Big Fish | Burton’s Film Baits But Doesn’t Bite

January 8, 2004 by

The dark branches of the trees on the poster for "Big Fish" contrast against their light background. This sort of coupling has become a chromatic trademark for director Tim Burton.
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The Artful Dodger: The Cultural Aftershocks

January 5, 2004 by

I spent Winter Break in a television trance. But whenever I broke away from VH1's marathon sessions of C-grade celebrities telling me what to remember from the '70s and '80s, I checked out the newspap...
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Tipping Sorrow’s Scales

December 4, 2003 by

In the closing scenes of "21 Grams," one of the main characters lies in a hospital bed and recalls the urban legend that the 21 grams a human body supposedly loses at the moment of death is the loss o...
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The Artful Dodger: Sins of the Inept Reporter

November 24, 2003 by

I write a lot. I write for school, I write for my job, and I think my post-college plans will somehow involve newspaper journalism, a special form of writing through which one attempts to disseminate ...
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Will Your Politics Be on the Final, Professors?

October 30, 2003 by

Students don't pay for lectures about why the president is an asshole when they should be teaching them how to make a macaroni sculpture or interpret Dostoyevsky. Neither should they expect to learn a...
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Burn Britney Burn!

October 30, 2003 by

Britney Spears is going to hell. But she didn't get her reservations in Perdition for D-grade musical stylings, her vapid personality or her contamination of American young women with her whorish fash...
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The Artful Dodger: ‘The Real World’ Is Lame but Rejection Still Sucks

October 23, 2003 by

I just volunteered to have my privacy obliterated and my very persona flattened into a two-dimensional TV character. I auditioned for "The Real World."
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Kill Bill

October 16, 2003 by

Thurman, a nameless blonde swordswoman in a motorcycle suit with a yellowjacket color scheme, slices through countless Yakuza, the mad schoolgirl Go Go Yubari (Chiaki Kuriyama) and the notorious crime...
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The Artful Dodger: Hollister Co. Shirts Endorse Earthquakes, Mediocrity

October 15, 2003 by

After the towers at the World Trade Center fell, people everywhere started wearing those "I Love NY" shirts. Even if they didn't live in the Big Apple, the shirts helped them feel like they were suppo...
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Citizen Kane’s Alter Ego

October 9, 2003 by

It's a great time to wear tights, even if Orson Welles never thought so. Since the success of 2002's "X-Men," which both earned subtle praise from critics and grossed $157,299,717 during its theatrica...
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Media Gadfly

October 2, 2003 by

The bastardization of a once earth-shatteringly political rock movement by an entire age group of poseurs totally deserving the label "Generation Z": priceless.
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The Artful Dodger: Just Try to Ignore the Talking Pavement

September 30, 2003 by

"You know this isn't wrong." The pavement near the edge of the 6600 block of Pasado Road told me so. If I'm not mistaken, this mysterious message of reassurance became part of the Isla Vista landscape...
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The Artful Dodger: A GOLDen Shower for All

September 23, 2003 by

Normally, if I said so-and-so went down on me and didn't come up all night, I'd get a high five. But when the so-and-so that started to blow has the initials G-O-L-D, the result complicates my life co...
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Surreal Summer: Sunny California Loses Its Grip on Reality

September 19, 2003 by

Never has the question "What the hell happened?" been so apt. It's like California suffered the Attack of the Thousand Subleasers. Now we're all left to vacuum up all the crazy remnants of this surrea...
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Cliff Notes, Heroin, Porn, and the English Major

May 29, 2003 by

I might as well wear a Cliff Notes-yellow S on my chest for "shit for brains."
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