The Brilliance of “Going My Way”

December 16, 2006
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The Brilliance of “Going My Way”

TV stations tend to show the great 1944 film Going My Way, directed by Leo McCarey and starring Bing Crosby and Barry Fitzgerald, more often around Christmas, even though only a couple of scenes are set during Advent. The film, however, always repays watching. In particular, it illustrates the superiority of moral suasion over coercion in the creation of civil order — a lesson always worth remembering. Although Going My Way won several Academy Awards, including Best Picture, the film’s reputation rapidly declined beginning in…

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A Brutal Christmas Album

December 15, 2006
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A Brutal Christmas Album

If you’ve read my article on Christmas music below, you probably noticed that the Omniculture has made itself thoroughly manifest in that area, providing an astonishing variety of music for the season, for every taste. And some for those with no taste at all, or at least an infinite sense of humor and boundless tolerance for chaotic assaults on the senses. Everything happens in the Omniculture, as I’ve noted, and the following post from CybersMusic illustrates that perfectly: it documents a death metal Christmas album.…

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The Sounds of Christmas

December 15, 2006
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The Sounds of Christmas

Advent is my favorite time of year, for all the conventional reasons, and Christmas music is for me an essential part of it. I listen to it as much as possible throughout the season. (I have found, alas, that this music does not work for me during other times of the year.) Unfortunately, there have not been many truly great Christmas songs composed during the past couple of decades, which means that most of the really good Christmas music is highly familiar to anyone who…

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The Inestimable Larry Miller

December 13, 2006
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The Inestimable Larry Miller

Larry Miller is one of the funniest comedians around. Rather like a younger Bob Newhart but with a bit more of an edge, the balding, pudgy Miller has made a name for himself as a comic character actor in numerous movies and tv shows, but where he made his name was as a hilariously funny standup comedian who applied traditional morality and sound common sense to our crazy Omniculture society, a place that is simultaneously puritanical about progressive political shibboleths (such as tobacco, fatty foods,…

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Conan the Influential Barbarian

December 13, 2006
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Conan the Influential Barbarian

John J. Miller of National Review has put together a nice overview of Robert E. Howard’s "Conan the Barbarian" tales, for the Wall Street Journal. Miller notes that Conan has been a highly popular character in the original pulp tales and subsequent comic books, movies, and simply as a widely known fictional character. Miller’s article is well worth reading as an introduction to this important literary phenomenon. Conan was the muscular, aggressive hero of 21 narratives the lonely, unhappy, Texas-born and -based Howard wrote in…

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Macy’s Name Change Backfires

December 12, 2006
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Sometimes it’s important to respect traditions and follow conventional morality even when it doesn’t seem to make logical sense on the surface. Consider, for example, Macy’s recent travails. The retail giant bought numerous other stores in the past couple of years and decided to change all their names to Macy’s, to strengthen the corporate identity. Macy’s also reduced service and merchandise quality at the stores. That’s exactly the type of crude corporate behavior one sees in old movies (and many new ones as well). The…

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Animal Rights Activists Lose One

December 11, 2006
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Animal Rights Activists Lose One

The National Basketball Association has announced that the league will stop using the microfiber composite basketballs it has been employing this season, and will return to use of leather basketballs as in previous years. Players had complained that the new basketballs became very slippery during games and the microfiber coating would cut the players’ fingers after repeated use. In response to the hailstorm of complaints from players, NBA Commissioner David Stern announced that the league will go back to the old basketballs beginning January 1…

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Apocalypto Opens Strong

December 10, 2006
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Apocalypto Opens Strong

Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto, reviewed earlier on this site, opened strong this weekend, leading the movie box office race with a take of $14.2 million. That is much less than the opening weekend take of Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, which brought in $83.8 million in its first weekend in 2004. Overall box office was down 25 percent from the same weekend last year, when The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe opened. However, the relatively strong performance of Gibson’s movie,…

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Do You Listen to Yes?

December 10, 2006
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Do You Listen to Yes?

Cadillac has a new commercial in which a group of young men in a Caddy discuss the great progressive rock group Yes. One of the guys is playing "Wonderous Stories" in the car through his Ipod, and the others express their doubts that this is cool: "Who listens to Yes?" one asks. The Yes fan replies, "Lots of people listen to Yes." A bearded guy wearing sunglasses in the back seat says, "Everybody listens to Yes, huh?", oozing skepticism. They decide to ask two attractive…

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An Unconventional Christmas Movie

December 9, 2006
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An Unconventional Christmas Movie

  If you’re interested in seeing an unusual film set at Christmas, and a good one, you might want to take a look at The Ice Harvest, which was released to theaters about a year ago and is now available on DVD. For more info on the film, here is my review from Breakpoint: A Film of Second Chances By S. T. Karnick1/3/2006 The Ice Harvest Just as crime statistics are a good measure for gauging the health of a society, crime films can reveal…

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Gibson’s Apocalypto

December 8, 2006
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Gibson’s Apocalypto

Upon hearing that Mel Gibson was filming a story set at the end of the Mayan empire and performed in an ancient foreign tongue translated into subtitles, one might well have wondered what possessed Gibson to undertake such an odd task. Indeed, many people wondered exactly that. Well, now we know, as Apocalypto premiered today in theaters across the United States. The film tells the story of a young father, Jaguar Paw, from a small tribe who is taken prisoner after a Mayan attack force…

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The Bane of Conservative Cultural Criticism

December 8, 2006
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The Bane of Conservative Cultural Criticism

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…

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Culture and Nature: Animals Gone Wild

December 6, 2006
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Our friend and fellow classical liberal Ilana Mercer has a very interesting and well-argued article in today’s American Spectator, on how a powerful and widely held cultural idea has actually changed the natural world, and for the worse. Mercer points out that the often laudable effort over the past couple of centuries to discourage mankind from harming animals has had an awful unintended consequence: many animal species are losing their fear of human beings and are increasingly attacking humans. Mercer argues: While Western man works…

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A Christmas Treat from Roy Wood

December 6, 2006
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A Christmas Treat from Roy Wood

Here’s a treat for you—a video featuring Roy Wood. Wood is one of the great — and most unfairly underappreciated — rock music composers of all time. He was the leader of the terrific 1960s band The Move, started the Electric Light Orchestra with Jeff Lynne and Bev Bevan, moved from there to form the rock-oriented band Wizzard, and created in his solo albums some of the best pop music albums of the past three decades. His solo albums Boulders and Mustard, in particular, are…

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The Limits of Utilitarianism—A BBC Drama Series

December 6, 2006
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The Limits of Utilitarianism—A BBC Drama Series

The BBC TV program 11th Hour, currently being shown in the United States on Monday nights at 9-10:30 EST on BBC America, has an interestingly ambivalent attitude toward science. The four-episode series appeared in the UK early last year and is now in its first run in the United States, according to my calcuations. To be sure, the program is pro-science, but it’s not at all certain how we as a society ought to decide what is allowed and what isn’t. The protatonist’s investigation of…

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