Rick McGinnis
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Written on 19 Oct, 2018 at 13:56 in
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Amusements Rick McGinnis It’s easy to believe that society is falling apart, especially if you spend any time on social media. My liberal friends are certain that the earth is on the verge of an imminent ecological disaster – probably climate change, but they’ll take resource depletion or overpopulation in a pinch. My conservative friends fill their Facebook feeds with stories and memes about the threat of unchecked, invasive immigration, or warnings ... (Continue reading)
Written on 16 Sep, 2018 at 7:27 in
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Amusements Rick McGinnis There’s a visual shorthand you see in movies and on TV shows that’s meant to let you know you’re in the presence of Roman Catholics, and probably Irish ones. It’s a picture of John F. Kennedy hanging on the wall of someone’s bedroom, dining room or living room, or in some bar, barber shop or police chief’s office. It might be accompanied by a portrait of whatever Pope is ... (Continue reading)
Written on 24 Jul, 2018 at 19:10 in
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Amusements Rick McGinnis
This year marks the 50th anniversary of the release of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, a film widely regarded as one of the best and most important in the history of cinema. I’m not here to dispute this judgment – I’m a big fan of the film, and have been since my brother-in-law took me to see a road show screening during its 10th anniversary. ... (Continue reading)
Written on 1 Jun, 2018 at 9:38 in
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Amusements Rick McGinnis Tom Wolfe (Photo Rick McGinnis)
Reading the obituaries for writer Tom Wolfe, who died last month, it’s hard not to think of the overused word “enigmatic,” which seems odd for a man who was neither reclusive nor reticent with his opinions. Wolfe flamboyantly embodied a collection of contradictions that only seem unusual now that his sort of public intellectual seems to be passing from existence.
In a ... (Continue reading)
Written on 14 May, 2018 at 12:54 in
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Amusements Rick McGinnis Maybe it’s some remnant of our tribal past, but it’s hard for us to leave behind some impulse to fear and vilify whoever lives one village over, beyond the river or in the next valley. We might think we’re sophisticated, cosmopolitan people, but this nascent tribalism is never far from the surface, and I saw it re-emerge with a roar during recent municipal elections here in Toronto.
... (Continue reading)
Written on 23 Mar, 2018 at 19:43 in
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Amusement Rick McGinnis My first glimpse of Jordan Peterson was almost a decade ago, when he appeared on TVO’s current affairs show The Agenda with Steve Paikin alongside my friend, the writer Kathy Shaidle. She was on the show arrayed against a dismal group of evangelical atheists, including then-United Church minster Gretta Vosper – the God-botherer against the God-deniers, a hard hour of media labour that might have made turning down a ... (Continue reading)
Written on 21 Feb, 2018 at 8:00 in
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Amusements Rick McGinnis It’s been a long time since we’ve lived through a juicy controversy about art. The last really huge, international scandals that broke across the headlines and inspired debates on TV and in government were at least a generation or more ago, and it’s doubtful that a millennial will recognize names like Karen Finley, Robert Mapplethorpe, Andres Serrano or Chris Ofili.
Subsequent furors have diminished in volume, and have been mostly ... (Continue reading)
Written on 12 Jan, 2018 at 9:22 in
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Amusements Rick McGinnis If you go by an article published in the UK’s Independent last year, the anti-monarchist movement in that country isn’t very healthy. The story begins with five men handing out pamphlets in Leeds city centre on a rainy Saturday. (The canvasser who has their folding table is late, apparently.) They remain polite in the face of hostility from weekend shoppers with royalist sympathies, and one of the die-hard republicans ... (Continue reading)
Written on 11 Dec, 2017 at 10:20 in
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Amusements Rick McGinnis When it was released in 1976, the movie Network was publicized as an “outrageous” comedy, a satire that imagined a worst case dystopia of the near future, based on the dismal precedents being set in the horrid ‘70s. It’s a sign of how far past mere movie satire we’ve gone that it’s been turned into a musical on the London stage, starring Bryan Cranston of Breaking Bad fame.
The film ... (Continue reading)
Written on 3 Nov, 2017 at 11:09 in
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Amusements Rick McGinnis The rancid feast that is the news cycle served up a pair of groaning platters recently when the death of Playboy founder Hugh Hefner was quickly followed up by the destruction of the public reputation of Harvey Weinstein, a Hollywood producer and the founder of Miramax studios.
Hugh Hefner, founder of Playboy and champion of ... (Continue reading)
Written on 16 Oct, 2017 at 11:52 in
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Amusements Rick McGinnis In 2002, Richard Florida published his book The Rise of the Creative Class and made a career for himself as an urban theorist, traveling the world lecturing and advising on how struggling, economically challenged cities could revive themselves. His “creative class” – a loose coalition that included artists, tech workers, academics and, interestingly, gay men and women – were rebuilding decimated downtown neighbourhoods and could do the same almost ... (Continue reading)
Written on 15 Sep, 2017 at 8:11 in
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Amusements Rick McGinnis In a summer of box office disappointments, Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk was an unexpected hit, since nobody thought that an epic film about the evacuation of British troops from Europe in the early days of World War II would be much more than a money-losing Oscar contender, meant to open deep in autumn.
This would be the popular image of what was known as the “miracle of Dunkirk,” where the line between soldiers and citizens was erased just before the nation would ... (Continue reading)
Written on 1 Aug, 2017 at 11:07 in
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Amusements Rick McGinnis The arrival of the first warm days brings with it the summer blockbuster, a seasonal indicator as venerable as crowded cottage weekends, sandy beach towels, the chemical cocktail of bug spray and sunscreen and the smell of gas generator exhaust and cotton candy at a fairground. The summer blockbuster has been declining with the general fortunes of Hollywood lately – this summer is predicted to be down by at least 10 per cent, thanks to early flops like King Arthur ... (Continue reading)
Written on 30 Jun, 2017 at 17:23 in
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Rick McGinnis Just at the zenith of their political, cultural and social influence, it has become fashionable to turn a corrosive eye on the Baby Boomers, that huge generational cohort born somewhere between the final years of the Second World War and the beginning of Beatlemania outside of Britain. Keep in mind that very little of this is self-critical; the generation preceding the Boomers is far too old and diminished to ... (Continue reading)
Written on 17 May, 2017 at 11:09 in
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Amusements Rick McGinnis Culture is one of those words – like marriage, society, science, family and gender - that we use a lot these days. And like those words, if you stopped the argument where it’s being used, it’s unlikely that everyone using it would share the same definition. I’m sure this has been the case for at least a generation now, but I’ve slowly come to the realization that, the longer this situation persists, the less likely it is that, in some ... (Continue reading)
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