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July 4, 2008

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Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
(Reviewed June 13, 2008)
Yet another attempt by Hollywood to pass off kiddie kartoons as fun for all ages Full Review

Iron Man
(Reviewed May 16, 2008)
Another cartoon hero of the silver screen appeals to adults who no longer feel any shame about enjoying kids’ movies — and so comes closer to making kids’ movies the only kind there are Full Review

Son of Rambow
(Reviewed May 8, 2008)
A funny and enjoyable movie but also one which loses a great opportunity through taking the movies too much at their own valuation Full Review

Baby Mama
(Reviewed May 5, 2008)
An occasionally funny chick-flick that tries to do too many things at once Full Review

Diary
ENTRY from July 3, 2008

My colleague and friend, Roger Kimball, elsewhere picks up on a line in an article by Patricia Cohen in today’s New York Times about changes in the political allegiances among younger faculty in American universities: "In general, information on professors’ political and ideological leanings tends to be scarce," she writes — of what is presumably one of those mysteries that seems hilariously impenetrable to the earnest lefties of the Times, like their periodic head-scratching as to how it can be possible that crime rates are going down at the very same time when more and more people are going to prison. Go figure. But Roger is too modest to have mentioned an even more striking thing about the article, which is that the Times also doesn’t see the strangeness of leaving out the name of the author of Tenured Radicals when discussing this subject.

I suspect that Patricia Cohen is herself a person of youth and therefore, perhaps, forgivably ignorant about what she rather patronizingly calls, in Barack Obama’s words, "the psychodrama of the Baby Boom generation" which loomed so large in the now fast-fading era of Bill and Hillary Clinton, George W. Bush, Al Gore and John Kerry. With our new and improved Obama-era politics, nous avons changé tout cela. Perhaps, too, Ms Cohen has been fooled by her own euphemism of "liberals" to describe those who have consistently associated themselves with the most illiberal forces in our society for forty years. If so it wouldn’t be the first time that that had happened at the Times!

There’s another line from the article that I want to mention, however, and that comes in the words of one Erik Olin Wright, described as "a 61-year-old sociologist and a Marxist theorist." Asked about the political focus of his university younger colleagues, he told Ms Cohen that "there has been some shift away from grand frameworks to more focused empirical questions . . . In the late ’60s and ’70s, the Marxist impulse was central for those interested in social justice." Then, in her own words, she adds: "Now it resides at the margins." It would be interesting to know if Professor Wright said something like this which she is paraphrasing, or if this is her own conclusion. One of the other of them, if not both, fails to understand how Marxist assumptions have made themselves central to American scholarship even where Marxism itself may have retreated to the margins. Full Entry

Note to readers: My new book Media Madness, is now published and available for order from Encounter Books. Less a polemic than an attempt to understand the origins of the mass media’s folie de grandeur, the book is a warning even to those who are deserting the big networks, newsweeklies and large-circulation dailies not to carry with them into the more attractive world of niche media the undisciplined habits of thought that the old media culture has given rise to. To order this book, please click here

Also available, now in paperback, is Honor, A History, which was first published in 2006. A study of Western cultural artifacts, from the epics of Homer to the movies and TV shows of today, it is focused on explaining why Western ideas of honor developed so differently from those elsewhere — and especially from the savage honor cultures of the Islamic world. The book then goes on to trace the collapse and ultimate rejection of the old Western honor culture from World War I until the present day and to suggest the conditions that would have to prevail for its revival. To order this book, please click here