1.125 words
Here is another cash grab served up in time for Thanksgiving. This train wreck of a film is a turkey that cannot be pardoned. Of the countless film adaptations of the Robin Hood legend made since the early twentieth century, the latest is somewhere at the very bottom of the pile.
Director Otto Bathurst wants you to know that his adaptation is different from its predecessors: modern, cool, up-to-date. (more…)
1,290 words
Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald is the latest installment in the ever-expanding Wizarding World franchise and the second film of the Fantastic Beasts series. Much like Peter Jackson’s bloated Hobbit trilogy, the Fantastic Beasts franchise is an unapologetic cash grab and will sprawl across five films, approaching the length of the original Harry Potter series.
Stanisław Wyspiański, Self-Portrait
Stanisław Wyspiański, Self-Portrait
2,302 words
Stanisław Wyspiański
Acropolis: The Wawel Plays
Translated by Charles S. Kraszewski
London: Glagoslav Publications, 2017
Stanisław Wyspiański was a Polish dramatist, painter, and poet and is widely regarded as the father of modern Polish theatre. He was a central figure in the Young Poland movement. (more…)
2,060 words
Leftists are fond of mocking conservative defenders of the Constitution, but they mysteriously morph into strict constructionists whenever anything threatens to overturn a law that suits their interests. (more…)
2,507 words
Donna Zuckerberg
Not All Dead White Men: Classics and Misogyny in the Digital Age
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018
Homer
The Odyssey
Translated by Emily Wilson
New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2017 (more…)
1,130 words
Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto is set in present-day Los Tuxtlas, Mexico in the year 1511 and depicts the final days of Maya civilization through the eyes of a man named Jaguar Paw. The main theme of the film is summarized by the Will Durant quote displayed at the beginning: “A great civilization is not conquered from without until it destroys itself from within.”
Apocalypto is hard to find: (more…)
2,289 words
For a long time, the tales of Norse voyages to North America described in the Saga of Erik the Red and the Saga of the Greenlanders were thought to be legends. It was not until the nineteenth century that historians and archaeologists began to investigate the subject of Pre-Columbian Norse exploration in earnest. The first to do so was the Danish historian Carl Christian Rafn, whose Antiquitates Americanæ (published in 1837) sought to ascertain the location of Vinland. (more…)
1,541 words
Three years after its premiere, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton is still running and is currently on its second national tour. The hip-hop, racially diverse reimagining of the life of Alexander Hamilton has been the object of nauseatingly fulsome praise since its premiere and has been zealously promoted by the mainstream media. (more…)
2,002 words
Bill Niven
Hitler and Film: The Führer’s Hidden Passion
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018
This book is a great companion to Frederic Spotts’ Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics. The only shortcoming of Spotts’ book was that it did not discuss Hitler’s interest in film and his involvement in the German film industry. This book does just that. (more…)
Illustration from the 1875 account of the expedition, Die zweite deutsche Nordpolarfahrt in den Jahren 1869 und 1870 unter Führung des Kapitän Koldewey.
Illustration from the 1875 account of the expedition, Die zweite deutsche Nordpolarfahrt in den Jahren 1869 und 1870 unter Führung des Kapitän Koldewey.
1,973 words
Germany undertook two Arctic expeditions from 1868 to 1870. The prospects of heroic adventure, national glory, and scientific advancement were all motivating factors. Polar exploration was hailed as a demonstration of Germanic courage and fortitude, as well as of the strength of German science and technology. (more…)
6,261 words
Catherine Nixey
The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World
Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018
Catherine Nixey’s The Darkening Age is a powerful and highly readable account of the Christian destruction of classical antiquity. It is certainly not without flaws, but it offers hard-hitting and concise rebuttals to widespread myths surrounding the history of early Christianity. (more…)
3,042 words
Frederic Spotts
Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics
New York: The Overlook Press, 2003
Leaders throughout history have frequently deployed the arts as a means by which to display their power. Hitler is unusual, however, in that art was central to his political vision. He was intensely interested in the arts (painting, sculpture, music, and architecture) and dreamed of forging a state whose artistic and cultural achievements would rival those of ancient Greece and Rome. (more…)
1,550 words
Among the vast array of sources that influenced Tolkien in the creation of his legendarium was the Kalevala, a collection of Finnish folk poetry compiled and edited by the Finnish physician and philologist Elias Lönnrot. Much scholarship exists on Tolkien’s Norse, Germanic, and Anglo-Saxon influences, but his interest in the Kalevala is not as often discussed. (more…)