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When keeping it real goes wrong

by Ruben Mancillas

( Art and Commerce and Family )

“Walt Disney is being kept cryogenically frozen in the basement of one of the medical buildings.”
-The only thing I remember from the UCLA orientation tour

According to Neal Gabler’s new biography, Walt Disney was so obsessed with a vision of his boyhood home that he wanted to recreate it as the entrance to Disneyland. Thus his [...]

Candy-colored clown

by Ruben Mancillas

( Art and Politics )

The last movie Adriean and I saw in the theatre was Children of Men. It was January, well after the midterm elections, but the explicit Abu Ghraib imagery was still a shock. The ads for Quietus, the government-sponsored suicide drug, were great and reminded me of a similar scene from the ’70s dystopian classic, Soylent [...]

Sr.’s movie club

by Ruben Mancillas

( Family and Movies )

My dad and I saw Hard Times when I was seven years old.
It’s a Walter Hill film starring Charles Bronson as a Depression-era streetfighter and James Coburn as his manager. There’s a great quote in the film by the Strother Martin character, Poe. Poe is introduced as a fight doctor who has “two [...]

Girls gone mild

by Ruben Mancillas

( Love and Television )

William Burroughs once commented that the Paul Bowles autobiography Without Stopping should really have been entitled Without Telling.
I am sure that I was not the only one in the live studio audience of The Bachelor: Rome – The Women Tell All to have been thinking about this and looked forward to asking the ten rejected [...]

Conventional wisdom

by Ruben Mancillas

There’s been a lot of talk, maybe too much talk, about some kind of schism between the two coastal entities, with apologies to our beloved flyover contributors, which make up much of the Whatsit.
Most of it, alas, seems to have been generated by me.
Please consider me reformed.
My selfish desire for vendetta thus abated, I move [...]