Rules of Attraction, The
La Ronde — or is it La Dolce Vita? — goes to college. Love may be elusive, but there is plenty of sex, booze and drugs to take your mind off the fact.
Life of the Parody
Spy thrillers have always been exercises in fantasy, but the fantasy is becoming ever more infantile.
— From the September-October American Spectator
Entry from October 8, 2002
An editorial in the Wall Street Journal has ridiculed, and with good reason, the statement by the mother of the “American Taliban” John Walker Lindh that “Some people are seekers, and he is one of them. I know that sounds New Age, and some people won’t get it, ” she told People magazine, “but he…
8 Femmes (8 Women)
Come to think of it, the capacity of Scott’s “minist’ring angel” to be beastly to her menfolk and even more beastly to other women has always been comic.
Man from Elysian Fields, The
A ridiculous bit of wish-fulfilment nevertheless suggests that family values may no longer be considered box-office poison.
Debating Iraq
America has never looked so democratic as in the long-running media “debate” over military action in Iraq, alas — From the October New Criterion
“Keen About Death” — Reintroducing the Language of National Honor
— From Our Brave New World: Essays on the Impact of September 11, edited by Wladyslaw Pleszczynski (Stanford CA: Hoover Institution Press, 2002).
Entry from October 1, 2002
Politics as Reality TV: Part III A desire to find something familiar in the new (I think) leads Michael Kazin, a former SDS leader and Weatherman and now a historian at Georgetown University, to compare “American Candidate,” the proposed Fox reality show designed to pick a presidential candidate, with “a noble political tradition” in America…
Sweet Home Alabama
Corny and over-the-top as Hollywood’s celebrations of the virtues of rural life as compared to urban used to be, at least the filmmakers usually gave the impression of believing in it.
Tuxedo, The
The now familiar practice of making machines into the heroes of our favorite technological romances has taken another leap forward.
Entry from September 26, 2002
A footnote to the review of The Four Feathers below and the description of it by the progressive-minded David Thomson, writing in the progressive-minded New York Times, as “preposterous racist folderol.” Well sure. What else should the Times say of it? But another thing that Thomson wrote caught my eye. Of the 1939 film-version of the…
Entry from September 23, 2002
O my prophetic soul! It comes as no surprise, of course, that reality outruns parody. No sooner had I suggested, no more than half-seriously, that the TV networks ought to run a reality TV show, along the lines of “American Idol,” to pick a presidential candidate than Fox announced that it has just such a…