veuger, who has included Warren G’s “Regulate” in his list of “The 21 greatest conservative rap songs of all time.” His misreading of the events depicted in that ditty are so egregious—so monumental—that they must be disputed.
Veuger writes:
I’m less concerned by the events of last night’s Mad Men—which was an incoherent mess that taught us nothing new about any of the characters (“Don Draper’s childhood was awful! The 60s were weird! Stan has a crush on Peggy! Black people are scary!*”) while laying on the symbolism so thick that it swiftly metastasized into SYMBOLISM!—than the reactions to last night’s Mad Men. It was a prime example of “interesting” television.
The Internet has had a good bit of fun with the husband and wife who own Amy’s Baking Company, a restaurant in Arizona. To recap: After a disastrous appearance on Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares, the proprietors took to social media to defend themselves and their business.
It did not go well.
I don’t really feel the need to pile on in that regard; the link above will give you a good sense on just how poorly they handled the situation. I do think it’s worth taking a moment to move beyond the snickering and consider what prompted the meltdown in the first place in order to see what we, the humble viewer, can learn.
In my review of Star Trek Into Darkness, I wrote that “There’s an ill-advised and entirely unresolved subplot that involves war with the Klingons, worry about blowback from what amounts to a drone strike, and the militarization of Starfleet.” I’d like to modify this criticism just a bit in a spoiler-heavy post after the jump. But the thrust is this: Star Trek Into Darkness is actually a crypto-neocon defense of the necessity and morality of drone strikes. (Don’t worry, nerds: While there are heavy spoilers I won’t reveal the name of the villain since that’s all we you seem to care about.)
J.J. Abrams’ first Star Trek film faced a daunting challenge. It had to accomplish three not-necessarily-complementary goals in just over two hours.
Listen, you f—ers, you screwheads. Here is a man who would not take it anymore. A man who stood up against the scum. —Travis Bickle
As you may have heard, Kevin Williamson made the leap from “National Review writer” to “Great American Hero” last night when he decided that enough was enough, that he could no longer idly stand by and watch the shameful state of affairs in our nation’s theaters go unchallenged, that he had to take matters into his own hands. From his account:
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