As regular readers of this publication may know, I have written a couple of times in praise of the 1945 mystery-suspense novel The Red Right Hand, by Joel Townsley Rogers. The book appears to be something of a Rorschach test, however, as readers tend to be intensely divided in their opinions of it. It's a classic case of people either loving the book or despising it.

I can sympathize with those who dislike the book, as I just don't "get" some works that others think quite sublime. One of those who doesn't like The Red Right Hand at all is TAC reader Edmond D. Smith, whose comment on the book is well worth reading as a representative of that view.

Edmond Smith's particular critique includes the following:

I found the book (in no particular order):

Terribly dated

Convoluted

Unconvincing

Forced

Preposterous

and (worst of all)

Tiresome.

I understand that the story structure is intentionally (how do we know this, exactly?) unconventional, which is fine if that works. I don't think it did here. It just felt slap-dash. Maybe Rogers was drinking while he was writing it?

The Riddle character would have worked better if he hadn't seemed so strange and unstable. I really didn't have any emotional interest in him. I don't think that there was a single believable character (with the possible exception of Elinor) in the entire cast of Adams Family wannabees.

And the legendary [denouement] struck me as Rogers being tired of writing the damn thing and wanting to wrap it up in a hurry.  . . .

It strikes me that a hallucinatory story of this nature can only work if the "solution" makes all the "hallucinations" work in a very real way. In this case however, the ending is even more preposterous than the peculiar mystery it attempts to solve.

I realize the genuine acclaim the book has gotten must be based on some quality of excellence. But for the life of me I just don't get it.

These are critiques others have made of the book as well, so obviously there is something to them. Yet as Edmond Smith notes, the book's admirers are just as certain that it's a work of extraordinary power. So, in a response to Edmond's comment, I tried to elucidate some of the virtues I see in the book:

I think the power of the book for me, and perhaps for other readers, lies in great part in its ability to evoke a strong sense of evil so powerful that it seems to distort the entire universe, making space and time themselves unreliable--and then resolve it and restore things to normal by the workings of simple, humble human goodness.

Clearly you did not get that sense of the book, and that has been the case for some other readers I know, too. That's why in writing about the book I try to warn people about its unconventionality and help them understand what is to be appreciated about it. Here, for example, are a few things I think the book accomplishes:

Evocative, well-chosen writing style

Powerfully conveyed and meaningful atmosphere

Vivid characterizations and dramatic choices--descriptions of people's clothing, language, and thought processes is particularly smart, in my view

Thematic resonance--themes of doubles, various kinds of perversion, seeming unreliability of time and space, question of free will versus determinism, etc.

A powerful sense of the demonic and its opposite, God's providence. The former is made manifest in the perversions, the central murders and bizarre characters, the wicked motives, the disorienting disturbances to the fabric of space and time. The latter is made manifest in the continual background thread of love--one character's love in particular, of course--and the sense of justice and the continual search for it, and in the sense of basic logic and goodness that are disturbed by the very elements noted above as representatives of the demonic.

Vivid depiction of eternal human impulses such as greed, lust, love, sympathy, anger, jealousy, etc.

Emotional power--young marrieds at center of story, aging of Dr. Riddle and waning of his sense of purpose in life, callousness of some characters toward others' needs, etc.

Powerful sense of justice, awareness that liberty requires human responsibility, and desire to protect the weakest among us.

Those are a few of the things that I, and I believe the book's other admirers, see in The Red Right Hand.

I hope that these thoughts will help potential readers of The Red Right Hand find it easier to identify what it to be appreciated in the book, should any of you undertake the endeavor. Edmond Smith responded quite generously to my follow-up comment and reiterated what prevents him from enjoying the book.

Thus potential readers of The Red Right Hand are both forewarned and forearmed: you may really enjoy it, or you may not. To do the latter, however, it may well come in handy to be aware of the discussion here and know what the book will and won't do: it will provide a trip into a uniquely American nightmare and back out, but it won't satisfy one's need for realism and characters with whom one can closely identify.

As I have stated, The Red Right Hand is a powerful book and well worth reading, if you're able to get past the surface eccentricities. Underneath those, it's a highly compelling story with serious truths to convey. It's not for everybody, by any means, but for those that can appreciate it, The Red Right Hand is a splendid read.

--S. T. Karnick

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 01:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (10)

This week:
* Monday—Cary Grant gets up Lincoln's nose;
* Tuesday—The Asphalt Jungle takes a turn to the west;
* Wednesday—Elizabeth Taylor falls for a bad'un;
* Thursday—Richard Basehart hangs out for fourteen hours;
* Friday—Walter Slezak dies a very happy man;
* Saturday—Bogie dabbles in the black market;
* Sunday—Robert Ryan gets really tough in Tokyo.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Monday—November 2nd

12:00 PM—Arsenic and Old Lace (1944)
A young man about to be married discovers the two aunts who raised him have been poisoning lonely old men.
Cast: Cary Grant, Raymond Massey, Peter Lorre. Dir: Frank Capra. BW-118 mins, TV-G, CC, DVS

8:00 PM—Vertigo (1958)
A detective falls for the mysterious woman he's been hired to tail.
Cast: James Stewart, Kim Novak, Barbara Bel Geddes. Dir: Alfred Hitchcock. C-130 mins, TV-PG, CC, Letterbox Format

10:15 PM—North by Northwest (1959)
An advertising man is mistaken for a spy, triggering a deadly cross-country chase.
Cast: Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint, James Mason. Dir: Alfred Hitchcock. C-136 mins, TV-PG, CC, Letterbox Format, DVS

----------

Tuesday—November 3rd

12:45 AM—Anatomy of a Murder (1959)
A small-town lawyer gets the case of a lifetime when a military man avenges an attack on his wife.
Cast: James Stewart, Ben Gazzara, Lee Remick. Dir: Otto Preminger. BW-161 mins, TV-PG, CC, Letterbox Format

3:30 AM—Bunny Lake is Missing (1965)
A distraught mother searches for her seemingly non-existent daughter, bringing her sanity into question.
Cast: Carol Lynley, Keir Dullea, Laurence Olivier. Dir: Otto Preminger. BW-107 mins, TV-PG, CC, Letterbox Format

8:45 AM—The Badlanders (1958)
Western outlaws join forces for a daring gold robbery in this remake of The Asphalt Jungle.
Cast: Alan Ladd, Ernest Borgnine, Katy Jurado. Dir: Delmer Daves. C-84 mins, TV-PG, CC, Letterbox Format

----------

Wednesday—November 4th

10:00 AM—The Woman in White (1948)
Classic mystery about the adventures of a young tutor sent to a ghostly country estate.
Cast: Gig Young, Eleanor Parker, Sydney Greenstreet. Dir: Peter Godfrey. BW-109 mins, TV-G, CC

12:00 PM—Hunt the Man Down (1950)
Lawyer uncovers secrets behind a decade-old murder case.
Cast: Gig Young, Lynne Roberts, Willard Parker. Dir: George Archainbaud. BW-68 mins, TV-PG

5:15 PM—The Girl Who Had Everything (1953)
A criminal lawyer's daughter falls for one of his clients.
Cast: Elizabeth Taylor, William Powell, Fernando Lamas. Dir: Richard Thorpe. BW-70 mins, TV-G

----------

Thursday—November 5th

1:45 PM—Woman Wanted (1935)
An innocent woman is chased by both gangsters and the police.
Cast: Maureen O'Sullivan, Joel McCrea, Lewis Stone. Dir: George B. Seitz. BW-67 mins, TV-G, CC

8:00 PM—Fourteen Hours (1951)
A policeman tries to talk a desperate young man off the ledge of a New York skyscraper.
Cast: Richard Basehart, Paul Douglas, Barbara Bel Geddes. Dir: Henry Hathaway. BW-92 mins, TV-PG, CC

----------

Friday—November 6th

10:00 AM—Sinbad the Sailor (1947)
The Arabian Nights hero sets off to find the lost treasure of Alexander the Great.
Cast: Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Maureen O'Hara, Walter Slezak. Dir: Richard Wallace. C-117 mins, TV-PG, CC, DVS

----------

Saturday—November 7th

8:00 AM—The Man Between (1953)
An East Berliner helps a British woman trapped behind the Iron Curtain.
Cast: James Mason, Claire Bloom, Hildegard Knef. Dir: Carol Reed. BW-102 mins, TV-G

10:00 AM—Family Plot (1976)
A phony psychic takes on a pair of kidnappers.
Cast: Barbara Harris, Bruce Dern, Karen Black. Dir: Alfred Hitchcock. C-120 mins, TV-14, Letterbox Format

12:15 PM—Tokyo Joe (1949)
An American in post-war Japan gets caught up in the black market.
Cast: Humphrey Bogart, Sessue Hayakawa, Alexander Knox. Dir: Stuart Heisler. BW-89 mins, TV-PG

8:00 PM—Take the Money and Run (1969)
An incompetent criminal becomes the subject of a documentary.
Cast: Woody Allen, Janet Margolin, Marcel Hillaire. Dir: Woody Allen. C-85 mins, TV-14, CC, Letterbox Format

----------

Sunday—November 8th

12:00 AM—Gumshoe (1971)
A would be private eye gets mixed up in a smuggling case.
Cast: Albert Finney, Billie Whitelaw, Frank Finlay. Dir: Stephen Frears. C-88 mins.

3:15 AM—The Delinquents (1957)
When he's separated from the girl he loves, a teen turns to crime.
Cast: Tom Laughlin, Peter Miller, Richard Bakalyan. Dir: Robert Altman. BW-72 mins, TV-PG, Letterbox Format

4:30 AM—The Young Stranger (1957)
A neglected teen gets into trouble with the law.
Cast: James MacArthur, Kim Hunter, James Daly. Dir: John Frankenheimer. BW-84 mins, TV-PG, CC

6:30 AM—Murder at the Gallop (1963)
Elderly sleuth Miss Marple suspects foul play when an old friend is supposedly scared to death by a cat.
Cast: Margaret Rutherford, Robert Morley, Flora Robson. Dir: George Pollock. BW-81 mins, TV-G, CC, Letterbox Format

10:00 AM—Les Miserables (1952)
An obsessive policeman relentlessly hunts a man who escaped prison after stealing bread.
Cast: Michael Rennie, Debra Paget, Robert Newton. Dir: Lewis Milestone. BW-106 mins, TV-PG, CC

12:00 PM—The Maltese Falcon (1941)
Hard-boiled detective Sam Spade gets caught up in the murderous search for a priceless statue.
Cast: Humphrey Bogart, Mary Astor, Sydney Greenstreet. Dir: John Huston. BW-101 mins, TV-PG, CC, DVS

8:00 PM—House of Bamboo (1955)
An Army investigator infiltrates a Tokyo crime syndicate to solve a colleague's murder.
Cast: Robert Ryan, Robert Stack, Shirley Yamaguchi. Dir: Samuel Fuller. C-102 mins, Letterbox Format

~~~~~~~~~~~

—Mike Gray

Posted by Mike Gray at 10:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Government broadcaster PBS is running a new, five-part series on a subject naturally interesting in our time: American Experience: The 1930s. Episodes are available for online viewing here.

The program is just what one would expect from PBS: earnest, well-researched, skillfully presented, and eager to lick the boots of government while criticizing individual freedom for everything wrong in the world, S. T. Karnick writes.

1. The government causes business cycles and downturns through its erratic, manipulative policies intended to benefit powerful voting blocs at the expense of those less able to fight back. The market works when left alone, and government interference should be limited to redressing actual harms done by one party to another. This includes combating fraud, enforcing valid contracts, and setting clear but liberal guidelines for transactions made across political borders. And nothing more.
   
2. The Great Depression brought on a cultural conservatism and moral regeneration of the American people. This is an aspect of the era which few people seem to understand. It was in the early '30s, for example, that the movie industry was finally badgered into imposing a Production Code ensuring all widely distributed films would conform to a set of standard plotlines, language restrictions, and limits on visual sensationalism (a move which undoubtedly had salubrious results but was probably unnecessary given the change of public taste in a more conservative direction; in addition, the movie studios engaged in it voluntarily, even if under the threat of state regulation; thus the Code was surely less drastic, damaging, arbitrary, and politically controlled than it would have been if imposed by government). During the 1930s the American people revolted against what they saw as the social and cultural excesses of the 1920s just as strongly as they did against what they saw as the economic excesses of the time. Earnestness and attention to the political, economic, and moral implications of human action were on the rise in all media. Breaking economic and political corruption was a major concern of the American culture.
   

The Great Depression was widely seen at the time as a punishment for the economic, social, and moral changes of the 1920s, when the nation had moved in a more classical-liberal direction affording greater economic, social, and personal freedom. The Roaring '20s were seen in retrospect as a time of excessive license in all things (which they indeed were in some cases), and the Depression was viewed as an understandable payment that had to be made--the hangover after the party.

Thus the nation decided to swear off the booze of individual liberty altogether. As a cure, the people turned to government control of the economy and tighter moral strictures against individual freedom. If this sounds like today's regnant political agenda, that's because the two are indeed identical in means, motive, and opportunity. And they are both criminal in their stupidity.

I believe that both the moral reaction and economic impositions of the Depression era were overwrought and unnecessary, but the moral reaction was the more justifiable of the two because it largely avoided using government force for its implementation. As a result of its relatively voluntary, organic nature, the moral response to the Roaring '20s managed to do some good, as noted above, while refraining from doing much harm.

Of the economic puritanism of the time, the very opposite was true. That is the way of government action.

Given PBS's track record as a diehard advocate of a statist, progressivist agenda, it should surprise no one that the American Experience series refuses to incorporate liberal notions such as these, choosing instead to smother the truth in a miasma of irrelevant moralization.

Right at the beginning of episode 1, "The Crash of 1929," the narrator refers to "the promise and the illusion of the 1920s," setting the moralistic tone of the episode. Immediately thereafter, the noted statist economist the late John Kenneth Galbraith is shown saying, "Let us not think for a moment the illusion, the aberration of the 1920s is unique. It is intimately a part of the American character."

In other words, people will go mad if not constrained by a gigantic, all-powerful benevolent government. We are undoubtedly supposed to be grateful for the warning.

Immediately thereafter, two commentators criticize the lovely Irving Berlin song "Blue Skies" as emblematic of the 1920s "illusion" that freedom was a good thing. The machinations of stock market manipulators in the decade are limned in some detail, and the commentators explicitly condemn the lack of government regulation.

What they do not note is that fraud of the sort described in this part of the program is illegal now and was illegal then. Thus while the perpetrators of such actions were morally responsible for their wrongs, from a social perspective the real culprit behind such market manipulation was in fact the government, in failing to perform its basic function of preventing fraud, enforcing valid contracts, and otherwise preventing people from harming one another.

Indeed, a commentator in the program explicitly states that such manipulation was legal at the time, which is quite wrong and would be deceptive even if true. Yes, it was the case that there were no specific laws explicitly criminalizing a variety of particular manipulative actions in the stock market, but those acts were fraud and could have--and should have--been prosecuted under existing laws. In addition, the failure to have laws preventing such fraud would be a failure of government criminal law, not of economic policy.

Economic regulation, however, is the agenda here, and every possible means is used to argue for it. The episode briefly criticizes New York Mayor Jimmy Walker for his fiscal imprudence, but the moment is conveyed as a critique of 1920s excessive exuberance and liberality, not as a matter of government corruption and a failure of government to do its duties.

Similarly, the role of the Fed in the 1920s bubble (which it fed by debauching the currency) and in the subsequent Depression (which it created and prolonged by by tightening the currency far too much and excessively interfering in the markets, thus preventing the needed corrections from occurring) is alluded to but presented in moralistic terms, as another example of excessive liberality followed by a painful but necessary corrective action.

Individual investors are likewise presented in moralistic terms, depicted as greedily and foolishly chasing after "the one lucky break," as one person puts it. One is given no understanding of how the investors' actions could in fact have seemed at the time to be rational, not speculative. The reality is that, then as now, an individual must look at the possible returns and risks involved in investing one's money and also in not doing so. If the government reduces apparent risk to zero--as the Fed did during the 1920s and 2000s--what on earth does one think investors will do but continue to invest in a wide variety of ventures based on increasingly risky foundations?

This is what happens in all bubbles, and it is what happened in the most recent one, but American Experience refuses to acknowledge this critical fact. Thus here too a failure of government is elided and its effects blamed on the allegedly free choices of individuals in an allegedly underregulated market.

Tellingly, as the program describes the stock market crash of 1929 and the events that led up to it, nothing about Fed policy or the money supply is mentioned. Yet the Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman has convincingly argued that the manipulation of the money supply caused both the bubble and the bust. That particular truth, however, does not contribute to and in fact contradicts the program's agenda for government power and against individual liberty. Thus it, too, is redacted from the story.

Near the end of the episode, Galbraith blames it all explicitly on the investors--the "suckers" as he crudely and callously calls them--and says that such crashes happen every twenty or thirty years because that's how long it takes for the "suckers" to forget that their earlier greed and foolhardiness led to disaster. The alternative explanation--and the true one--is not given any attention: that every twenty or thirty years the government's renewed manipulation of the economy as a means of buying votes results in disaster.

The program concludes with an argument that what the stock market crash taught Americans was a great lesson in humility. Certainly that was the lesson that the American people took from it. The real lesson, however, is that governments' attempts to manipulate the economy always bring catastrophic consequences in time.

Of course it's true that many people did many bad things both in the stock market and in other areas of human endeavor in the 1920s. But that's always the case, human beings being what we are. What was different about the 1920s and '30s was the choices government made, and the consequences were world-changing.

The real moral failure to be found in American Experience: The 1930s is in many people's continual refusal to recognize that freedom of choice is a good, and coercion an evil, regardless of who is doing which.

--S. T. Karnick

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 10:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The repugnant Time Inc., publisher of Time magazine, is implementing massive employee layoffs, amounting to about 540 people let go, New York magazine reports.

The media behemoth, once a bastion of bourgeois classical liberalism but for the past several decades a forum for statism and a plethora of other forced social distortions, has been battered by the rise of the internet and Time's increasing distance from its readers' beliefs.

One feels sympathy for the laid-off workers but must recognize that this is a very salubrious trend indeed.

--S. T. Karnick

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 09:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 09:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

 

The Right would recognize the tactics Prof. Pielke describes since it has been on the receiving end of them for years. The latest example is the Limbaugh – NFL kerfuffle. The minnows (Wikipedia) attribute fabricated quotes to Limbaugh, the big fish (The Nation magazine, NFL personnel) cite those quotes and mainstream journalism’s giant fish (CNN’s Rick Sanchez, Washington Post's Michael Wilbon) cite the big fish.

In the end, Limbaugh is fired. As Saul Alinsky infamously phrased it, “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it. Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions. (This is cruel, but very effective. Direct, personalized criticism and ridicule works.)”

Prof. Pielke, welcome to the real world.

--Daniel Crandall

Posted by Daniel Crandall at 09:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Victor Davis Hanson is no Luddite. A classics scholar, he appreciates culture in the health of a society. But he’s had enough. He’s mad as hell and he’s not going to take it anymore! So tune in? Turn on? Nah. Drop out. Many of us can relate. The crassness of American culture that at every turn contradicts and ridicules our deepest held beliefs is hard to take.

Of course this has been going on a long time. And the basic response of those on the right has been what? Whatever it has been for the last 50 years obviously isn’t working very well, because we don’t see much improvement and things appear to be getting worse. Sure there are flashes of light here and there, but generally the hegemony of the secular left in professions of cultural influence is almost absolute.

His response?

I have some confessions to make, not because any of you readers are particularly interested in my views; but rather because I think some of you are in the same boat: Have you stopped reading, listening, watching, and paying attention to most of what now passes for establishment public or popular culture? I am not particularly proud of this quietism (many Athenians did it in the early 4th century BC and Romans by the late 3rd AD), but not really ashamed of it either.

A final, odd observation. As I have dropped out of contemporary American culture and retreated inside some sort of 1950s time-warp, in a strange fashion of compensation for non-participation , I have tried to remain more engaged than ever in the country’s political and military crises, which are acute and growing. One’s distancing from the popular culture of movies, TV, newspapers, and establishment culture makes one perhaps wish to overcompensate in other directions, from the trivial to the important.

--Mike D'Virgilio

Posted by Mike D'Virgilio at 09:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Posted by Mike Gray at 11:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Released yesterday, This Is It is a behind the scenes look at rehearsals for the tour that never happened. It might be interesting, writes Mike D'Virgilio.

I must admit that Michael Jackson creeped me out. I’m sure I’m not alone in that visceral assessment. When I heard about this movie the last thing I knew I would ever do is watch it, let alone pay money to see it. But Dana Stevens’ review in Slate may have changed my mind. And here is the reason why:

The most surprising thing about This Is It may be its purity of intent. The film, directed by the "billion-dollar maestro" Kenny Ortega (he was also the director of Jackson's stage show, as well as a long list of mega-spectacles including the opening ceremony of the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics) makes no attempt to explore Jackson's offstage life, past or present—a brief montage of Jackson 5 clips during the song "I'll Be There" is the only nod toward biography. Instead, Ortega is interested in—obsessed by—showing us Jackson as a working artist.

--Mike D'Virgilio

Posted by Mike D'Virgilio at 09:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

"He created a new form of television," said screenwriter Marc Scott Zicree, author of "The Twilight Zone Companion."

"Science fiction was basically viewed as kids' stuff," he says. "There is a great interview that Mike Wallace did with Rod just prior to 'The Twilight Zone' where he says to Rod, 'Now you are doing this kind of kids' stuff, are you giving up writing anything important?' "

The American Cinematheque's Egyptian Theatre is paying tribute to this seminal series, which paved the way for countless shows such as "The Outer Limits," "Star Trek" and even "Lost," with a three-hour program Friday including screenings of some of the best-loved episodes, as well as discussions with Zicree; Serling's widow, Carol Serling; and writers Earl Hamner Jr. and George Clayton Johnson, who wrote such memorable installments as "Kick the Can," starring Ernest Truex as an old man in a retirement home who quite literally returns to his childhood.

Posted by Mike D'Virgilio at 09:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

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Posted by S. T. Karnick at 05:25 PM | Permalink

The power of professions of cultural influence to affect people's worldview is not well understood by the average politically obsessed conservative. Elect some conservative politician and somehow America will become a better place, they believe. It doesn’t work that way, Mike D'Virgilio writes.

At Breakpoint Regis Nicole wonders if Americans are really Hindus. In terms of worldview, that might be close to the truth:

After giving a nod to our Christian founding and the overwhelming percentage of Americans who identify themselves as “Christian,” Newsweek admits, “Of course, we are not a Hindu … nation.” Nevertheless, “recent poll data show that conceptually, at least, we are becoming more like Hindus and less like traditional Christians in the ways we think about God, our selves, each other, and eternity.” Though not stated in the article, our “conceptual” faith has led to lifestyles and behaviors that are at variance with our professed faith.

I actually enjoy talking with functional relativists, be they religious or not. It's not all that difficult to get them to realize that holding two completely contradictory thoughts simply isn't tenable. I do that by asking lots of questions and making very few assertions.

Regardless of how tolerant the Hinduization of America appears to Americans to be, it simply isn't logically sustainable. Truth is like water to the human soul. Go without it long enough and you will die. But when your parched lips taste it, nothing ever tasted better. I've seen it over and over again; most people want to believe that there is a there there. Reality is concrete and exists, including truth.

This points out the absolute importance of culture in the health of a nation. And it further points out what a tragedy it has been that that Christians and others who hold traditional values (for lack of a better term) have abdicated professions of cultural influence to secular leftists.

For more than a half-century, people of a conservative bent have focused on politics and public policy almost exclusively, thinking that this will determine the direction of our society. The only time culture becomes important to these people is to complain about it.

Culture forms the plausibility structure of a society, i.e. those things that seem true and real to people, and the secular left has been given free reign to ingrain their worldview into America through Hollywood and entertainment, media and journalism, and of course education. It’s not enough to comment or complain about these professions, we have to get in there and do the dirty work of earning a living so a conservative friendly worldview again permeates our society.

That seems impossible now, but it isn’t. It will take a generational commitment to permeate these professions with people who understand that relativism is a self-contradiction.

--Mike D'Virgilio

Posted by Mike D'Virgilio at 08:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

There were so many excellent comments from readers this past week that it's impossible to pick just one. So here's a sampling of some of the best.

Jim Lakely's essay on the latest Rush Limbaugh controversy--the absurd overreaction to his attempt to buy into the NFL's St. Louis Rams franchise--inspired several good comments.

From Edmond D. Smith:

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 12:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

From The New York Daily News:

“OLTL" was taping scenes in late-June concerning roommates Cristian, Layla and Fish. (They'll air in September.) Cristian and Layla suspect that sweet cop Fish is gay, but aren't sure how to approach him about it. So they buy a book about how to tell if you're gay and plan to give it to him.

Cristian's mom, Carlotta, was supposed to find the book and assume Cristian is gay. Her reaction was scripted to be very accepting and even amused, citing his love of art and fondness for going shirtless as signs she should have recognized.

But Mauceri, who has played diner purveyor Carlotta Vega for 14 years, refused to play the story as written, saying a Latina mother would not be so accepting. Rather, Mauceri rewrote the scenes to make Carlotta confused and troubled, and submitted them to "OLTL" execs.

 "That's not the story we're telling," responded an exec.

Of course not, because every show on TV has to have some kind of homosexual element. I was watching ABC’s "Flash Forward" this week, and they just had to have a lesbian plot line with kissing and the morning after glow. It’s just so normal, don’t you know.

Why is it that Hollywood is enamored of inserting homosexuality, no pun intended, everywhere it can? Because the worldview and values of the “execs,” the people who run the studios, believe homosexuality is no different than skin color, and that homosexuals have been oppressed by America’s religiously bigoted past and they want to change that.

The U.S. media, like all the professions of cultural influence in the nation, is a left-wing monolith. If it weren’t so, we would occasionally see story lines in TV shows or movies where there is serious moral disapproval of homosexuality that is not immediately dismissed. If such disapproval is shown in contemporary dramas, those who express it are portrayed as religious fanatics or close-minded hicks.

A little more nuance about such moral issues would be greatly appreciated and make the resulting dramas and comedies more realistic. A little more “diversity,” a value dearly held by modern liberals, would help. After all, that is what most Americans believe.

But this is what we get for the last 50 years of conservatives ignoring culture except to complain about it. All the obsession on the right with politics and public policy will not change the values and stories coming out of Hollywood. Only an influx of people who appreciate and embrace America’s founding values working there will do that.

--Mike D'Virgilio

Posted by Mike D'Virgilio at 06:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

This week:
* Monday—Simone Signoret gets diabolical;
* Tuesday—somebody wants to kill George Hamilton;
* Thursday—Douglas Fairbanks goes on a treasure hunt;
* Friday—Fu Manchu doesn't want much—just the world;
* Saturday—Vincent Price is abominable when he's not going crazy;
* Sunday—Jack Lemmon must be crazy to want to dispose of Virna Lisi.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Monday—October 26th

2:15 AM—Diabolique (1955)
A cruel man's wife and lover plot to kill him.
Cast: Simone Signoret, Vera Clouzot, Paul Meurisse. Dir: Henri-Georges Clouzot. BW-116 mins, TV-14

9:30 PM—Chandler (1971)
A former private eye lands in hot water when he agrees to protect a government witness.
Cast: Warren Oates, Leslie Caron, Alex Dreier. Dir: Paul Magwood. C-86 mins, TV-14, CC, Letterbox Format

----------

Tuesday—October 27th

3:15 AM—Moran of the Lady Letty (1922)
In this silent film, a playboy fights to save a young woman from the smugglers who have kidnapped them.
Cast: Dorothy Dalton, Rudolph Valentino, Charles Brinley. Dir: George Melford. BW-68 mins, TV-G

9:15 AM—Beat the Devil (1954)
A group of con artists stake their claim on a bogus uranium mine.
Cast: Humphrey Bogart, Gina Lollobrigida, Jennifer Jones. Dir: John Huston. BW-90 mins, TV-PG, CC

10:00 PM—The Power (1968)
A scientist tries to unmask a murderous genius with psychic powers.
Cast: George Hamilton, Suzanne Pleshette, Yvonne De Carlo. Dir: Byron Haskin. C-109 mins, TV-PG, CC, Letterbox Format

----------

Wednesday—October 28th

8:00 PM—Targets (1968)
An aging horror star and a psychotic veteran come face to face at the premiere of the star's most recent film.
Cast: Tim O'Kelly, Boris Karloff, Peter Bogdanovich. Dir: Peter Bogdanovich. C-90 mins, TV-PG, CC, Letterbox Format

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Thursday—October 29th

6:00 PM—Sinbad the Sailor (1947)
The Arabian Nights hero sets off to find the lost treasure of Alexander the Great.
Cast: Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Maureen O'Hara, Walter Slezak. Dir: Richard Wallace. C-117 mins, TV-PG, CC, DVS

----------

Friday—October 30th

4:30 AM—I Promise to Pay (1937)
A man goes to a loan shark to finance his family's vacation.
Cast: Chester Morris, Leo Carrillo, Helen Mack. Dir: David Ross Lederman. BW-68 mins.

6:00 AM—Behind the Mask (1932)
A federal agent goes undercover in prison to break up a drug syndicate.
Cast: Jack Holt, Constance Cummings, Boris Karloff. Dir: John Francis Dillon. BW-68 mins, TV-PG

7:15 AM—The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932)
A Chinese warlord threatens explorers in search of the key to global power.
Cast: Boris Karloff, Lewis Stone, Myrna Loy. Dir: Charles Brabin. BW-68 mins, TV-PG, CC

Then spend the rest of the morning and afternoon with Boris Karloff in nine other films.

8:00 PM—Gaslight (1944)
A newlywed fears she's going mad when strange things start happening at the family mansion.
Cast: Charles Boyer, Ingrid Bergman, Angela Lansbury. Dir: George Cukor. BW-114 mins, TV-PG, CC, DVS

10:00 PM—Night Must Fall (1937)
A charming young man worms his way into a wealthy woman's household, then reveals a deadly secret.
Cast: Robert Montgomery, Rosalind Russell, Dame May Whitty. Dir: Richard Thorpe. BW-116 mins, TV-PG, CC

----------

Saturday—October 31st

12:00 AM—Psycho (1960)
A woman on the run gets mixed up with a repressed young man and his violent mother.
Cast: Anthony Perkins, Janet Leigh, Vera Miles. Dir: Alfred Hitchcock. BW-109 mins, TV-PG, CC, Letterbox Format

6:00 AM—The Woman in White (1948)
Classic mystery about the adventures of a young tutor sent to a ghostly country estate.
Cast: Gig Young, Eleanor Parker, Sydney Greenstreet. Dir: Peter Godfrey. BW-109 mins, TV-G, CC

8:00 AM—Dead of Night (1945)
Guests at a country estate share stories of the supernatural.
Cast: Mervyn Johns, Roland Culver, Michael Redgrave. Dir: Alberto Cavalcanti, Charles Crichton, Basil Dearden, Robert Hamer. BW-103 mins, TV-14, CC

12:00 PM—The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971)
A madman uses the plagues of ancient Egypt to avenge his wife's death.
Cast: Vincent Price, Joseph Cotten, Virginia North. Dir: Robert Fuest. C-95 mins, TV-14, CC, Letterbox Format

1:45 PM—Diary of a Madman (1963)
The body of a French magistrate is taken over by the soul of a murderer.
Cast: Vincent Price, Nelson Olmsted, Nancy Kovack. Dir: Reginald Le Borg. C-97 mins, TV-14, Letterbox Format

8:00 PM—Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1941)
A scientist's investigations into the nature of good and evil turn him into a murderous monster.
Cast: Spencer Tracy, Ingrid Bergman, Lana Turner. Dir: Victor Fleming. BW-113 mins, TV-PG, CC, DVS

10:00 PM—Murders in the Zoo (1933)
Someone is using zoo animals to dispose of people.
Cast: Charlie Ruggles, Lionel Atwill, Gail Patrick. Dir: Edward Sutherland. BW-62 mins.

11:15 PM—The Body Snatcher (1945)
To continue his medical experiments, a doctor must buy corpses from a grave robber.
Cast: Boris Karloff, Henry Daniell, Bela Lugosi. Dir: Robert Wise. BW-78 mins, TV-PG, CC

----------

Sunday—November 1st

12:00 PM—How to Murder Your Wife (1965)
After marrying while drunk, a cartoonist puts his murderous fantasies into his work.
Cast: Jack Lemmon, Virna Lisi, Terry-Thomas. Dir: Richard Quine. C-118 mins, TV-G, Letterbox Format

6:00 PM—Shadow of a Doubt (1943)
A young girl fears her favorite uncle may be a killer.
Cast: Joseph Cotten, Teresa Wright, Macdonald Carey. Dir: Alfred Hitchcock. BW-108 mins, TV-PG, CC

10:00 PM—Uncle Silas (1947)
A young woman's uncle and governess plot to kill her for her inheritance.
Cast: Derek Bond, Frederick Burtwell, O.B. Clarence. Dir: Charles Frank. BW-103 mins.

~~~~~~~~~~~

—Mike Gray

Posted by Mike Gray at 03:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The American media were once steeped in a culture of liberty, and Bruce Walker explains why that is no longer so.

We got a little debate going about “objective” journalism in a recent post. I came across a piece at the American Thinker that does a good job of contrasting what the media culture in this country was once like, vibrant and messy, versus the corporate behemoths that walk in leftist lockstep today. Here is a bit of what Bruce Walker has to say:

Mass media once was a flurry of highly competitive newspapers who delighted in scooping other city newspapers for big stories, and whose editorial policies were almost always in conflict with each other because the newspapers themselves had certain philosophical and political "customers" who expected their newspaper to be a watchdog on the opposition. Every major city in the nation had several newspapers who disagreed with each other on policy issues and who presented news stories with different slants. The citizen was protected from the abuse because of very real competition between newspapers, just as Green Giant and Birdseye competed with each other for the frozen food customers.

The monolithic nature of leftism, however, prevented flourishing competition among big institutions from protecting us. As the left became a sort of political religion, the employees, directors, and owners of mass media corporations all began to think just alike. Part of that hive mentality has been attributed to geography: New York, DC, Los Angeles, and a few other places housed nearly all the television news and entertainment executives, most book publishing and film making, the bosses of the music industry, and the lords of Madison Avenue.

It became possible to attend a cocktail party in which every potentate of popular culture voted for the liberal Democrat presidential nominee, even when the conservative Republican candidate had carried forty-nine states. It became possible also for men like Obama, Axelrod, Emanuel to attend "respectable" colleges without, really, having to think an original and independent thought. It became possible for men to rise to heights without knowing any facts by mastering the catechism of leftism perfectly.

Leftism became an infection of mind and of spirit which grew into raging epidemic within those organs of mass media, and anyone who did not show symptoms of the sickness were, themselves, diagnosed as sick. Private thought, belief, and opinion became evidence of a stubborn unwillingness to submerge into the oblivion of the collective hive.

Because the opponents of the hive mentality of mass media have a thousand different opinions and beliefs, mass media finds its opposition incomprehensible and unconquerable. The idea that ten million free Americans could have almost as many viewpoints simply does not occur to people manufactured from childhood with a single viewpoint presented in cartoons, classrooms, college campuses, comedies, and corporate bureaucracies. 

--Mike D'Virgilio

Posted by Mike D'Virgilio at 09:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

A public school teacher argues that the achievement gap between white and black is a about parents not race; it's a cultural matter, Mike D'Virgilio notes.

In “Making the Grade Isn't About Race. It's About Parents,” Patrick Welsh was stunned when some of his students in his all black class blamed their poor academic performance on the lack of a father in their home. Excuses are always convenient, but there is empirical sociological evidence to back up their claim. He states:

My students knew intuitively that the reason they were lagging academically had nothing to do with race, which is the too-handy explanation for the achievement gap in Alexandria. And it wasn't because the school system had failed them. They knew that excuses about a lack of resources and access just didn't wash at the new, state-of-the-art, $100 million T.C. Williams, where every student is given a laptop and where there is open enrollment in Advanced Placement and honors courses. Rather, it was because their parents just weren't there for them -- at least not in the same way that parents of kids who were doing well tended to be.

It's not a skin color issue, because practically every child from a broken or non-married family does worse in every way. But the black family has been particularly devastated, and this did not happen in a vacuum.

This isn't a Republican or Democrat issue, but it is a philosophical issue. Ever since I can remember growing up in the 60s and 70s the left in our country, i.e. modern liberals, have denigrated the family. The seeds of this animosity toward traditional religious values of course go back hundreds of years, but those decades saw such elite opinion make its way into and throughout American culture. The family to many feminists and their allies was a bastion of patriarchal oppression, which destroyed the soul of the individual, especially women.

Popular culture affirmed this view over and over and does so to this day. (Consider, for example, one movie I saw recently, Revolutionary Road.)

This mentality has become part and parcel with the left's view that government is the solution for pretty much everything. When Lyndon Johnson declared war on poverty, he and everyone on the left naively thought that government transfers of wealth could actually change human nature!

It's astonishing how foolish modern liberals are when it comes to understanding human nature. Give your children something for nothing long enough and you destroy their character. Everyone, including liberals knows this. But for some reason welfare intended well is supposed to help people. It may in some small immediate way, but something for nothing destroys adult character too.

Thus you have generations of black men who do not believe they need to marry the woman who bears their child. Out of wedlock birth is 70% for the black community.

And liberals wonder why there is an achievement gap or argue it's caused by racism. The worldview of the modern liberal is permeated with victimization. We’re all victims; we’re all powerless and need the benign hand of government to redress the grievances unjustly inflicted upon us.

Until the underlying philosophy is exposed for the poison that it is, nothing will change for the better.

--Mike D'Virgilio

Posted by Mike D'Virgilio at 07:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Posted by Mike Gray at 04:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

On WorldNetDaily Jerome Corsi reports an amazing coincidence:

Attacking Fox News and defending President Obama is a family affair for Anita Dunn, the White House communications director who has blasted Fox as an arm of the Republican Party and talked about "controlling" the news media. She's married to Robert Bauer, the chief of the political law group at Perkins Coie, the Seattle law firm hired by the White House to defend Obama in court cases challenging his "natural born" citizenship status and thus, his eligibility under the U.S. Constitution to be president. Dunn is targeting Fox News with criticisms emanating from the administration that it isn't even a news network, while Bauer has done his best to prevent the American public from seeing a wide range of Obama's records that could prove, or disprove, his eligibility to occupy the Oval Office.

A guy I used to know once said, "Trust me, there ain't no coincidences in politics!" Maybe he was right.

~~~~~~~~~~~

—Mike Gray

Posted by Mike Gray at 12:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Ben Boychuk and Joel Mathis—who write a weekly political point-counterpoint column syndicated by Scripps Howard News Service—recently posted a podcast of a terrific joint interview with Steven F. Hayward, author of The Age of Reagan: The Conservative Counterrevolution, 1980-1989.

It's well worth a listen, and is one of the best interviews of Hayward about his book, writes TAC contributor Jim Lakely.

Both Boychuk (the conservative) an Mathis (the liberal) are accomplished journalists and first-rate thinkers. And one of the main reasons why their podcast of the interview is so compelling is that they challenge Hayward from both sides — in the same interview. It should go without saying that Hayward also sparkles in the podcast, and offers great insight on Reagan.

Topics covered include discussion of Hayward's recent Washington Post op-ed wondering if conservatism is "brain dead," comparing the ways both Reagan and George W. Bush interpreted the Constitution, whether Dubya was a "superficial Reaganite," whether Sam Tanehaus is "all wet about Edmund Burke," and whether Glenn Beck is a serious thinker or "a modern-day Morton Downey Jr."

I really enjoyed the section of the podcast dealing with Burke. Hayward mentioned something that surprised me: That Burke was one of progressive Woodrow Wilson's favorite political philosophers. Hayward also offers a pretty compelling defense of Glenn Beck, imagines how William F. Buckley's TV persona would be different if he was just getting a start today, and also assesses the current state of political books from the right (Verdict: Where are today's Milton Friedmans?!).

And as a treat between segments, Ben and Joel picked some excellent bumper music — which is almost enough to warrant a listen by itself. (If you've never heard RJD2, here's your introduction.)

Click here to listen to or download the podcast at Infinite Monkeys, where both Boychuk and Mathis blog.

(Full Disclosure: I'm also a contributor to the Infinite Monkeys blog under the nom de plume Dr. Zaius.)

Posted by Jim Lakely at 08:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Jonathan Leaf, The Politically Incorrect Guide™ to the Sixties (2009)
Regnery, Inc.
247 pages
ISBN 978-1-59698-572-8
$19.95
Buy it here for less.

There's an old saying that history is written by the winners. In the case of what happened in America during the 1960s, however, history has been written by the losers, according to Jonathan Leaf in his Politically Incorrect Guide™ to the Sixties.

Social and political radicals discovered during the '60s that they couldn't transform America into their utopia. Their hour in the sun soon expired, and time worked its changes—but they never lost their zeal for radicalism. They grew older, true, but they never abandoned those utopian aspirations. Many radicals went to college and never left, supplanting their conservative mentors through attrition; consequently, academia as a whole became even more radicalized than it had been in previous decades. And since it is the wont of academics to publish incontinently, it stands to reason that their version of a historical period like the 1960s would reflect their own biases and leave us with a distorted image of the times.

Jonathan Leaf seeks to correct the false picture of that period which today's Left-leaning cultural commissars would have us believe.

Leaf covers a lot of ground, discussing such widely disparate subjects as politics, war, music, fashion, films and TV, the civil rights movement and feminism, and the space program; in doing so, he unearths artifacts that had escaped even me, one who passed through his adolescence in that era.

A few of the things Leaf uncovers which today's would-be arbiters of culture would just as soon have us forget:

* "The vast majority of college students in the 1960s were not political crusaders, but normal kids who spent their time going to classes, studying, dating, and pursuing other unremarkable activities."

* "Much greater changes in sexual behavior took place in the 1920s and 1940s than in the 1960s."

* "Perhaps the biggest failing of the civil rights movement was that it worked toward spreading affimative action programs as a leading goal."

* "Professors, writers, and other elite thinkers of the decade [of the 1960s] were carried away with bizarre, extremist social theories that could not even get a serious hearing among the general public, imbued as it was with common sense. The sixties intellectual class inexplicably became enraptured with these ideas, showing a nihilistic determination to tear down American society and all its institutions, customs, and values."

* "[T]he truth is that rock music was not as popular as liberals would have you believe .... [M]ost of the 'seminal' sixties rock bands sold modestly, while many of the most popular performers were crooners, jazz musicians, country singers, and classical musicians."

* "The dress of the 1960s was very conservative, providing a stark contrast to the overt sexuality of the previous decade. Even student radicals dressed conservatively ...."

* "The Apollo moon landings may have looked like 'stunning achievements' at the time, but in retrospect they seem like something else: overpriced publicity stunts."

* "During the Warren Court ... nine unelected justices laid claim to vast new powers, ushering in the current system of judicial supremacy. The Warren Court dates to the 1950s, but it really came into its own in the 1960s, when it issued numerous radical rulings that upended the previous balance of powers between the legislative, executive, and judicial branches."

* "[T]he greatest hero to appear in the Americas." — Norman Mailer on Fidel Castro.

* "The most pernicious effect of the War on Poverty was that it destroyed the black family."

* "So how then did the North Vietnamese win? The same way that Hitler captured France and Poland: with tank batallions ... [so] when [the U.S.] Congress ordered an end to American air support, South Vietnam's fate was sealed."

* "[Russell] Kirk made the case that class divisions were a natural consequence of liberty and a guard against egalitarianism and uniformity; that experience was a better guide than ideology; and that the religion of the Bible was truer in its account of man and his nature than the utopian theories of leftist social engineers."

Pick up a copy of The Politically Incorrect Guide™ to the Sixties. If you're old enough to remember that period of American history, then it should be a trip down memory lane. If you're a committed radical of the same vintage, however, you may be disappointed, since the history you thought you made isn't the history that actually happened.

----------

Chapters:

Part I: The Social Sixties

1. The Student Radicals: Who They Were and Which Girls They Wanted
"Most college campuses were not hotbeds of radicalism during the 1960s."

2. The Sexual Revolution and the Start of Feminism: Where'd Mom and Pop Go?
"The 1960s feminist movement was started by moderate liberals and hijacked by radicals."

3. Civil Rights and Uncivil Wrongs: From Freedom Rides to "Burn, Baby, Burn"
"The sixties urban riots were not caused by poverty and racism."

4. The Intellectuals: Did They Have It All Figured Out?
"Sixties 'intellectuals' glorified crime, violence, and urban blight."

Part II: The Cultural Sixties

5. Rock 'n' Roll: Soundtrack to the Sixties?
"Rock music was not particularly popular in the 1960s."

6. Movies and TV: Not Great but Not Yet Decadent
"Popular 1960s TV shows reflected conservative, patriotic values."

7. Mods, Minis, Wide Ties, and Brooks Brothers: The Best of Sixties Fashion
"Sixties fashion was a conservative reaction to the suggestive clothing of the 1950s."

8. To the Moon, But at What Price?
"Manned moon flights were a costly, futile boondoggle."

Part III: The Political Sixties

9. The Unwarranted Court: Earl Warren and His Battle Against the Constitution
"The most radical political effects of the 1960s were achieved through judicial fiat."

10. Camelot as It Really Was
"John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson gained their biggest political victories through vote fraud."

11. Johnson's War on Poverty—and Common Sense
"The Great Society was marked by soaring crime and increasing drug abuse."

12. The Vietnam War: Snatching Defeat from the Jaws of Victory
"The media transformed the 1968 Tet Offensive from an overwhelming American victory into a devastating defeat."

13. The Birth of the Counter Counterculture
"Our politics today are the continuation of the ideological battles of the 1960s."

Notes (20 pages)

~~~~~~~~~~~

—Mike Gray

Posted by Mike Gray at 06:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

CNN, fresh off being dubbed a "real" news organization by the Obama White House, has embarked on a three-part series examining that bizarre and foreign cultural subset of America called conservative talk radio listeners. To those not in the liberal elite, they're known simply as "normal folks."

From the tone of Part One, you almost expect the sparkly CNN reporter to beat her way through the topical jungle of Palm Beach, enter the EIB studios and ask: "Dr. Limbaugh, I presume?" This series promises to reveal more about CNN and the ignorant snobs in the MSM — who see conservative talk radio as a mysterious "Dark Continent" — than it does about those who listen, writes Jim Lakely.

Carol Costello begins by proffering the theory that conservative talk radio is "so powerful" and "some say it has made our country viciously partisan." By "some say" Costello means "CNN." Funny, I don't recall CNN declaring that "some say" all those anti-war protesters taking to the streets with their blood-dripping Bush puppets was "viciously partisan" — same for the left blogosphere's Chimpy McBushitler stuff — let alone making "our country viciously partisan." But if I continue parsing every sentence as I have the brief intro, we'll be here all day.

Before we roll tape, let me reveal one priceless detail: Costello interviews a psychiatrist to evaluate the obviously un-well minds of conservative talk radio listeners. With that enticement, let's go:

The "regular guy" who she features in Lancaster County, PA, listens to talk radio for eight hours a day she says, with astonishment. Of course, she'd love it if people watched CNN for eight hours a day. But listening to talk radio is soemthing you can do while you work, so it's hardly as wasteful as zoning out in front of the boob tube. Anyway, it's clear that Dr. Gail Saltz, the shrink used as a source in this piece, doesn't think all that talk radio listening is very healthy. Especially if they listen to The King, Rush Limbaugh.

Saltz says Limbaugh's "style appeals to those who think they have no voice." Well, gee, Doc. Why might they think that? I'm no psychiatrist, but maybe it's because their views are reflected almost nowhere in the culture except talk radio and Fox News. But it's Saltz' description of Limbaugh's style that really gets the "exploring a foreign culture" vibe going.

"He is essentially operating like the bully. And if you're on the playground, do you want to be under the bully's wing and go along with him and get therefore some power by proxie, too? Or do you want to be left out alone on the playground where who knows who's going to take you out."

Huh? Leave it to a liberal to infantilize full-grown adults. Never mind that the piece points out conservative talk radio listeners are more educated than the general population in formal schooling. You can also add on how educated they are getting about politics and the culture by listening to the radio. But that analysis doesn't even make sense. Take, for instance, the Tea Party protestors.

The movement started organically, online, with no help from talk radio. Yes, eventually all the conservative talkers took up the cause and greatly encouraged it, but talk radio did not start the movement. The people who showed up at town halls to confront their rulers about their radical plans and marched in Washington on September 12 are not wilting flowers or weaklings who need the protection of a "bully". The Tea Party movement is wholly characterized by self-reliance and self-empowerment. That's why you saw very few mass-produced signs, the hallmark of a rally peopled by liberals.

Nor do conservatives derive their "power by proxy" from the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, Michael Medved or Dennis Prager. Liberals don't understand conservative talk radio because they don't understand conservatives. As demonstrated by Saltz's infantilization of talk radio listeners, liberal elites think conservatives have the minds of children, easily swayed by whatever "demagogue" is on the dial when they start up their cars. The fact is, your average conservative radio listener is well-informed on the issues, has formed his own opinions, votes almost religiously, and seeks out hosts who will affirm their views — because they hear them expressed in so few other outlets. But, as the "regular guy" told Costello, they don't agree with everything even their favorite host says, which shows that talk radio listeners are critical thinkers — more so, it seems, than your average MSM reporter.

But you've gotta love the part with the MSM's go-to liberal talk host, Randi Rhodes (Oh. Pardon me. A host "who many consider a liberal talker." Can't be putting any labels on liberals. Bad form.) Right after the shrink told CNN's audience that conservative talk hosts attract listeners who like "strong, aggressive messages" — translation: knuckle-dragging troglodytes — they cue up Rhodes. Her intro: "IIIIIIITTTT'S FRIIIIDAY, BASTARDS!!!!" A tad "aggressive," no? The irony, naturally, was lost to CNN.

And, typical of the small percentage (9 percent) of liberal hosts, it's time for a bitch-fest. The reason more people don't listen to liberal talk radio is not because it's a failure, but it's a matter of "access." Talk radio fans, which Rhodes claims to be, "have no choice" but to listen to the likes of Limbaugh. "And the other thing is conservative radio listeners love to be angry." This from a host who did a bit on President Bush getting shot. Again, I'm no psychiatrist, but this might be a case of projection. Might want to get her in contact with Dr. Saltz.

But note that word: access. That's the talking point for attempts to revive the Fairness Doctrine. The market is locking immense talents like the no-audience Rhodes from the masses. So we have to have the government "fix" that. I like Greg Gutfeld's take on Big Hollywood:

Apparently, the left is banned from talk radio! I’m sorry, but I don’t see a sign at the clubhouse, saying “no liberal hosts.” The only sign is from the public, who hates them. It’s called supply and demand. The demand is for a conservative viewpoint – and it’s currently being supplied.

What happens when you supply a product for which there is no demand? You get Air America. Some might call that a noble experiment, but it was neither noble, or experimental. Instead it functioned like a jar of leftwing preserves– a time capsule of corrupt liberal thinking, circa 1977. And, of course, for NPR to succeed, it needs government assistance. For liberal ideas to survive, you need welfare.

Bingo! And it reminds me of something. NPR attracts listeners more affluent and educated than even conservative commercial radio's with-it and successful audience. Isn't that the kind of demographic advertising agencies salivate over? One would think NPR could branch off a "for-profit" arm and give it a go in the market. Won't happen, but it'd be nice to see them put their wallets and careers where their sanctimony is.

In sum, this segment on CNN is not only a reflection of the network's cluelessness, but about how it assessed its own audience. CNN produced this "conservative talk radio as a Dark Continent" piece because it determined that its viewers see conservatives with the same level of ignorance. And the superficial and condenscending tone of the first installment only proves why conservatives are increasingly tuning out CNN. As Charles Krauthammer famously quipped about the brilliance of Roger Ailes, founder of the Fox News Channel: He discovered a niche audience — half of America.

Posted by Jim Lakely at 10:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

The visual style of the show is familiar from Bruckheimer's many other policiers, such as the CSI series. It has the same tendency toward dingy, low-level lighting, moving camera shots, eccentric framing, and the like, though in The Forgotten it's not as frenetic and flashy as in most of Bruckheimer's shows. That's a good thing.

The stories and performances reflect the earnestness of Bruckheimer's TV productions, while avoiding the sensationalism the other shows tend to indulge in. Christian Slater is Alex, an ex-cop who leads the Forgotten Network, a team of private citizens in Chicago who investigate cases in which the police have run out of leads and can't afford to devote additional resources.

Avoiding both cynicism ad romanticism, the program makes a point of showing how many people around the nation are willing to volunteer their help. It also shows people who refuse to help, thus making each such instance a test of a person's character.

Alex's daughter was the victim of a crime and is gone; each member of the team has experienced such a victimization or some past relationship with a criminal. These experiences give each of them a superpower, as they jokingly call it, such as a special ability to spot lies.

Thus instead of being crippled by their personal trials and tragedies, they overcome them and use their hard-won wisdom to help others in trouble.

Slater is very effective in his role as the group's leader--it's easily the best role he's had in years, even better than his dual role in NBC's short-lived series My Own Worst Enemy. And he makes the most of it, infusing the character with a surprising amount of charisma. Just watching his character listen to people is interesting, as Slater conveys the character's judgments and reactions entirely through subtle cues in his posture and facial expressions.

Also refreshing is the openly judgmental nature of the show's protagonist. Alex is no moral relativist--he has no hesitation about rebuking people who do wrong, yet he never seems priggish or smug. On the contrary, his concern is always directed toward the team's mission, not any personal, ego-driven agendas.

A gimmick the show uses effectively is to have the dead person talk in voice-over occasionally throughout each episode, explaining things about their former life, especially as they bear on what might have led to their death. These voice-over narration passages also make clear why these persons' lives had meaning and they should not be forgotten. They also lead to some rather tender, moving moments at an episode's climax.

The back story that led up to the murder at the center of each episode is explained by various characters who may have been involved. That's rather standard for mysteries, but what The Forgotten does particularly well is show interesting relationships among the suspects which afford some nice insights into the choices they make and why.

Also important is the fact that the murders aren't committed by investment bankers, fashion magnates, and the like, who of course almost never commit murder in real life. Instead, the murders in The Forgotten are typically committed by people of lower social status and economic means, as is the case in the real world.

That's another thing that makes The Forgotten at least a little bit more than just a formula mystery. It's not Tolstoy, of course, or even Agatha Christie, but it's a serious attempt at meaningful storytelling, and that can make for memorable television.

--S. T. Karnick

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 12:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It is becoming increasingly obvious that the whole edifice of modern journalism is built on a lie, argues Mike D'Virgilio

Back in the day, when there were only a few choices for America’s TV viewing pleasure, there solidified a myth that certain human beings had a view of reality devoid of all prejudice, bias, or personal opinion. They were called journalists. One even signed off his evening newscast telling America, “That’s the way it is.” And people believed him, it is said.

Although most Americans with any modicum of common sense and understanding of human nature realized that all human beings have a point of view in everything they do, journalists continued to insist that their allegedly dispassionate view of the day’s events was “the way it is.”

Many of them still make that claim, but the reality is that there is no such thing as “objective journalism” and never has been, as my colleague S. T. Karnick tells me. If the election of Barack Obama didn’t completely burst that bubble, Web maestro Andrew Breitbart is doing his bit to deflate the balloon completely.

The Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto tells the story in a very informative article, “Taking On the 'Democrat-Media Complex': The conservative Internet entrepreneur on bringing down Acorn, Hollywood liberals, and embarrassing the mainstream media.”

It is more than obvious that the current U.S. media complex is corrupt and that the elitist, progressive experts’ claim of objectivity is a mere fig leaf intended to hide that corruption. Breitbart’s ripping away of that fig leaf—which has been drooping for the past three decades since the press’s response to the rise of Reagan made media bias increasingly obvious—is salutary and long overdue.

Taranto makes a point in the last paragraph that I think questionable, although I understand why he says it:

Even if one accepts Mr. Breitbart's critique of the mainstream media, nobody should root for their downfall or destruction. Their role—that of impartial watchdog and broker of information—is a vital one, whether or not they perform it well. While Breitbart-style opinionated journalism can provide healthy competition, it cannot substitute for straight news.

--Mike D'Virgilio

Posted by Mike D'Virgilio at 11:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (8)

Nearing her ninetieth birthday, modern-day "Crime Queen" P. D. James has published Talking About Detective Fiction (Bodleian Library, 2009), a book of her thoughts on the genre in which she has written for nearly half a century. It's quite a short book--a small, thin, highly selective volume of 160 pages with no footnotes or endnotes--and some sentences in it appear to have been lifted from earlier critical pieces published by James. Nonetheless, critical observations from a writer of James' caliber are always worth reading. I recommend Talking About Detective Fiction to people interested in the fascinating history and nature of the detective fiction genre.

Of the book's eight chapters, two concern the genre before the Golden Age of detective fiction (this "Golden Age" is generally given the years 1920 to 1940), one is about the Golden Age itself, one about the American "hardboiled" private detective subgenre associated with Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald, one about the British Golden Age Crime Queens (Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham, and Ngaio Marsh) and three deal with, respectively, the design of the detective story, its appeal (and lack of it to some people), and its future.

The bulk of the book addresses the British Golden Age, with greatest emphasis being laid on the celebrated Crime Queens of that time, who are still popular today. The Crime Queens get a chapter that constitutes about 17 percent of the book, and references to them appear throughout its pages. Not surprisingly, six of the seventeen works consulted by James for Talking About Detective Fiction concern specific Crime Queens.

People familiar with James' interviews and critical writings will know that she has had a tendency over the years to be somewhat dismissive of Agatha Christie in relation to Christie's sister Crime Queens. This tendency can again be glimpsed in James' new book. Although James lists as a source Laura Thompson's 2007 biography of Christie, Thompson's forcefully argued thesis that Christie should be taken more seriously as a crime novelist (as opposed to a "mere" puzzle-maker) makes little headway here with James.

James asserts, for example, that her illustrious predecessor "employs no great psychological subtlety in her characterizations" and that "the last thing we get from a Christie novel is the disturbing presence of evil." This is the usual line popular critics have taken on Christie's work, conflicting with evidence provided by Thompson in her recent biography and by John Curran in his just-published book on Christie's writer's notebooks.

In my view it is beyond doubt that there was a shift in emphasis and tone evidenced in Christie's books beginning in the late thirties, with several taking on features commonly associated today with what is called the crime novel (as opposed to the mystery novel). There is very much a sense of evil--sin, I would say--in Endless Night (1967), for example, or And Then There Were None (1939), books as bleak as any penned by James. There also is more complex characterization in Sad Cypress (1940), say, or Five Little Pigs (1942) or The Hollow (1946) than Christie is typically given credit for.

Many academic scholars have come round to recognizing this, and it would be good to see more mainstream critics and skillful writers such as James do so as well.

James does admit having reread some Christie novels for her new study. Some of these she found unreadable, we learn, yet others surprised her by being "better written" than she recalled. She cites as a specific example of the latter A Murder is Announced (1950), a Miss Marple novel that vividly portrays social conditions in the postwar, austerity-ruled Great Britain of the Labour Party.

James is quite kind to the other Crime Queens. She recognizes qualities people dislike about their work, such as intimations of intellectual and social snobbery, but she makes clear she holds these writers in great esteem for, in her view, having moved the detective novel closer to the realistic novel of manners.

Like Julian Symons--the crime novelist and author of the influential genre survey Bloody Murder (1972), which is favorably cited here several times--James clearly ranks the "realistic" modern crime novel higher on the artistic scale than she does the often "artificial" Golden Age detective novel. Like Dorothy L. Sayers, who similarly is cited a number of times in her capacity as a literary critic, James uses the Victorian-era novel as an aesthetic guide, praising Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, and Anthony Trollope in these pages. Readers familiar with the increasing girth of and material detail in James' novels over the last forty years again will not be surprised by this preference.

James finds Sayers' college novel Gaudy Night (1936) the greatest achievement of the Golden Age in terms of combining a puzzle "with the novel of social realism and serious purpose." Critics Q. D. Leavis and Edmund Wilson would turn over in their graves at the notion of Gaudy Night as an example of "social realism," though there's no question the novel has a "serious purpose" (most significantly, assessing the position of educated women in society). Interestingly, we learn James first read this novel in 1936, 73 years ago. Manifestly, it had a great influence on her future writing career.

Sayers' greatest weakness in James' eyes seems to be that the murders in her tales often are "unrealistic." "Today, in choosing how to despatch our victims," writes James, " we are less concerned with originality and ingenuity than with practical, scientific and psychological credibility." No doubt, though one might raise some similar questions about the mechanics of the James murders in, say, Unnatural Causes (1967), Shroud for a Nightingale (1971), and An Unsuitable Job for a Woman (1972). Of course these all are novels that were written under the setting sun of the Golden Age, when people were not yet ashamed to enjoy ingenuity at the expense of "realism."

James includes a chapter discussing some of the other writers of the Golden Age, and her emphasis is overwhelmingly on British writers. Luminaries such as E. C. Bentley, Michael Innes, H. C Bailey, Gladys Mitchell, Edmund Crispin, Cyril Hare, and Josephine Tey all get a well-deserved paragraph or more. Nicholas Blake and G. D. H. and Margaret Cole are mentioned, as intellectuals who wrote detective novels. Monsignor Ronald Knox is discussed, though for his detective fiction writing rules, not his six forgotten detective novels.

Unfortunately, James ignores S. S. Van Dine, the highly influential American detective novelist whose novels were big bestsellers in the United States in the 1920s, along with the once very popular and highly regarded Ellery Queen, confirming a marked Anglo-centrism in James' focus Surprisingly, John Dickson Carr, the highly regarded master of the locked room mystery, is omitted as well. Aside from Edgar Allen Poe, the only Americans I can recall being discussed are Chandler, Hammett, and Macdonald--one would get the impression from Talking About Detective Fiction that only hardboiled mysteries were produced by Americans in the Golden Age, which is certainly not the case.

The main discussion of pre-Golden Age writers in Talking About Detective Fiction is given over to Arthur Conan Doyle and G. K. Chesterton, the illustrious creators of, respectively, Sherlock Holmes and Father Brown. R. Austin Freeman, creator of the great scientific detective Dr. Thorndyke, is omitted, which is unfortunate, since James praises scientific realism in the modern crime novel and thus might well have been expected to appreciate the Thorndyke tales.

Similarly, the underrated Golden Age British "Humdrum" writers are omitted, except for G. D. H. and Margaret Cole, who really are not Humdrums anyway. Usually Freeman Wills Crofts will get a perfunctory mention in genre surveys, but not here (unless I missed something--there is no index). Most regrettably, there is no mention of Henry Wade, a much underappreciated, sober Golden Age writer who was actually more of a precursor in theme and tone to James herself, in my view, than any of the Crime Queens.

Generally speaking, James breaks no great new ground in Talking about Detective Fiction, and the opinions expressed are pretty familiar to those already familiar with James, but it is a pleasure to have all her thoughts collected in one small, smoothly written volume. I should note that James is occasionally wryly amusing, as when she writes about Baroness Orczy's rather antiquated Lady Molly of Scotland Yard. James has always had an excellent sense of humor, something we do not get to see as much of in her work as I would like.

At the end of James' "talk," when speculating on the future of the genre (on this she is optimistic), she deems detective stories "unpretentious celebrations of reason and order in our increasingly complex and disorderly world" that we read for "relief, entertainment and mild intellectual challenge." The Moonstone may not be Middlemarch, concludes James, but we can honor the genius which produced the one without devaluing the ingenuity and artistry that produced the latter.

Fair enough. I, for one, shall continue to reread my clever Golden Age favorites in the years to come, just as I shall reread certain ingenious detective tales by P. D. James.

Talking About Detective Fiction (2009) is published by the Bodleian Library, to which Baroness James has donated the author's royalties from the hardback edition. Recently published in Great Britain, it will become available for purchase in the United States on December 1.

--Curt Evans

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 03:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The top three films at the U.S. box office this past weekend all outperformed expectations. Where the Wild Things Are, directed by Spike Jonze from the popular children's book by Maurice Sendak, came in on top of the heap with a healthy $32.5 million in ticket sales. The audience was primarily adults, as the distributor, Warner Brothers, successfully chose to market it mainly toward adults instead of children for the film combining live action, animation, and puppetry.

Finishing a very strong third was the low-budget horror film Paranormal Activity, which brought in $20.2 million. Both this film and Where the Wild Things Are received good reviews from the critics.

--S. T. Karnick

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 02:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Are belief in God and belief in science all that different? Mike D'Virgilio has his doubts.

One of the fundamental assumptions of modern American culture, and especially of those in our professions of cultural influence, is that science is objective and rational, and religion is, well, not.

Contrary to this assumption, however, all people have faith in something, be they atheists, agnostics, or the religious. The mystery of life cannot be fully explained on this side of the divide between life and death, much as we all wish to try.

Although this should inspire humility among all parties, it does not prevent a good many people from characterizing religious people, especially Christians, as devoid of reason and as stubbornly clinging to proven falsehoods so that they can retain their unjustifiable religious faith. I would say atheists are devoid of reason, but that’s for another article.

A post by Denyse O'Leary at the Salvo blog on a neuroscience study about belief aptly outlines the issue:

The study compares religious believers and non-believers, which I think is a bogus comparison. Everybody believes something. One must be quite the dull stick not to believe anything.

Non-believers in traditional religions are often great fans of the environment, the government, their trade union, their home team, a political party, atheist book clubs, a rock band, their local Hell's Angels club house, or whatever.

It would be a big step forward if researchers recognized that religious beliefs are not different in principle from other beliefs. The fact that such nonsense is even entertained is an impediment to science.

I am hardly surprised to learn that "the difference between belief and disbelief appears to be content-independent."

But it should at least try.

--Mike D'Virgilio

Posted by Mike D'Virgilio at 01:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

 For daring to be part of a group bidding for the NFL's St. Louis Rams, Rush Limbaugh was viciously slandered and libeled as a racist. For days. Practically no one in the dominant media culture rose to Rush's defense—just weeks after many prominent figures defended pedophile fugitive director Roman Polanski. And there have been few if any public apologies from those who peddled the false, absurd, and grotesque claim that Rush pined for the days of slavery and wanted to give Martin Luther King's assassin a posthumous Medal of Honor.

But in today's culture, being a liberal means never having to say you're sorry, Jim Lakely writes.

In his gleeful column about Limbaugh's failed attempt to become an owner of the Rams, Eugene Robinson writes: "In announcing that Limbaugh was no longer associated with his bid for the Rams, Checketts said it was 'clear that his involvement in our group has become a complication and a distraction.' That's the way the free market works in this great country of ours. I know that Rush will join me in a chorus of 'God Bless America.'"

Nice try. Since nobody is talking about using government regulation to keep Limbaugh from suffering from a smear campaign or its fallout, conservatives' belief in the free market is entirely irrelevant to the controversy. (People acting under no government compulsion make foolish and even wicked decisions all the time. Has any conservative ever denied this obvious truth?)

Conservatives' criticism has been directed at the invented quotes that much of the media have used to portray Limbaugh as a racist: the vile claims that he approved the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and favors slavery. Incredibly, Robinson does not mention these journalistic fabrications.

And it's much the most interesting facet of this story. Much of the press was willing to believe that Limbaugh believes these hateful things, and even broadcast them — and that millions of American conservatives listen daily to this type of filth. This is what a lot of liberal journalists think about their conservative fellow citizens. Is it any wonder their coverage is so frequently unfair?

As Limbaugh himself noted on his radio show Thursday (and later in his WSJ piece), this is not really even about him. Rush is just a conduit for the liberal establishment's attack on conservatism, which they believe to be racist at its core. Whether or not most liberals actually believe that, the leading lights of liberalism that get on news chat shows and write columns are quick use race as a club to shut down debate and discredit their political opponents. One must look no farther than attempts to portray criticism of Obama as having no grounding in principle, but in racism.

As but the latest example of this technique, Michael Wilbon, a sports columnist I used to greatly admire in The Washington Post, did not use his column Thursday to walk back from his unfair characterization of Rush. Instead, he doubled down.

But Limbaugh has [a] long history of the same insults and race baiting, to the point of declaring he hoped the president of the United States, a black man, fails. I never understood why someone with Limbaugh's gift for communication was so nasty and, in my opinion, gave cover to bigots everywhere under the guise of conservatism. Clearly, I'm not alone.

So ... Limbaugh, as principled a conservative as you can find — one who even opposed John McCain for president (until the only other option was Obama) — opposes the ultra-liberal Obama because he is black. Must be the only explanation. (Sigh.) This from a man who admits he doesn't listen to Limbaugh — but everyone he knows tells him that Rush is a racist, so it must be true. (How much do you want to bet Wilbon has few if any friends who have listened non-stop to a single hour of Rush's show, let alone a week's worth?)

Certainly, Rush Limbaugh does not have a "right" to be a minority owner of an NFL team. And there is no "right" that protects him from being unfairly called a racist (though libel laws do give him the right to seek judicial punishment for the slander). Yet we should all agree that what has happened to Rush this week was a terrible wrong. In a just society, those who peddled the lies about what Rush said should be thumped out of the public commentariat.

There are no accusations more damning in American society than to be unfairly portrayed as a racist, especially if one makes his living as a public commentator. And to be falsely accused of saying on the air that the assassin of MLK deserves a Medal of Honor? To say that slavery "wasn't all bad"? Egad! Yet I've heard no one who peddled those vicious libel fully take it back (Excising the quotes from stories with an "editor's note" stating Limbaugh "claims" he never said it, or that it can't be proven is almost as shameful as the original smear).

Of course, the two loudest howlers against Rush — Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson — continue to enjoy fawning media attention despite their own long history of race hustling and perpetuating mythical "race crimes" (See: Rape Case, Duke Lacrosse; Brawley, Tawana). They are never even asked to apologize, let alone have it in them to do it.

So, yes. My wish is about the true race hustlers being marginalized is as likely to come to pass as I am to be signed by an NFL team. But I will cling to it nonetheless — and so should everyone who thinks it's finally time to elevate our national discourse, especially on matters of race.

(Cross-posted at Infinite Monkeys) 

Posted by Jim Lakely at 01:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

This week:
* Tuesday—Joseph Cotten has a cloak but no dagger;
* Wednesday—Alida Valli gives a good imitation of an iceberg;
* Thursday—Joan Fontaine has a right to be suspicious in two films;
* Friday—Robert Mitchum breaks a sizable number of commandments;
* Saturday—Bela Lugosi takes a bite out of crime;
* Sunday—Fay Wray screams again, and with good reason.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Monday—October 19th

5:00 PM—A Night in Casablanca (1946)
A hotel manager in postwar Casablanca tackles renegade Nazis.
Cast: The Marx Brothers, Charles Drake, Sig Ruman. Dir: Archie Mayo. BW-85 mins, TV-G

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Tuesday—October 20th

2:00 AM—The Man with a Cloak (1951)
A mystery man tries to help a young innocent escape a murderous housekeeper.
Cast: Barbara Stanwyck, Joseph Cotten, Leslie Caron. Dir: Fletcher Markle. BW-81 mins, TV-PG, CC

3:30 AM—A Killer is Loose (1956)
A crook tries to avenge his wife's accidental shooting by a cop.
Cast: Joseph Cotten, Wendell Corey, Rhonda Fleming. Dir: Budd Boetticher. BW-73 mins, TV-PG

11:00 AM—Pocketful of Miracles (1961)
A good-hearted gangster turns an old apple seller into a society matron so she can impress her daughter.
Cast: Bette Davis, Glenn Ford, Hope Lange. Dir: Frank Capra. C-137 mins, TV-G, CC, Letterbox Format

9:45 PM—Strait-Jacket (1964)
Murder follows an axe murderer home when she's released from a mental hospital.
Cast: Joan Crawford, Diane Baker, George Kennedy. Dir: William Castle. BW-93 mins, TV-14, CC, Letterbox Format

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Wednesday—October 21st

11:30 AM—The Paradine Case (1947)
A married lawyer falls for the woman he's defending on murder charges.
Cast: Gregory Peck, Alida Valli, Charles Laughton. Dir: Alfred Hitchcock. BW-114 mins, TV-PG, CC

6:15 PM—Return from the Ashes (1965)
A gigolo marries a wealthy widow, seduces her stepdaughter and plots to kill them both.
Cast: Maximilian Schell, Samantha Eggar, Ingrid Thulin. Dir: J. Lee Thompson. BW-108 mins, TV-PG, Letterbox Format

10:00 PM—The Third Man (1949)
A man's investigation of a friend's death uncovers corruption in post-World War II Vienna.
Cast: Joseph Cotten, Orson Welles, Alida Valli. Dir: Carol Reed. BW-104 mins, TV-14, CC

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Thursday—October 22nd

12:00 AM—Suspicion (1941)
A wealthy wallflower suspects her penniless playboy husband of murder.
Cast: Joan Fontaine, Cary Grant, Nigel Bruce. Dir: Alfred Hitchcock. BW-100 mins, TV-PG, CC, DVS

2:15 PM—The Bigamist (1953)
A woman discovers her husband has another family in another city.
Cast: Joan Fontaine, Ida Lupino, Edmond O'Brien. Dir: Ida Lupino. BW-79 mins, TV-PG

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Friday—October 23rd

7:30 AM—Within the Law (1939)
A wrongly convicted woman studies law and seeks her revenge.
Cast: Ruth Hussey, Tom Neal, Paul Kelly. Dir: Gustav Machaty. BW-65 mins, TV-G

11:45 AM—The Law in Her Hands (1936)
A lady lawyer for the mob tries to break free of her criminal connections.
Cast: Margaret Lindsay, Warren Hull, Glenda Farrell. Dir: William Clemens. BW-58 mins, TV-G

6:00 PM—The Law and the Lady (1951)
A society jewel thief falls for one of her marks.
Cast: Greer Garson, Michael Wilding, Fernando Lamas. Dir: Edwin H. Knopf. BW-104 mins, TV-G, CC

8:00 PM—The Night of the Hunter (1955)
A bogus preacher marries an outlaw's widow in search of the man's hidden loot.
Cast: Robert Mitchum, Shelley Winters, Lillian Gish. Dir: Charles Laughton. BW-93 mins, TV-PG, CC, Letterbox Format

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Saturday—October 24th

12:00 AM—Rebecca (1940)
A young bride is terrorized by the memories of her husband's glamorous first wife.
Cast: Laurence Olivier, Joan Fontaine, Judith Anderson. Dir: Alfred Hitchcock. BW-130 mins, TV-PG, CC

2:15 AM—Pretty Poison (1968)
A young man gets in over his head when he convinces a small-town girl he's a secret agent.
Cast: Tony Perkins, Tuesday Weld, Beverly Garland. Dir: Noel Black. C-89 mins, TV-PG, CC, Letterbox Format

7:30 AM—Mark of the Vampire (1935)
Vampires seem to be connected to an unsolved murder.
Cast: Lionel Barrymore, Elizabeth Allan, Bela Lugosi. Dir: Tod Browning. BW-61 mins, TV-PG, CC

9:00 AM—Brothers United (1937)
In the final chapter of Dick Tracy, criminals try to turn the famed detective evil.
Cast: Ralph Byrd, Kay Hughes, Smiley Burnette. Dir: Alan James, Ray Taylor. BW-17 mins, TV-G

4:15 PM—The Hound of the Baskervilles (1959)
Sherlock Holmes investigates the haunting of an isolated British estate by a murderous canine.
Cast: Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee, Andre Morell. Dir: Terence Fisher. C-87 mins, TV-G, CC, Letterbox Format

6:00 PM—They Only Kill Their Masters (1972)
A small-town sheriff attempts to clear a Doberman of murder charges.
Cast: James Garner, Katharine Ross, June Allyson. Dir: James Goldstone. C-98 mins, TV-14, Letterbox Format

8:00 PM—The Letter (1940)
A woman claims to have killed in self-defense, until a blackmailer turns up with incriminating evidence.
Cast: Bette Davis, Herbert Marshall, James Stephenson. Dir: William Wyler. BW-95 mins, TV-PG, CC

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Sunday—October 25th

7:30 AM—The Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933)
A disfigured sculptor turns murder victims into wax statues.
Cast: Lionel Atwill, Fay Wray, Glenda Farrell. Dir: Michael Curtiz. C-77 mins, TV-PG, CC

~~~~~~~~~~~

—Mike Gray

Posted by Mike Gray at 11:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Posted by Mike Gray at 10:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (7)

Throwing off all moral conventions, the counterculture believers of the 1960s and '70s thought that they were embracing freedom. Instead they have turned into the establishment of the 21st century, and their calling card is tyranny. Mike D'Virgilio writes.

My, what a difference a few years can make. The once-mighty counterculture, which reflexively questioned authority and wanted to die before they got old, now demonizes anyone that dare question their authority (see The Rush Limbaugh Media Lynch Mob) and will do anything to live forever. But there is a new counterculture in the land, and their calling card is liberty, as James Hudnall at Big Hollywood argues. And a persuasive case he makes:

The counter-culture wanted to be free of what they considered a constricting, conformist society. Yet what did they turn it into when they got old and assumed power? They created a society more restrictive and conformist than that “evil” repressive 50s culture they love to vilify. They have become the new scolds. They have ushered in an “Age of Unreason” where you have to do what they say or else. They tell us what we can eat, what we can say, what kind of car to drive, what kind of light bulbs to use, on and on. They lecture us about our “carbon footprint” and “sustainable lifestyle”. They claim that the government, which they have spent the last eight years railing against, can solve all our problems if we abdicate what’s left of our personal freedoms, without question.

It’s not a conservative vs lefty argument. It’s freedom lovers verses the statists. It’s liberty vs tyranny.

We’ve founded an organization, The Culture Alliance, toward that end. Imagine some of the energy and money and focus that the right has poured into politics over the last 50 years focused on culture. We'd better, because if not, tyranny’s noose will only grow tighter.

--Mike D'Virgilio

Posted by Mike D'Virgilio at 09:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (8)

Over the years, I've been collecting Regnery's series of oversized paperbacks grouped under the umbrella title of Politically Incorrect Guides™, or PIGs—and in my opinion every one of them has been worth the money.

These PIGs are jam-packed with information and facts—call them inconvenient truths—that have been chronically suppressed by the cultural commissars who permeate education, politics, public opinion, and religion.

True, I don't agree with every single assertion contained in them, but I enjoy being challenged in my thinking—sometimes enough to actually do the research to confirm or discredit them.

What usually follows is a jaw drop followed by "Dang! I didn't know that!"—or words to that effect.

If you've never read any of them and you're not afraid of new and possibly dangerous ideas, then by all means start adding these PIGs to your menagerie.

Here's a list, in no particular order, of The Politically Incorrect Guides™ to:

The Great Depression and the New Deal
The Founding Fathers
The Sixties
American History
Islam (and the Crusades)
Global Warming and Environmentalism
The Civil War
The Middle East
The Bible
Hunting
The Constitution
Capitalism
The South (and Why It Will Rise Again)
Science
English and American Literature
Darwinism and Intelligent Design
Women, Sex, and Feminism
Western Civilization
The Vietnam War

Reviews of some of these guides are forthcoming on TAC.

~~~~~~~~~~~

—Mike Gray

Posted by Mike Gray at 01:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Twilight Zone taught real truths about the human condition.

It is a show I watched as a child but it is only now that I have begun to realize how meaningful a program it really was. The show was preoccupied with man's place in the universe, with threats to freedom and individuality, and with man's inhumanity to man. With such preoccupations, I figured there must be a lot of grist there for the religious school mill.

Read more here.

--Mike D'Virgilio

Posted by Mike D'Virgilio at 10:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The newly released historical novel Wolf Hall, by Hilary Mantel, sounds very interesting. Winner of the Booker Prize, Wolf Hall is set during the reign of English king Henry VIII and concentrates on the fascinating political intrigue of the time and the lessons to be learned from it.

Keynotes:

At the book's center: Thomas Cromwell, the ruthless blacksmith's son who rose to power under Henry VIII because of his intelligence, cunning and work ethic. . . .

Mantel's novel is less about Henry's sex life and more about power: how to get it, wield it, keep it, particularly if you—like the low-born Cromwell—lived in a merciless world ruled by the rich and titled.

Cromwell usually is presented as a bully utterly lacking scruples, but Mantel's Cromwell is a sympathetic character modern readers will understand. Wolf is like a Tudor-era version of American Gangster, with Cromwell as Denzel Washington.

Read review here.

--S. T. Karnick

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 09:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A new video game by the author of the classic Monkey Island series and Grim Fandango has just been released. Brutal Legend puts the player in a fantasy world inspired by heavy metal music and featuring celebrity voices such as Jack Black, Rob Halford, Lemmy Kilminster, Lita Ford, and Tim Curry, with more than 100 songs represented.

USA Today reports:

Schafer's team at Double Fine Productions conjured an ancient world based on heavy-metal imagery. Demonic villains ripped from the cover of a Black Sabbath LP inhabit an airbrushed Meat Loaf album art landscape. Enslaved humans are literally "headbangers," pounding their craniums in mines.

Out today for Xbox 360 and PS3 (rated M for ages 17-up, $60) Brütal Legend is not just about the music, although the game has more than 100 songs by artists from Anthrax to Wrath of Killenstein. Heavy-metal royalty such as Ozzy Osbourne, Rob Halford of Judas Priest, Lemmy Kilmister of Motörhead and Lita Ford provide character voices; Tim Curry (Rocky Horror Picture Show) plays the villain, Emperor Doviculus. . . .

"You are in a world of heavy metal," Black says. It "lets you do battle and slay demons and live out some of your fantasies."

The new game reportedly exhibits the same mischievous sense of humor as Schaffer's other works.

--S. T. Karnick

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 09:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

After barely surviving last season, the excellent TV drama Friday Night Lights has been renewed for not just one but two years. The satellite service DirecTV saved the program last year when NBC was about to cancel it, by providing additional revenue for the right to show the episodes several months before they would appear on the broadcast TV network.

The show returns October 28 on DirecTVs The 101 Network, commercial-free, with the same arrangement as last year allowing the episodes to be shown on NBC next year. The fourth and fifth seasons of the show will consist of thirteen episodes apiece.

Friday Night Lights: Recommended.

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 08:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Bolstered by a weak slate of competition and a huge amount of television commercials over the past few weeks, the comedy Couples Retreat, starring and cowritten by Vince Vaughn, won the U.S. movie box office derby with its debut this weekend, achieving strong earnings of $35.3 million. Industry analysts were surprised, having predicted the film to bring in but $20 million during its first weekend.

The vulgar and broad but amusing comedy drew in large audiences despite horrible reviews from the critics. The film's combination of comical sensationalism and largely traditional values helped it connect with audiences. That's a classic American comedy approach, and Vaughn's ability to tap into it made it an unexpectedly strong success.

Also doing unexpectedly well: the independently produced horror film Paranormal Activity, which earned $7.1 million in only 160 theaters around the nation. For comparison, the top three films of the week each played in about 3,000 theaters.

Paranormal Activity refreshes the horror genre by returning to a strong tradition in Gothic fiction: ordinary characters with whom the audience can identify, in situations with which the audience can identify, which are then turned into frightening, usually preternatural scenarios. It's a genre that could use a little refreshing, given the pattern of mounting gore and depictions of torture in recent years.

Thus a stronger intellectual and psychologically plausible approach is greatly welcome, and initial audience reaction to Paranormal Activity seems to reflect this.

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 10:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

After decades of the conservative punditocracy calling the shots, maybe it's time the right-wing elite made room for a little street theater and some of those folks in the phone directory Bill Buckley endorsed so many years ago, Daniel Crandall writes.

Nothing irritates the elite more than being shown up by those they consider their inferiors. Make the conservative aristocracy look bad (not a particularly difficult thing to do), and charges of populism, or worse, will slide down their noses, as they grumble about the hoi polloi over cocktails and cigars in the Brooks-Frum “New Majority” smoking lounge.

Imagine you discover a way to decrease costs, increase revenue, and give the employees a greater stake in the company. Your senior manager, however, hates the idea and its radical nature. “It is not how we do things around here,” you’re told. Undaunted, you go around him, show the CEO the idea, and she loves it.

It is implemented across the company to great success. There’s a perceptible shift in the company culture. The senior manager, who shot it down, despises you because the organization now sees him, if not as an obstacle to advancement, as someone unwilling to shake up the status quo because it might put his authority at risk. Some wonder if he ever cared about the company at all, or was it just the salary and office perks that concerned him.

Some among the conservative intellectual elite are sounding like that self-serving senior manager. They are irritated with the populist rhetoric coming from Glenn Beck and the Tea Party activists for what appears to be no other reason than its effectiveness at mobilizing the public into action.

David Brooks took this potshot: “For no matter how often their hollowness is exposed, the jocks still reweave the myth of their own power. They still ride the airwaves claiming to speak for millions. They still confuse listeners with voters. And they are aided in this endeavor by their enablers. … [T]he slightly educated snobs who believe that Glenn Beck really is the voice of Middle America.”

Glenn Beck, according to David Frum, is “paranoid,” “hysterical,” “none too scrupulous about facts and truth,” and, perhaps worst of all, “working for himself … [choosing] his targets according to his own scheme of priorities,” which are limited to making “a pleasant living for himself by reckless defamation.” I wonder if Mr. Frum is familiar with the term projection.

Stephen F. Hayward is a bit more charitable than Frum and Brooks. Unfortunately, he still sees the boots on the ground in the political battles as “unfocused, lacking the connection to a concrete ideology.” While less dismissive of Beck and his fans, Hayward believes good conservatives come with law degrees (Hugh Hewitt –Michigan Law, Michael Medved – Yale Law, William Bennet – Harvard Law) or write serious books like William F. Buckley Jr., Milton Friedman or Irving Kristol. “Today,” Hayward writes, “the conservative movement has been thrown off balance, with the populists dominating and the intellectuals retreating.”

My bookshelves are full of tomes by conservative intellectuals (Buckley, Hayek, Kirk, Thomas Sowell, Robert Nisbet). I ask myself at the end of the day, however, did their books reduce the size and scope of government? No. Have they curtailed federal regulatory infringement on the lives of everyday folks? No. Has a single conservative intellectual done anything to reverse the trends S.T. Karnick described:

Since the end of World War II, the American culture has trended toward ever-greater promotion of narcissism, self-expression, antinomianism, identity politics, and questioning of all conventions and authority. It has become an instrument for the devaluation of all values.

In a word: No. And yet, for many Republicans these intellectuals are the conservative movement.

Brooks, Frum, and other conservative opinion-shapers have been the source for Republican talking points. Michael Medved, one of those shapers, with the fifth largest audience on talk radio, has stated the only way beat Obammunism is by “electing more Republicans to high office.”

In one sense, Medved is right. If we want to curtail the Left-wing fast track into the Euro States of America, then Republicans are the way to go. However, arguing, as often Medved does, that electing Republicans, especially of the moderate brand, is a way to “fight back against the menacing expansion of government” flies in the face of facts.

Consider a Heritage Foundation report on welfare spending in America. Spending has seen a steady upward climb, beginning in 1964 with LBJ and his “War on Poverty” dolling out about $50 billion (in 2008 dollars). In 1981, Reagan was elected and spending dipped, for a brief time, below $300 Billion. In 1996, with welfare eating up about $500 billion, along came Newt Gingrich, the Contract with America, and “reform” intended to “end welfare” as we know it. In 2008, spending is over $700 billion. Please explain how electing Republicans has stopped the “expansion of government.”

Concerning the intellectuals’ embrace of Reagan (David Brooks notwithstanding), one can only comment that nothing succeeds like success. In the 1970s, when Reagan’s conservatism inspired him to oppose Carter’s plan to abandon the Panama Canal the conservative elite, as represented by Buckley, National Review, et al, stood four-square with … Jimmy Carter.

What really has conservative intellectuals’ panties in a bunch? Are Tea Party folks, as Hayward says, “brain-dead?” Before these intellectual elites continue down that road, they might want to check with Mark Steyn, writing at National Review:

The intellectual heft at the tea-party protests consists of the animating principles of the American idea: the Founding Fathers writ large in comic-book lettering---TRADE FREEDOM FOR SECURITY AND YOU WILL HAVE NEITHER! That so many conservative sophisticates regard this as either hopelessly provincial or beyond the bounds of political viability testifies to the real intellectual bankruptcy out there.

From where I sit, in the hinterlands of the Pacific Northwest, Glenn Beck has done, in about a year’s time, what the right-wing intellectual elite residing in the New York-Washington DC megalopolis have never done. Beck got people to put down the books, get off their couches, and get out in the street. He is not satisfied with simply reading about America’s Founding Fathers or the history of Progressivism in America. He demands that the People make their views known to their elected officials. And people are responding.

William F. Buckley Jr. the godfather of conservative punditry., famously stated, “I am obliged to confess I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University.” Glenn Beck inspired not 2,000 but hundreds of thousands of average citizens to travel across America on planes, trains, buses, and automobiles to demand that their elected representatives live up to their oath of office and “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign or domestic.” Today, many of Buckley’s intellectual progeny bemoan this unseemly behavior; telling this phone directory riff-raff that they should listen to their betters.

I appreciate the information and intellectual stimulation that comes from the great minds on the Right, both past and present. Today, however, we have a chance to cleanse the Right of big-government Republicans and their intellectual defenders with a free-market, liberty-oriented populist movement. It would be a shame if this opportunity were lost to a few squishy conservatives writing for the movement's bitter enemies at the New York Times and USA Today.

--Daniel Crandall

Posted by Mike D'Virgilio at 10:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

J. Y. Jones, Worship Not the Creature: Animal Rights and the Bible (2009)
Nordskog Publishing, Inc.
176 pages
ISBN 978-0-9824929-1-8
$19.95
Buy it here.

The animal rights movement seems to be gaining momentum, power, and influence all over the United States and Western Europe, working in conjunction with its close allies in the radical environmental movement. It has moved completely away from the issues of animal stewardship and now calls for a wholesale halt to all animal utilization to meet any human needs. This trend is linked to a dangerous form of radical vegetarianism, the logical outcome of such a philosophy. The movement touts all aspects of its plan for humanity as good for people, the environment, and animals. While the Bible unquestionably teaches good stewardship of animals under man's dominion, it is highly deceptive and absolutely erroneous to use it in support of arguments for animal rights. All such attempts to make these radical philosophies "God-sanctioned" are highly in error and beg a scholarly attempt to refute them. That is essentially what this book is all about.

J. Y. Jones' Worship Not the Creature is written from a Bible-believer's perspective, yet he invites anyone—atheists included—to examine the sound arguments for animal welfare and the unsound premises which undergird the movement for animal rights. Jones correctly distinguishes between animal welfare—which is everyone's responsibility, Bible-believer or not—and animal rights, for which no sound or even sane arguments can be presented.

Jones begins by establishing the authority of Scripture and the Creator's will regarding the animal kingdom. He continues with the Great Flood of Noah, focusing on the dietary consequences of that great cataclysm. (His fascinating observations on the impact of vitamin B-12 production and consumption and its relative scarcity after the Flood are something I had never considered before.)

He continues from the Old Testament period—which consistently supports the Creator's intentions for man's use (not abuse) of animals—into New Testament times. Jones, knowing there is a vegetarian subculture which attempts to wrench Scripture into supporting their lifestyle, intentionally puts forward the rather shocking (to them, anyway) idea that Jesus Christ, as the oldest male in his family and in accordance with Jewish law and custom, might have cut the throats of Passover lambs on many occasions and killed barnyard animals at other times. Jones' intention is to show that the Bible also supports animal use (not abuse) from Christ's birth to the present day; he is also underlining the hypocrisy of many so-called "Christian" groups who cherry-pick the Bible to support their own narrow views while ignoring Scripture's authority in other areas. (In other words, it's the whole thing or no thing.)

Jones notes the recent upswing in animal-on-man violence. (Did you know, for example, that just over a year ago 133 people were killed in Mozambique by a variety of animals, with elephants and crocodiles being the most common predators?) He believes this is a trend that will continue and intensify because of animal rights activists, who almost always press for regulations that favor predators. It's only a slight exaggeration to say that one day, if these activists have their way, it could be a federal crime to interfere with a bear while he is pawing through your trash can.

The increase in wild animal attacks on people may reach a culmination in what the Bible calls the Great Tribulation, a time when a world dictator will attempt to murder anyone—but especially Jews and Christians—who do not worship him as god. Jones believes this man—called "the Beast" or the Antichrist—will very probably be both a rabid environmentalist and an animal rights advocate. "The Beast" could have all the caged animals of the world set free to prey at will on any would-be resisters in order to spread terror among the populace. Since the Bible tells us he will be inhabited by Satan himself, Jones' scenario isn't that far-fetched.

In the meantime, we have animal rights advocacy groups that can't withstand public scrutiny. Among them, according to Jones, are People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) and the Humane Society of the United States, both of which are top-heavy with overpaid lobbyists and fundraisers and light on meaningful animal welfare programs. Jones believes these associations exist almost solely to fund radical groups that push for legislation, rules, and regulations which are aimed at crippling the United States in one way or another. If any animals get helped, it's almost by accident. As Jones notes, the ultimate aims of radical animal rights groups and radical environmentalists often dovetail; their mutual interests inevitably overlap. (What Jones doesn't say is that the present administration is also top-heavy with people who hold such radical views of man, animals, and nature—and that's not good news.)

All in all, Worship Not the Creature is worth your while. It's an easy read, but with substance; the author supports his thesis well; and, like me, you might encounter ideas you had never thought of before.

-----

Chapters:

1. Creation, Evolution, and Biblical Integrity
2. In the Beginning
3. A Changed World
4. Post-flood Animal Utilization
5. Animals and the Law of Moses
6. God's Judgment Through Animals
7. Biblical Stewardship of Animals
8. The Relationship of Jesus to Animals
9. New Testament Animal Utilization Apart from the Four Gospels
10. The Vegetarian Angle
11. The Key Connection: The Spirit of Antichrist and Modern Environmentalism
12. The Role of Animals in the Predicted Tribulation
13. Final Thoughts
Appendix: Wild Game Recipes from the Kitchen of a Hunter's Wife (Linda Jones)
Scripture Index

~~~~~~~~~~~

—Mike Gray

Posted by Mike Gray at 03:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

This week:
* Monday—Lon Chaney spooks a lot of people;
* Wednesday—celestial beings can use a Handi-Wipe®;
* Thursday—Arsene Lupin looks like two different people;
* Friday—Hurd Hatfield hides those unsightly blemishes—for a while;
* Saturday—Gary Cooper runs aground;
* Sunday—Boris Karloff rounds out the week by spooking a lot of people, as well.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Monday—October 12th

12:00 AM—The Unknown (1927)
In this silent film, an escaped killer pretends to be a sideshow's armless wonder.
Cast: Lon Chaney, Joan Crawford, Norman Kerry. Dir: Tod Browning. BW-50 mins, TV-PG

1:00 AM—Unholy Three (1925)
In this silent film, a ventriloquist masquerades as an old lady to front a crime ring.
Cast: Lon Chaney, Harry Earles, Victor McLaglen. Dir: Tod Browning. BW-86 mins, TV-G

4:00 AM—The Strange Woman (1946)
An unscrupulous 19th-century woman will stop at nothing to control the men in her life.
Cast: Hedy Lamarr, George Sanders, Louis Hayward. Dir: Edgar G. Ulmer. BW-99 mins, TV-PG

6:45 AM—Five Golden Hours (1960)
A con artist who fleeces wealthy widows falls for his latest mark.
Cast: Ernie Kovacs, Cyd Charisse, George Sanders. Dir: Mario Zampi. BW-90 mins, TV-G, Letterbox Format

9:45 AM—The Golden Salamander (1949)
An archaeologist gets mixed up with gun runners.
Cast: Trevor Howard, Anouk Aimee, Herbert Lom. Dir: Ronald Neame. BW-98 mins, TV-G

11:30 AM—The Journey (1959)
A Communist officer falls hard for a married woman trying to escape from Hungary.
Cast: Deborah Kerr, Yul Brynner, Jason Robards, Jr. Dir: Anatole Litvak. C-126 mins, TV-PG, CC, Letterbox Format

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Tuesday—October 13th

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Wednesday—October 14th

3:45 AM—Angels with Dirty Faces (1938)
Childhood friends on opposite sides of the law fight over the future of a street gang.
Cast: James Cagney, Pat O'Brien, Humphrey Bogart. Dir: Michael Curtiz. BW-97 mins, TV-G, CC

8:00 PM—The Cuckoos (1930)
Two tramps-turned-fortune-tellers try to solve a kidnapping.
Cast: Bert Wheeler, Robert Woolsey, Jobyna Howland. Dir: Paul Sloane. BW-97 mins, TV-G

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Thursday—October 15th

12:45 AM—Peach-O-Reno (1932)
Two divorce lawyers run a gambling joint by night.
Cast: Bert Wheeler, Robert Woolsey, Dorothy Lee. Dir: William A. Seiter. BW-63 mins, TV-G

2:00 AM—Arsene Lupin (1932)
A gentleman thief risks his life in an attempt to steal the Mona Lisa.
Cast: John Barrymore, Lionel Barrymore, Karen Morley. Dir: Jack Conway. BW-84 mins, TV-G, CC

3:30 AM—Arsene Lupin Returns (1938)
A reformed jewel thief helps detectives track down a criminal.
Cast: Melvyn Douglas, Warren William, Virginia Bruce. Dir: George Fitzmaurice. BW-81 mins, TV-G

6:15 AM—Parole Girl (1933)
A wrongly convicted woman tries to make amends after getting out of prison.
Cast: Mae Clark, Ralph Bellamy, Marie Prevost. Dir: Edward F. Cline. BW-68 mins.

11:30 AM—High School Confidential! (1958)
A young police officer returns to high school undercover to investigate the drug trade.
Cast: Russ Tamblyn, Jan Sterling, Mamie Van Doren. Dir: Jack Arnold. BW-85 mins, TV-PG, CC, Letterbox Format

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Friday—October 16th

7:00 AM—Gaslight (1944)
A newlywed fears she's going mad when strange things start happening at the family mansion.
Cast: Charles Boyer, Ingrid Bergman, Angela Lansbury. Dir: George Cukor. BW-114 mins, TV-PG, CC, DVS

9:00 AM—The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945)
A man remains young and handsome while his portrait shows the ravages of age and sin.
Cast: Hurd Hatfield, Angela Lansbury, Donna Reed. Dir: Albert Lewin. BW-110 mins, TV-G, CC

12:45 PM—The Hoodlum Saint (1946)
After finding religion, a cynical newspaperman tries to help young hoods.
Cast: William Powell, Esther Williams, Angela Lansbury. Dir: Norman Taurog. BW-92 mins, TV-PG, CC

6:15 PM—Mister Buddwing (1966)
A man suffering from amnesia confronts a series of women in his search for his memory.
Cast: James Garner, Jean Simmons, Angela Lansbury. Dir: Delbert Mann. BW-99 mins, TV-14, CC

8:00 PM—The Narrow Margin (1952)
A tough cop meets his match when he has to guard a gangster's moll on a tense train ride.
Cast: Charles McGraw, Marie Windsor, Jacqueline White. Dir: Richard Fleischer. BW-72 mins, TV-PG, CC

10:30 PM—Lured (1947)
A woman helps the police catch the serial killer who murdered her best friend.
Cast: George Sanders, Lucille Ball, Boris Karloff. Dir: Douglas Sirk. BW-103 mins, TV-G

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Saturday—October 17th

12:30 AM—The Lodger (1944)
The inhabitants of a boarding house fear the new lodger is Jack the Ripper.
Cast: Merle Oberon, Laird Cregar, George Sanders. Dir: John Brahm. BW-84 mins, TV-14

9:00 AM—The Fire Trap (1937)
In the thirteenth chapter of Dick Tracy, the famed detective must escape a dark room where's he's the only target.
Cast: Ralph Byrd, Kay Hughes, Smiley Burnette. Dir: Alan James, Ray Taylor. BW-17 mins, TV-G

9:30 AM—The Devil in White (1937)
In the fourteenth chapter of Dick Tracy, the famed detective fights to escape a burning ship.
Cast: Ralph Byrd, Kay Hughes, Smiley Burnette. Dir: Alan James, Ray Taylor. BW-20 mins, TV-G

12:00 PM—Torn Curtain (1966)
A U.S. scientist pretends to defect to follow his mentor behind the Iron Curtain.
Cast: Paul Newman, Julie Andrews, Lila Kedrova. Dir: Alfred Hitchcock. C-128 mins, TV-PG, Letterbox Format

10:30 PM—The Wreck of the Mary Deare (1959)
The skipper of a sunken ship stands trial for negligence.
Cast: Gary Cooper, Charlton Heston, Michael Redgrave. Dir: Michael Anderson. C-105 mins, TV-PG, CC, Letterbox Format

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Sunday—October 18th

4:30 AM—The Ghost Ship (1943)
A young innocent signs on with a ship whose captain is going mad.
Cast: Richard Dix, Russell Wade, Edith Barrett. Dir: Mark Robson. BW-69 mins, TV-PG, CC

7:30 AM—Bedlam (1946)
When an actress tries to reform an asylum, its corrupt keeper has her committed.
Cast: Boris Karloff, Anna Lee, Billy House. Dir: Mark Robson. BW-79 mins, TV-PG, CC

11:00 AM—Les Miserables (1935)
An obsessed policeman relentlessly pursues an escaped convict.
Cast: Fredric March, Charles Laughton, Cedric Hardwicke. Dir: Richard Boleslawski. BW-109 mins, TV-PG, CC

1:00 PM—Anatomy of a Murder (1959)
A small-town lawyer gets the case of a lifetime when a military man avenges an attack on his wife.
Cast: James Stewart, Ben Gazzara, Lee Remick. Dir: Otto Preminger. BW-161 mins, TV-PG, CC, Letterbox Format

6:15 PM—High Sierra (1941)
An aging ex-con sets out to pull one more big heist.
Cast: Humphrey Bogart, Ida Lupino, Arthur Kennedy. Dir: Raoul Walsh. BW-100 mins, TV-G, CC

~~~~~~~~~~~

—Mike Gray

Posted by Mike Gray at 09:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Edmond D. Smith pithily characterized the intent and a major outcome of the Nobel Prize committee's awarding of this year's Peace Prize to President Obama:

I understand the party starts in Qadaffi's tent later today.

TAC contributor R. J. McReady added:

I'd like to go on record as nominating myself for The 2010 Nobel Peace Prize. First Internet pseudonym/avatar to win. I've done nothing for 12 days before, and I could use the cash.

And in a comment on my review of the ABC sitcom Cougar Town, Bill Evans contributed a brief, thoughtful essay on the emotionally unsatisfying aspects of life after the Sexual Revolution:

This is an issue I've dealt with, often. Many of my friends sleep around. They don't seem to realize that, regardless of morality, there is no free lunch. I try to tell them:

1) Sleeping with a lot of people can make it more difficult for you (and your partner) to be monogamous. You've been experiencing anyone you're attracted to as a potential sexual partner. Do you think, that after years of this habit, you can suddenly shut this off? For the rest of your life?

2) Sex is amazing. Casual sexual encounters are ontologically different than those within a loving relationship. It's fun - a lot of fun - to hook up with someone. But a real relationship provides a meaningful and blissful element not possible with casual encounters. When you do settle down with someone, sex will be whatever it's been to you. It probably won't change.

3a) Women: More so than men, you want to ensure that your ultimate relationship is forever. By sleeping around, first, you obviously jeopardize that. And ladies, no guy wants to be last in line.

3b) Men: Contrary to what you may think, women cheat just as often as your brethren. Think about that. Your woman probably wants someone with some experience, but the woman who will be faithful to you may not want to be with Ron Jeremy. Do you?

4) If your partner has been with many other people, chances are s/he's been there and done that. Without someone who did it better than you, even if that's in retrospect. Good luck.

Thanks to all of our readers who contributed comments this week.

--S. T. Karnick

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 09:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Exemplifying the great cultural gulf between those who build the country and those who rule it, U.S. troops in Afghanistan are rapidly losing morale as President Obama dithers over what to do.

The central question: what is the U.S. mission in Afghanistan?

Unlike the situation in Iraq, U.S. military personnel on the ground are increasingly coming to the conclusion that the United States cannot realistically hope to achieve any positive result by continued occupation of Afghanistan. Thus their morale sags as their comrades die or are maimed without a clear objective being served by the sacrifices.

An article in the Times of London describes the situation with sobering accuracy.

Key passages:

The men are frustrated by the lack of obvious purpose or progress. “The soldiers’ biggest question is: what can we do to make this war stop. Catch one person? Assault one objective? Soldiers want definite answers, other than to stop the Taleban, because that almost seems impossible. It’s hard to catch someone you can’t see,” said Specialist Mercer.

“It’s a very frustrating mission,” said Lieutenant Hjelmstad. “The average soldier sees a friend blown up and his instinct is to retaliate or believe it’s for something [worthwhile], but it’s not like other wars where your buddy died but they took the hill. There’s no tangible reward for the sacrifice. It’s hard to say Wardak is better than when we got here.”

Captain Masengale, a soldier for 12 years before he became a chaplain, said: “We want to believe in a cause but we don’t know what that cause is.”

The soldiers are angry that colleagues are losing their lives while trying to help a population that will not help them. “You give them all the humanitarian assistance that they want and they’re still going to lie to you. They’ll tell you there’s no Taleban anywhere in the area and as soon as you roll away, ten feet from their house, you get shot at again,” said Specialist Eric Petty, from Georgia.

The article is well worth reading in its entirety.

While many on the right call for a big troop surge to stabilize the situation in Afghanistan, it remains unclear what objective would be served by such a large investment in lives and other treasures.

If, as has been suggested by many, our goal is to go after al Qaeda and capture or kill Osama bin Laden, a mass occupation of Afghanistan is an absurd way to go about it. Information is what we need, and occupying Afghanistan has done little to provide it so far and has little promise of doing so. Moreover, upon receiving such information, having bases in Afghanistan merely cuts off a few minutes in the trip bomber jets would have to make to take out the al Qaeda leaders.

To pay such a large price for the saving of a few minutes on a bombing run is patently absurd, even if that few minutes would prove to be the difference between hitting bin Laden or missing him.

The alternative apology for our involvement in Afghanistan--to sort out the tangled and destructive political and social situation in that nation--is even less justifiable. It is in fact the very quagmire many people argued Iraq would be, to a vastly greater degree. At least in Iraq it could be argued that most of the locals wanted us there. In Afghanistan that is clearly not the case, and everybody is armed to the teeth. We simply cannot win there without destroying Afghanistan and inflicting huge damage to our own society.

Fortunately, a principled alternative is available, and one that sets our real national interests as its foundation. As I have argued in the past, classical liberal principles, reflecting the thoughts of a great tradition extending all the way back to Gen. George Washington, provide an unsurpassed guide for deciding on when to undertake military action:

[T]he classical liberal position on international affairs would be as follows:

• Every nation is sovereign over its own affairs.

• Every nation is entitled to conduct its affairs as it chooses unless its actions affect other nations.

• When actions affect other nations, those nations have a right and indeed a responsibility to their own citizens to remedy the situation. The obligation on the part of the reacting nation is to formulate a response that redresses the offense and ensures that there will be no imminent repetition of it.

• An affected nation responding to a wrong has no right to impose additional consequences on an offending nation, even if the intended effect is to ensure that the offender will not resume the offending activities beyond the foreseeable future.

That is clearly a principled position that provides a definite guide for action against foreign aggressors while upholding the idea of national sovereignty that is crucial to the protection of any people and their government.

In the same article in which I outlined these principles, I pointed out how the Iraq War failed the test:

Just as obviously, this is not what the United States has done in Iraq. Changing Iraq's government and overseeing their writing of a constitution certainly stepped well over that line. Assisting the new Iraqi government in pacifying the nation and policing it were thoroughly unjustified on classical liberal principles and remain so.

It seems evident that the situation in Afghanistan fails this test a good deal more spectacularly than even our Iraq involvement did. The current goal is murky at best, achievement of any large objective by an outside country in Afghanistan is difficult to the point of foolhardiness, and other means would achieve the benefits sought in our involvement there more readily and economically in all respects.

--S. T. Karnick

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 01:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Keynotes:

The ceaseless flow of bad taste that South Park emits like lava from a volcano erupted again on Wednesday night. And what I mean by that is, I laughed until I choked at the season premiere’s highly irreverent salute to “celebrities that died over the summer.” . . .

South Park managed to hit a shotgun-spray of pop-culture targets with deadly, devilish accuracy: not the deaths of these people, but rather the endlessly-haunting media coverage of them; excessive piety; and crass exploitation.

Read review here.

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 11:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

NBC has canceled the critically acclaimed police drama Southland before airing a single episode this season. The series temporarily filled the Thursday 10 p.m. EDT timeslot of the long-running hit medical drama series ER last summer.

Southland was praised by critics and progressive sexual activists for its dark, gritty tone and portrayal of a tough Los Angeles cop whose homosexual activity gradually became an increasingly prominent aspect of the narratives.

However, its ratings dropped throughout its run, as more and more viewers discovered that the show's dark, gritty tone was unrelenting and that the very forthright treatment of homosexuality would continue and intensify. One of the show's two central characters was shown to be a homosexual, and attention to that part of his life increased as the show progressed.

NBC canceled the series after six episodes were already produced for the upcoming season, considering them too dark and gritty for the 9 p.m. timeslot they would have to fill because of the net's decision to run The Jay Leno Show every weeknight at 10. The completed Southland episodes will not be shown on NBC, and the series' producers may look for a possible alternative venue on cable.

The entire saga shows once again that the nation's media elites are wedded to a progressive, socially transformative agenda which the public does not support or enjoy being subjected to.

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 09:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 08:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

The new ABC drama series FlashForward (Thursdays, 8 p.m. EDT) tries rather successfully to recreate the mysterious atmosphere of the network's hit show Lost, beginning with a global catastrophe that takes the plane crash that began that series and hikes it to a far more spectacular level. It's an impressively well-directed scene in the pilot episode and sets a suitably mysterious and dramatic tone for the series--well, a frankly melodramatic tone, in fact.

But it's quite entertaining despite the overwrought nature of the premise and the writing. The scenes after the initial catastrophe employ imagery reminiscent of the 9/11 attacks, urban warfare, and the evangelical Christian notion of the Rapture. What they resemble most, however, are the similar scenes in the great number of megadisaster films and TV documentaries of the past couple of years.

This is an interesting trend, given that the United States has been at relative peace in the international arena and was in the midst of economy prosperity when nearly all of these were conceived, written, and produced. Yet we have had TV movies about giant meteors colliding with the earth and threatening all life on earth, the moon being knocked out of its orbit and set on a collision course with the earth, and other such apocalyptic scenarios.

Similarly, a documentary on the History Channel imagined Life After People, showing the world reverting to its natural state after humans have died out, as buildings and bridges crumble, etc. And of course the movie studios have brought us numerous visions of mass destruction, including the Transformers films and many others, leading up to the forthcoming mega-megadisaster film 2012.

Why this sort of thing has permeated the culture at this time is by no means obvious, as noted, though the global-catastrophe scenarios offered by global warming alarmists and other environmental radicals are quite possibly a major cause.

Anyway, this type of mass-extinction imagery is common in the two episodes of FlashForward aired so far and is integral to the show's concept. In the pilot episode we see everyone in the world simultaneously lose consciousness for 2 minutes and 17 seconds. We then find out--and see in flashbacks--that while everyone was unconscious, of course, innumerable vehicles went out of control and crashed, hundreds of aircraft fell out of the sky, swimmers drowned, people walking on stairways fell to their deaths, and so on.

An FBI team of which central character Mark Benford (Joseph Fiennes) is a member determines that everyone in the world seems to have "flashed forward" in their minds during the blackout, to a point six months into the future: April 29, 2010, at 10 p.m Pacific time.

In short, "Seven billion people saw the future," as Benford says.

Naturally, what both the audience and the characters alike want to know is how, and why? The pilot and second episode suggest that the event may have been the result of some human activity, as the team has discovered at least one person--seen in the crowd at a baseball game on video--was not asleep during the great blackout and does not appear to have been at all surprised by it.

Others think there's more to it, and thus religion is a fairly prominent theme in the show. For example, FBI agent Benford's babysitter tells him, "I think God did this. . . . To punish us." In the very next scene, a doctor tells Benford's wife that his glimpse of the future saved him from committing suicide: "It's like a sign from God or something."

Some of the visions prove to be highly disturbing, such as that of Benford's wife, who sees herself having an extramarital affair, and that of Benford himself, who sees himself as having relapsed into alcoholism. Even worse, his partner sees nothing, which suggests that he will be dead in a few months. A phone call from a mysterious woman confirms this: she says he will be murdered in March of the next year--the Ides of March, in fact. The potential significance of the reference to Shakespeare's Julius Caesar is obviously intended but left unexplained at this point.

Thus many people hope the future is not unavoidably fated but instead is still open to alteration by human effort.

That brings up another religious and philosophical issue, the thorny questions of predestination, or fate, and free will. The characters  in the first two episodes speculate about the matter in very practical, very human ways, and of course the question is by no means resolved at this point. It makes for some interesting viewing, however, as does FlashForward in general.

--S. T. Karnick

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 03:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Posted by Mike Gray at 03:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Set in the fictional small town of Orson, Indiana, The Middle (8:30 EDT) follows Hank in ABC's new Wednesday night lineup and, like the Kelsey Grammer program, features a big sitcom star, Patricia Heaton. Also like Hank, The Middle takes a comic but sympathetic look at Middle America, described by central character Frankie Heck (Heaton) as "One of those places you fly over on your way from Somewhere to Somewhere Else but you wouldn't live here."

The writing of the pilot episode was particularly strong, and it even uses a couple of symbols to very good effect: a jet flying overhead, and Frankie's new drivers license with its grossly unattractive photo documenting how badly life has been beating her down. Heaton's willingness to make herself look silly and physically unattractive is used to great effect in the pilot episode and shows great sense on her part and that of the show's producers.

As in the late, great Malcolm in the Middle, the entire family is fairly messed up, and their lives are largely awful. They live on fast food, and Frankie's days are a perpetually hectic blur. The youngest child, Brick, is described by his teacher as "Maybe clinically quirky," and his best friend is his backpack. Their oldest, a son named Axl, is a surly jock. The middle child, Sue, is an appearance-challenged teen who fails at every extracurricular activity she tries.

Yet despite all the comic horrors of their lives, they really do love one another, and in the end that makes their crises endurable and the show enjoyable. While showing the troubles of people who are striving to achieve the American Dream but not making it, the pilot episode of The Middle doesn't make fun of their hopes and ambitions.

As such, it's ultimately a positive view of American aspirations while remaining realistic in acknowledging that the dream includes an ever-increasing list of material things that continually remains outside many people's grasp. It also points us back toward the importance of personal relationships and the real source of happiness in familial love. This kind of comedy, tough but never cynical, is rarer than one would wish.

--S. T. Karnick

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 02:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 09:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Financial Times has a story today about how Hollywood's movie studios are feeling the pinch of a wrecked economy, and it's beginning to cost some high-powered executives their jobs. At Disney, which released the box office duds G-Force and Confessions of a Shopaholic, studio chairman Dick Cook was shown the door. Never mind that he was responsible for the enormously profitable Pirates of the Caribbean movies. Hollywood is nothing if not a "what have you done for me lately" town.

Besides, If you ask me, the Pirates franchise has to be one of Hollywood's luckiest success stories. A movie based on a Disney ride? Starring the wooden Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightly? All bonuses had better have been paid to Geoffrey Rush, Bill Nighy and (of course) Johnny Depp. Without his iconic "Keith Richards plays dress up ... and a little gay" turn, the first movie is a flop-er-ooo of historic proportions.

Before we get into the meat of FT's story, a quick aside. Shopaholic was labeled a bomb. Though it placed a paltry 4th in its opening weekend, it grossed $44 million in America and the film still raked in $106 million worldwide. That's a "dud"? Even G-Force, which according to Wikipedia had a budget of $80 million, pulled in nearly $170 million in box office receipts.

If that kind of performance can cost you your job in Hollywood, how can anyone stay employed? For that matter, I can't believe that Shopaholic cost more than $30 million to make. And isn't a $76 million profit considered a good thing? As for Land of the Lost? Now that's a bomb—$100 million-plus budget, the worst reviews of any film in years, and a (miracle) box office gross of $63.5 million. But that's what Universal Pictures does—produce bloated, awful movies. Yet it still cost the jobs of Marc Shmuger and David Linde, the co-chairmen of the studio.

Anyway, back to the story:

After a summer bursting with expensive box office flops, a film made for a paltry $15,000 and starring an unknown cast is shaping up to become one of the year’s surprise successes.

Paranormal Activity, a horror film in the mould of the Blair Witch Project, has been selling out midnight screenings in a handful of US cities and looks set to become a bona fide hit when it is released across the US by Paramount this month.

Again, if that once-in-a-decade-or-two crap shoot is the new standard of job-keeping success in Hollywood, the whole industry is in trouble. A Blair Witch or Paranormal should be considered a bonus to employees and stockholders, not a studio-saving necessity.

Blog-master Sam (S. T. Karnick) has remarked often that Hollywood has only itself to blame for its moribund condition. During the Bush years, Hollywood obsessed over making movies that they thought only insulted the then-president but ended up alienating general audiences who were not willing to plunk down $12 plus snacks for films that insulted their country's military as well as their intelligence. We'll never really know if a slate of movies honoring the heroism of our fighting men and women in battle would have succeeded in keeping Hollywood financially healthy. But Hollywood execs threw so much cash down their antiwar ideological hole, they're now paying a deep price.

One would think Hollywood would be recession-proof. Yet it's time for the kind of belt-tightening every other industry (and family) is now enduring.

At Universal, Ron Meyer, the chairman who decided to dismiss Mr Linde and Mr Shmuger, has vowed to make cost control a priority when commissioning films. “We have overspent and underperformed,” he says of the films released this year. “We have to change with the times and look at the economics of today’s movie business.”

In an industry rife with bloated salaries, talent pay is the most obvious area to cut. Some stars receive astronomical fees for their work and the “20 and 20” pay day–referring to a $20m upfront payment plus 20 per cent of the film’s gross before the studio earns a penny–is not uncommon.

Not uncommon, eh? Not for long. Seriously, what bankable stars are left out there? I'm having trouble thinking of any. Sandra Bullock's latest film was a disaster, and I'm sure she had the clout for the "20 and 20" demand. As Sam pointed out last week, the days of Bruce Willis' name on the marquee ensuring box office success are pretty much over. Tom Cruise? Please. Jim Carrey? He's got a re-imagining of A Christmas Carol coming up. I have serious doubts about that (though I wish him and the film luck). Julia Roberts long ago lost her luster. And even Adam Sandler's Funny People was a bomb and lost money thanks to director Judd Apatow's self indulgence.

Since the only critical and box-office boffo movie I can recall from this year off the top of my head is Pixar's UP, it appears that the future of profitable movies in the foreseeable future are exceptionally well-made animated features with great scripts and plots. (And, we should remember, that UP was considered a huge risk for Pixar before release--no bankable voices, no toy tie-ins, unique adult-centered plot, etc.).

At any rate, at least Universal is drawing a line in the sand when it comes to overpaying for "big stars" in its movies.   

Universal’s new management team refuses to be drawn on star salaries, with Donna Langley, the new co-chairman, insisting there are other areas to consider, such as the rising cost of energy and materials.

“Greenlighting any film is becoming more and more difficult [because] the cost of making movies has risen,” she says.

Just wait until Hollywood's beloved Obama signs the cap-and-tax energy bill!

Top talent will continue to command a premium price, according to Barry Katz, president of New Wave Entertainment, which represents stars such as Dane Cook.

“I can guarantee you that the big stars aren’t going to take a pay cut,” he says. “Studios need them to bring in the audiences.”

Dane Cook is a "star"? I missed the memo. In any case, the idea that the studios need "stars" to bring in the audiences just isn't backed up by box office take so far this year. As of this morning, here are the Top 10 grossing films of 2009 (subject to change, naturally, after the Christmas movie season):

Bottom line: adaptations of already-familiar material and animated productions are pretty much the only sure things in Hollywood these days. The days of movie stars luring huge crowds to the cineplex are long gone. And Hollywood's economics will have to adjust to that reality sooner or later.

As a bonus, maybe they'll actually start producing better films. How about casting "stars" in those movies based on video games, toys, and children's books—and get on with financing the work of small filmmakers who can produce cheap gems that make people leave the theater feeling they got much more than their money's worth?

--Jim Lakely

Posted by Jim Lakely at 07:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Given its status as a spinoff from the most popular show on television, NCIS: Naval Criminal Investigation Service, there's little surprise in the fact that NCIS: Los Angeles has done well in the ratings during its first two weeks.

But it's impressive indeed that the series finished third overall among all primetime TV programs, behind only NCIS and NFL Sunday Night Football. Following the tried and true formula for creating good popular entertainment, NCIS: Los Angeles repeats the important elements of NCIS while providing sufficient novel apects to distinguish it from its model sufficiently that audiences will see it as worth investing in.

Like the team in NCIS, which is set in Washington, D.C., the central characters of NCIS: LA are a diverse group of mostly young people who solve mysteries and fight crime. A prominent additional element NCIS: LA brings to the fomula is a national security angle, as the Office of Special Projects team works to capture particularly dangerous criminals who threaten the national security.

In contrast to the largely pristine offices in NCIS, the NCIS: LA team innhabits a tatty, grungy headquarters building that looks more like a variety of cluttered loft spaces than the offices of a serious organization. It may or may not be a plausible notion, but it's different enough from NCIS to ensure viewers won't see it as too imitative.

A more important difference from NCIS is the team's use of advanced technology and its propensity for going deep undercover in false identities to penetrate the enemy organizations, which routinely puts their lives in great danger. This is a particular specialty of Special Agent G. Callen (Chris O'Donnell), the show's lead character. He and Special Agent Sam Hanna (LL Cool J) tend to serve as lead investigators on the cases and engage in the most gunplay, hand-to-hand combat, and the like.

In between fights, the two engaging special agents trade insults regularly, like characters in a Howard Hawks film. (This, too, is one of the immensely enjoyable things about NCIS.) Both lead investigators are very likable but somewhat enigmatic--much of Callen's past is murky at present, and Hanna evidences anxieties possibly stemming from his past as a Navy SEAL.

As in NCIS and most other contemporaty crime series, elements of the team members' personal lives and aspirations are interspersed throughout the narrative, creating a set of overall story lines that carry on from episode to episode and encourage viewers to keep returning.

Also as in Hawks films and NCIS, G. positively enjoys the risks he undertakes by going undercover in dangerous situations. In episode 2, for example, he sets himself up as a potential target on a golf course in order to flush out a murderer. His bravery is made all the more impressive by the understated way in which O'Donnell portrays the character.

Hanna also seems to like his work and participates in the banter to some degree, although he is often gruff and standoffish, apparently reluctant to let anyone get close to him emotionally. That's rather more of a cliche than one might like, but the producers have some fun with it: knowing Hanna's propensity to shield his emotions, G. ends each of first two episodes by telling him, "Love you, man." Very Hawksian, and very engaging.

As in the semi-popular FOX show Bones, the team includes an operational psychologist who is as annoying to the other team members as he is to the audience. However, the insights he expresses do sometimes prove rather useful. The other members of the team are personable but not particularly strong characters at this point. If history is any indication, of course, we'll get plenty of backstory about them in future episodes.

Linda Hunt is the real highlight of the show, however, as Henrietta "Hetty" Lange, the head of the division. The naturity and wisdom she brings are a welcome respite from the relatively immature and anxiety-prone team she oversees.

That is a significant difference from most Howard Hawks films, where older characters typically are rather risible, and is even a bit different from NCIS, where elderly pathologist Ducky (David McCallum) is wise and charming but overly talkative and occasionally a bit unfocused. Similarly, Special Agent Leroy Gibbs's elderly ex-boss in NCIS is a bit of a weirdo who tends to pursue his own agenda. Thus Hunt's character brings a nice new angle to NCIS: Los Angeles.

--S. T. Karnick

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 12:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

The cheery action comedy Zombieland led at the U.S. movie box office this weekend, bringing in $25 million, a quite decent performance for the traditionally slow period in cinema attendance between summer blockbuster season and the holiday blockbuster season.

The highly promoted anti-religion romantic comedy The Invention of Lying performed poorly in its first weekend, finishing fourth with $7.4 million in ticket sales. It ended up well back of the animated comedy Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs ($16.7 million) and a 3D rerelease of two old Pixar films--Toy Story and Toy Story 2 ($12.5 million).

--S. T. Karnick

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 02:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

(Click on article description to read.)

Review of Ricky Gervais's controversial The Invention of Lying

Review of fun Zombieland

Chris Rocks Polanski and his defenders: It's rape!

The real religious implications of The Invention of Lying.

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 09:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

(HT: Big Hollywood and the SNL examiner)

(Cross-posted at Infinite Monkeys)

Posted by Jim Lakely at 12:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

With a $25 million dollar opening this weekend, Zombieland demonstrates that there's simply no substitute for showing people a good time.  Relatively short on plot and deep characterization, but long on charm, this postmodern zombie comedy hits all the right buttons and sends you back out into the world with a smile on your face, writes R. J. MacReady.

First let me start out by saying, this movie is not the American Shaun of the Dead.  It's American.  There are zombies. But that's pretty much it. Shaun of the Dead is actually a very richly layered comedy with zombies representing emotional or intellectual death by complacency rather than actual death by wildly infectious virus. Zombieland is more of an amusement park. Hence the title and the third act set in an amusement park.

And that's not a bad thing.

Eddie Izzard has a great stand-up routine about the difference between American and European movies. In this routine he postulates that European movies feature people arranging matches.  American movies, however, take the basic premise of a European movie, explode the budget, throw in some space monkeys and a liberal use of the f-word, and sell a great deal more popcorn. So, perhaps in that sense, Zombieland is indeed the American Shaun of the Dead.  But the similarities end there.

The movie is really about Jesse Eisenberg's character, Columbus. I'd compare him to Woody Allen (because that's what pretty much everyone else is doing), but there's never a moment where he expresses a desire to marry his Asian stepdaughter, so I don't think the comparison is totally apt. 

He is, however, neurotic, and that has helped him survive.  He provides a narration throughout the movie, and for me, that's really one of the drawbacks of the movie. Not the concept of narration, mind you, just the actor's voice and the fact that he actually refers to the post-zombie-apocalypse world he lives in as "Zombieland." Dude, it's not cute. I liked the movie better when I thought Zombieland referred to the theme park the characters were trying to get to at the end.

Anyway, Columbus, so named because that's where he's going, meets up with Tallahassee, played by Woody Harrelson, and the two form an unlikely bond. I say that entirely tongue in cheek. I'm fairly convinced that that's the way it was written down or pitched. It's a very likely bond. We knew they'd get along despite their differences, and even develop, dare I say it, a grudging respect for each other by the end of the movie.

They meet up with a love interest for Jesse, played by Emma Stone, and a surrogate daughter for Woody, played by Abigail Breslin. The girls are smarter than the boys because they are, of course, girls. Again, you can see the buttons being pressed as you watch. And there's a lot of metal guitar riffs used to great effect (good use of Van Halen, Metallica, and White Stripes), so it hits all the right action notes.

Like I said, Zombieland is first and foremost a fun movie. There's funny stuff. There's gross stuff. Relationships are established because the moviemakers know that we, the audience, want the relationships to blossom. Maybe it's because we think the actors are engaging. Maybe it's because there's enough in the script to make us think the actors are engaging.

But regardless, this movie does something that many movies these days fail to do. It tries to give the audience what it wants, and not necessarily in an exploitative way. There's an obligatory intestine shot (just like there's a car chase in every action film, there's been an intestine shot in pretty much every zombie movie since Night of the Living Dead). But even though there's gag about the "Zombie Kill of the Week," the filmmakers don't go out of their way to come up with "creative" zombie kills. For example, despite the appearance of two chainsaws, you don't see them used on a zombie. (I know, Chekov would've been furious.)

And the movie doesn't overstay its welcome. It clocks in at a cool 81 minutes, just enough time to introduce our characters, set them on their journey, and resolve any differences in a climactic zombie shoot out.  Now, I didn't laugh out loud at it as much as I did for the first Austin Powers movie or Ghostbusters, but I did laugh out loud at least once, and I didn't stop smiling or check my watch. 

If there was a flaw, the movie could've been a little scarier to make the laughs bigger. The director, Ruben Fliescher, and writers, Rhett Reese & Paul Wernick, spent more time deconstructing all the tropes of zombie movies and not enough time developing tension. Sure, they probably were shooting for a comedy, but not all their jokes were killer. Using some of the weaker jokes as tension breakers might have made them funnier.

For example, the main character repeatedly lists his rules for survival throughout the movie, but the rules themselves aren't terribly funny. However, when they show up in a moment of tension you can't help but laugh. They could have used this technique in other areas, but chose not to.

If I were to hazard a guess at any social implications of the box-office success of the movie, I'd say that it taps into our anxieties of living in a fallen world. In addition, I know the whole post-9/11 thing has totally been played out, but I think there may be a little left in that toothpaste tube for this movie, based upon its setting. Unlike zombie movies that take place as the disaster is happening, this one takes place long after. Here there is no real hope that a cure will be found or that life will somehow return to normal if the characters can survive the night or get to X location.  Instead, the characters all struggle with how to relate to each other in this new environment, heightened trust issues and all.

And that's really why Woody Harrelson's character is such a hoot. Unlike the main protagonist who carries his own hand sanitizer, Harrelson's Tallahassee is blissfully undisturbed by the new order of things. Indeed, he seems to thrive. In the end, Eisenbergs' Columbus learns to be more stereotypically "manly" by the end of the movie, perhaps commenting on the sustained emasculation of the American male.

Nah.

The movie is a movie. It's a piece of entertainment, and like Romero's Night of the Living Dead, it just wants to be a good movie (though Romero's movie wanted to scare you, this movie wants you to laugh).

You've wasted movie ticket money on worse movies. Why not check it out? And if not, see it on DVD.  It's not the greatest movie ever, but it's certainly fun enough that you can bet that it will be mentioned when people review the big screen adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's The Road later this year.

Oh, and one extra note. A lot of folks call this a "road movie." For you Hope and Crosby fans, that's kind of misleading.

On the one hand, there's some similarity in that we're taking the trip with the characters because we want to see the chemistry between the actors. In that sense, maybe it is like a Hope and Crosby movie. But on the other hand, not a lot happens on this trip. There's no independent plot device for our characters to resolve other than figuring out that they want to travel together. So maybe it's not very Hope and Crosby in that sense.

And I'm pretty sure Bob Hope never killed someone with a banjo, so that's different too.

--R. J. MacReady

Posted by R. J. MacReady at 09:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Ricky Gervais's The Invention of Lying tells a fantasy story about a world in which people do not know how to lie. The conceit is that lying is the product of a gene no human had before it suddenly popped up in Gervais's character, fortysomething failure Mark Bellison. But instead of simply being a cute comedy based on a silly concept, The Invention of Lying is an ambitious, largely unfunny comedy based on a silly concept. It's not nearly as cute, innocent, or funny as Gervais's fans might expect,

In fact, it's really rather dreary. Yet it does have some good points. Although the early scenes in the film, in which we see Mark's sad, unsuccessful life, are pretty depressing, there as some funny moments after he invents lying. In addition, the philosophy behind the film is sufficiently confused and inconsistent to be more interesting than one might expect.

Before Mark invents lying, no one in the society is truly happy. They speak with brutal honesty toward one another, in particular calling attention to one another's faults and their own very base desires, and no one seems to mind the situation too much.

However, there's something more than just truth-telling going on here, as the characters in these early scenes seem like the pod people from Invasion of the Body Snatchers. There's no love and no generosity. People's lives have no meaning, and they don't look for any. They live for the purpose of advancing the human race genetically, each person trying to find the most genetically superior mate they can catch. Love does not enter into it.

As it happens, the film posits that human beings have no concept of God, and hence do not see any higher purpose in life and have no hope of a life beyond death. This seems part and parcel of the depressing nature of the society depicted in these scenes, though it is difficult to imagine that Gervais intended to make that particular point, given his public statements about the film.

Nonetheless, it is a definite truth that the godless society is unpleasant and uninspired.

After Mark starts lying, things become somewhat interesting--and human kindness begins to make an appearance. Mark's lies stop a neighbor from committing suicide, help a homeless man get money, bring a troubled couple back together, and give hope to a depressed woman and the occupants of an old people's home.

Mark then uses his invention to enrich himself, as one might expect. But even that does not bring him happiness, because his real desire, to have the love of beautiful Anna (Jennifer Garner), remains unfulfilled.

He sets out to become successful at his old job, writing screen documentaries, by telling fanciful stories that are much more interesting and fun than the true-life tales that had been produced thereto. The first big story he invents is a clearly mythical saga combining scifi and other fantasy notions.

Next come the controversial scenes in which Mark invents God and an afterlife. (In the theater at which I watched the film, there were only two other people at the showing, and they walked out during this scene. Obviously they were not expecting the overt stance for atheism in the film.)

What motivates Mark to invent an afterlife is something we've seen nothing of to this point: love. His sympathy for his dying mother inspires him to tell her that there is hope beyond death. It's important to note that neither Mark nor anyone else in the film shows actual evidence of loving another person until this moment, when Mark has already invented lying. The lying gene is strangely connected to the ability to love. As we will see, the key to both is imagination.

Mark is overheard while telling his mother the good news about the next life, and of course people want to hear more. Hope is in the air. So Mark explains further. There is a Good Place where good people go after death, and a Bad Place for the others. He says that doing three bad things will send people to The Bad Place instead of The Good Place. (That, of course, is nothing like what Christianity teaches, although one could see it as a misinformed atheist's mistaken impression of the faith.)

Under a good deal of sincere but understandably confused questioning by a great crowd of people gathered on his lawn, Mark explains more about the Man in the Sky, the afterlife, and morality, in a scene reminiscent (perhaps too much so) of similar scenes in Monty Python movies.

This is all very difficult for the people to understand, as the early scenes and a park-bench conversation with Anna have established that what people lack most of all in this fictional world is imagination. They cannot see past the surfaces of things.

Soon after his invention of The Man in the Sky, however, people begin to lose their concerns about practical matters and set their thoughts on the next. (Here, too, the difference with Christianity is evident, as Christians are explicitly called to love one another and be good stewards of the blessings given to them in this world.) Their new concern for the next life is manifested in the same way as their previous concerns for this one, however, because they remain selfish and still don't have love for one another.

Eventually, however, even that changes, as Anna comes to see that a fat little boy tormented by bullies is "so much more than fat little Brian." She starts to imagine what is behind the boy's dumpy, genetically unattractive surface.

This leads to a very affecting ending, as Anna finally makes a free choice to marry Mark. (The film, despite its odd concept, hews to a traditional romantic comedy structure.)

Yet there is a further irony in this. In reacting to Anna's choice to marry a more genetically attractive man (Rob Lowe), Mark is given a couple of opportunities, including one at the dramatic climax, to lure her into marrying him regardless of her genetic preference. In particular, she asks him directly whom the Man in the Sky wants her to marry. All Mark will have to do is say yes, and she will marry him.

Mark refuses to tell her. Like God in dealing with mankind, Mark refrains from forcing or tricking Anna into loving him. She must do so of her own free will, or it has no meaning.

So what we have here are two worlds. One, without God and controlled by thoughts of evolution, is a spectacularly dreary, unhappy place without love or meaning. On the other hand, even a fictional God brings the world meaning, joy, liberty, and wonder.

Thus although Ricky Gervais has publicly said that his film takes an atheist position, it appears that even he cannot imagine a happy, emotionally fulfilling world that does not acknowledge a good many fundamentally religious thoughts, and in particular Christian ones.

--S. T. Karnick

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 04:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Feeling lucky?

Winning the lottery is the cherished dream held by many. Occasionally, however, being a winner can be a nightmare:

Some have stories about dreams fulfilled, about investments that ensure wealth for generations to come. Others talk about making an effort not to change at all; of continuing to work; of driving the same car, living in the same house. And others tell of a plague of problems and of sieges of beggars; family, friends and strangers; of lawsuits between relatives and of being dragged to court by the government; and in one case, prison on tax fraud charges.

And then there's always someone like this guy.

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Running up the tab

Unlike the lamestream media, which have the implicit patriotic responsibility to monitor the government and alert American citizens to its usurpations of power, Phyllis Schlafly has been paying attention to what's been happening since the current administration took over. It is mind-boggling how much money has been expended in domestic social programs alone during the last four decades; the United States could have fought and won four World War IIs compared with the so-called War on Poverty and have more to show for it:

To get an idea of how big is the debt Obama is creating, which ultimately will have to be paid by the Middle Class, let's compare spending on welfare to spending on fighting wars. Since the beginning of LBJ's Great Society spending, our government has spent $15.9 trillion (in inflation-adjusted 2008 dollars) on means-tested welfare, which is more than twice the cost of all major fighting wars in U.S. history. We spent only $4.1 trillion (in 2008 dollars) on World War II, which was the most expensive single undertaking in U.S. history.

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California is a basket case

Brenda Walker lives in the Golden State and writes periodically for V-DARE.com. If any state can be said to signal which way the nation will be going politically and culturally, California is it. It looks more and more like the once-golden state could be America's future:

If industrial outsourcing, permissive immigration, ridiculously generous pensions and punitive regulation were winning strategies for a balanced budget, then California would still be a great success instead of an increasingly Mexified state with growing pockets of third-world slums and a permanent underclass. California is a textbook case of stupid and irresponsible governance, largely because failed political ideologies are still popular in the halls of the state legislature. Economist Milton Friedman famously observed, "You cannot simultaneously have free immigration and a welfare state." California has surely demonstrated the folly of trying to do exactly that.

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He's a "natural born" citizen—or is he?

According to Senator Tim Johnson (D-South Dakota):

President Obama's mother was a citizen of the United States, and children of American citizens are conferred citizenship at birth, meaning that Barack Obama was born a citizen of this country regardless of the location of his birth.

So that settles it, right? Not exactly. There are such matters as his mother being underage at the time, his father being a British subject, and Obama's dual citizenship which raise endless questions about his actual status as a U. S. citizen.

The controversy has made it to the courts, naturally, with most cases being tossed out. According to WorldNetDaily, the President has already spent close to a million dollars on a phalanx of lawyers jealously guarding his personal records from public scrutiny. Even if there's nothing to all of this, you can't help but be a little suspicious of his attitude:

A hearing Monday is set to determine whether the U.S. Justice Department will get its motion to dismiss a lawsuit challenging the constitutional eligibility of Barack Obama to hold the office of president or whether the case will move forward to be heard on its merits.

Before you dismiss the idea out of hand that the President might not be a natural born American citizen, you would do well to peruse WorldNetDaily's ample archive of over 300 articles on Barack Obama's eligibility and then decide.

~~~~~~~~~~~

—Mike Gray

Posted by Mike Gray at 01:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The discussion of The Invention of Lying in our comments section, just as in the society at large, has largely taken quite predictable lines: delighted laughter from atheists at the presumed squirming of believers, and dismay from believers at feeling attacked by a person whom they like, the comedian Ricky Gervais.

But there is a good deal more to be taken from this film and the assumptions it conveys. To wit: that neither atheism nor theism has a lock on either reason or goodness.

A comment by Peter on my original article on this film brought the issue to the fore nicely. Peter wrote, in part:

I haven't seen the film, but I'm not sure how it can be considered an attack on religion.

It seems to me that a society that tells only the truth can by definition only [tell] the truth that it knows. Atheism, like religion, is a belief. It may be a correct belief, but it is still a belief. It requires speculation about the existence or nature of a deity. A society with no fiction would not in the first place have presumed to speculate on such things - all their statements would be bounded by what they know. Effectively, such a society could have no beliefs.

We do not live in such a society. We have lies because we have beliefs and vice versa. How material in its critique of [our world] can a society be which functions so fundamentally differently from ours? However religion started in this alternate society, it didn't start that way here. Indeed, the primary similarity between the two worlds would seem to be the very possibility that something could exist and be true without people knowing about it.

That may not be what Gervais intends for audiences to conclude from the film, but it is an important implication nonetheless.

It brings up what is at the heart of the film and the discussion of it: that either side--theism or atheism, or for that matter agnosticism--is based on assumptions about the degree to which human perceptions can apprehend all that exists.

That is really the center of the debate and always has been: what Peter describes as the very possibility that something could exist and be true without people knowing about it or being able to perceive it directly.

Atheists claim that it is not possible, but what actual evidence can atheists give to back up such a claim? None, by definition. For there is no more reason to assume that human perceptions can apprehend all truth than there is to assume that they can't. There is no unassailable logical or evidentiary basis on which to make either assumption. Either claim is just an assumption, and by definition there can be no more evidence for it than the opposite assumption, and thus by definition neither is scientific.

Each side, then, is based on faith. Theists have faith that there is more to this world than we can ever see directly, and atheists have faith that there is not. Neither claim is conclusively provable in this world.

It truly is a matter of faith--on both sides.

Now, atheists have every right to hold their assumption about what exists and what doesn't and to argue for it to their heart's content. Likewise, theists have the exact same right to hold the opposite assumption and argue for it. What neither side has the right to do, however, is to claim that the other side does not reason rightly or is uniquely disposed to believe falsehoods.

On the contrary, each side can reason perfectly logically from its own basic premise, and has a perfect right to do so and to state their thoughts publicly.

And each side should be expected to defend its reasoning and show that it does not contradict the evidence of our senses.

The latter is a claim that atheists make about theism: that belief in the existence of God is irrational and that the evidence of nature shows that there is not a God. That claim is entirely false and cannot be justified. Nothing we can see can prove that there is no God. You must take that on faith, just as one must take belief in God on faith.

Theists, for their part, have no basis on which to take offense at people who freely choose to have a different assumption about the nature of the cosmos.

In sum, a truly reasonable discussion of the case for or against God can only come about if all parties recognize and openly acknowledge that their entire worldview is based on a fundamental unprovable assumption, and that this assumption colors everything they see and think. There is thus no room for triumphalism on either side.

There is no war between faith and reason, and there never has been. There is only a war in which reason is adduced by both sides, with continually varying levels of wisdom and grace displayed by the partisans of both positions. Those who would mock the other side as uniquely irrational only show themselves to be arr