Continue reading "'Grand Theft Auto IV' Tops Half-Billion Dollars in Sales in One Week" »
Continue reading "The Light in "Dark" Fiction" »
American film critics detest violent movies—unless there's an antisocial message involved. TAC correspondent Mike D'Virgilio looks at critical reactions to violence in movies.
Continue reading "The Violent Hypocrisy of Mainstream Film Critics" »
As expected, Joel and Ethan Coen won the Academy Award for Best Picture for their film No Country for Old Man last night at the Oscar ceremony.
The brothers also shared the award for Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay. The film picked up another award as Javier Bardem won for Best Supporting Actor.
The violent crime drama, which many critics have described as extremely grim, disturbing, amoral, and even nihilistic—meaning all of those terms as compliments, which may be the most disturbing thing of all—had earlier swept the awards from the major film talent organizations, including the Directors Guild. The film clearly captured the mood of Hollywood and the media, although as noted here yesterday, underneath the surface No Country for Old Men actually contradicts their values.
Continue reading "Hollywood Honors Coen Brothers, 'No Country for Old Men'" »
Here's a preview of an article coming soon on another site. I've been working with the editor for a week to get this published, and an updated version will run eventually, but in the meantime here's a version that is timely because the season-ending of Prison Break will run on Fox tonight at 8 EST.Continue reading "A Defense of Pop Fiction" »
Providing further proof that America's elites are delighted when people of low mental ability use Christians and Christianity as punching bags, ESPN has suspended sports-show anchor Dana Jacobson for one week after she indulged in a drunken, foul-mouthed public tirade that included an astonishingly vulgar curse directed at Jesus Christ.
The one-week suspension is very revealing of the mentality of the management team at the Disney-owned sports network, given that the same behavior would have gotten anyone not in the media fired, and it would have gotten a media person fired had it been delivered against an accredited victim group—cf. the termination of radio host Don Imus and basketball commentator Tim Hardaway last year.
Continue reading "Christ-Hater Skates,Thanks to Elite Prejudice Against Christians" »
I haven't seen The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything: A Veggie Tales Movie, so of course I have no opinion on whether it is any good, but I found a fascinating assumption in Lou Lumenick's review of the film in the New York Post.
Lumenick suggests that a work reflecting Christian values must necessarily be bad.
In an outline of what's wrong with the film, Lumenick states the following:
The CGI animation is crude, the humor is cruder, and the plot is Christian-friendly. Proceed at your own risk.
My advice to all, including non-Christians: when reading reviews in the New York Post, proceed at your own risk.
TAC Mystery Fiction Correspondent Mary Reed reviews a classic novel by English suspense writer "Sapper," now available for free online through Project Gutenberg Australia.
H. C. McNeile, aka "Sapper," is one of the most popular and most reviled of mystery-suspense writers.
Writing largely between the two World Wars, the former British military man brought an American-style hardboiled approach to British fiction with his popular character Bulldog Drummond, a wealthy, intrepid, honorable former military officer. The Drummond tales combined suspense, espionage, and detection, rather after the fashion of Leslie Charteris's Saint stories. The character also appeared in the movies and on television and radio.
Sapper also wrote straight detective novels, one of which is Ronald Standish, the item currently under review.
Sapper's books sold very well indeed, and readers enjoyed them immensely, but literary critics of later decades, especially since the 1960s, have criticized his books as representing an obsolete, politically damaging, and personally vile point of view—for the narratives frankly demonstrate that different types of people behave differently. This is a reality that contemporary thought (if it can be honored with that designation) would like to deny and ignore, consigning it to the ash heap through force of career destruction of those who dare to speak it.
Hence, reading books such as those by Sapper is a dangerous act and should be undertaken only by the bold. I recommend that you do so immediately.—STK
Continue reading "A Dangerous Mystery Writer" »
Film directors Brian De Palma and Paul Haggis have attacked the media for not reporting enough on the negative aspects of the Iraq War, and said that they felt compelled to make up for that poor reporting by making their recent films Redacted (De Palma), which opens tomorrow, and In the Valley of Elah (Haggis), which opened a few weeks ago and crashed at the box office.
There has been no word yet on whether reporters will return the favor by making quality movies to compensate for the shoddy filmmaking behind the current crop of films opposing the Iraq War.
Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards has written a letter demanding that two Swedish newspapers apologize to the band and its Swedish fans for publishing a very negative review of an August 3 Rolling Stones concert in Gothenberg, Sweden. The review said Richards looked "very drunk" at the performance.
Now, there's a shocker.
Continue reading "Richards Stones Reviewer" »
The best-reviewed movie of the first half of the year was . . .
So reports the Rotten Tomatoes website, as noted in the Hollywood Reporter.
The Disney-Pixar computer-animated release directed by Brad Bird (The Incredibles) was joined at the top of the heap by a group of films consisting mostly of critical favorites that did poorly at the box office—with Knocked Up being the major exception.
Continue reading "Best-Reviewed Film of the Year" »
Coincidentally timed to align with today's premiere of Live Free or Die Hard, the magazine Entertainment Weekly released its list of the greatest action movies of all time. Number one in the genre was Die Hard.
It's a fairly good and reasonable list, albeit tilted toward more recent films as these things usually are. I doubt, for example, that Spider-Man 2 and Kill Bill—Vol. 1 will make the list in future decades, even though they may be justified in making this one.
Some titles I'm glad to see included are Drunken Master II: Legend of Drunken Master (feat. Jackie Chan; I think Drunken Master is better, however), The Adventures of Robin Hood (though it's absolutely ridiculous that it's not number 1 or 2), Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Hard-Boiled (John Woo's highly influential film starring Chow Yun-Fat is an action film with heart and mind as well as the necessary amount of muscle) and Akira Kurosawa's The Seven Samurai (although I like his Hidden Fortress a good deal more).
Continue reading "Greatest Action Movies of All Time" »
Jenny Morse is an excellent libertarian writer and thinker, with a Ph.D. in economics, who holds to traditional moral positions and points out that government in the United States is a huge factor contributing to the undermining of the moral values that make freedom, economic productivity, and social progress possible.
Jenny has written a very pointed and correct letter to the editor in response to a syndicated cartoon by Berk Breathed. I reprint it here for your edification:
Continue reading "Anti-Male, Anti-Marriage "Humor"" »
A column by Chicago Sun-Times sportswriter Rick Telander this past weekend, "La Russa Crying in His Beer," exemplifies a mentality, a cultural perspective, that is extremely common these days, and very dangerous.
Telander basically blames La Russa and, secondarily, the St. Louis Cardinals' owners, for Cardinal pitcher Josh Hancock's death by automible accident a week ago.
Telander couldn't be more wrong, and his well-meaning moralism will in fact do much harm and no good.
Continue reading "The Culture of Personal Irresponsibility" »
Syndicated columnist Mona Charen unearthed a brilliant gem of insight from the great philosopher Snoop Dogg, in his reaction to the Don Imus controversy. Mr. Dogg says that some people can use some words, and others can't, because some people are real and others are not.
If Mr. Dogg's line of thinking sounds familiar, it's because it is. It's from George Orwell's Animal Farm. It is articulated, you'll recall, by the villains: the pigs.
Continue reading "The Wisdom of Snoop Dogg" »
As stated here two days ago (see below), radio host Don Imus's characterization of the Rutgers ladies' basketball team was odious and entirely unacceptable. He should certainly be punished for it, and I believe that a suspension is appropriate.
Continue reading "The Double Standard Regarding Offensiveness" »
Alas, a lot of people watching "Amazing Grace," Michael Apted's just-released film, may get the impression--perhaps deliberately fostered by Mr. Apted--that Wilberforce was a mostly secular humanitarian whose main passion was not Christian faith but politics and social justice.
This is an utterly astonishing claim.
I categorically disagree with Ms. Allen's assessment of the film. To give evidence of an absence in a film is difficult, of course, but it is significant that she doesn't give any examples of specific instances in which Amazing Grace slights religion. All she provides is an interview statement by the film's director, Michael Apted, to Christianity Today in which he clearly meant to convey that he wanted to avoid preachiness in the film. That is a statement for which I would commend him.
In great contrast with Allen's assessment, the reviewer for Christianity Today enthusiastically endorsed the film:
Similar to Chariots of Fire and Shadowlands in tone, Amazing Grace balances faith and filmmaking in a historical drama that depicts an ordinary Christian doing extraordinary things because of his beliefs.
He concludes,
It's a well-told cinematic example of a man who used his faith and God-given opportunities to change the world for good.
In my analysis of the film for National Review Online (previewed on this website over the weekend) I concentrate on how the film's aesthetic techniques convey its ideas, and hence I don't give a lot of examples about how the film shows Wilberforce's religious convictions and how they affect his actions. But that is indeed a strong aspect of the film, pace Ms. Allen.
She fails to acknowledge, for example, the film's treatment of Wilberforce's struggle to decide whether to devote his life to politics or the ministry, and his friends' persuasive argument that his talents would be best spent in politics and hence that is the best place for him to serve God. The first scene in which we see him at home, he is lying on the ground staring in wonder at the pastoral scene around him, and talks to his servant about his great delight in God's creation.
If anything, Wilberforce comes off as entirely driven by religion and specifically a fiercely passionate relationship with God through Jesus Christ, the hallmarks of evangelicalism. There can be no doubt of this from anyone watching the film fairly and carefully.
In addition, the treatment of Wilberforce's friend John Newton is about nothing but his Christianity and how it affected his life. And so on, throughout the film.
To suggest, as Ms. Allen does, that this film obscures the Christian foundations of the slavery-abolition movement in a manner reminscent of Spielberg's Amistad is so wrong as to be calumnious.
The film makes it perfectly clear that Wilberforce's evangelical Christianity was entirely central to his actions.
My analysis of the film begins with a point about a scene being more subtle than it may initially seem. Perhaps Ms. Allen simply wanted more of a Fox Faith kind of thing. That, of course, is her prerogative, but I'll take Amazing Grace any day.
As conservative critic/commentator Michael Medved notes, conservative bloggers have been attacking the forthcoming Fox News comedy series The Half Hour News Hour, which will premiere this Sunday night at 10 EST. The complaint has been that a few scenes released on YouTube have not been very funny or at least not uniformly so.
Having seen both shows in their entirety, Medved acknowledges that some scenes do indeed misfire, but he says that overall the program is good and that the humor is about as successful as in most comedy shows in their early weeks, meaning only fitfully so. Medved says that viewers, especially those on the right, should give it a chance:
For most people, the big question is whether The 1/2 Hour Comedy Hour, which debuts this Sunday night, February 18, is worth thirty minutes of your time?
After watching the first two episodes of the show, my answer is an unequivocal "Yes" -- it's worth watching, worth supporting, even if the project is very much a work in progress which, along with a few laughs, delivers a few moments of embarrassing, unfunny, ineptitude.
OK, Mike: will do.
A commenter going by the cybernom of Pascal Fervor has made some interesting and provocative comments on my appreciation of the great film writer and director Billy Wilder. Fervor's comments specifically refer to the thematic content of Wilder's great mystery-comedy-drama Witness for the Prosecution. In my brief survey of Widler's career I mentioned this film as a classic but said nothing specific about it.
Mr. Fervor's comments afford an opportunity to talk further about this excellent motion picture which was produced in 1957 film and starred Charles Laughton, Marlene Dietrich, Tyrone Power, and Elsa Lanchester. Set in London and dealing with a murder trial, Witness for the Prosecution is a strong comedy-drama with numerous plot twists and interesting characters.
First, I would suggest that everyone get a hold of a copy of this film, either the individual release or in the superb Wilder box set. Wilder is one of the greatest American filmmakers, and his movies are both entertaining and insightful. He has been characterized as cynical by most reviewers and critics, but as I demonstrate in my appreciation of Wilder and his work, his body of work is much more sophisticated than that simplistic characterization suggests, and much more laudable than the common opinion holds.
Now, on to Witness, specifically. Pascal Fervor asked about my opinion of "the social commentary that may be inferred from" the film. As Mr. Fervor points out, however, it is difficult to discuss this matter without possibly giving away some plot points that would lessen the fun for those who have not yet seen the movie and choose to do so after reading the discussion. However, I think that we can dance around it a bit while still making our meaning clear.
Fervor astutely characterizes the film as an "amazingly successful demonstration of human gullibility," and ties this insight to my reevaluation of Wilder's reputation. He offers his insight into Witness as further evidence for my point that Wilder was no cynic (As I wrote in my appreciation of Wilder, "Wilder knew that life does provide happy endings for those who live honestly, decently, and right. Wilder said, perhaps rather surprisingly, 'Anyone who doesn’t believe in miracles isn’t a realist.' ”):
[W]orking with your own evaluation of Wilder, I think you implied there is good reason for us not be so convinced of his lauded and perhaps cultivated appearence of cynicism. Indeed, there is reason to suspect from his whole body of works that he just so happened to provide a measure of protection to his viewers from cynics by unmasking them and revealing a bit of their tactics.
Our gullibility -- and maybe our guilty pleasure to be willingly gulled by masters -- I think is the overarching theme and social commentary [in Wilder's body of work, if I'm reading Fervor correctly here]. I think he employed a disarming measure here [in Witness] too. I don't believe I've seen another film that has quite as many subtle puns as does this movie. Include in this two and maybe three (Wilfred) character names. Double entendres R us.
I hope I've added to your appreciation for this classic. And that I haven't written too much.
Mr. Fervor has indeed added to my appreciation of this film—though I would hardly have thought that possible, given my already great fondness for the movie—and no, he has not written too much, by any means.
Mr. Fervor's comments are spot-on. He is correct to point out that Wilder's exposure of our vast human vulnerability to jiggery-pokery (to use John Dickson Carr's evocative term) in this film fits perfectly with this filmmaker's process in other movies. Like the scars on a particular character's face, the motives and intentions of the various characters in the film are hidden from one another, and the misunderstandings multiply.
In this way, one could indeed see Witness for the Prosecution as expressing a certain cynicism, as the distance between people's surface impressions and the reality behind them can be great indeed in the narrative. Yet this need not be cynical at all, and isn't in this case. After all, the observation that human beings are always being bad and pretending to be good is simply an expression of the Christian idea of Original Sin. In addition, Wilder shows the great good in several characters, including the lead character of the narrative, barrister Sir Wilfred Robarts, who rather flippantly risks his health and life in order to serve his client with a clear head. There is nothing cynical about that at all. On the contrary, it's quite inspiring.
Although it may at first seem something of an odd duck among Wilder's output, Witness for the Prosecution is indeed of a piece with his other work, thematically, and it's interesting in how oblique a way this film expresses those themes. Looking at the theme of deception, one can see why Wilder was attracted to the source material--an Agatha Christie short story and play--and also why he had such great affection for Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories.
Witness for the Prosecution is rather unusual among Christie's works in that it doesn't include several suspects from whom to choose, as her novels and short stories tend to do. On the contrary, it is designed for the theater, and with immense skill and ingenuity. Nonetheless, as Mr. Fervor's comments show in regard to Wilder's adaptation, Christie's narrative serves the same ends and provides the same pleasures as her other tales. In mystery fiction, we delight in being fooled by the author's trickery, and more greatly in that justice is ultimately done as the detective character does eventually figure out whodunnit.
We delight in being fooled, I think, because we human beings simply enjoy reasoning. Mystery fiction (of the classical, puzzle kind) invites us to exercise our God-given capacity for reason, and challenges us to the utmost in that regard. And because we don't solve the mystery, we more greatly appreciate the exercise.
After all, once the mystery is solved, the story is over, and our pleasure in ratiocination is finished in the present case. Hence, we actually enjoy being fooled, because it prolongs the highly pleasurable reasoning process until the last possible moment.
This is a rather different point from Mr. Fervor's, although I think that the two are complementary. On a practical, psychological level, mystery fiction gives pleasure by exercising the mind. On a thematic, moral level, mystery fiction challenges us by showing how easily we can be fooled, how easily manipulated by cynical evildoers.
In both these ways, mystery fiction does much more than provide light entertainment—though it can do that as well. It has been popular over the ages because it works on a deep psychological level while affording easily accessible, surface enjoyment. All genre fiction has its benefits, and in Wilder's film of Witness for the Prosecution, these rewards are at their apex.
The Achilles heel of most conservative cultural critics is their tendency to characterize repugnant works of pop culture as establishing that society as a whole, or some great swath of it, is irredeemably corrupt. In commenting, for example, on Carol Iannone's scathing review of the pro-homosexual and apparently exceedingly vulgar and imbecilic British film The History Boys (written by the overrated and immensely asinine author Alan Bennett), Lawrence Auster of View from the Right claims that "the British elites despise their country, their culture, their history, and secretly or openly wish to have done with it all."
Auster says that this movie shows that Britain is on a "path to national suicide."
One play, of course, does not a culture make, and Auster can undoubtedly claim his point is that The History Boys is not conclusive in itself but is revealing as part of a massive chain of evidence of corruption. Auster, however, writes, "by the time the movie ended, the realization hit me that the British elites that created a movie like this, that praised and recommended a movie like this, seek with cold and deliberate malice the destruction of their country."
Now, that is surely wrong, and it is why conservatives so seldom gain much traction in discussions of culture. The "irredeemably corrupt society/elite" argument is simply an unsophisticated, incorrect, and uninteresting critique.
There is undoubtedly a significant proportion of the British elite that is as corrupt as Alan Bennett, and there is surely a goodly portion that is sympathetic to them although they cannot bring themselves to go that far. But there are also certainly a great many who don't accept the premises of Bennett and his ilk. That's the Omniculture: Everything happens.
Look at the BBC and other British television, for example, and you'll find a good deal of material that is repugnant to the sensibilities of a reasonable, spiritually and mentally healthy person, and you'll also find much that is sensible and good. Even in openly sleazy shows such as Mile High and Footballers' Wives there are highly traditional assumptions and moral lessons to be derived. It all depends greatly on the viewer's own point of view.
Things are just a lot more complex than Auster appears to be willing to recognize. It seems clear to me that people are struggling, in England and the United States alike, to find a wordview, mentality, and culture that makes sense after the post-World War II demolition of American society's shared values. It is a process that is ongoing today, and no one can say where it will ultimately lead, whether toward destruction, regeneration, or a perpetual unhappy tension between the two. It is simply not ours to know at this point.
The fact is, anybody can cherry-pick a few especially vivid examples of popular culture on either the wilder or more traditional edges of the Omniculture and claim that things are getting worse or getting better. But the creation of simple dichotomies and the demonization of one's cultural enemies will get us nowhere. False and/or simplistic, Manichean statements simply undermine one's credibility and that of one's allies in the struggle to redeem the culture.
I stirred up some concerns among PKD fans with my Philip K. Dick article, which was cross-posted at The Reform Club site. Francis Poretto commented thoughtfully there, suggesting that there is no way to discern true greatness in a writer. After stating, "For my money, a great writer is one who inspires me to great emotion," Francis asks, "How shall I judge Dick, or any writer, great, even if permitted to use my criterion?"
It's a fair question, and one that I implicitly answered in my original comment on PKD. Francis correctly observes that a numerical analysis of how a particular author measures up to an individual's chosen standards is impossible. Hence, he suggests, it's silly to engage in such discussions. "I think you can see where this is going," he concludes.
I can indeed see where that is going, and I am rather surprised to see someone who is most decidedly not a philosophical relativist taking the position Francis is staking out in regard to literature. Certainly it's true that we cannot hope to judge the quality of literary works and the overall achievements of their authors by some sort of quantitative analysis, but that is absolutely not the same thing as saying that there are no qualitative differences between such works and authors. And if there are such differences, then it is most certainly useful and salutary to discuss the matter.
Francis points out the following as possible standards, but then dismisses them:
-- Widespread critical acclaim?
-- Volume of sales?
-- The length of time his works have been read?
-- His avoidance of modifiers?
-- The effulgence of his imagery?
-- Some other criterion?
The answer, as you will have already guessed, is (f), some other criterion. Or, more accurately, some other criteria.
To wit:
Most assuredly there is a certain something at the heart of all great literary works that cannot quite be identified, much less quantified. Rather like the human soul, we perceive it but cannot isolate it. However, just as the human soul is held in a body that makes identifiable and even quantifiable actions, this heart of a novel is contained in (and indeed suffuses) a book that has identifiable characteristics. These characteristics can even be usefully quantified in some cases, though I believe actual numerical quantification to be unnecessary for a valid literary analysis.
Specifically, it is possible to put individual tastes aside and discuss literature and the other arts in a rational and salubrious way.
We can observe, for example, that some books have deeper, more true, and more convincing characterizations than others. We can see that some have plots that are more interesting and diverting than others. Some have stories that are more plausible, convincing, and usefully reminiscent of reality than others. Some have descriptive passages that make the fictional world come alive more convincingly than others. Some have prose that is so beautiful and artful that it gives us distinct pleasure to contemplate. Some have moral implications that bring our human condition into greater focus and give us real insights into our position in the cosmos. And so on.
Yes, we cannot always quantify such things, but we certainly can make comparisons and discuss what is most worthy of our time and energy. And the point of my post was that a good many of the writings of Philip K. Dick are much more worthy of our time and attention than those of most mainstream American literary artisans of the twentieth century.
So let us indeed feel free to discuss the quality of authors' works, singly and in toto. We should always recognize that there is much room for disagreement, awareness of ambiguity, and differing assessments of how various works measure up to the ideal characteristics of literature, and that individuals can hold different rankings of importance among the various aspects of literary excellence, but that it is nonetheless both possible and necessary to discuss these works objectively and with a sincere search for truth at the heart of the matter.
Naturally it's tempting for critics to see Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan as a satire against political correctness, as Peter Suderman has gamely attempted to do on National Review Online. When something gives us pleasure, we really want to believe that it is good. But that's simply not the way things work, and it is certainly not the way Borat works. Sacha Baron Cohen, the comedian who wrote and stars in the film based on his HBO TV show, makes no attempt to tie the film's vulgar humor to American "political correctness" codes or any other political meaning.
On the contrary, the film is simply a string of jokes based on the grotesqely ignorant central character's lack of decorum regarding bodily functions, presumably as a result of his being brought up in a primitive, poverty-stricken country in southwest Asia.
What the movie really delivers is lots of jokes about sex, defecation, sex, religion, sex, mental deficiencies, sex, cruelty to all creatures less powerful than oneself, sex, ethnic prejudice, sex, and sex. Borat simply is not political, and there is in fact nothing useful that we can learn from it, despite critics' attempts to shoehorn some meaning into it.
On the contrary, Cohen's jokes about rape, for example, are funny and politically incorrect, but they manifest a lack of decorum, they don't stand back from it and make a point about manners and morals. What point, after all, could those particular jokes make? That some people don't take rape seriously enough? That is not a point worth making, and I don't believe for a moment that Cohen is attempting to do so. He's just being funny.
And the film is very funny indeed. It's just a string of dirty jokes, and most of them work pretty well, if the audience with whom I saw the film is any indication.
Yes, we do see, in absentia, the value of manners, decorum, and the flush toilet, etc., but that's not really a lesson for most people, nor does it have anything to do with political correctness codes. It's just funny.
There is an interesting moment late in the film, an extended reference to the film comedy team Laurel and Hardy. I think that the comparison is apt. Although Borat bases its humor on subject matter that would not have been acceptable during the era when the great comedy pair made their movies (and is probably not exactly acceptable even today), it is clear that its makers had the exact same goal as the people behind the Laurel and Hardy movies: to make people laugh, and nothing more.
And there's nothing wrong with that. It's good to have a nice laugh once in a while. We shouldn't have to make excuses for that. And that's good, because there is no excuse for Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. And I doubt that Cohen wants anybody making excuses for him. So I won't.
In commenting on our discussion of Christian cinema (see posts immediately below), some visitors brought up a couple of interesting points. One is that any kind of Christian movie ought to be acceptable to both critics and audiences, and the other is that the economic realities of making Christian films today require a more encouraging stance than Barbara Nicolosi and I seem to have taken regarding Facing the Giants.
Clearly both these observations are well-intentioned, but I think that adopting these recommendations would greatly harm any nascent Christian cinema, rather than helping it.
Let's examine them individually.
First, the premise that any kind of Christian cinema ought to be good enough for Christians, with the implied corollary that any Christian film is at least better then what Hollywood puts out, ignores an imporatant reality: what is on the surface of a film does not always reflect what it all actually means. Many Hollywood films and TV programs, despite their often shabby surfaces, carry meanings that Christians should find quite appealing. If you have any doubts about this, click on the "Movies" and "Television" categories on this page and take a look at some analyses of Hollywood products showing how easily they are misinterpreted if we concentrate solely on surface imagery.
The other side of this issue is the fact that an openly Christian movie can carry underlying messages and assumptions that are at best dubious, as in the Left Behind series (especially to non-Evangelicals), or are outright false, as appears to be the case with Facing the Giants.
Hence, it is clear that the ideas behind Christian films should be approached with the exact same attitude toward which we look at the ideas behind mainstream cinema. Let's call it enlightened skepticism.
As to the second point, that Christian cinema requires encouragement, I submit that this is precisely what Barbara Nicolosi and I are both trying to accomplish. As I noted in my Weekly Standard review of Ms. Nicolosi's latest book, one of the contributors rto that volume correctly notes that
Christians are "of the lineage of Michelangelo, Raphael, Shakespeare, Lewis, Tolkien, and Caravaggio," and that "there was a time when Christians were the undisputed masters of art and literature." As many Christians have withdrawn into a "safe" religious subculture, "Mainstream culture has moved on without us, and the world of entertainment has coarsened in our absence."
If we are to encourage people to create art that is both fully Christian and of high aesthetic quality, we must be willing to criticize their products fairly and honestly. Otherwise, they will have no incentive to try to excel, and we will end up with dreck—and garbage with a Christian patina is still worthless.
We do artists no favors when we pretend that good intentions are more important than results. Yes, good intentions are laudable, and we may well acknowledge people's intentions. But it cannot stop there. Bad art is bad, and we should tell the truth about it. Nowhere does Scripture tell us to bear false witness about our neighbors, even if we wish to do so to spare their feelings. A lie is a lie.
Pretending that substandard work is in fact good is a sure way to destroy an artist. Think about it this way: if you were coaching a child at basketball, and their shot mechanics were wrong but they were trying hard, would you really say that they're doing it right? Even if they were badly missing all their shots? To do so would be a contemptible thing.
The same is true with artists of whatever stripe, and it is particularly important when trying to nurture new artists and forms. To pretend that they are doing just fine when they're missing all their shots simply ensures that they'll never make the big leagues. Instead of artists on the order of Michelangelo, Raphael, Shakespeare, Lewis, Tolkien, and Caravaggio, we will get complacent, pointless junk. And that would be worse than having no Christian cinema at all.
There is room in society for both high art and pop culture, and both have an important place and can be highly salutary in their effects. Yet both must meet quality standards if they are to have a good effect on people. And it is up to critics and audiences to encourage artists to try to reach the very highest standards in whatever form their work takes.
Our job as critics and consumers is to tell the truth, with our pens and pocketbooks. If we do that, the artists will find their way, and real creativity will flower. If not, the torrent of lies will kill them all.
The one thing most certain to destroy a work of genre fiction is for the author to try to "transcend the genre."
You've heard of this many times, I'm sure, from the opposing point of view, as critics praise some author for transcending the genre in which they're working and thereby producing "a real novel."
That is hogwash.
The result of such endeavors is typically a poor example of both genre fiction and mainstream fiction. I won't name names here, but much of what has received the most critical praise in the mystery field qualifies strongly for this dubious distinction.
Read a few of the most recent Edgar Award winners if you want to be fully versed in the infamous results of authors thinking themselves superior to their audiences.
On this point Helen Szamuely has written a good book review for the website of the Social Affairs Unit in Great Britain. Noting the drab results produced by many writers trying to write "real novels" in the mystery genre, Szamuely writes:
I blame the critics, starting with Julian Symons and his seminal Bloody Murder. As the author of a number of extremely interesting detective novels himself Symons ought to have known better. But he and his many successors have been advocating the theory that the best detective story writers ought to go beyond the genre and write "real" novels. Symons, for example, who always prefers thrillers to detective stories, despite his own achievements, repeatedly shakes his head over someone like Ngaio Marsh failing to transcend the genre.
Transcending the genre is all very well but a good detective story is considerably more difficult to write than a sloppily constructed and written "real" novel. In fact, all that happens is that we get a romance with a little detection thrown in instead of a detective story, not a work of literature.
Szamuely is absolutely right to point to Symons and his Bloody Murder as a great offender in this matter. Symons and the American critic Otto Penzler have probably most powerfully and influentially represented the idea that the best kind of mystery novel is not a mystery at all and really not much of a novel, either .
Their intentions were and are good, I am sure, but their ideas are simply wrong.
Symons, Penzler, and their vast host of slavish followers praise what they call crime stories, which are narratives in which a crime is (perhaps) committed and the minds of the various characters are analyzed from a psychological point of view.
Hence, they are often not really narratives at all and hence not really novels at all.
The opposing point of view is that a novel is first and foremost a story, and that a mystery novel is first and foremost a story with a criminal mystery at the center.
This point should seem obvious to those uninitiated in the occult practices of modern literary criticism. It is obvious because it is true. As George Orwell noted, there are some things that are so silly that only an intellectual could believe them.
The notion that a novel without a real story at the center is the best kind of novel is precisely the kind of idiotic notion only an intellectual could believe.
For more on what a real mystery novel is like, read this.
Part 1 of ABC's The Path to 9/11 two-part docudrama aired last night, and reactions from political types were largely as expected.
Supporters of former president Bill Clinton complained about some scenes in advance copies of the program (which were altered before airing, to reflect their concerns), some on the political right were disgusted by leftists' calls for censorship and retaliation against ABC, and others on the right took what they apparently considered to be the high road, claiming that the film's condensation of certain events into dramatic scenes was outrageous. The latter included Bill Bennett, Bill O'Reilly, John Podhoretz, and John Fund.
Fund, in his Opinion Journal article on the film, even goes so far as to say that it is fundamentally dishonorable to make docudramas: "Their rules simply aren't good enough when dealing with events that are still fresh in the minds of so many. At worst, they can be used by ideological gunslingers like director Oliver Stone, who smeared the reputations of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon in paranoid fantasy films."
That seems to me to be a serious overreaction to this film, as indeed were the reactions of the Democrat opponents of the film. The rules for dramas are different from the rules for histories, and they should be.
It's a movie, people.
Everyone involved seems to have no idea whatever of the purpose of a docudrama.
It is this: to tell a whacking good story through the use of historical events.
That is a very good thing to do, contra Mr. Fund. The telling of stories gives us insights into human nature and the world around us, in addition to helping us understand the issues surrounding the matter at hand.
The main purpose of a docudrama is to tell an enlightening story. It is acceptable to condense the sequence of events, conflate several characters into one, and make other changes to the historical record in order to bring out the inherent drama of the central conflicts.
Shakespeare's history plays and tragedies do this routinely, and no one but an ugly fool would suggest that the world would be better without them.
What is not right is to distort major events in a story so as to create an impression contrary to the facts or the greater truth behind the story.
All of this is basically a matter of degree: if the invented scenes do not distort the real-life story or characters significantly, there is nothing at all wrong with including them. Niggling about details, as the political critics of The Path to 9/11 have done, simply shows ignorance of literary history and is a blatant attempt to prevent people from seeing the greater truths a particular docudrama may present.
The Path to 9/11 is not Shakespeare by any means, but it is a compelling drama that gives us real insights into how the minds of its characters worked.
Does Bill Clinton come off as something of an ass when it came to dealing with terrorism? Yes. But he was something of an ass in that regard. His administration did indeed bungle the response to the challenge Bin Laden posed, and that did indeed lead to 9/11. And the Bush administration has made countless mistakes in its handling of the run-up to the tragedy and especially in the aftermath, which will reportedly be depicted in tonight's concluding episode of The Path to 9/11.
The important thing for a docudrama, in being true to the events it depicts, is to get the characters' motivations and reactions right.
The Path to 9/11 does this admirably. The real conflict in the film is the central problem we still face today in fighting terrorism: that the values our nation holds most dear are the very things that prevent us from most effectively fighting terrorists. And terrorists astutely exploit this, as the film makes clear.
The Path to 9/11 depicts this conflict in numerous ways, weaving it throughout the story. We see FBI agents, for example, waiting until just a few hours before a planned December 31, 1999, terrorist attack because in America a person arrested must be charged with a crime within 24 hours or be released.
The need to wait until the very day of the planned attack poses an awful risk on innocent attendees of the New York City millennial New Year's celebration, of which they are entirely unaware, but the film makes no evident comment on this. It is simply a fact of the way we do things here, and it is an important part of what makes America what is is.
In this way, The Path to 9/11 gets the important things very right, and if Sandy Berger comes off as perhaps a jot less reponsble and attractive than he may have been in real life (and I certainly do not know that to be so), that is surely an acceptable choice on the part of the filmmakers in telling the bigger story: that America's greatest advantages are also its greatest vulnerabilities.
The New York Post reports that former President Bill Clinton has sent ABC president Bob Iger a letter protesting the network's depiction of his administration's response to terrorist threats as shown in the upcoming miniseries, The Path to 9/11, to be broadcast by the network this coming Sunday and Monday at 8-10 p.m. EST. The Post reports:
A furious Bill Clinton is warning ABC that its mini-series "The Path to 9/11" grossly misrepresents his pursuit of Osama bin Laden - and he is demanding the network "pull the drama" if changes aren't made.Clinton pointedly refuted several fictionalized scenes that he claims insinuate he was too distracted by the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal to care about bin Laden and that a top adviser pulled the plug on CIA operatives who were just moments away from bagging the terror master, according to a letter to ABC boss Bob Iger obtained by The Post.
The former president also disputed the portrayal of then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright as having tipped off Pakistani officials that a strike was coming, giving bin Laden a chance to flee.
"The content of this drama is factually and incontrovertibly inaccurate and ABC has the duty to fully correct all errors or pull the drama entirely," the four-page letter said.
The movie is set to air on Sunday and Monday nights. Monday is the fifth anniversary of the attacks.
The docudrama does indeed include some fictionalized scenes to help compress the story into a manageable form, as such productions customarily do, but appears to be accurate overall. It is based on the comprehensive 9/11 Commission Report and other factual sources. The cast includes Harvey Keitel, Patricia Heaton, Penny Johnson Jerald (of Fox's 24), Amy Madigan, and Donnie Wahlberg, none of whom will ever work in Hollywood again if the former president has anything to say about it, as he clearly wishes to do.