Zaki Hasan

It seems that, even after becoming a national punchline and getting soundly schooled by President Obama himself at last year's White House Correspondents' Dinner, Donald Trump has yet to give up on the right wing fever dream that the president wasn't born in this country. Of course, Trump being Trump, we...

The first Men in Black from 1997 has one of my all-time favorite movie quotes, courtesy of Tommy Lee Jones as he welcomes Will Smith to the film's titular organization:

"Fifteen hundred years ago, everybody knew that the Earth was the center of the universe. Five hundred years ago,...

Every once in awhile I'm approached at some event or another by a total stranger who knows me, or knows of me, because of my blog, or because of one of my pieces posted here at Huffington Post. "You're Zaki Hasan... the writer?" Blows my mind every time. I guess I am a...

I had a bit of an epiphany a few weeks ago when I saw that a student in the very first class I ever taught, lo those many years ago at San Jose State, was celebrating a birthday that put them at exactly the same age I was when I'd...

One of my first memories of comic heroes on the screen -- indeed, possibly one of my earliest memories ever -- comes from when I was four years old and watching syndicated reruns of TV's The Incredible Hulk, terrified and exhilarated at the sight of Bill Bixby metamorphosing into a green-painted, fright-wigged...

With time and math both signaling that the battle for the Republican presidential nomination is in its final throes, it's starting to look a whole lot like Mitt Romney is going to be cementing the "presumptive nominee" status he's enjoyed practically since the last presidential election wrapped.

With the primaries...

That John Carter, director Andrew Stanton's expansive (and expensive) adaptation of Edgar Rice Burrough's classic literary hero, was a labor of love for the helmer of Pixar spectacles Wall-E and Finding Nemo is evident in the care and forethought that's been laced into every frame. This is a film that lacks...

There was a time when I used to listen to Rush Limbaugh. All the time. And not ironically, either.

As a junior high student in the thick of the '92 presidential election season, I'd stay up way later than I was supposed to so I could watch his short-lived TV...

Even two months ago, the notion that Rick Santorum could pose a serious challenge to the financial preeminence of Mitt Romney in the race for the Republican nomination (much less actually leading Romney in many polls) would have been dismissed as fanciful hugger-mugger.

And yet here we are and,...

As I alluded to last week, I got off to a bit of a rocky start with the Mission: Impossible movie series, with my initial outrage at how the first film in 1996 blowtorched the legacy of the TV show whose name it appropriated turning to apathy at...

The business of franchise-building is never easy.

When all the hard work and sweat of crafting a solid enough first installment to warrant a sequel finally pays off -- as it did both critically and commercially for Warner Bros.' Sherlock Holmes reboot in '09 -- the filmmakers inevitably find themselves at...

Remember the overheated bloviating last year about Park51 (a.k.a. the "Ground Zero Mosque")? Nearly all of 2011 had passed without a similar Muslim-related controversy du jour to take up media bandwidth, but based on the last few days, it looks like one has manifested just in time to beat the buzzer...

I thought I'd said everything I needed to say about Smallville in May when discussing the series' long-in-coming finale, but after spending most of the last week digging into the complete series set containing all ten seasons of the proto-Superman skein, I'm struck by how, despite the

I spoke my piece about the disturbing worldview of comic artist Frank Miller a month ago after his graphic novel Holy Terror -- a celebration of bigotry dressed up as a celebration of patriotism -- hit the shelves, and I was happy to let it be at that. But then he...

Whether we're talking about TV shows, movies, or red underoos, there's no shortage of Superman news lately, and I think a big reason why we continue to find the character so interesting is his role as a kind of cultural arbiter in our society, with an elastic...

Growing up in the '80s and '90s, comic artist/writer Frank Miller was an inspirational figure to me. His seminal Batman opus, The Dark Knight Returns, depicting an aged Bruce Wayne reclaiming his cape and cowl to set a post-apocalyptic Gotham City aright once more, was one of those rare pieces...

Part of becoming a parent is that your life ends up delving into areas that you didn't even realize existed when you were living unencumbered just a few years previously.

One example of this is the personal hell I go through several times a day when attempting to change...

Whenever someone like Warren Buffett, as he did earlier in the week, says something to the effect of "Raise my taxes, I'm paying too little," there's the inevitable chorus of, "Well, if he wants to, he can just write the government a check" that arises in response.

After the build-up of my mega-Apes reviewing jam session two weeks ago, I was gratified to see Rise of the Planet of the Apes not only measure up to its lineage, but also open to an impressive total that's given the legendary franchise a renewed cultural currency. Last week, I spoke with Rise screenwriters Amanda Silver &...

Perhaps the most brilliant narrative move in a host of brilliant narrative moves executed by Rise of the Planet of the Apes is that it's an "end of the world" movie that manages to make us forget it's an "end of the world" movie.

So effectively does director Rupert...