Secretary
How do you get away, in today’s Hollywood, with a movie celebrating masculine domination and feminine submission? Easy! Make it a matter of kinky sex.
Four Feathers, The
As he did in Elizabeth, Shekhar Kapur tries to make his historical characters less like themselves and more like us. Why the self-congratulation?
Entry from September 17, 2002
Investment advice: It’s a good time to buy futures in second-tier celebrities. Naturally the spread of celebrity culture must be especially good for anyone with a small capital sum in minor, local or accidental fame. But there are also things lesser celebrities are willing to do that major stars are not, and there are signs of…
Barbershop
What makes Tim Story’s film so good as moral instruction is what makes it, um, not quite so good as a movie.
Stealing Harvard
Bruce McCulloch does the best he can to make a movie his fellow Canadian, Tom Green, cannot reduce to an episode of “The Tom Green Show.” He can’t.
Entry from September 9, 2002
Memorializing September 11th Part Three — and a propos of both “The Aristocracy of Feelings” from this month’s New Criterion, and “Be Yourself, Get into College” from last Friday’s Wall Street Journal, posted below. . . One of my favorite pop songs is “Kathmandu” by Bob Seeger. In it he sings to a pounding, rock’n’roll…
The Historian as Futurologist
John Lukacs is too good a historian to be taking up the role of prophet.
— from the September Crisis
The Aristocracy of Feelings
Are we asking enough of our leaders if we are only asking them to have the right emotions?
— from the September New Criterion
Entry from September 6, 2002
Feedback. . . David Hill writes: “You say there is no reason to bomb Iraq, but a few days ago Nelson Mandela told Bush that attacking Iraq would lead to the destruction of the United Nations. Isn’t that quite a good reason?” Folks, I’ve got to admit, he’s got me there. But I don’t believe,…
Be Yourself, Get Into College
Nowadays you don’t actually have to know anything, but you do have to fake sincerity and deep feeling to get into our top colleges and universities — from The Wall Street Journal
Entry from August 30, 2002
The conservative case against attacking Iraq. . . One scarcely wishes to give comfort to a man who is undoubtedly an enemy of the United States and of virtually all of its friends (as well as some of its enemies). Nor can it be denied that it would be in our interests — almost as…
Last Kiss (L’ultimo bacio)
A rediscovery of the romance of the normal is not such a big deal, but it is something to be encouraged.