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Knight’s Tale, A
Not that I approve of it myself, but the metaphor of “culture war” would seem to imply two more or less evenly matched forces struggling with might and main to master and destroy or disperse each other. Yet much of what goes under that name is more like culture murder. Even that expression would be…
Timecode
Artistic innovation tends to follow a pattern, which begins with the reaction of the young rebels against the prevailing style, after its tricks become too familiar. So Wordsworth and Coleridge’s manifesto in the preface to the 1798 edition of Lyrical Ballads drew attention to the tired “poetic diction” of the time and called for a…
Alien Resurrection
The movies of the Alien series have always had as subtext the feminist view of abortion, but never more so than the latest, called Alien Resurrection, which comes to us from Jean-Pierre Jeunet. Jeunet was co-director of the very weird French films Delicatessen and City of Lost Children, and this looks a lot like both…
Edge, The
Of The Edge, written by David Mamet and directed by Lee Tamahori, it must be said that we should be grateful for what it does not do. It does not make the billionaire, Charles Morris (Anthony Hopkins) into a predictable rich-man villain, or even into a soulless, unpleasant character who stands aside as the real…
Replacements, The
There are a lot of things wrong with Howard Deutch’s new film, The Replacements, beginning with the fact that it is a football movie and therefore, in my view, extremely limited in its scope for originality. But it is just about worth seeing. There are some good jokes — I especially liked the one where…