Archive for July, 2020
A review of the 2017 movie “American Assassin”
July 9th, 2020 by Roger Darlington
For decades, the James Bond films defined the spy genre with a hard-edged hero chasing his foe from one exotic location to another. Then the Jason Bourne trology refined the genre with kinetic fight scenes and bad guys inside the hero’s camp as well as outside it. “American Assassin” is an attempt to create a […]
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A review of the 2015 movie “McFarland, USA”
July 8th, 2020 by Roger Darlington
We all love a feel-good movie. And the Americans especially have made a sub-genre of a sporting feel-good film in which the underdog overcomes adversity and makes it big, whether the sport is boxing (the “Rocky” franchise) or football (“The Blind Side”) or baseball (“A League Of Their Own”) or – in the case of […]
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The world understands so little of the history of Persia and Iran
July 7th, 2020 by Roger Darlington
I’ve very much enjoyed watching the three-part BBC Four documentary series “Art Of Persia” presented by Samira Ahmed. I learned so much. For instance, I knew nothing about the lost city of Merv where an estimated 700,000 were slaughted. However, I do know something about the history of Persia/Iran from my reading of a couple […]
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Word of the day: agnotology
July 6th, 2020 by Roger Darlington
The word was coined over 10 years ago by Stanford University professor Robert N. Proctor, but has new resonance with the advent of Brexit in the UK and Trumpism in the USA. Proctor defines agnotology as: Culturally constructed ignorance, purposefully created by special interest groups working hard to create confusion and suppress the truth. You can […]
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