Surface realism is a perfectly nice thing for a movie to have, but it’s a mistake to elevate it beyond its real importance — and that is true for audiences, critics, and filmmakers alike. In the case of films based on Biblical events, the temptation in recent years has been to deride movies of the past as unsophisticated and kitschy, and to elevate current-day religious films as superior. This is a mistake, as there are many excellent films with Biblical themes that viewers obsessed with…
The North Carolina Bar has filed charges against Durham District Attorney Thomas Nifong. The Center for Individual Freedom’s Freedom Line reports: On December 28, 2006, the North Carolina State Bar filed ethics charges against Durham, North Carolina District Attorney Michael B. Nifong for public statements made related to the so-called Duke University rape case. As noted earlier on this site (see articles here, here, and here) and elsewhere, the case was a blatant instance of false prosecution from the beginning. The Freedom Line article nicely…
Peter Wood, the brilliant anthropologist and author of the new book A Bee in the Mouth: Anger in America Today, has contributed a very astute analysis of "The Liberalitarian Dustup" in National Review Online. I recommmend it highly. Analyzing the disagreement between libertarians and liberals as to whether the two sides have much in common and might make good political bedfellows, and concentrating on leftist Jonathan Chait’s furious rejection of libertarian Brink Lindsey’s overture suggesting an alliance, Wood uses the exchange to exemplify the absurd…
As you may have heard in the news, District Attorney Michael Nifong has dropped the rape charges against the Duke University lacrosse players falsely charged last March. As Thomas Sowell notes in National Review Online, Nifong decided to drop the charges when the head of the lab that looked at the DNA evidence in the case testified under oath that the accuser had DNA from other men on her, but none from any Duke player. However, as Sowell astutely notes, Nifong has left some relatively…
A clearly well-intentioned movie is rather more of a rarity in Hollywood these days than we should like, and as a consequence I am favorably toward such pictures even when the results don’t quite measure up. Night at the Museum is one such, a big-budget comedy loaded with special effects for Christmas vacation audiences, aimed at pre-adolescents whose sense of wonder is stronger than their sense of logic. It’s got nice visual effects, nice performances, nice ideas, and nice intentions. Yet it sells its young…
This is the last day in which I can decently mark the centennial of the birth of the truly great detection fiction writer John Dickson Carr. Carr flourished as a writer during the 1930s and ’40s and wrote numerous classic detective novels and short stories, continuing to write until the 1970s. With Doyle, Chesterton, Christie, Queen, and Sayers, Carr is one of the greatest of all mystery writers. Carr was the master of the "impossible crime" story and its best-known subset, the locked-room mystery. Carr’s…
Your correspondent has been very busy with other work during the past week and has neglected his work here, for which he apologizes profusely. During this hectic time, however, we did manage to take a couple of hours to see Rocky Balboa, the sixth and supposedly last of actor/writer/director Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky films. Stallone has promoted the film aggressively to Christian audiences, pointing out that he has become much more greatly committed to Christianity (and jolly good for him!), specifically the Catholicism in which he…
Tomorrow night Texas Tech basketball coach Bobby Knight goes out to break Dean Smith’s record for lifetime victories by an NCAA men’s basketball coach. Knight has been vilified for years by the press, and of course some of his behavior has certainly earned rebuke. However, as Michael Ledeen points out in National Review Online, the press tends to hold Knight to a higher standard than it sets for most coaches. For example, Ledeen notes, Yes, he’s got a temper. I have never known a winning…
May you have a very Merry Christmas and a happy and prosperous New Year! For some interesting reading, please browse our archives and enjoy our reports and analyses of a great variety of cultural events and trends.
Candace de Russy has provided a nicely informative article about the uglier side of the Omniculture, in today’s edition of National Review Online. The American public square, de Russy notes, has been blitzed with what Gawker.com, a gossip website, calls “revulse-amusement” and misused for what columnist Andrea Peyser terms a “raunch-fest” — revelry calculated, according to the New York Times, to churn up waves of “ethical nausea.” After recounting some of the recent seamy media events, such as the O. J. Simpson book and Britney…
Here’s an interesting item in our ongoing series of observations that everything happens in the Omniculture. Women’s Wear Daily reports that photo editors are beginning to retouch photos of seriously underweight fashion models in order to make them appear . . . healthier: PUTTING ON THE POUNDS: As the body mass index of runway walkers continues to make headlines, skinny models just might present a whole new problem for editors. Everyone has a story of a celebrity cover slimmed by Photoshop, but several editors have…
Caitlin Moran of the Times of London asks several important questions about Christmas in the paper’s December 18 issue, the most important of which is, who wrote and performed the better Christmas song, Roy Wood of Wizzard or Noddy Holder of Slade? Slade is one of the most underrated rock bands of all time, at least in the United States. The great pub rockers brought a delightful Scottish, working-class flair to hard rock in the early to mid 1970s (and some of the worst clothing…
The estimable Sam Smith of the Chicago Tribune quotes former NBA Utah Jazz coach Frank Layden on current Jazz coach Jerry Sloan, who just achieved his 1,000th victory as a coach in the NBA, regarding Sloan’s legendary toughness: Sloan replaced Frank Layden in 1988, and this was Layden on Sloan: "Nobody fights with Jerry because you know the price would be too high. You might come out the winner, at his age, you might even lick him, but you’d lose an eye, an arm ……
Tonight at 8 p.m. EST, Turner Classic Movies is showing an excellent Christmas film, one which I recommend highly. Remember the Night (1940) stars Barbara Stanwyck as Lee Leander, a beautiful shoplifter in a big city (New York City, I think), whose court case is continued until after Christmas by clever assistant district attorney John Sargent (Fred MacMurray, who would costar with Stanwyck in Billy Wilder’s 1944 venture into film noir, Double Indemnity), who realizes that no jury will convict her right before Christmas.…
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