Remembering the So Few
Why doesn’t our newspaper of record publish more, and more detailed, obituaries of America’s Second World War veterans, before they are all gone?
— From The New York Sun
Santa Clause 2, The: The Mrs. Clause
Santa would a-wooing go and naturally gets himself quite a present to unwrap on Christmas morning. Hollywood, as usual, brings us every adult’s Christmas fantasy.
Entry from November 4, 2002
Like the great Ed Anger of the Weekly World News, I’m pig-biting mad that anyone would pay the slightest attention to the Hart-Rudman task force on homeland security of the Council on Foreign Relations or its report, “America Still Unprepared, America Still in Danger”? Why should the thing even exist, let alone get its pronouncements…
Punch-Drunk Love
Paul Thomas Anderson shows why style, however brilliant, cannot make up for basic flaws in content.
Entry from October 29, 2002
In suggesting that Marshall Mathers, professionally known as Eminem, is “the world’s best rapper,” the New York Times cites as corroboration the opinion of a Mr José Gallardeo, a 16 year-old pupil at the James Monroe High School in the South Bronx, who has a particular admiration for his favorite artist’s poetic descriptions of raping…
Roger Dodger
A not-uninteresting first feature from Dylan Kidd is a little too glib about providing its hero with the fixings for a moral makeover, but, all the same, it’s hard not to like him.
Grey Zone, The
Enough, already! We know that movie folk are compassionate people. Why do they have to keep making Holocaust dramas to persuade us of the fact?
Entry from October 25, 2002
You might have guessed that the sniper was going to turn out to be a postmodern criminal when Clint Van Zandt, the former FBI profiler who, having accused the killer of “playing God” immediately before the police got the message that “I am God,” told Tim Russert: “We are dealing with an interactive terrorist.” But…
Auto Focus
Only a child of the 1960s could have thought of the idea of trying to make Bob Crane into a tragic hero — or come as close as Paul Schrader does to succeeding.
Entry from October 15, 2002
Whenever I hear someone talking about his principles I think, here’s someone preparing himself for some betrayal. There’s nothing like high principles to reconcile a man to ratting on his friends. Look at Jim Jeffords. All he had to do was cross the floor and turn the Senate over to the Democrats and the next thing…
Swept Away
The material girl is now, under the influence of the romantic leftism of her husband and Lina Wertmüller, the dialectical-material girl