Remember the Night (1940)

More Christmas pandering to the kids. But do the kids really want to be pandered to?

First westerns, then horror films, now gangster flicks: all the great Hollywood genres have been appropriated by the spoofters and turned from serious melodrama— in living memory, the movies have become the one place in the aesthetic world where the expression is not an oxymoron— into comedy and parody. Hard on the heels of this…

Tomorrow Never Dies, directed by Roger Spottiswoode is the latest in the seemingly endless chain of James Bond films. It is a disappointment. One of the few pleasures that conservatives could take in the Hollywood product of the late Cold War — that is watching an unashamed cold warrior fighting the commies for the good…

A husband and wife are driving home after an evening out. The wife asks the husband why it should be that they put braces on girls just at the moment when they are most self-conscious about their appearance. The husband, looking tired and fed-up, says he doesn’t know and lapses into silence. Suddenly there are…

Yet another moral tale to illustrate how much is to be deplored by all right-thinking people the “cycle of violence”

There is often a satirical edge to Mike Myers’s comic speciality, which is characters who are trying and mostly failing to be cool. At some level, he understands the foolishness and moral poverty of the “cool” ideal and loves to laugh at those whose self-presentation falls pathetically short of their own self-image. But there is…