I’m a Little Late Paying Off My Mortgage

Posted on August 9, 2022 by Robert Lockard, the Deja Reviewer

I have moved a mountain. It wasn’t as fast as it was for Enoch simply telling mountains to flee from before him. But it happened, nonetheless. I feel like there’s only one song that can sum up my feelings right now.

In September 2016, I wrote a HuffPost article predicting I would be debt-free in five years. That prediction failed to come true. Instead, it took five years and 11 months. As of August 3, 2022, I have paid my mortgage in full. That was my last debt. I have no student loan, car loan, or personal loan. Not even a credit card. In one sense, I’m a little late paying off my mortgage. But in another, I’m a little ahead of schedule. Continue reading →

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The Hasty Rewrite of My Last Article

Posted on August 2, 2022 by Robert Lockard, the Deja Reviewer

I have never done anything like this before. But I want to share it because it was such an interesting experience. Since the beginning of the Deja Reviewer in 2011, I’ve almost always published a new article on Tuesdays. The reason I do that is to give myself leeway in preparing images and formatting articles over the weekend.

If something ever goes catastrophically wrong, I prefer to have a couple of days to fix it, hence why I don’t publish on Mondays, right after the weekend. Late at night last weekend, something went catastrophically wrong. Continue reading →

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A Wonderful Detail I Never Noticed Before in The Parent Trap (1998)

Posted on July 26, 2022 by Robert Lockard, the Deja Reviewer

We are going to talk about one of my favorite movies today. When I find a movie I really enjoy, I often wind up watching it obsessively. Over and over. It’s kind of a blessing and a curse. Because I miss out on a lot of other good quality entertainment by zeroing in on just one thing. At the same time, though, it enables me to pick up on little details I otherwise would have missed.

For example, The Parent Trap. I absolutely love the 1998 remake. It’s the right way to update an old classic. I thought I had already talked about all the reasons why I love this movie. But there’s something wonderful I had totally missed in it until recently.

Continue reading →

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This Film Scene Sums Up Elon Musk and Twitter Right Now

Posted on July 19, 2022 by Robert Lockard, the Deja Reviewer

I need to write something light and fun. And it just so happens I read about something that, while outwardly serious, easily lends itself to comedy.

For a while now, Twitter has been fighting Elon Musk’s attempts to purchase it, likely because they feared he would expose the company’s dirty little secrets. But he made them an offer their shareholders couldn’t refuse, and it looked like he was going to own the company.

After a few months of looking at their books, though, Musk is now saying he wants to back out of the deal. And Twitter is threatening to sue him to force him to buy the company. This move will almost certainly reveal all its hidden censorship and fake users in the form of discovery if it actually proceeds to trial. Continue reading →

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Behold the Awesome Symmetry of Akira

Posted on July 12, 2022 by Robert Lockard, the Deja Reviewer

Okay, this has been one of the most extraordinary experiences of my 11 years as the Deja Reviewer. Several months ago, a reader of mine named Jordan sent me three movies he had a feeling about being examples of Cinematic Chiasmus. And each of them turned out to perfectly fit the mold: Tron, Escape from New York, and Dreamscape. I kept being blown away by how right he was with each film I looked at.

And then he hit me with one more curveball. He suggested I take a look at a little film called Akira. I’ve loved this movie since I was a teenager, and I read all of the manga to get the full story. It was a huge pleasure to revisit Akira and see if it works as a symmetrical story structure. Sure enough, it does! Let me introduce you to the awesome symmetry of Akira. Continue reading →

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You’ve Got Mail Has the Perfect Solution to a Love Square

Posted on July 5, 2022 by Robert Lockard, the Deja Reviewer

I promised I would avoid talking about Miraculous: The Tales of Ladybug and Cat Noir several months ago. But I have to break that commitment in this article. I recently discovered that a 1998 movie entitled You’ve Got Mail has an incredibly satisfying template for how to solve the love square at the heart of Miraculous.

The main frustration with the show is that the two leads are in love, but they don’t know it because they each love a different side of the other. They’re stuck in a perpetual holding pattern as they fly in circles around each other. A two-hour movie doesn’t have the luxury of allowing that to drag on for more than 100 episodes. It has to get down to business fairly fast. So I’d like to present how You’ve Got Mail accomplished the impressive feat of getting its two romantic lead characters to fall for each other’s public and secret sides. Continue reading →

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Feeling Bad for Feeling Bad

Posted on June 28, 2022 by Robert Lockard, the Deja Reviewer

My fingers hurt. Nothing new there. But something strange has happened. I had intended to write a different article this week about how this website sometimes feels like my journal, but I found that it would work better if I combined it with another more-pressing topic that’s recently come up. Continue reading →

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Unfinished Work

Posted on June 21, 2022 by Robert Lockard, the Deja Reviewer

Have you ever almost completed a project, but then left it for weeks and not gone back to it to finish the job? I ask because I find myself in that position right now. I recently went through my old files and discovered several intriguing articles I started to write and then abandoned. In a rather meta fashion, I find myself thinking: what was I thinking? How could I just abandon such interesting articles? There are four reasons I came up with. Continue reading →

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Is It Possible to Tell a Complete Story with No Repeated Words?

Posted on June 14, 2022 by Robert Lockard, the Deja Reviewer

I reuse a lot of words as I write. If you saw the first drafts of my articles before I publish them, you’d see that I say “so” and “that” far too often. It’s during the editing process that I remove all those unnecessary words. For someone so prone to reusing the same words over and over, I wondered recently if it’s possible to tell a complete story without using any word more than once.

I took it upon myself to make the attempt. And here are the results. The following story, as far as I can tell, has no repeated words, and it tells a fairly coherent tale full of drama, tragedy, and action. Though most of that is merely implied. I hope you enjoy. Continue reading →

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The Ongoing Miracle of My Hands

Posted on June 7, 2022 by Robert Lockard, the Deja Reviewer

I have wonderful news to share! More than a year and a half ago, I took my future into my own hands when I stopped seeking professional medical help for my arthritis. I’m awfully young to have such bad hands, or so my rheumatologist told me three years ago. But there was nothing he could do to help me. I went in several times to have painful Cortisone injections and other treatments, but nothing helped Continue reading →

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