Jonathan's blog

From the parking lot at Big Boys (I sense a theme to the bumper stickers around here):

Greg Sargent muses:

…in a rational world, the fact that the same people calling for aggressive military intervention in Libya were almost uniformly wrong about Iraq would make folks less inclined to listen to them, not more.

I recently watched Land of the Lost (2009, PG-13).  From ScreenIt!:

A scientist, his new assistant, and a tourist trap operator end up in another dimension where the past, present and future coexist, and then try to find their way back home, all while dealing with dinosaurs, reptilian creatures and more.

Some films are just silly.  Land of the Lost is one of those that is enjoyably silly…and what's not to like about Will Ferrell, Danny McBride and Anna Friel?

I give it 3 out of 5.

Tonight I finished watching the documentary Reporter (2009).  From it's web site:

REPORTER is a feature documentary about Nicholas Kristof, the two-time Pulitzer Prize winning columnist for the New York Times, who almost single-handedly put the crisis in Darfur on the world map. The film puts the viewer in Kristof’s pocket, revealing the man and his methods, and just how and why real reporting is vital to our democracy, our world-awareness, and our capacity to be a force for good. But REPORTER has a second agenda. By tracking a newsman, we track his news.

I give it 4 out of 5.

I recently finished reading The Help by Kathryn Stockett.  From Wikipedia:

The Help is…about African American maids working in white households in Jackson, Mississippi during the early 1960s.

It didn't impact me the way The Color of Love did (which I mentioned here and here), but I enjoyed it.  It gets criticism as a white woman writing about the black experience, but Stockett addresses/acknowledges that directly in the afterward…and I'm not sure why we should only be allowed to write about ourselves (whatever category of self that might be).