Defending Your Life

[See “Our Childless Dystopia” in The New Atlantis of Winter, 2007, under “Articles”] Discover more from James Bowman Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email. Type your email… Subscribe

A classic reissued in time for Mardi Gras remains well worth-seeing

The best moment in the new movie-version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, directed by Michael Hoffman, comes as Bottom (Kevin Kline) in the form of an ass is transported to the bower of Titania, the Fairy Queen (Michelle Pfeiffer), who has fallen in love with him (as the Shakespeareans among you will remember) because of…

The movie version of the scatological TV series, South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut, directed by Trey Parker from a script he co-wrote with Matt Stone and Pam Brady, is billed as satire, but it has no coherent satirical vision. In fact, it cannot even remember what, if anything, it is supposed to be satirical…

Professional wrestling is truly postmodernism in sport, which makes it surprising to me that there have not been more documentaries like Beyond the Mat, directed by Barry Blaustein. This movie, though it is rather badly organized and tries to do too much, contains some marvelous, even unforgettable footage of what life is like behind the…

Earlier this year, in a review of Panic by Henry Bromell, I observed that it was possible to appreciate a film which is an impressive bit of propaganda for a political position with which you profoundly disagree. Just think of Leni Riefenstahl’s The Triumph of the Will. Nowadays, the most assiduous ideologues among film-makers are…