After a summer like the one we’ve just had, you’d be justified in asking, once again, “Why are movies such a pile of crap lately?”
According to Peter Greenaway, British filmmaker, it’s because, as he puts it, “Cinema is dead.” It’s been dead for ages, apparently, so the pile of crap we keep encountering is the decomposing body of cinema. Or something.
If you’re an established filmmaker, you can dine out for years on a line like “Cinema is dead.” For some reason it makes artistically inclined people give you money to fund your cinematic projects. That’s what you call “irony.” (more…)
Exiled editor Mark Ames appeared on the Dylan Ratigan Show this week to talk about the 2nd anniversary of the Lehman Brothers collapse, the Tea Party electoral victories, and the decline of the American empire.
If you’re like us, you’re sick and tired of having to wait around for some loathsome celebrity to die just to read their obituary. Who says we can’t read the obituary before they die, on our own time? They’re the ones dying, after all–we’re the ones holding all the cards now. Really, who says we have to abide by their schedules? Why should we be hostage to other people’s selfish, crass materialism (or whatever it is that motivates them not to die as quickly as we’d like them to)? We shouldn’t–that’s exactly right, sir. We shouldn’t just sit there and let their terminal illnesses hold our obituary-consumption hostage.
Which is why we here at The eXiled have developed a revolutionary new tool that will transform the literary death-watch. It’s a new technology we call “The Pre-legy.”
At eXiled, we’re not content to wait for the doctors to give us the thumbs-down and the ol’ sad face. We want to know what folks’ll be saying after a celebrity death, without waiting for that celeb’s pig-valve heart to flatline. We want our celebrity eulogy served up yesterday-like, chop-chop: we want the Pre-legy.
Take our old friend Christopher “Hic!” Hitchens: instead of waiting for the throat cancer to take him away, we decided to get proactively involved in the ol’ warmonger’s impending death by generating, through our new technology, The Eulogy (or “Pre-legy) we’re all waiting for: the Martin Amis funeral speech, before it’s written. And we got it. How’d we do that? Well, thanks to an old Russian software programmer who owes us a favor for reasons we’d rather not get into, he zombied up for us a virtual Martin Amis that can squirt out highbrow virtu-tears that really make you think, virtu-tears over the upcoming death of Amis’ best bud, Chris Hitchens. (more…)
Good news from the trenches of California’s water war: The cabal of billionaire farmers and real estate developers that has been engineering a stealth privatization of …
No two ways about it, the famous editor was fried. Doing too much phone had finally done in his brain. No big thing normally, but his reader was sick this week, and his famous author had to have an answer, …
Ancient Gonzo Wisdom should be a perfect book: a collection of all the interviews Hunter S. Thompson ever gave. It begins with a talk Thompson gave on ABC News in 1967, shortly after Hell’s Angels was released. It ends with …
There’s this woman making the rounds of the talk shows with her new book, UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go On the Record. She’s an earnest, homely progressive named Leslie Kean with a tan semi-afro, wire-rimmed glasses, and the …
When Amazon started printing readers’ book reviews on the net, a window opened briefly on the mental worlds of ordinary people — or, as Harry Dean Stanton so memorably called them, “ordinary fuckin’ people.”
This review was first published in The eXile on March 21, 2002.
Jonathan Franzen’s novel The Corrections, billed as a masterpiece, is a worthless fraud, a hopelessly trite story gaudied up with tedious overwriting. The overwriting is meant to conceal …
This classic “prank” first published in the summer of 1999 ranks as one of the eXile’s least-successful pranks (which paradoxically made it x-tra annoying) on our longtime nemesis Michael McFaul–formerly a top Clinton USAID official in Moscow, Carnegie Endowment and …
Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is a financial flop so far, I don’t know why exactly. It’s aimed directly at the prized demographic of Young People Who Still Go to Theaters to See Movies If Anyone Does, In Order to …
