Serving Sara
Beautiful people having funny adventures on the wrong side of the law and getting rich. You’ve just got to love them — don’t you?
Entry from August 21, 2002
John Edwards’s Presidential PAC is calling itself “New American Optimists” — a fact which, so far from being itself a sign of optimism, is running neck and neck with Bob Dole’s slogan in which he claimed to be “the most optimistic man in America” as the most amusingly cynical thing any politician has said in…
Possession
Neil LaBute’s attempt at a real romance goes — perhaps unsurprisingly — horribly wrong.
Entry from August 16, 2002
Memorializing September 11th, Part Two. How could anyone resist the invitation? “Certificate enclosed to honor Mr James Bowman on the Wall of Tolerance,” announced the envelope — right under: “Please R.S.V.P.” Not surprisingly, the certificate to the effect that my name was on the W. of T. and co-signed by Morris Dees and Rosa Parks…
Read My Lips (Sur Mes Lèvres)
The French may look down their noses at bourgeois morality, but aren’t they witty and charming?
Entry from August 13, 2002
The question of whether or not Michael Sells’s book, Approaching the Qur’an: The Early Revelations, should be required reading for the incoming freshmen at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has already become one for the “culture wars.” Pavlovian responses on both sides suggest that no one really wants a “debate,” as such affairs…
Secret Ballot (Raye makhfi)
Another immensely watchable film from Iran, in spite a slight tendency to promote civic responsibility
Teaching the Gorillas
Americans tend to believe in their God-given right to begin the world over again, but their sums have a way of coming out the same — From The American Spectator
Entry from August 9, 2002
Memorializing September 11th, Part One: The fact that advertisers are saying they won’t advertise and networks (at least Fox) are saying they won’t run advertisements on September 11th makes the interesting point that, somewhere in the backs of our minds, there is still a sense of the honorable limits to commercial activity. Of course, we…
Good Girl, The
A sharp satire of popular romanticism occasionally spills over into mere superciliousness.
Entry from August 7, 2002
Movie Odds and Ends: John Hayward writes about Minority Report: If anything, I thought your review cut the movie a remarkable amount of slack for its implausibilities. Are we to believe that the same America which agonizes endlessly over the delicate legal rights of John Walker Lindh, and seems ready to summarily execute police officers…
Entry from August 5, 2002
When Richard Nixon lost to Pat Brown in the California gubernatorial race of 1962 and subsequently staged his petulant, “you-won’t-have-Nixon-to-kick-around-anymore,” press conference, President Kennedy was reported to have observed that: “Nixon went out like he came in: no class.” Maybe there’s something about losing the presidency by a whisker after you have been “only a…