All the Real Girls
David Gordon Green’s thoughtful indy strives for worthiness as well as likability but falls foul of its own earnestness
Entry from February 11, 2003
“It’s called attention to the fact that poets are against the war in a big way,” says Jay Parini, an anti-war poet himself, referring to the First Lady’s cancellation of a White House-sponsored poetry event scheduled for this week. There seems a general sense in which anti-war poets seem to assume their right to speak…
Deliver Us From Eva
This not-very-funny comedy does at least hold some interest as a parable of black upward mobility.
Final Destination 2
Another unsuccessful attempt at the movie that tried to identify Death with Fate and got tangled up in its own metaphysics. But several accidental demises are very cool.
Biker Boyz
Like the Iliad, Biker Boyz — directed by Reggie Rock Bythewood from a screenplay he co-wrote with Craig Fernandez and based on an article by Michael Gougis in New Times magazine — presents us with the theatre of raw masculinity. Also like the Iliad it depicts a series of stylized taunts and scenes of individual…
Entry from January 26, 2003
Anthony Ralston, an American professor of mathematics and computer science now living in Britain, writes in reply to a column in The Times of London by William Rees-Mogg claiming that America is now committed to war with Iraq. Any withdrawal at this point, thinks Rees-Mogg, “would undermine US global influence in a disastrous way; it…
Amen (Der Stellvertreter)
Costa-Gavras — with the help of Rolf Hochhuth — delivers a stinging indictment of the Catholic church’s part in the Holocaust. You were expecting, maybe, exoneration?
National Security
The movie itself is at best routine, but it is interesting to watch the rather un-p.c. reactions of the audience
Entry from January 15, 2003
And speaking of American empire. . . Ronald Wright, an Anglo-Canadian novelist writing in the TLS, ends a review of Henry Kamen’s Spain’s Road to Empire: The Making of a World Power (Allen Lane/Penguin) by citing appreciatively Kamen’s view that “Protected by their own view of how the world should be run, most Spaniards were…
“Media Bias” Revisited
Has “the liberal media” metamorphosed into “the conservative media” while nobody was looking? Not exactly
— From The New Criterion, January, 2003
Entry from January 9, 2003
All of a sudden the idea of American empire seems to be in the air. Of course it has been there for a long time in the view of those who despise the more expansive sorts of American foreign policy. Up until now, pretty much every believer in American empire, from Gore Vidal and Noam…