The American Culture

When I heard that Kenneth Branagh was doing a remake of Sleuth, the interesting but overblown and somewhat asinine adaptation of Anthony Shaffer's play of the same name, brought to film in 1972 by director Joseph L. Mankiewicz, it seemed likely to be another Entirely Unnecessary Remake, like the Jude Law film of Alfie and all the silly remakes of 1970s and '80s horror films such as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Halloween.

Even more warning was the fact that since his first film, an excellent adaptation of Shakespeare's Henry V (itself an Entirely Unnecessary Remake of Lawrence Olivier's impressive 1946 production), Branagh has done little that was interesting or even competent, either as an actor or as a director.

Plus there was the gimmick of casting Michael Caine, who had played the youngest of the three characters that populated the original film version, to play the oldest in this version, and that his replacement as the younger character would be prissy Jude Law, who had taken on Caine's classic role in the recent Entirely Unnecessary Remake of Alfie.

Advance reports from Venice, where Branagh's remake has just premiered in the city's film festival, are that the movie just doesn't work. The Hollywood Reporter review says it looks "great" and has some witty new lines from screenwriter Harold Pinter, but its attempt to go very "dark" in the third act falls flat.

That's another silly trend among the pop-culture elite of our times, the idea that making things "dark" makes them more intelligent and artistic. It does not. It makes them more cliched and stupid, almost invariably. This is why people don't go to see films like The Black Dahlia: such movies are boring and stupid.

The Hollywood Reporter critique observes, "The big names and a tight 86-minute running time also will help, but the film's downbeat tone won't encourage huge box office."

The Mankiewicz version strongly emphasized the class-warfare and Generation Gap issues so popular at the time, and Branagh's EUR does the same, according to the Hollywood Reporter writeup, but evidently the filmmaker's desire to make this one "deeper" and more intense than the earlier version just makes the entire thing obvious and vulgar:

Pinter produces some cracking lines of dialogue that Caine and Jude relish to the full. He even has Law ask: What's it all about? The two actors deliver movie-star performances of the highest level, and their gamesmanship is hugely entertaining. Until, that is, the third set, when a grimmer mood takes over along with considerable homoerotic banter that seems to have little grounding and lacks wit.

"Sleuth" is the kind of film that should leave audiences with a wicked smiling shiver, but alas, that's not the case.

What Branagh and his collaborators seem not to have realized is that the original film version was already plenty dark itself, in its themes and personal conflicts. The only way to top that would be to vulgarize it by making everything more obvious, and hence superficial, and hence less intellectually stimulating.

I'll carve out some time to see the film when it arrives on our sparkling American shores, and will of course report on it then. For now, however, it seems likely that the new Sleuth exemplifies some thoroughly undesirable trends of our time.

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 09:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Turner Classic Movies features one of the greatest filmmakers of all time today: Buster Keaton.

Here's a link to my Weekly Standard essay on Keaton, which is available to subscribers only, alas.

Here's a link to my American Culture essay on Keaton's missed opportunities. 

Among the Keaton films scheduled for broadcast on TCM today and tomorrow, all of the silent ones up through 1928 are very good, great, or classic. I most highly recommend Cops; Sherlock, Jr.; Steamboat Bill, Jr.; The General; and The Navigator.

Here's the TCM Keaton lineup for today and tomorrow:

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Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards has written a letter demanding that two Swedish newspapers apologize to the band and its Swedish fans for publishing a very negative review of an August 3 Rolling Stones concert in Gothenberg, Sweden. The review said Richards looked "very drunk" at the performance.

Now, there's a shocker.

Richards, of course, is world-famous for looking like a particularly ancient and frightful witch and speaking an incomprehensible blather most commonly heard among street-wandering schizophrenics—and is widely beloved for it all, as a sort of crazy uncle character. Yet somehow the review set him into a state of high dudgeon reminiscent of Arianna Huffington on a bad day. In a statement released today and reported by Reuters, Richards demanded the newspaper apologize:

"Never before have I risen to the bait of a bad review," the veteran rock star said in a statement released on Wednesday.

"But this time ... I have to stand up for our incredible Gothenburg audience and for our fans all over Sweden ... to say that you owe them, and us, an apology."

I suppose it is ordinarily a bit of an insult to claim that a person was drunk on the job, but in Richards's case, it's precisely what we'd expect. In fact, it's what he's paid for—to appear to be drunk if not actually to be drunk.

So I greatly doubt that the band's fans were offended by the reviewer's claim that Richards was inebriated during the Gothenberg show, even if he wasn't (although of course he probably was—he keeled over onstage during a Helsinki show on the same tour). After all, no one attending a Rolling Stones concert is expecting Keef to perform with the miraculous precision of a Jan Akkerman. No, they're just there to have fun hearing the same songs they've heard hundreds of times before, performed live by a bunch of nutty rich old codgers.

Here's hoping Keith gets over it and goes back to being our crazy lovable uncle instead of a crazy scary uncle who writes angry letters to newspapers.

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Film critic and social commentator Michael Medved had a point recently when he observed that Hollywood has little interest in depicting Muslim terrorists, which are of course the big threat of our time, and instead typically characterizing terrorists as Caucasians. In an article for USA Today, Medved noted that this is especially absurd in the wake of the 911 attacks:

Since 2001's devastating attacks, big studios have released numerous movies with terrorists as part of the plot, including Sum of All Fears, Red Eye, Live Free or Die Hard, The Bourne Ultimatum and many more, but virtually all of them show terrorists as Europeans or Americans with no Islamic connections. Even historically based thrillers downplay Muslim terrorism: Steven Spielberg's Munich spends more than 80% of its running time showing Israelis as killers and Palestinians as victims, while Oliver Stone's World Trade Center highlights the aftermath of the attacks with no depiction of those who perpetrated them. United 93 stands out among recent releases in showing Islamic killers in acts of terror — and it would be hard to tell that story without portraying the suicidal hijackers.

Beyond topicality, Tinseltown's respect for Muslim sensibilities has proved so pervasive that there has been little or no reference to bloody episodes of the Islamic past. In Kingdom of Heaven, Muslim followers of Saladdin appear far more sympathetic than the thuggish, devious Christian Crusaders. Despite the fact that founders of Islam built their religion through centuries of conquest vastly more bloody than incidents at the beginnings of Mormonism, it's unthinkable that filmmakers would ever depict Mohammed and his followers as viciously as they handle Brigham Young in September Dawn.

It was a terrible event and an utter atrocity, of course, but Medved is right to point out two problems with the film treatment. One is that it presents the Mormon leaders Brigham Young and Josep Smith as religious fanatics, when a fair treatment would require an equal emphasis on the persecution the Mormons endured in those early years. Nothing can excuse the Mountain Meadows Massacre, of course, but it wasn't an isolated instance of religious fanaticism that was unique to the Mormons.

And that leads to Medved's second and more important objection: that the film's pretense that religious fanaticism in the West is an important concern for us today. It is absolutely not. It is Islam that is the religious threat to the West (and the rest of the world as well), and no other. Medved is correct to note,

The measured response to public smears of Mormonism in effect rebuts the September Dawn suggestion that the church represents a relevant example of violent religious fanaticism. Despite the turbulence of their founding generation, Mormons have been conspicuously peaceful, patriotic, hard-working and neighborly for at least the past 117 years (since the church repudiated and banned polygamy).

Nonetheless, it turns out he needn't have worried: September Dawn has absolutely tanked at the box office, as Reuters reports:

The most painful debut of the weekend belonged to director Christopher Cain's "September Dawn," the re-creation of a 19th century massacre committed by a band of Mormons. Released through Slowhand Releasing, the film earned just $901,857.

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One of the most influential popular artists of our time will join one of the most important  songwriter-performers of the 1970s for a brief concert tour of the U.S. east coast this fall, as Bob Dylan and Elvis Costello get together for thirteen performances.

More info is available at the official Bob Dylan website, here.

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With Superbad at number 1 at the movie box office for the second week in a row and not much else changing in the cinemas, and only two notable new movies—Mr. Bean's Holiday, which I'm looking forward to seeing, and War, a Jet Li/Jason Statham actioner which I also mean to see but haven't yet managed to fit into the sched), it's a good time to look at a film that's been in the theaters for a few weeks already.

No Reservations, the drama starring Catherine Zeta-Jones, Aaron Eckhart, and Abigail Breslin, got mediocre reviews, but I rather liked it. (On the other hand, I saw it the weekend it was released but haven't got around to writing about it until now.) Most of the negativity centered on complaints of the film's predictability, which typically means that the reviewer didn't find it very interesting but does not know why.

Yet there was one interesting thing about it, which the reviews appear to have missed. That is that the film is not a romantic comedy (which would explain why it is not very funny) or essential a romance at all, and is not about food and the making and enjoying of same (which has been done to death on television in recent years anyway).

What it is, and what makes it interesting to those who are not mentally deficient enough to be professional film critics, is a serious drama about a woman who has never learned how to love. Through the course of the film, we find out that chef Kate (Zeta-Jones), an intense, work-obsessed, single woman in Manhattan, never knew her father well—he ran out on the family—and never was close to her mother. Through a tragedy, the death of her single-parent sister, Kate has to raise a young girl (Breslin), and this causes her to confront her essential loneliness and try to work out an answer.

If that all sounds rather serious, well, you're right. It is serious, and Kate's problems all trace back to an unfortunately common phenomenon of our times—divorce—and hence the film has resonance and perhaps some important lessons for a great many people. That makes No Reservations an interesting film well worth seeing.

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Season 1 of the Spike TV series The Kill Point concludes tonight with a two-hour episode. It's a fairly engaging series about a bank robbery gone bad that results in deaths and a drawn-out hostage situation (with very strong performances by Donnie Wahlberg and John Leguizamo), though it's nothing essential, by any means.

There is, however, one interesting angle. The robbers/hostage takers are a former platoon of U.S. soldiers back in country after their tours are over. The leader (Leguizamo) is a former sergeant who was court-martialed after he refused to send his men into a particular site in Iraq. After his refusal, the higher-ups sent another platoon, and they were all killed. So instead of being considered a hero for saving his men and warning of disaster, he's been made the fall guy for their catastrophic mistake.

Well, as an image of how competent and honest government generally is, the story angle makes sense. As an example of how the U.S. military actually works, however, it seems more than a bit unfair. Yes, poor decisions are made, and cover-ups happen, but this sort of thing is thankfully the very uncommon exception, not the norm. And although one of the characters, herself an ex-marine, points out to the ex-sergeant the obvious truth that other people's wrongs don't justify robbery and murder, the central premise of the mission gone bad and hero turned martyr remains.

Also part of this plot point is the fact that the leader of the robbers uses their status as ex-soldiers to score points with a left-wing press eager to politicize every occasion. Out on the street in front of the television cameras, he characterizes his men as neglected heros who have been driven to crime by the failure of the federal government and the American people to take care of those who fought to preserve their freedom. As an image of how easily scummy people can exploit left-wing politics, it's impressively accurate and evocative.

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The mixing of genres can be interesting when it works, but when it doesn't, it's usually a disaster.

The producers of the forthcoming CBS TV primetime series, Viva Laughlin, based on the BBC series Viva Blackpool, will see if they can avoid the shoals. The series will feature mystery-suspense plots augmented with musical-theater sequences, the network has revealed. USA Today explains:

Imagine if your life came scored and choreographed.

That's the experience of Viva Laughlin's central character, Ripley Holden. When he wants to open a casino, he struts about and joins Elvis in Viva Las Vegas. When his predatory mistress won't let him go, they engage in an aggressive duet of Blondie's One Way or Another. When it's time to put it all on the roulette wheel, he gets stoked by adding his voice to Bachman-Turner Overdrive's Let It Ride.

Film star Hugh Jackman is serving as executive producer and will occasionally appear on the show, which has raised some attention for the series. 

The network is hoping the addition of musical sequences will bring new life to the mystery-suspense genre, says Shari Ann Brill of media buyer Carat, as quoted in the USA Today article:

"In order to attract more and younger viewers, you have to offer something different. But I just don't know if the typical CBS viewer, who is so accustomed to criminal procedurals, will take to something very different," she says.

This sort of thing has been tried before, and has always failed both with critics and audiences, as in the ludicrous Steven Bochco series Cop Rock.

The reason is very simple: although the musical sequences may increase our understanding of the characters, that is not what suspense fiction is about. It's about story, story, and story. The musical sequences inevitably interrrupt the flow of the suspense story. The two forms just don't fit together. How the producers mean to solve that problem, I cannot imagine.

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 05:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

As promised earlier today, here is my review of Alan Reynolds's book, Income and Wealth, which appeared in the June 2007 issue of Budget and Tax News:

Income and Wealth
By Alan Reynolds
Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2006
231 pages, $55.00, ISBN 0-313-33688-1

The past decade has brought a tsunami of complaints about increasing economic inequality in the United States, a "vanishing middle class," and a huge and increasing concentration of wealth among the top 1 percent of wage earners.

As Alan Reynolds points out in his superb new book Income and Wealth, those claims are false. Every one of them.

Reynolds, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, has written for all the major newspapers and is a syndicated columnist. He observes that the amount of inequality one sees in the United States depends on how you define terms such as "average," "working," "family," and "real," and on what dates are used.

The definitions used by activists for bigger government grossly overstate the income of those at the top of the scale and similarly understate figures for those at the bottom.

Manipulating Income Figures

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, for example, continuously declares real incomes in the United States have stagnated since 1973 for all but the top 10 percent.

But as Reynolds notes, "studies that use income tax data to estimate income distribution usually exclude transfer payments," which have risen substantially since 1973. The data also exclude employee benefits, which skyrocketed during that period, and include a huge amount of income "that used to be reported under the corporation income tax" and that happens to have been rising in recent years.

By artificially deflating incomes in the lower brackets and inflating those in the upper brackets, Krugman and his cronies make income inequality appear much larger than it really is.

Middle-Income Families Doing Fine

Reynolds also takes on the numerous reports about a "vanishing middle class," which suggest once-prosperous individuals are plummeting into the lower income brackets.

As Reynolds points out, these reports use a fixed definition of middle income, which "ensures that the proportion of households in that middle group must decline with a rise in general prosperity, because prosperity causes a rising percentage of families to earn more than $50,000."

And general prosperity has indeed risen. Reynolds notes, "In constant 2000 dollars, U.S. consumers spent $25,816 per person in 2004--nearly double the $13,371 figure for real per capita consumption in 1973." Similarly, "median household net worth (assets minus debts) has increased steadily and substantially."

More than 75 percent of poor households had air conditioning in 2001, whereas in 1971 less than 32 percent of all U.S. households did.

The same is true of other items such as microwave ovens and color TVs. Whereas nobody had a home VCR or DVD player in 1971, 98 percent of poor households did in 2001, and around a quarter had personal computers and cell phones.

Middle-income households have enjoyed similar improvements in living standards. For example, the average size of new homes rose from 1,500 square feet in 1970 to 2,349 square feet in 2004, while the home ownership rate rose by several percentage points. Obviously, incomes for lower and middle-income households have risen nicely in recent decades.

'Work Matters'

The most important factor in household income is simply the number of workers in the home, Reynolds notes: "There are nearly six times as many full-time year-round workers in the top quintile as there are in the bottom quintile, according to the Census Bureau."

Contrary to the activists' fevered assertions of a continuously rising number of "working poor," Reynolds writes, "The poverty rate among full-time workers is negligible." Reynolds aptly summarizes the situation as follows: "Work matters."

And, Reynolds notes, if we ignore transfer payments we get a distorted picture of conditions in the lower income quintiles. Reynolds suggests individual and household spending and wealth are better indicators than income figures, which have been so skillfully manipulated.

Policy Follows Falsehoods

The activists' trick of turning good news into bad would not matter much if these debates were purely for intellectual sport, but they are in fact the driver for much of our public spending at all levels of government.

Huge increases in government spending on Medicaid and Medicare, other health insurance, and other transfer programs intended to alleviate economic inequality are destroying state budgets. And the federal budget groans under the weight of transfer programs and other entitlements.

Certainly all of these mistakes could be honest ones, but they're falsehoods nonetheless, and an objective reader of Income and Wealth must conclude many journalists and activists are knowingly manipulating statistics to further an agenda for more government control over the economy and to undermine support for free markets.

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In his syndicated column, William F. Buckley pays tribute today to Alan Reynolds, the Cato Institute economist who has defended free markets for nearly four decades.

Reynolds has published hundreds of articles in newspapers and magazines, notably in The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Reason, National Review,and in national syndication. His devotion to facts instead of ideology has made him a huge thorn in the statists' side during his entire career.

He is also an immensely cheerful and personable gentleman. (And he once played guitar in rock star Little Richard's band. How many economists have done that?)

Recently Reynolds wrote his first full-length book, Income and Wealth, in which, in his usual way, he demolishes the great statist myths of our time. As Buckey notes:

"Income and Wealth" (published by Greenwood Press) is stunning in its revelations and its deflations of popular Democratic superstitions. On page 203, for example, Reynolds lists the most popular superstitions of the derogating class, including the assertions that 80 percent to 90 percent of U.S. households have experienced no increase in real income for 25 years, and that only the top 1 percent to 10 percent have received any significant benefits from the growth of productivity.

"Not one of those statements is even remotely close to being true," Reynolds writes. "It is difficult to imagine how so many of the nation's leading economic journalists and economists claim to believe not just one or two of these incredible ideas, but the entire package."

Buckley is absolutely correct to refer to Reynolds as "an economist of acute precision" and pay homage to him. Later this afternoon I will post my review of Alan Reynolds's book, Income and Wealth.

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I've seen a multitude of interpretations of the Harry Potter book series, and for me the most interesting ones emphasize the ideas in the narratives, instead of arguing over the books' literary quality. (The latter seems to me a moot point.) One of the best brief summaries I've seen is Jerry Bowyer's, published today.

An excerpt:

Jo Rowling has a wonderful talent for tapping into Biblical and literary symbolism. From the very beginning, I've believed that Hogwarts is the literary representation of the Christian Church. Towered over by stone spires, filled with living icons of great men and women from the past, Hogwarts is a place where ancient books are studied to relearn great wisdom from the past. Hogwarts was founded by four great wizards over a thousand years ago who were united in the belief that their knowledge should be passed on. Like the four evangelists in early church literature, each has its own seals and symbol and its own special focus of virtue. Many of those wonderful names, such as Godric Gryffindor, Rowling revealed in a recent interview were, taken from medieval Christian saints.

The full article is available here. 

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Normally I hate revisionism, but this looks like it just might work:

Warner Bros. and Village Roadshow Pictures are teaming on "Oz," a revisionist take on the L. Frank Baum books that hatched "The Wizard of Oz." . . .

[Said writer Josh Olson,] "The appealing thing about the Baum books to me is how wildly imaginative they are. There are crazy characters from amazing places. I want this to be ‘Harry Potter’ dark, not ‘Seven’ dark." . . . "A lot of the plot is mine, but the characters are all Baum."

—from Variety 

The film's prospective director, Todd McFarlane, wants it to appeal to the same audiences that enjoyed the Lord of the Rings movie trilogy. If the authors continue to respect the source material, the film could conceivably serve, as they say they intend, as an effective sequel to the original, rather than a remake. We'll see.

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EMI has put together a remastered edition which is on sale in the UK now and will be ready for purchase in the United States on September 3, according to amazon.com. It is currently available for preorder at amazon.com.

Birmingham, England-born Roy Wood was the founder and driving force behind the classic late-1960s rock band The Move and the 1970s group the Electric Light Orchestra, which he founded with Move alumnus Jeff Lynne. Wood was the Move's main songwriter and arranger, and was the major creative force behind ELO's first and most creatively innovative album.

The Move (1967-1971), while extremely melodic and known for creating highly catchy tunes, was the first band to develop the heavy metal sound, with emphasis on rumbling bass and the lower tones on electric guitar accompanying impassioned vocals. The band was also a leader in the psychedelic sound and an early developer of progressive rock. It had numerous big hits in England and some in the United States; a few of their best-loved songs are "Flowers in the Rain," "I Can Hear the Grass Grow," "Blackberry Way," "Do Ya," "California Man," "Fire Brigade," and "Brontosaurus."

After leaving ELO, Wood formed the rock-oriented Roy Wood's Wizzard, which had numerous hit singles and albums in Britain but did not make much of a dent in the United States. Wood kept working but was not able to get much music out to the public after the demise of Wizzard in the mid-1970s.

Much useful information on Roy Wood and his musical career is available on Roy Wood's website. 

While recording albums (and numerous hit singles) with the Move, Wood recorded Boulders in 1969, performing all the voices and every instrument except the use of harmonium on one track. The record was not released until 1973, however, because the band's manager did not want it to compete with the group's main releases. (This was a horrible mistake, as noted in this excellent article on Wood in the Daily Telegraph.)

The instrumentation is impressively varied, including the usual guitar, drums, and bass, plus a myriad of keyboards, woodwinds, banjo, sitar, string bass, horns, harp, cello, and much more. Wood uses numerous vocal approaches, including multiple overdubs of his voice to create orchestral choirs and "doo wop" choruses. Wood even provides a charming percussion background for "Wake Up" by slapping two bowls of water with his hands, recorded in stereo.

The song styles on Boulders range widely—gospel on "Songs of Praise," folk-pop on "Wake Up," country (the delightful "When Gran'ma Plays the Banjo" and the "Rockin' Shoes" section of "Rock Medley"), medieval serenade ("Dear Elaine"), Celtic (The "Irish Loafer" section of "Rock Medley"), doo wop ("All the Way Over the Hill"), madrigal ("Miss Clarke and the Computer"), straighforward rock and roll ("Rock Down Low" and the "Locomotive" section of "Rock Medley"), rockabilly (the "She's Too Good for Me' section of "Rock Medley"), and the Beach Boys style ("All the Way Over the Hill"). (The California-based band were among Wood's favorites, and he wrote and performed several songs that one could almost swear were Beach Boys recordings, such as "Any Old Time Will Do" and "Why Does a Pretty Girl Sing Such Sad Songs?" from Mustard, another absolute must-have, classic Wood solo album, and the single "Forever".)

All of this variety is tied together by Wood's peculiar genius for melody and his decision to use melodic and rhythmic approaches from one era with instrumentation from another, as when he uses madrigal to tell a story of a computer falling in love with a woman ("Miss Clarke and the Computer"), complete with electronically processed voice representing the computer, and a brief jazzy passage at about the 2:00 mark.

The music of Boulders is lively and rhythmic, the lyrics are intelligent and charming, and the entire affair has a real sense of both joy and seriousness. Boulders is truly one of the great albums of the rock era.

Most Highly Recommended

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 10:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

If you need any demonstration of the amazing cultural power of tweeners (young people exiting childhood and entering the early years of adolescence), the popularity of the Disney TV movie High School Musical should provide it. It was watched by millions on television, has sold well in DVD, and has spawned a cottage industry of associated paraphernalia including concert tours and CDs.

Last Friday night the sequel, High School Musical 2, kept the tweeners and their undoubtedly reluctant parents enthralled, setting a record for non-network TV viewership:

AP reports—

Friday's premiere drew an estimated audience of 17.2 million, which would make it the most-watched basic cable program ever, according to Nielsen Media Research. It more than doubled the viewership of the first movie, "High School Musical," which drew 7.7 million in 2006.

The basic cable record had been held by a "Monday Night Football" game on ESPN in 2006, which was watched by 16 million.

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The raunchy coming-of-age comedy Superbad opened big at the box office this past weekend, in fact bigger than any other movie that has opened in late August. Reuters reports:

"Superbad" grossed $31.2 million, breaking a 12-year-old record for movies that opened after August 15, said Rory Bruer, president of distribution for Sony Pictures. . . .

"Superbad" displaced "Mortal Kombat" as the top money maker film to debut after August 15, according to Bruer.

The film about two nerdy high school buddies looking for booze and girls unseated last week's top earner, "Rush Hour 3," a buddy film about two hapless cops.

Rush Hour 3 is still going strong, however, as the Reuters article reports:

"Rush Hour 3" came in second with $21.8 million for New Line Cinema, down 49 percent from its opening weekend. It has grossed a total of $88.2 million since its debut on August 10.

Because it did not have expensive stars, computer effects, or settings, Superbad cost approximately $20 million dollars to produce, a relatively miniscule amount for a Hollywood release.

The Invasion, another remake of the 1950s space alien film directed by Don Siegel, came in fifth, bringing on only $6 million despite the presence of big (and expensive) stars Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig (the current James Bond).

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J. K. Rowling, author of the mega-bestselling Harry Potter books, is writing a detective novel, according to the Sunday Times of London. AP reports:

The Sunday Times newspaper quoted Ian Rankin, a fellow author and neighbor of Rowling's, as saying the creator of the "Harry Potter" books is turning to crime fiction.

"My wife spotted her writing her Edinburgh criminal detective novel," the newspaper, which was available late Saturday, quoted Rankin as telling a reporter at an Edinburgh literary festival.

A mystery series selling in the hundreds of millions, as the Harry Potter series did, would certainly be good for the genre's overall popularity—but is exceedingly unlikely. However, Rowling's ability to bring imagination and some interesting ideas to genre fiction has been fully proven, and her effort could indeed be refreshing for a form of fiction that has become rather dreary in recent years.

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Tomorrow night brings the conclusion of The Company, a three-part, six-hour miniseries on Turner Network Television (TNT). The series, based on a novel by Robert Littell, is produced by Ridley Scott and Tony Scott and tells the story of approximately three decades in the history of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.

In so doing, it vividly illustrates the conflicting national security goals that inevitably face all liberal societies.

The story is basically sympathetic to the aims of the agency, meaning it approves of the overall U.S. goals in the Cold War, although it is honest about the shortcomings and failures of execution that occurred. The tragic consequences of the Eisenhower administration's refusal to provide direct support to the Hungarian uprising in 1956 are shown vividly, yet one can assuredly make a strong case, especially on classical liberal grounds, that the president's decision was the right one.

Eisenhower's decision was almost certainly right from the perspective of U.S. interests, yet it surely had devastating consequences for Hungary. That is tragic, and the CIA's evident encouragement of the Hungarians to revolt against their government contributed to the tragedy, although it's obvious that the Hungarians did indeed want to revolt regardless of the U.S. position on the matter.

As the program makes clear, it was not the United States that was the problem; it was the Soviet Union that was responsible for all the death, destruction, and torture.

In the Bay of Pigs incident, by contrast, President Kennedy's decision not only to encourage the invasion but also to finance, train, and supply the invasion force made it an entirely different matter. Kennedy's refusal to provide air cover for the invasion was catastrophic and clearly set back U.S. foreign policy for a couple of decades. As one character notes, if the United States considered Cuba a real threat, we should have invaded openly and directly. That would have been the honorable and defensible thing to do.

As these observations suggest, The Company does an excellent job of laying out the issues that confronted the United States during the Cold War, and the difficult choices our nation had to make. The presence of a mole in the CIA over many years—which is also based on fact—further suggests the practical difficulties of conducting the Cold War. A nation devoted to centralized government power, such as the Soviet Union, has easy choices to make: attack whomever you wish, whenever you think you can succeed. A liberal nation such as the United States, by contrast, must respect the sovereignty of other nations, involve itself in other nations' affairs only when there is a true and direct threat to U.S. citizens and property, and respect the rights of its citizens while doing all that it must to protect them.

That is an almost impossible combination of goals to satisfy simultaneously, yet a liberal nation must purse them all. That the Cold War presented us with an implacable, immensely formidable enemy made the choices even more difficult. As The Company suggests, the need to make those choices is a matter of immense importance and great drama.

The writing, production, direction, and performances in the series all help make The Company both dramatically and intellectually compelling. Chris O'Donnell, Michael Keaton, and Alfred Molina stand out among a highly skilled cast.

The final episode of the series premieres Sunday night at 8:00 EDT on TNT, and you can catch up with the story by watching full episodes online here. 

Recommended.

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 10:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The central moral issue of the past century was whether a traditional (in fact, millennias old) assumption behind moral thinking should prevail, or should be replaced by a newer, seemingly more compassionate thought. It is a matter over which American society is still struggling.

The classical Western notion, of course, was that an individual is responsible for his or her own actions, even if outside circumstances contributed to the person's decision to break a rule. That meant, for example, that even poverty did not excuse theft.

Of course, even if personal responsibility was assumed, mercy and common sense were essential to the dispensing of true justice. Western morality and our sense of justice always recognized that sometimes, albeit rarely, an individual's circumstances can be so compelling as to excuse rule-breaking. And of course anything not done by choice, such as killing a person in self-defense, was automatically excused.

This mindset was challenged in the past century by the philosophy of determinism.

Resting on the obvious truth that all material actions are caused in some way or another, the moral philosophy of determinism extended this to suggest that to a great extent human beings do not act freely by their own choice. It is in fact a highly sophisticated argument, but it ultimately rests on the assumptions of philosophical materialism.

In its popular manifestation, in any case, moral determinism led to the idea that criminal behavior was largely not a matter of free choice but instead an inevitable consequence of the circumstances in which the wrongdoer found him- or herself. Hence the emphasis on "alleviating the root causes of crime" as opposed to removing criminals from society and punishing them to lower the attractiveness of the choice to engage in criminal behavior.

Such a mentality certainly benefits those who commit crimes, of course, as they are fairly easily absolved of responsibility for their actions, and punishment is increasingly hard to justify. It is seriously deaf to the victims of crime, however, as it places the emphasis on the awful circumstances that drove the criminal to harm someone, and concentrates efforts on removing those circumstances. What it does then, is make a perverse quest of bettering the lives of the criminal class, rewarding them for their misdeeds.

As a result of this perverse situation, instead of simply holding criminals more responsible for their actions, "victims' rights" organizations sprung up, with the intent of providing ministrations to victims to give them "closure," meaning to reconcile them to the fact that they were victimized by others and that nothing good was going to be done about it or any real effort made to reduce the incidence of such crimes.

By the 1980s, this elaborate scheme of superficial niceness to both criminals and their victims and refusal to pursue real justice had become clearly absurd and harmful, and a reaction set in. Since that time, American society has been torn between the two approaches to moral responsibility, with the criminal justice system and social welfare apparatus moving more toward the notion of personal responsibility while the schools inclulcated a deterministic moral philosophy.

This argument between two philosophical approaches has also played out widely in the culture, esepcially in crime fiction. For me one of the best forums for contemplating issues of moral responsibility has been mystery fiction, and I think that most of the best instances I've seen of such treatment have been in the realm of classic puzzle mysteries.

One such writer is H. C. Bailey, author of the classic Reggie Fortune mysteries. Bailey quite consciously tackled the issues of personal responsibility and possible compulsion, and his main detective, Reggie Fortune, often openly recognized that legal guilt and moral responsibility can be two very different things. As a result of this recgonition of tension between two notions, Bailey's mystery stories have a fairly sophisticated moral point of view.

But moral sophistication does not, in this case, mean decadence. Bailey recognizes the difficulties in establishing the truth of free will and personal responsibility, but he recognizes that in practical terms they must be assumed to be true or society will devolve into chaos. The key, as Dr. Fortune's actions make clear, is that each situation be analyzed thoroughly so that the response is just and true for that instance. That, it is clear, is all that we can hope to do in this world.

In a 1935 profile of his great detective character Reggie Fortune, "Meet Mr. Fortune," Bailey demonstrates this truth by directly and insightfully addressing the question of personal responsibility for one's actions:

On the conviction of a criminal he [Fortune] has sometimes been heard to repeat the phrase of the old divine, "There, but for the grace of God, go I." But this does not proceed from the comfortable philosophy that anybody may be a rascal if circumstances impel him that way. Mr. Fortune's creed is that the original impulse in a great deal of crime is a motive which many or most people feel. The distinction of the criminal is that he indulges it selfishly. For that selfishness when it wrongs others Mr. Fortune finds no excuse in difficult or tempting circumstances. A cruel crime is to him the work of a pestilential creature, and he sees his duty in dealing with such cases as that of a doctor in "treating" illness. The cause must be discovered and extirpated. There is no more mercy for the cruel criminal than for the germs of disease. Both must be made innocuous. The measures taken against both must be such as to diminish the danger of further infection.

Here, as in the best of his stories, Bailey manages to square the circle morally: fully recognizing the power of circumstances while thoroughly accepting the fact that what distinguishes the criminal from the rest of us is the choice to break the rules.

Philosophy, as Bailey and Fortune both recognize, can serve as a foundation for action, or it can serve as an excuse for shirking one's responsibility to protect those who cannot protect themselves. And the latter class, of course, includes all of us at one time or another (in childhood, in dotage, and at least eight hours of every day of our lives, as we sleep). It is why the Reggie Fortune stories so often deal with threats or crimes against children—they are among the most clearly defenseless of us all, and the defenselessness of victims is what makes crime so repugnant.

As Bailey makes clear, the honorable route is to take the measures necessary to ensure the protection of the innocent. This attitude should be neither eccentric nor particularly courageous, yet it too often seems so, both in the real world and in fiction.

The power of popular culture is that it enables us to see the consequences of our assumptions without having to suffer them ourselves.

Unfortuntunately, we are all too often wont to ignore the warnings and forge ahead anyway. That is our choice.

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 09:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The popular Fox TV series House, M.D. implied major changes at the end of the last season when each of the three members of the eponymous, eccentric, tortured genius doctor's team left his employ either voluntarily or otherwise.

Since then, the producers of the series have announced the hiring of several new cast members who are reportedly trying out for spots on House's depleted team. However, as E! News reports, the previous members will in fact return to the show at some point and in some capacity:

Season three ended in May with both doctors [played by Jennifer Morrison and Jesse Spencer] seemingly leaving Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital for less curmudgeonly pastures, after Chase was fired and Cameron resigned. But both Morrison and Spencer, as well as Omar Epps, whose Dr. Eric Foreman also supposedly split, are returning to House in the fall, so show runner Dave Shore must have something else in mind for Hugh Laurie's resident trio of consciences.

Nevertheless, when the Emmy-nominated series' fourth season kicks off, the diagnostic wing will be more crowded than usual. Kal Penn, Olivia Wilde, Anne Dudek, Peter Jacobson and Edi Gathegi are all joining the cast as young doctors in competition to join House's team.

It's the mark of a good TV series that, one, the producers have continually tried to keep the show fresh by incorporating new ideas and plotlines (even though most of the latter have been largely annoying and stupid) and, two, that anybody cares who's leaving and who's staying.

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 10:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

The popular ABC TV series Desperate Housewives will add two homosexual characters to its recurring cast this fall. E! Online reports: 

The season is already shaping up to be more diverse than years past, introducing the first ever gay couple to Wisteria Lane.

Judging Amy's Kevin Rahm and One Life to Live's Tuc Watkins have nabbed recurring roles on the series. They will play the show's first gay couple, but details are scarce about their exact story line. Though if tradition is any indication, it's likely the seemingly happy couple will have something to hide from their nosy neighbors.

At the TCA conference last month, Cherry indicated that one of the men will have a particularly fractious relationship with [actress Teri] Hatcher's Susan, whose desire to be politically correct and prove her open-mindedness at the new couple backfires.

Undoubtedly the show's producers will be mighty careful to avoid suffering the same fate.

In the similarly suburban-angsty film American Beauty, you will recall, the homosexual couple was presented as the only happy match in the entire narrative. For the couple in Desperate Housewives to deviate from that mythical contemporary political-cultural ideal would be to court endless harassment from radical homosexual groups.

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 05:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Look back into the history of the past century, and one U.S. political-cultural truth is eminently clear:

Governors win the presidency.

As a rule, a senator or vice president running for the presidency against a state governor is extremely unlikely to win the race. The last senator who was not a sitting president to win the presidency: Kennedy in 1960, and it's almost a certainty that the close race against Richard Nixon—a former senator and vice president, not a governor—was stolen by pols in Illinois and Texas.

So, when I think about whom any party should nominate for president, I always suggest they go after a governor. 

The reason governors beat national politicians, I think, is fairly simple: they have accomplishments they can cite, have served as CEO of a large government organization (as the U.S. presidency is), and, most importantly, don't have a voting record on important and controversial national issues.

Senators, by contrast, don't have the individual political-administrative accomplishments to which to point, have records dotted with controversial and polarizing votes, and typically have made a lot of enemies on the national level.

It's a certainty that the Democrats will reject my advice and run a Senator this time, either Clinton or Obama, most likely, with Sen. Edwards also running fairly strong.

Plus, the Democrats are hopelessly statist, so nobody they nominate is likely to satisfy me or any other reasonably liberal person.

On the Republican side, the top tier candidates are much more varied. Among them are a Senator, McCain (although he's just barely hanging on at this point, with New Hampshire his only hope for renewal); a former mayor of New York City, Rudy Giuliani; and a governor, Mitt Romney, who would surely be the odds-on favorite if he were not a Mormon but who cannot win the general election because he is highly unlikely to energize the Republicans' crucial voting bloc, evangelical Christians. Also among the prospective candidates is actor and former Senator Fred Thompson.

So, given that the best choice is a governor and Romney probably isn't it, whom should the Republicans nominate, from a purely practical perspective?

Before last weekend's Iowa straw poll I was telling associates that among the current candidates the best choice for the Republicans would be Mike Huckabee. A former Baptist minister who served two terms as governor of Arkansas, a state long controlled by Democrats, where he nonetheless enjoyed high approval ratings, Huckabee is hardly more obscure than Bill Clinton was in 1991 (unless you think Clinton's tenure as leader of the National Governor's Association made him world-famous).

Huckabee has been criticized from the right for not being sufficiently anti-tax and not strongly enough opposed to illegal immigration, but those are positions on which he will no doubt continually move to the right, and he did cut a lot of tax rates as governor of Arkansas.

He's no Ron Paul, to be sure, but from a practical standpoint Huckabee would certainly seem to fit the bill. (Paul should run for governor of Texas before running for president, but he'd be too old by the next go-round for the presidency thereafter. Alas.)

Huckabee has appeal as a candidate, though I'd welcome the entry into the race of some other prominent Republican governor. (Tommy Thompson was hopeless because of his association with the hated Bush administration.) Failing that, I'd reckon they're best off settling for Huckabee.

After his strong, second-place finish in last week's Iowa Straw Poll, Republicans should take a good luck at Huckabee. Unless another Christian, low-tax governor (not named Bush) enters the race unexpectedly, Huckabee actually gives them the best chance of winning, if history is any guide.

And you may rest assured, it is.

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 09:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

Today on National Review Online, American Enterprise Institute education policy studies director Frederick Hess astutely observes the significance of a recent incident at a Maryland university in which a checkout person refused to ring up a young woman's purchase because she was wearing a t-shirt declaring herself as pro-Israel.

Ironically, the incident resulted in a series of conciliatory gestures from the woman who was refused service, and the store made it a policy that employees could discreetly refuse to serve someone whom they found politically unacceptable, provided that they quietly found someone else to serve the person.

As Hess points out, this incident illustrates the contemptible contemporary process of turning tolerance on its head to ensure that certain favored groups get special treatment because they continuously complain about how downtrodden they are:

Exactly how “tolerance” devolved into coddling those who choose to take offense for the slightest of reasons is a question for another day (although decades of experience demonstrates that on-campus tolerance is more frequently understood as the right of “victims” to air grievances than of heterogeneous speakers to be heard). Another question is how and why we’ve allowed identity politics to constrict public spaces.

But the pressing problem with the way “tolerance” as touted by too many educators is that it rewards zealotry; while the zealots are understood to be beyond its soggy grasp, the rational and pragmatic are expected to do what is necessary to keep the peace.

The champions of “tolerance” have pitched it as a costless and all-embracing virtue, all the while dismissing or sidestepping concerns that it might dim critical faculties or undermine commitment to core American values. Indeed, the goings-on