Love Me If You Dare (Jeux d’Enfants)
Are even the French beginning to get a little tired of existential angst? See Yann Samuell’s movie and judge for yourself
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
Even the kids who love this stuff might want to start thinking about putting away childish things
Entry from June 3, 2004
Chips from the workbench. . . It is way too easy to make fun of Tina Brown’s narcissism and self-absorption, but I just couldn’t resist this wonderful example from her latest column in the Washington Post. Of course we can guess most of the reasons why Tina, like all those beautiful people with whom she…
Obligations to “Spin”
Richard Clarke, Howell Raines, Jayson Blair — all are the heroes of their own self-manufactured dramas to which they imagine we all ought to pay attention
— From The New Criterion of May, 2004
Virgin Flight
What’s happened to romance? Who would have thought that it could survive in France, of all places?
— From The American Spectator of May, 2004
Contemplating Homer, Tony, Buffy, George. . .
The academic fashion for taking pop culture seriously can make pretentiousness fun
— From The Wall Street Journal of May 28, 2004
Day After Tomorrow, The
The German-born Roland Emmerich’s anti-Americanism is ever less subtle, yet Americans are still lapping it up
Control Room, The
A movie to reassure us: the Arab satellite news service al-Jazeera is hardly any more anti-American than the rest of the media
S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine
A haunting documentary that confronts some Khmer Rouge thugs with their victims in an attempt to trace the origins of evil
Entry from May 14, 2004
Dr Johnson’s much misunderstood saying about patriotism’s being the last refuge of a scoundrel came to my mind as I read a letter to The Times of London from a Mr G.V. Harries of Cheltenham. Mr Harries had by his own account been one of the 275 now-notorious members of the Oxford Union who voted in…