Good Night and Good Luck
Hollywood’s on-going, long-term project, The Simpleton’s Guide to Cultural and Media History, is given yet another instalment, thanks to George Clooney
Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit
Another brilliantly funny episode in the lives of a cheese-eating inventor and his dog
The Plame Game
The media’s lust for scandal is only partly because they hate George W. Bush. They also want to attract an audience by wrecking America’s political culture — From The New Criterion of September, 2005
Talking Dirty
Dirty jokes just aren’t what they used to be. What do you have to do around here to violate a taboo, anyway? — From The American Spectator of September, 2005
Entry from September 29, 2005
Now that they are over, we can ask what were the anti-war demonstrations in Washington last weekend for? Though the demonstrators professed to want to meet with George W. Bush, they cannot have had much of an expectation that they would or that, if by some fluke they did, they would have stood the slightest…
History of Violence, A
David Cronenberg’s is the second of this week’s meditations on “violence” and, though better than Dear Wendy, is still pretty confused
Dear Wendy
Lars von Trier is back on his hobby-horse: creating an alternative version of America to attack because he knows nothing of the real America
Everything is Illuminated
Liev Schreiber’s intermittently amusing adaptation of Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel prunes the original a little too drastically
Unfinished Life, An
A movie about forgiveness is itself a bit hard to forgive
An All-American Scottish Wit
A film retrospective titled “Alexander Mackendrick: Auteur and Academic” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York is well worth a visit — From The New York Sun of September 2, 2005
Esquive, L’ or Games of Love and Chance
The impulse behind this multicultural French film is a good one, but the translation makes it sound as if these French high school kids were trying, and failing, to talk in Ebonics