Anger Management
The Hollywood in-joke of presenting Jack Nicholson as a therapist for angry people takes this movie a long way, but not long enough.
Entry from April 9, 2003
Maybe now that we actually see people dancing in the streets and welcoming American and British troops with smiles and flowers and pulling down statues of their now ex-dictator, we might hope for an apology from those many commentators in the media and elsewhere who, during the past couple of weeks, have been heaping scorn…
Entry from April 3, 2003
“Ten days into a war fought under the flag of disarmament, U.S.-led troops have found no substantial sign of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. . . ‘All the searches have turned up negative,’ said a Joint Staff officer who is following field reports. ‘The munitions that have been found have all been conventional’. . ….
Assassination Tango
Robert Duvall and his fetching companion, Luciana Pedraza, are fun to watch on the dance floor, but the movie he has built round those scenes is a pretty feeble one.
Contending With Tragedy, Angling for Dollars
What? You didn’t know that the real hero of September 11th was Chuck Schumer?
— From The Wall Street Journal
Entry from March 26, 2003
Interesting — wasn’t it? — that Michael Moore’s Oscar-night outburst purported to speak for the other nominees in the category of Best Documentary Feature because “we like nonfiction and we live in fictitious times — a time when we have fictitious election results that elect a fictitious president — a time when a man is…
Entry from March 14, 2003
The outbreak of rape accusations at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado has suggested to Lee Hockstader and T.R. Reid of the Washington Post — who think that “the widening scandal may turn out to be a bigger setback for the military than the Navy”s Tailhook Association debacle in 1991 — that the “Academy…
Bend It Like Beckham
A celebration of the rich, multicultural tapestry that is Britain today whose sunny, funny approach to questions of cultural difference is perhaps just a tad overoptimistic.
Himalayan Self-Righteousness
If you thought journalists were bad, try poets! And President Bush is the one who is supposed to be stupid?
— From The New Criterion, March 2003