Superior to the Truth
CNN confesses it was doctoring its reporting from Baghdad to make it more favorable to Saddam Hussein. Who could have guessed it?
— From The New Criterion, May 2003
Shape of Things, The
Like so much of the rest of Neil LaBute’s output, this is a good movie in a bad — I think a very bad — cause.
Entry from April 30, 2003
Norman Mailer is once again going mano a mano with Gore Vidal — this time for the title of Most Deluded Ageing Novelist with Wacky Conspiracy Theories about US Power. Vidal had got the jump on Mailer with his new book, Dreaming War: Blood for Oil and the Cheney-Bush Junta. This followed on from last…
Confidence
Ed Burns, a born movie-star rather than an actor, is a confirmed narcissist and therefore the last man in the world to be playing a confidence man
It Runs in the Family
Shouldn’t a heartwarming family comedy start with a heartwarming family? Not, apparently, if they’re the Douglases.
Honor Among Thieves (1)
The long-term decline of the understanding of honor in the West takes another quantum leap downwards. Could we have anything to learn from the Arab enemy?
— From The Wall Street Journal of April 25, 2003
Entry from April 22, 2003
Professor Lionel Tiger, writing in the Wall Street Journal says of the death of Dr. Robert Atkins that “No one can say ‘we told you so’ as they did when Jim Fixx the jogger guru died young or Adele Davis the diet autocrat died at all.” Look again, Prof. In the same day’s London Daily…
Winged Migration
Nature documentaries have never been so gorgeous — but Jacques Perrin’s film would have been no less so with some added documentary-style touches
Mighty Wind, A
As in Waiting for Guffman and Best In Show, Christopher Guest takes a satirical sledge-hammer to some pretty small nuts, but his film is also, and once again, uproariously funny
Chasing Papi
Is it the cultural and linguistic divide between Anglo and Hispanic America which makes the humor in this movie so hard for me to find, or is it just an awful movie?
Entry from April 16, 2003
The conscience of the left is a wonderful thing to behold. I remember some commentator during the Vietnam war who found his way into the “Current Wisdom” of the American Spectator — it may have still been The Alternative then — who blamed Johnson or Nixon or whoever it was who was getting the blame…
Rather Not
Dan Rather, world statesman, bids a solemn farewell to his old friend and sparring partner, Saddam Hussein. Pass the barf bag.
— From The New Criterion, April, 2003