Every ten years, Sight and Sound, published by the British Film Institute (BFI), conducts a poll of hundreds of film critics, scholars, and others to produce a list of the Greatest Films of All Time. In the first such poll, in 1952, the top film was Vittorio De Sica’s 1948 Ladri di Biciclette (Bicycle Thieves, a.k.a The Bicycle Thief). In 1962, 1972, 1982, 1992, and 2002, the winner was Orson Welles’s 1941 Citizen Kane. In the 2012 poll, Kane dropped to the #2 slot, behind Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 Vertigo. Finally, participants in the 2022 poll startled the world by designating Marv Newland’s 1969 animated short, Bambi Meets Godzilla as the Greatest Film of All Time.
Actually, Bambi Meets Godzilla was not the winner of the 2022 poll, though it should have been. The actual 2022 winner was Chantal Akerman’s 1975 Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles—a 3 hour, 21 minute-long cinematic lobotomy. The Sight and Sound panel should have chosen Bambi Meets Godzilla because it has precisely the same plot and lasts only a minute-and-a-half. The plot that these two films share is hysterical when confined to 90 seconds, but becomes soul-crushing when stretched to 134 times that length.
Todd Field’s Tár starring the inimitable Cate Blanchett is unquestionably the top film of 2022 and will undoubtedly soon be sweeping up a very large bagful of awards.
A hyper-reactionary Baby Boomer like myself will find a lot to admire and enjoy in Tár, despite being (as those younger generations say) “triggered” by its acceptance of sexual deviance as conventional and mainstream, of a “BIPOC pangender” identity implicitly conferring a special status, and of life under the tyrannical “sexual grievance” regime as normal.
Lydia Tár may be an arch member of the disgusting Community of Fashion elite, but she is also a highly talented professional and a staunch defender of high culture. We conservatives will appreciate the irony of her ultimate victimhood and pity her tragic end.
Zadie Smith, in the NYRB, published a distinctly brilliant review, appreciation, and analysis of the film whose take on generational differences and cultural change is quite illuminating, even across a partisan differences divide:
“To paraphrase Schopenhauer—who gets several shout-outs in Tár—every generation mistakes the limits of its own field of vision for the limits of the world. But what happens when generational visions collide? How should we respond?”
Cultural Luminaries make a lot of money. Their imperious attitudes and witty bons mots are in demand everywhere—until they aren’t. As Tár discovers the very next morning, while guest teaching at Juilliard. Here her charismatic lone-genius shtick—which so delighted the gray-haired festivalgoers—falls on stonier ground. Tár is now speaking to a different generation. The generation that says things like I’m not really into Bach. Such statements are calculated to bring out the hysteric in a middle-aged Cultural Luminary, and Tár immediately takes the bait, launching into an aggressive defense laced with high-handed pity (for the young man who dares say it) and a more generalized contempt for his cohort. Read the rest of this entry »
Don’t Look Up is the least subtle allegory of modern times. It is a mallet of a metaphor. It is the bluntest of parables, smashing through TV and tablet screens across the globe and screaming at viewers: ‘This is a film about a comet but REALLY IT IS ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE.’ They really do scream, especially Leonardo DiCaprio, who plays the clever, sexy scientist Dr Randall Mindy, who, unlike the dentally challenged rednecks he has the misfortune to call his fellow citizens, knows that the comet is real and that it really will hit the Earth. Poor Mindy is in a constant state of apoplexy at fickle, dim mankind, on one occasion bellowing: ‘YOU ARE ALL GOING TO FUCKING DIE.’ Leo, being a green nut himself, really hams it up, revelling in this mad, morally infantile script that gives free rein to his fire-and-brimstone eco-beliefs. Next time you see The Revenant, you’ll root for the bear.
It is hard to describe just how preposterous Don’t Look Up is. Adam McKay’s 145-minute lecture disguised as a movie is on Netflix. (Where else?) It tells the story of two low-level astronomers – Mindy and his punkish PhD student, Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence) – who spot a comet that is hurtling towards our big, dumb planet. They try to warn humankind, but to little avail. The president of the United States – Meryl Streep as a female Trump – is too busy thinking about the Midterms and the media’s discovery of the fact that she once sent a photo of her vagina to her nominee for the Supreme Court to worry about something as trifling as the extinction of all life on Earth. Let’s sit on it, she says. Businessmen wonder if the arrival of the comet might be a good thing. Think of all the minerals it will contain! Think of how many mobile phones we could make! Evil, money-grubbing capitalists? Original. As for the plebs: they’re far more concerned with celebrity tittle-tattle and earning a living – so vulgar! – than they are with the heat death of humankind.
It really is this unsubtle. It’s like someone reached into the head of a freshly politicised 16-year-old TikToker and turned the contents into a film. It falls to an Expert (Mindy) and a Cool Person (Dibiasky) to try to prise open the eyes of the ignorant throng. These are the heroes of our age in the eyes of the Netflix elites – people with postgraduate degrees and funny-coloured hair. Lawrence as Dibiasky sports a severe, red-dyed fringe – to distinguish her from the billions of normies who don’t care about the comet that’s about to vaporise them – and she goes on TV to weep and wail about the destruction of the planet, like George Monbiot recently did. One good line is when Streep’s president says they should use Dibiasky for media work more often, because she’ll connect with ‘disaffected youth and the mentally ill’. Every time DiCaprio and Lawrence’s characters were on screen, I felt myself turning a bit Betjeman. ‘Come, friendly comet…’ It is sweet relief when they die. (Come on, that doesn’t count as a spoiler – you knew this crap wasn’t going to have a happy ending.)
Love Actually isn’t in love with anyone except itself: it’s like watching a practiced lounge lizard go through his repertoire. That’s why Bill Nighy’s wrinkly old rocker steals the picture: although he’s just about the only member of the dramatis personae not actively looking for love, in a forest of over-mannered love scenes Nighy lurches through the movie with a cheerful indifference that makes his the only really honest character.
What I mainly remember as the years go by is the power imbalance: Almost every one of the alleged romances on which the film lingers is between a powerful man and his underling – Rickman and his sexpot secretary, Hugh Grant and the lowliest staffer, Colin Firth and his housekeeper. Even at the time, Curtis’s view seemed a weirdly narrow view of human relations. With the benefit of hindsight, I checked to see whether Love Actually was one of Harvey Weinstein’s masterpieces, but he was apparently busy with more obvious chick-flick Oscar bait that Christmas. In the Me-Too era we now know that beloved network anchormen have under-desk buttons to lock you in their offices, that PBS hosts think 25-year old interns at meetings enjoy seeing penises three times their age, that fashionable Manhattan restaurants have rape rooms, and that, when you clear out the sex fiends from NPR, there isn’t a lot left on the schedule.
In the old days, successful men did marry their secretaries and housemaids, but not so much now, at least in America, when power-lawyers and political consultants contract intermarriage like medieval ducal houses. So I thought I’d round things out with a Christmas picture about sex and power in the workplace from an era with very different cultural mores (although certain aspects of the scene remain entirely unchanged over six decades: “everybody knew”). It was made by the ultimate Hollywood cynic Billy Wilder, but he’s a piker compared to Richard Curtis. I’m not the biggest Billy Wilder fan, nor the biggest Jack Lemmon fan, nor Shirley MacLaine fan. But all three did some of their best work here. By the way, I am a huge Fred MacMurray fan and he is terrific in this.
The Apartment is a sad but true urban Christmas fable: there’s no snow, just flu all month long; the office-party booze makes everyone mean and sour; the only sighting of le Père Noel is an aggressive off-duty department-store Santa chugging it down at a midtown bar; and the Christmas Eve climax is an attempted suicide. But that’s what I love about The Apartment: its Wilderian cynicism is redeemed by one of the sweetest Christmas Day scenes in any movie. In his review of Rodgers & Hart’s amoral Pal Joey, Brooks Atkinson wrote: “How can you draw sweet water from a foul well?” Well, The Apartment pulls it off, wonderfully.
The century anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic is right around the corner. James Cameron’s record box office winner “Titanic” (1997) will be returning to the theaters in 3D, and we can expect the networks to be running round-the-clock broadcasts of the regular version.
Lindy West of Gawker sat down and watched the interminable Leonardo DiCaprio tearjerker and offers to spare us having to bother. Her review is devastating and extremely funny.
I don’t remember a lot of specifics about watching Titanic in theaters in 1997, but I was 15 years old, which means my two biggest concerns were 1) locating romance, and 2) not dying in a nautical catastrophe. So I think we can safely assume that I fucking loved that movie. I watched Titanic again on TV with my sister a few years later, making sure to switch it off right before that whole stressful iceberg thingy—a strategy that turns the movie into a pleasant romp about two teenagers who take a perfectly safe boat ride and then bang in a jalopy. The end. Charming! Watching Titanic for a third time this weekend—in advance of Wednesday’s big 3D reopening—I cannot imagine what I was thinking that second time around. I could not wait to get to the second half and watch all these motherfuckers drown.
Here’s the thing about Titanic, and the reason 15-year-old girls love it so much: James Cameron is a 15-year-old girl. All of the characters are either 15-year-old girls in disguise (“Parents just don’t understand!” “Waaah, make the boat go faster!” “I know we literally met 20 minutes ago, but I love you with a suicidal fervor!”), or the kind of goofy caricatures that 15-year-old girls would write if we let 15-year-old girls write our blockbuster screenplays. It’s She’s All That on a Boat, only with Kate Winslet as Freddie Prinze Jr., Leonardo DiCaprio as that girl who isn’t famous anymore, and also everyone freezes to death in the north Atlantic at the end.
Karen and I recently had the opportunity to view on Turner Classic Movies a curious, low budget old movie, “Love, Honor and Behave” (1938), lacking entirely a memorable big name cast, but specifically focused on the subject of Yalie-ness, on the distinctive old-fashioned Yale ethos.
The plot.
The marriage of old-time Yale man Dan Painter (Thomas Mitchell) to the stately and quite attractive Sally Painter (Barbara O’Neil, best known for playing the role of Scarlett O’Hara’s mother in “Gone With the Wind”, one year later, at age 28!) breaks up over a brief indiscretion. Sally remarries Doctor MacConaghey, taking away Dan’s son, Ted Painter (Wayne Morris).
Sally insists on raising Ted, contrary to his father’s wishes, as the paradigmatic good loser. Losing gracefully and graciously is her idea of being a gentleman. She refuses to send Ted to Andover (Dan’s old preparatory school), enrolling him in a different (possibly fictional) preparatory school in New Haven which I’d never heard of, because she believes Andover would make him too manly, too ruthlessly aggressive, and competitive. She won’t even allow Ted to play football like his father, bringing him up instead to be a tennis player.
Ted, at least, is permitted by mom to go to Yale. During his son’s senior year, Dan Painter is horrified as he watches Ted, playing for Yale, deliberately throw a tennis match against a Harvard rival because he believes the referee had previously made an erroneous call in his favor. Dan believes you ought to play by the rules, but you have to play to win. Intentionally losing is decidedly not proper manly behavior, not the Yale way.
The unhappy consequences of Ted’s upbringing by his mother continue even after graduation. Ted does rebel against mom, refusing to go to Medical School (in order to follow in his stepfather’s footsteps), but instead getting into the soap business in New Rochelle with a classmate. Ted also marries his childhood sweetheart Barbara Blake (Priscilla Lane) contrary to mom’s intentions and designs. But mother’s character formation lessons in uncompetitive self-effacement and non-aggression take their inevitable toll. The soap business goes under, and Ted cannot make Barbara happy.
When Ted’s business fails, Dan refuses to give Ted a job in his own business on grounds of principle (Dan is not only a Yalie, he talks exactly like an Ayn Rand character), and Ted is reduced to settling for menial work as a construction laborer for $3 a day.
Having had his problems trying to make a living during the Depression, Ted has been too busy working to entertain Barbara satisfactorily. Since he’s not available to take her out, and too passive to lay down the law, Barbara begins stepping out on Ted with a former rival. Finally, the worm turns, the deep-blue hereditary Yale blood (even without Andover’s influence) boils over, and Ted initiates a knock-down, drag-out fight with Barbara, ending in his giving her a good spanking. He also rises to the occasion and knocks down his rival with a good punch in the nose, and then throws him physically out of the house.
Dan Painter (conveniently on-hand to see the whole thing) is absolutely delighted. He now knows that his son has learned his lesson: that a man has to fight for things in this world, for success in business, even for his woman, just as he needs to be determined to achieve victory in athletic contests. Ted is now a properly competitive Yale man, just like his father.
LHB is certainly not a great film, not even a good film, but it is extremely interesting as a period piece and a case of watermark evidence of national-level recognition of a specific culture and personality associated with Yale way back then.
I was at Yale 30 years later, much had changed in America and at Yale, but I would say that even 30 years later, the “no excuses, just succeed” ethos had definitely survived in a number of undergraduate organizations right up into my day.
By now, Dan Painter’s hearty and unabashed, manly competitiveness must be thickly encrusted with layers of political correctness grown all over it like barnacles but I wonder if the same thing in essence, today unglorified, unacknowledged and unavowed, does not yet still survive at dear old Yale.
The new director has evidently removed some of poor old, pickled-in-alcohol and obsessed-with-violence, Sam Peckinpaugh’s personal dark obsessions, and has turned the remake into a cheerful tale of civilized Blue State elites turning the tables on violent, gun-and-God obsessed rednecks. Coastal elites may be losing in the political polls, but they can cheer in the movie house when the wimpy liberal takes out the Palin voter with a nail gun.
“Straw Dogs†— Rod Lurie’s odd and interesting remake of Sam Peckinpah’s venerable and violent button pusher — begins with a clash of cultural stereotypes. David Sumner (James Marsden) is a Hollywood screenwriter with an Ivy League education (or at least a Harvard T-shirt and fond memories of the Harvard-Yale game), newly arrived in his wife’s hometown, Blackwater, Miss. He is an effete coastal liberal, the kind of person who orders light beer at the local bar and grill, disdains its celebrated fried pickles and tries to pay with a credit card. He listens to classical music, uses big words like “acutely†and stays in shape by jumping rope. He can’t fix a roof or change a tire.
The local guys, for their parts, swear and fight and love guns, God and football. They listen to Lynyrd Skynyrd, and a few of them look as if they could moonlight as roadies for that shaggy, tragic Southern band. They leer at David’s wife, Amy (Kate Bosworth), and are generally ill-mannered when they are not being ostentatiously and menacingly polite. They work with their hands and aren’t much for book learning. On an especially hot day, one of them says, “This must be that global warmin’ you educated fellers are always goin’ on about.â€
The hyperbole is more amusing than offensive. Mr. Lurie, a former film critic whose earlier movies include politically tinged thrillers like “The Contender†and “Nothing but the Truth,†is holding a fun-house mirror up to an America that seems, at the moment, to thrive on polarization and mutual contempt. The reality is more complicated, but something of the corrosive, absurd logic of the culture wars is captured in the interactions between David and the gang of good ol’ boys who become his mortal enemies.
They are led by Charlie (Alexander Skarsgard), a big, blond, handsome ex-jock who dated Amy in high school. He artfully exposes David’s snobbery and also plays on the newcomer’s liberal habits of deference and self-reproach. David may indeed think that he’s better than the residents of Blackwater, as Charlie insinuates, but he also accepts the idea, so central to their sense of identity, that the locals are more authentic than he is, closer to God and the earth and the real America.
So he tries to compromise and adapt to their ways, which only amplifies their contempt. He is someone to be mocked, abused and taken advantage of, but never respected. Finally, after too many indignities and too much bullying, he has no choice but to fight back.
There is an obvious political allegory here, and it’s possible that “Straw Dogs†will find a cult following among frustrated Democrats going into the next electoral cycle. …
The setting and some details have changed — the previous David was a mathematician, writing a scholarly book instead of a screenplay on the Battle of Stalingrad — but the story and the characters are fundamentally the same. …
Mr. Lurie’s movie does not quite succeed on its own, though it is pulpy and brutal and at times grotesquely comical. The story does not cohere, and the performances are uneven. But as a piece of film criticism — as a conversation with, and interpretation of, an earlier film — it is intriguing.
No wonder the blue-state audience at the screening I attended cheered and hooted as David made ingenious use of a nail gun, a bear trap and two pots of boiling oil to keep his tormentors at bay. I’m kidding, to some extent. The response to righteous movie mayhem is always more visceral than philosophical. But “Straw Dogs†does give you something to think about.
Ace got around to seeing Atlas Shrugged rather late. He has not read the book very recently. And he is obviously not a card-carrying, Colorado-vacationing Randroid (he isn’t even able to remember the name of Midas Mulligan, for instance).
He awards the film only faint praise.
I was pretty nicely surprised. It’s good. Not great. But still — good. It’s actually more subtle than I was expecting; maybe too subtle in one key area (more on this later, as it truly is key). Rand’s book had the subtlety of a cast-iron lightning bolt, so any screen treatment might be expected to be much less didactic than her novel; but they seemed to have gone even further in toning down the heavy didacticism. Oh, it pops up here and there, but it’s not really objectionable.
In fact, to tell the truth, I could have endured a little more of the statement of principle stuff. Because with so much of that stripped away– why are the heroes acting as they do?
Two and a half stars good (which is my way of saying “Good enough to see, but not outstanding;” outstanding is three stars and superlative is four).
But it must have affected him more than he realized, because he goes on and on and on, trying to re-write the movie, re-directing the occasional scene, commenting in detail on the cast, and proposing adding hackneyed Hollywood character background to replace Dagny’s philosophical motivation. Ayn would be not amused.
The rest of us may be. Ace is certainly dead wrong about most of this, but it is clear that he wants more. The film was too short for him, and he wants more visible character development. I think the problem is that the financial situation, and the length of the book, required the film to be made in parts, and the resolution of the main characters’ conflicts, the conversion of Hank Reardon and Dagny, their persuasion to quit fighting a desperate battle to keep their businesses and the economy of the country afloat and to go on strike, occurs much later.
Where I did think Ace was right was in his objection to the film’s failure to make John Galt a mystery. The audience knows right away who John Galt is: he’s that guy in the slouch hat and trench coat we see lurking around everywhere, badly needing a shave. He’s the guy who siddles up to to banker Midas Mulligan (not “Bill McKenna”) early in the film. Ace is right in arguing that a greater effort to preserve the mystery story aspect of the whole thing would have been a better idea.
I don’t agree with him about reducing the ideology or about the desirability of “translating” the book into another medium. Film makers always justify the unconscionable liberties they take with works of literature with the “necessities of the medium” argument, and that’s an argument I’ve never bought. Films may not be able to include every scene or character or plot development in a book. Films do need to emphasize the visual. But the exigencies of translation do not really make Peter Jackson qualified to re-write J.R.R. Tolkien in fundamental ways, for instance.
Also, there are adaptations and adaptations. The 57th version of Jane Eyre may be moved to a contemporary setting in China for all we care. But the first film version of a deeply-loved cult classic, like Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter , or Atlas Shrugged needs to be decidedly faithful to the original. Those of us who have strong feelings about the book will be mightily offended by gross alterations, omissions, and distortions.
Hank and Dagny ride in the engine on the first train run on the newly constructed John Galt Line.
Filming a classic novel with an intense following inevitably presents a formidable challenge. The mind’s eye of every reader has formed its own images of the key characters. Its readers will have read and re-read it again and again, and will remember the plot in intimate detail and will feel ill-used if any key scene, important event, or powerful line of dialogue should be omitted.
For an old-time right-wing Rand aficionado like myself, attending the film version of Atlas Shrugged in 2011 combined the sensation of attending church services on Christmas Eve with dropping by the kind of in-group convention one might attend in one’s capacity as a Science Fiction reader or war gamer, to take part in an event simultaneously providing the powerful and intense gratification of witnessing the cultural apotheosis of a book one deeply loves while also keeping one on the edge of one’s seat in suspense over the quality and accuracy of the re-creation.
Yesterday, we defied torrential rainstorms and drove over 40 miles into (what is referred to out here as) “occupied Virginia,” the New Jersey-like suburbs of the District, to a multiplex theater in Fairfax to see the film version of Atlas Shrugged on its second day.
The first issue, in the case of this kind of film, is inevitably casting. The two key roles in the first portion of Atlas Shrugged are Dagny Taggart and Henry Reardon, and in both cases I think the casting choices were superb.
Ayn Rand would have loved, one imagines, the choice of the blonde, angular, and intense Taylor Schilling for Dagny. Schilling is along the lines of a younger, American version of Kristin Scott-Thomas: beautiful in a decidedly challenging, aristocratic, and intelligent manner. I thought she portrayed Dagny Taggart’s Ãœber-female combination of polished glamour and hoydenish tomboy indifference impeccably.
I have always had personal difficulties with picturing, or empathizing very successfully with, the great businessman Hank Reardon. Grant Bowler’s performance added the perfect note of ironic contempt in his interactions with the numerous villains surrounding him, which made the character work and come alive for me.
Michael Marsden’s James Taggart seemed perhaps a bit too young, and the choice of Iranian Navid Negahban for the nefarious Dr. Robert Stadler seemed peculiar, but in general the character actors playing the Rand villains did a bang up job. Michael Lerner’s Wesley Mouch and Armin Shimerman’s Dr. Potter were particularly fine.
The writer and production team all deserve a gold lighter and a life-time supply of dollar-sign cigarettes for plot accuracy and ideological fidelity. I was mentally comparing how faithful they were to the original here with Peter Jackson & company in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, who felt no diffidence in “improving” on Tolkien with a less upright and chivalrous Faramir, a crude and slobbering Denethor, an extra near-death experience for Aragorn, and so on.
Working on an extremely limited independent production budget (rumored to have been as little as $7 million, the kind of money it takes to make a television documentary), Paul Johansson did a remarkable job. Hostile mainstream media critics were quick to notice, and snark over, the absence of James Cameron-level production values and a big name cast; but, let’s face it, there is an awfully big difference in what you can do with $200 million in 1997 and what you do with $7 million in 2010. I’d say that Johansson and company turned in results that were downright miraculous considering the limitations of their budget.
Ayn Rand directly challenged the established consensus of values of modern society, and struck at the heart of the ruling political ideologies of her time and ours. Naturally, the media establishment has always treated her work with hostility. 2011 has not been very different from 1957 in that respect.
Roger Ebert has not read the book, and obviously wouldn’t like if if he did.
I am faced with this movie, the most anticlimactic non-event since Geraldo Rivera broke into Al Capone’s vault. I suspect only someone very familiar with Rand’s 1957 novel could understand the film at all, and I doubt they will be happy with it. For the rest of us, it involves a series of business meetings in luxurious retro leather-and-brass board rooms and offices, and restaurants and bedrooms that look borrowed from a hotel no doubt known as the Robber Baron Arms.
During these meetings, everybody drinks. More wine is poured and sipped in this film than at a convention of oenophiliacs. There are conversations in English after which I sometimes found myself asking, “What did they just say?” The dialogue seems to have been ripped throbbing with passion from the pages of Investors’ Business Daily. Much of the excitement centers on the tensile strength of steel.
Maureen Dowd trashed the film for not having A-list stars, without even bothering to pretend to have seen it.
Tea Party groups are helping to market part one of a low-budget film version of “Atlas Shrugged,†with no stars and none of the campy panache of the Gary Cooper-Patricia Neal movie of “The Fountainhead.†“Atlas Shrugged†aptly opened on Tax Day, getting a rave from Sean Hannity, who said it wouldn’t have been released “had Hollywood liberals gotten their way,†and a dismissive shrug from most critics, even conservatives.
Personally, I would take Taylor Schilling over Angelina Jolie for Dagny any day. Brad Pitt ought to see if he can’t talk to the producers about trying out for the role of Ragnar Danneskjöld in Part 3.
Meanwhile, on Rotten Tomatoes, polling is currently running 85% to 10% in favor, an extremely positive rating.
Anthony Kaufman, in the Wall Street Journal, spoke to Executive Producer Harmon Kaslow, who thinks that the opinion of MSM critics will not prevent the film from making its own way.
Despite the dreadful weather, the new-fangled stadium theater was nearly full, and the audience applauded vigorously at the film’s close.
We expected that the critics would have a fear of embracing this film,†says Kaslow. “We knew that there was a substantial likelihood that they would not view the film as to whether we got the message right, but would look at it comparing it to what Hollywood would have done. I don’t think our audience is persuaded at all by those reviews.â€
“It’s somewhat analogous to the family-based film market,†he continues. “Most family based films are not subject to review, because they know that that audience is all about the message. And if the message is right, they’ll give you a hall pass if the production values weren’t as high. And if we get criticized for the dialogue, most of it has been taken right out of the book. So, in a sense, they’re criticizing the literary nature of the work.â€
Reason has a celebratory opening day article and link collection.
The LA Times finds that Italians have better political scandals.
Reporting from Rome — The governor made off to a monastery after having affairs with transsexuals, but not before the cops videotaped a tryst, all flesh and white powder, and offered to sell copies to a magazine owned by the prime minister, who, at the time, was rumored to be entangled with an underage Neapolitan model.
Then one of the transsexuals, a Brazilian named Brenda, turned up naked and dead, her laptop computer submerged under a running tap. Oh, yeah, and the drug dealer who supplied cocaine to the governor and Brenda would meet his own demise. It’s an odd coincidence.
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Glenn Reynolds explains why the federal government has come to resemble Schlitz beer.
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Leo Grin, at Big Hollywood has a four part essay on Werner Herzog, Timothy Treadwell, and “Grizzly Man” (2005). Pt1, Pt2, Pt3, Pt4.
Big Hollywood is promising more in-depth reviews of significant conservative films.
Sometimes a review panning a film can be fun to read. C. Robert Cargill turns in an exceptionally amusing review of Lars von Trier’s new movie Antichrist, which actually contains both savage mockery and high praise.
Widely panned at Cannes by some, praised by others, and completely spoiled in the press, especially on the Drudge Report in which its final scenes were spoiled in headlines splashed across the front page (can’t find Drudge’s posting, but here’s a nice spoiler. – JDZ) It is not a nice film. It is dark, brooding, melancholy, and more than a little mean-spirited. Loaded from top to bottom with nudity, sexuality, and even a slow-motion shot that will itself ensure that this gets the dreaded NC-17 rating (as well it should for the level of adult content in this), it is at times a bit distracting. There’s so much nudity in this thing that I almost feel as if it should be renamed Lars Von Trier’s I Hate Pants! There are even a few scenes in which the characters lack pants for no good reason. But then again, there’s a lot of things in this that some would argue are here for no good reason. It is violent, bloody, and disturbingly sexual for a goodly portion of the film. Not in small doses. The majority of the film aims to offend you in one manner or another.
Happily for me, I already know that I loathe and despise Lars Trier (who is no kind of “von” whatsoever, the “von” he uses is just a joking cinematic reference to von Stroheim and von Sternberg, who both, for very different reasons, appropriated the preposition characteristic of names of Teutonic armigers) and all his works. Trier is a representative of the worst sort of European communist sensibility. Take an airsickness bag if you plan to see this one.
