Results tagged “madmax”

Looks like Pixar’s hit another home run with Wall•E, a movie about robot love on post-Apocalyptic earth. Jeffrey Wells calls it “a masterpiece of its type” but can’t stand the way director Andrew Stanton has been downplaying the movie’s ecological context in interviews. Wells writes, “It's a lie, of course – dis-informing of pig-trough moviegoers who might think twice about going to a ‘green’ movie that satirizes their lie-around, fat-ass lifestyle.” For those who trust only the accolades of print media, A.O. Scott deems the first 40 minutes “a cinematic poem of such wit and beauty that its darker implications may take a while to sink in.”

MUSIC: The Upper Crust are playing a proletarian downtown venue tonight! These four young nobleman will Rocque and Roll you with a polished AC/DC-esque sound. Do check them out, seriously. That is them to the right. We don't think we really need say anymore.

Gothamist is totally fascinated by this Times article about how society has actually been less violent over the centuries. The proposition from Norbert Elias, Swiss sociologist of the 1930s, was that things like using knives and forks (and not spitting or peeing in public) encouraged medieval society to transform into a more civilized one. "Elias has posthumously become the theoretical guru of a field that did not exist in 1939: the history of crime. It was then that pioneering historians began to do what most historians had thought impossible: create crime statistics for eras that did not systematically keep crime data." Further, murder was "much more common in the Middle Ages than it is now and that it dropped precipitately in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. Something very important changed in Western behavior and attitudes, and it stood much prevailing social theory on its head."