The Sense of an Ending
In making commercial cinematic adaptations of what was once commercial fiction, movie-makers ruin their material by casually adding up-beat endings — From The New York Sun
Rosenstrasse
Margarethe von Trotta’s moving story of a few brave German women who successfully defied the Nazis after their husbands were arrested gets a bit lost in the complications of the telling
Entry from August 17, 2004
Homosexuals seem to want to have it both ways — if you’ll pardon the expression — about the McGreevey affair. In the Washington Post, José Antonio Vargas writes about married men who are closeted gays having affairs, usually with other married men, as a recognized feature of the homosexual subculture. “Whether they call themselves gay or…
We Don’t Live Here Anymore
A portrait of spiritual and emotional emptiness among the academic classes — that may or may not be spiritually and emotionally empty itself
Danny Deckchair
A good-hearted Australian movie that just about rises to the level of being worth watching
Entry from August 6, 2004
There are certainly no prizes for guessing that The Manchurian Candidate adapts a rather musty Cold War tale of “brainwishing” by the Communist Chinese to make it into an attack on the Bush administration — only one of many being churned out by the Hollywood dream factory this election season. Everybody has noticed it. When…
Intimate Strangers (Confidences trop intimes)
Say what you like about the French, they’re better than we are at making neurosis interesting
Bourne Supremacy, The
Jason Bourne stands for the exquisite conscience of liberal America which, when geostrategic necessity comes calling, can only cry out that they should have left us alone
Entry from July 29, 2004
“Reading at Risk is not a report that the National Endowment for the Arts is happy to issue,” writes Dana Gioia, the Endowment’s chairman in his introduction to that lament for the decline of literary reading in America. Maybe so, but they’re prepared to put up with the report’s sad news if the alternative is…
Manchurian Candidate, The (2004)
Of course they had to update it: instead of the Korean, the first Gulf War, instead of brainwashing, implanted computer chips, and instead of the commies, the Bush administration
Entry from July 23, 2004
Idly, I pick up a copy of The New Republic: “The case against Bush, Part 2” it advertises. Now there’s a compelling read! How many parts will there be, I wonder? This one will run and run. Yet isn’t it normally the case that when you see “the case against” something or someone it’s because…
Orwell Rolls in His Grave
Ever wonder why the movies, both fict- and factional, are so attached to the idea of the vast right-wing conspiracy? Read on!