Left-Wing Talk Radio Is as Popular as Ever!

January 30, 2007
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As AP reports, a wealthy leftist sugar daddy has come to the rescue of beleaguered, bankrupt radio network Air America: Air America Radio, a liberal talk radio network, said Monday that it had reached a tentative agreement to be sold to the founder of a New York area real estate company. The network also said that Al Franken, its longtime headline personality, would depart next month. The agreement with Stephen Green, the founder and chairman of SL Green Realty Corp., appears to rescue the struggling…

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The Pursuit of Happyness—Review

January 29, 2007
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It’s not often that Hollywood depicts stockbrokers positively. That’s only one of several nice surprises in The Pursuit of Happyness, a light drama based on a true story and starring Will Smith in a modern-day Horatio Alger tale. Alger’s popular stories were all about the value of hard work. The Pursuit of Happyness includes plenty of hard work on the part of the protagonist, but we live in an investment society today, so in this film the emphasis is on the value of the investments—of…

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Is Rudy a Conservative?

January 27, 2007
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In a very interesting City Journal article, Steven Malanga argues that "Yes, Rudy Guiliani Is a Conservative/And an electable one at that." Malanga makes a strong case for Rudy as a Reagan-style conservative. He recounts well Giuliani’s record as mayor of New York City, in which, as Malanga establishes firmly, Rudy supported free markets and individual responsibility, as exemplified vividly in his tax cuts , welfare reform success, "zero tolerance" crimefighting, and firm rejection of racial politics. As Malanga notes, Giuliani did this in what…

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Sundance Controversy

January 25, 2007
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A comment on our Academy Awards post below asked our opinion about the controversies regarding this year’s Sundance Film Festival, Robert Redford’s annual forum for what Hollywood types see as quirky and interesting films and what usually turns out to be a collection of rubbishy postmodern cliches. It’s a good question. First, some background, from a Chicago Tribune article on the festival: Child endangerment is nothing new to the movies; it’s just that audiences are more accustomed to shameless emotional peril and physical but non-sexual…

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Leftists Push for TV Censorship

January 25, 2007
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The notion that the left is more liberal-minded than the right is one of those thoroughly wrong ideas that nearly everybody believes despite mountains of evidence to the contrary. Consider, for example, the specter of censorship of the press. While in possession of the presidency or Congress for most of the past three decades, the right has done a grand total of . . . nothing . . . to censor the press on the national level. Which is as it should be. True liberalisam…

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Academy Award Nominations Reflect Cultural Shibboleths

January 23, 2007
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Academy Award Nominations Reflect Cultural Shibboleths

The nominations for this year’s Motion Picture Academy Awards were announced today, and they basically repeated those made earlier this year by the Golden Globes. Dreamgirls was left out of the Best Picture nominations, rather surprisingly according to Hollywood insiders, and Sacha Baron Cohen was not nominated for his performance in Borat, which was not a surprise. (The Academy seldom honors broad comic performances, except those that are intended as serious. . . .) The AP story noted that ethnicity appeared to be a plus…

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“The Curse of the Golden Flower” and Two Ideas of Tragedy

January 20, 2007
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“The Curse of the Golden Flower” and Two Ideas of Tragedy

The Curse of the Golden Flower, Zhang Yimou’s latest film to be released in America, is a brilliant motion picture that interestingly exemplifies important differences between East and West. Following on the heels of two superb, epic dramas released in the United States in 2004—Hero (Ying xiong) and House of Flying Daggers—the Chinese director  manages to top those films. The Curse of the Golden Flower is even more visually gorgeous than its recent predecessors, which is saying a lot. Zhang has been making brilliant, critically…

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American Muslims’ Protests of Fox TV Show “24″ Are Misdirected

January 19, 2007
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American Muslim groups have protested to Fox Television for the use of Muslims as terrorists on the Fox TV program 24, CNN reports: Two years ago, Muslim groups protested when the plot of the hit Fox drama ’24′ cast Islamic terrorists as the villains who launched a stolen nuclear missile in an attack on America. Now, after a one-year respite during which Russian separatists played the bad guys on the critically acclaimed series, Muslims are back in the evil spotlight. Unlike last time, when agent…

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A Fascinating New Sport . . .

January 18, 2007
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A Fascinating New Sport . . .

Another item in our Everything Happens in the Omniculture series: professional pillow fights. Reuters reports: Welcome to the Pillow Fight League, which has been drawing growing crowds in Toronto since it formed early last year, and is now set to export its campy fun to New York City. The league is the brainchild of 38-year-old Stacey Case, a T-shirt printer and musician who came up with the idea that people would pay to see young women in costumes beat the tar out of each other…

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Fathers and TV Fiction

January 17, 2007
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Fathers and TV Fiction

In recent days National Review Online has published a couple of very good articles on the value of fathers, using cultural products as their examples and evidence. First, Kathryn Lopez wrote about Rocky Balboa, noting that the title character presents a strong image of fatherhood in his dealings with his son and with the fatherless son of a woman he meets in a tavern and eventually hires to help out in his restaurant. I would add that Rocky also acts as a surrogate father to…

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Black Coaches and Equal Opportunity

January 16, 2007
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Black Coaches and Equal Opportunity

As if the pressure on National Football League coaches weren’t enough, especially during the playoffs, Chicago Bears coach Lovie Smith and Indianapolis Colts coach Tony Dungy are forced to labor under the additional condition that everything they do will be characterized as having been accomplished—or failed, as the case may be—by a black American. This Sunday, the two coaches will be leading teams in the NFL conference championship games, with the possibility that both will coach in the Super Bowl this year. And of course…

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The Only Kind of Conservatism These TV Writers Could Imagine As Not Entirely Repulsive

January 16, 2007
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On the Acton Institute’s Power Blog, Jordan Ballor analyzes a scene in the most recent episode of the ABC-TV series Brothers and Sisters which he shows to be indicative of the mentality of big-government conservatism. Ballor writes: Here’s a speech [a conservative U.S. Senator played by Rob Lowe] gives to a group of ladies and donors (My comments are in brackets. The full episode is available for viewing at ABC.com here by clicking on the Brothers & Sisters graphic and selecting the episode marked 1/14/07.…

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Flash, Eccentricity Big at Golden Globe Awards

January 16, 2007
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Flash, Eccentricity Big at Golden Globe Awards

The Hollywood Foreign Press Association gave out its annual Golden Globe awards last night. and the big winner was the English school of acting. British performers were prominent among the winners, and the more eccentric the character, the more likely was recognition. Helen Mirren won for her portrayal of the enigmatic British queen Elizabeth II in The Queen and for portraying Queen Elizabeth I in the TV miniseries Elizabeth I, Forrest Whitaker won for his oddly winsome portrayal of mass-murdering former Ugandan dictator Idi Amin,…

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New Season of “24″ Begins with a Bang

January 15, 2007
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New Season of “24″ Begins with a Bang

The Fox TV series has progressed from a cult hit to an award-winning cultural bellwether, so it’s an interesting thing to see what each season’s central story line consists of. Last night was the first half of Fox’s four-hour, two-night season premiere (an excellent way to get viewers deep into the season’s story line very quickly). The story starts off with a bang, with Jack Bauer, just released from a Chinese prison (having been traded by the Chinese for undisclosed U.S. assets), where he had…

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Oprah’s Gift

January 13, 2007
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On her always-interesting blog, columnist Ilana Mercer has composed a fine and sympathetic analysis of the motives and assumptions behind Oprah Winfrey’s decision to open a relatively luxurious school for girls in South Africa. Mercer’s argument is that Winfrey’s reasons for building the school are highly laudable because they have not only the emotions (true sympathy) but also the logic just right: Her politics may be populist; but her deeds are patrician. Dare I suggest that there was something both Randian and Jeffersonian about this…

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"Culture is the expression of the guiding philosophy of the day."—Murray Rothbard
"To judge the quality of a cultural product is not to begrudge the preferences of the people who purchase it. It is simply to apply timeless, objective standards in assessing these products."—Ilana Mercer

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