Sonny Bunch is executive editor of the Washington Free Beacon. He also writes a weekly column for the Washington Post's website and is a cohost of the Weekly Substandard podcast. 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. Sonny’s writing has appeared in the above outlets, the Wall Street Journal, Commentary, National Review, the New Atlantis, Policy Review, and elsewhere. He has also worked at the public relations and nonprofit management firm Berman and Company. A 2004 graduate of the University of Virginia, Sonny lives in Virginia. His Twitter handle is @SonnyBunch.
I know that subtlety isn’t really Spike Lee’s thing, but even with that knowledge, I was still a little surprised by how didactic BlacKkKlansman managed to be—and how much it damaged the overall tone and flow of the picture.
Mile 22 doesn’t deal in platitudes so much as luxuriate in them, elevate them. James Silva (Mark Wahlberg) and his team of American paramilitary operatives are “option three”—when diplomacy and the military fail, you call in Overwatch to clean up the mess.
The Meg is about a giant shark escaping from the nether regions of the ocean’s floor in order to kill a handful of people before itself being killed.
On the latest episode of the Substandard, I tell a story about using Twitter for good, and how even in the process of using Twitter for good you kind of have to use it for evil. If you don’t want the story spoiled, listen now (it’s in the first 20 minutes of the show) and then come back here for some visual depictions of what I was talking about on the show. Go, listen now, I’ll wait. While you’re at it, maybe you’d like to subscribe and leave a review? We’d surely appreciate it.
In an effort to boost flagging ratings for the Oscars telecast, the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences has set a three-hour time limit on the program and is introducing a category to reward “outstanding achievement in popular film.” Let’s set aside the asinine ways that they plan on saving time (relegating technical awards to the commercial breaks instead of, say, getting rid of the goddamn song and dance numbers or reducing the number of self-indulgent montages of past, better movies from 23 to, like, I dunno, 15) and instead focus on the TRULY stupid idea: Best Popular Picture.
What a strange movie Christopher Robin is.
Mission: Impossible — Fallout is, like every other entry in the M:I series, a well-paced action-thriller providing ample fodder for its ageless star, Tom Cruise, to wow us with virtuosic stunt work wrapped up in a modestly complicated plot.
Stanley Kubrick, born July 26, 1928, would’ve been 90 today. He’s been on my mind more than usual given the hoopla surrounding 2001: A Space Odyssey, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year.
Unfriended was an interesting cinematic experiment: a horror movie told in real time using nothing but what we can see from a laptop screen to provide the viewer with information.
So here’s a cheery op-ed to start your day. In it, we learn of the mental struggles of Roy Scranton, a new dad who is sad and mad about a bad fad signaling the end of shad:
