Film

Excellent Book, So-So Movie

by

Several days ago, Michael Kennedy mentioned Nevil Shute’s end-of-the-world novel On the Beach. There were, of course, a considerable number of nuclear-war-related novels published during the Cold War era…one of the last representatives of this genre is Trinity’s Child, written by William Prochnau and published in 1983.

The central character, Moreau, is a B-52 copilot. Her decision to pursue a career in the Strategic Air Command was greatly influenced by her love and admiration for her father, a SAC general known as “the coldest of the cold warriors.” When Moreau was 10, her father took her to the Trinity atomic test site. She told him that all her friends expected to die in a nuclear war, and he explained to her the logic of nuclear deterrence:

“I’m sorry your friends are afraid…I don’t know if you can understand this yet, but fear is my job. It’s my job to keep everyone so afraid no one will ever use these bombs again.”

“How long do you have to do it, Dad?” she asked, eyes down, her small, fine hand picking at the old bomb crate.

“Forever, honey. Eternal vigilance, President Kennedy said. After me, someone else and then someone else and then someone else. Forever, into infinity.”

To which Moreau responded:

“After you…I’ll do it, Dad.”

Read more

The Tree of Life

by

Warning: spoilers, I guess, though with a film like this it’s hard to give anything away so as to really detract from the experience. Maybe a few autobiographical spoilers of my own.

Having only seen it once so far, I am aware of having gotten at most glimpses of its full intent. I cannot easily describe Terrence Malick’s oeuvre except in superficial ways: mostly out-of-doors, with nature as a significant element; spectacular cinematography; more or less nonlinear storyline; voice-over narrations. I have not seen Badlands but have seen everything from Days of Heaven on.

Read more

Hardly A Surprise

by

TV and the movies push a Liberal agenda, with the creative minds behind popular entertainment deliberately maneuvering to influence public opinion. Blatant propaganda in the service of a bankrupt ideology.

So what else is new?

Author Ben Shapiro claims to have the smoking gun. Taped interviews of some of the most influential and prominent names in entertainment, all of whom openly admit their bias, bigotry, and hatred of any political philosophy which opposes their own.

I know what you guys are doing right now. You are all shrugging your shoulders, blearily blinking at the screen, waiting for me to say something that you don’t already know. Or, at least, to say it in a clever and witty fashion.

Sorry to disappoint.

I would like to leave you with one final thought, though. This is yet again an example of Liberals babbling away about Soviet levels of groupthink without the whisper of unease. How could anyone with even half a brain believe that engaging in a massive mind control exercise is the least bit acceptable? And yet these movers and shakers in the entertainment industry are perfectly comfortable in discussing something that would literally have them advocating murder if anyone on the Right started to do it.

I think the people with Leftist political convictions need to get out more.

The Vestigial: It Seems Past – But Remains & Misleads

by

I’d like to note some minor irritations. Few lead as voyeuristic a life as I do, often using pop culture as a gauge to my reality. I know that betokens superficiality. Well, so be it. I’ve wasted much life in front of television sets and reading murder mysteries. And Humphrey Bogart’s image moved through that life.

So I followed ALDaily’s link to an LRB review of Stefan Kanfer’s Tough Without a Gun: The Life and Extraordinary Afterlife of Humphrey Bogart. Apparently, for Jenny Diski, as for many of us, Humphrey Bogart was bigger than life. He died before I became a teen, but his old movies reran constantly on fifties’ television; when I started college, French directors, as Diski notes, led us back to him. I watched many yet again at Chicago’s Clark in the late sixties. Bogart merged with the heroes of hard boiled thrillers and then Camus as we started to take our intellectual lives more seriously.

Read more

The Series and the Mini-Series

by

Movies intended for theater distribution are usually about 90-120 minutes long–this surely puts some serious constraints on character and plot development. The additional time made available by the series and mini-series formats (apparently the distinction between series and mini-series lies in whether the full set of episodes is planned in advance or not) would seem to open up some additional degrees of artistic freedom. And the changes in the way video is distributed, including Netflix and the various video-on-demand services, play very well with the series/miniseries format.

Over the past couple of years, I’ve watched several series, mostly via Netflix, which I thought were particularly noteworthy:

Read more