New coinage

recorded use of the word 'gynotopia'.

Film Critique: The Dark Knight

Released at the beginning of George H.W. Bush's presidency, Batman's meaning is essentially comic. It suggests that do-gooders are pessimistic because their job is never done and that evildoers are optimistic because there's so much bad left to be done....

The Dark Knight, which hits screens in the final months of George W. Bush's presidency, is fundamentally somber. It sugests that evildoers are inexhaustible, do-gooders exhausted, and that heroes, if they live long enough, are destined to be seen as villians. 

--Carrie Rickey, Philadelphia Inquirer (dead-tree) 17 July 2008

Film Critique: Mama Mia! (NYT)

See that girl! Watch that scene! If you change your mind, I’m the first in line. Mamma Mia, here I go again. Like me, you may have spent the last 30 years struggling to get lines like those out of your head — and wondering what they were doing there in the first place — but you might as well have been trying to compost Styrofoam. Those shimmery, layered arrangements, those lyrics in a language uncannily like English, those symmetrical Nordic voices — they all add up to something alarmingly permanent, a marshmallow monument on the cultural landscape. When our species dies out, leaving the planet to roaches and robots, the insects will beat their little wings to the tune of “Waterloo” as Wall-E and Eve warble along.

--A.O. Scott, NYT, 18 July 2008