Left to my own devices

The Oscars are this Sunday, so of course it's time for the 22nd Annual Matt Awards! I love going to the movies. It still holds the same excitement as when I was a kid. Of course, I have opinions about the films I see (check out the podcast here ), and so, in the late 1990s, I began my own little exercise to satiate my ego by having my own awards, wherein I selected the best in film, as a sort of counter to disappointment with the Academy Awards. All told, I saw 80-plus 2018 movies, and so many of them were above average. It is therefore difficult to winnow them down to just one winner in each category, but I have done so. Here, then, are the 2019 Matt Awards , honoring what yours truly believes to be the best in film from 2018.... Best Horror Film:  Hereditary The horror genre was strong in 2018. And, in my opinion, its definition expanded a bit last year (in a good way), Films like our winner, and A Quiet Place, Bird Box, Unsane , the Suspiria remake, and even Ann...

Recently, I felt a pull of '90s nostalgia, and decided to watch some music videos from that era (as you do). One of them was for Ondina's Into the Night , a fairly obscure Eurodance gem that was featured on one of those dance music compilations that proliferated throughout much of the decade. Reading the comments section of the video, I was initially nodding my head at a lot of the positive comments being made about the music and the decade, that is until I read one that said, "It was a simpler time." Reading that created the equivalent of a record scratch in my head. I was in my teens and early twenties during the 1990s. It was a fun decade, to be sure, though I am not as certain that it was because it was the '90s, so much as the age I was at the time. Indeed, we tend to romanticize our younger years, and that's okay. What we should be wary of is using nostalgia to cloud our objective view of the past, using it to look askance at the present. My lat...

The most recent in a series of increasingly frequent government shutdowns lasted for over a month. Many government workers still showed up for their jobs, but did not receive paychecks. Other employees were furloughed. It was, to put it mildly, a mess. Some folks out there (who apparently lack even a smidgen of empathy within their soul) chided the workers who were vocal about the strain the lack of pay was having on their life, smugly invoking the virtues of saving for a rainy day. The gridlock in our nation's capitol seemed to reach everyone, even if it was just to offer an opinion. Something else that the government shutdown brought to the fore was a reality often not spoken of about why we have jobs in the first place. Obviously, many jobs exist because of necessity. We need people to fly our planes, to treat us when we're ill, to stock our grocery shelves, to manage our air traffic control, and a host of other things. But, for better or worse, we live in a monet...

A little over twenty years ago, I was talking on the phone with a friend. He is African-American, and gay. We were discussing male celebrities we found attractive, and he asked me about a particular one, who happened to be black. I don't remember who it was, but do remember saying that he wasn't my type. My friend offered a gasping protestation, to which I responded that I simply wasn't attracted to black men. This drew a remark of, "That's racist," from my friend. The aforementioned conversation has always stuck with me, and returned to mind recently while reading an article about racism within the online gay dating community (and, no doubt, within the offline gay community, as well). Basically, if you're not Caucasian, then you'll likely face some barriers to acceptance. And, sometimes, the automatic rejection based on race can be cruel. One could argue that someone who would cruelly dismiss another because of their ethnicity isn't wor...