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By the way, aren't you a little old or don't you have anything better to do than abuse the ratings system? People have been complaining about you and this for literally nine months my little friend.
Posted at March 6, 2006 11:48 PM in response to Red State Brokeback?
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You're right man. I'm not just crazy, stupid too. I humble myself before your temple of wisdom.
Posted at March 6, 2006 11:45 PM in response to Red State Brokeback?
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I'm sorry man. I've been living in a cabin in Montana for seven and a half years straight, wearing pelts, and eating only the brightly colored berries. So what you're saying is that public displays of insanity are no longer fashionable?
Posted at March 6, 2006 8:13 PM in response to Red State Brokeback?
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Sure, and "Chinatown" was rich in Orientalism and sexism; it was also the best American film of all time. The trouble with "Brokeback Mountain" - the reason it falls short of greatness - is that it is in the end a protest film (not unlike "Easy Rider") rather than a tragedy. If the surviving lover had avenged his partner's murder and then taken his own life it would have risen to the level of classical tragedy, and might have been one of the thirty or so greatest American movies.
Posted at March 6, 2006 6:59 PM in response to Red State Brokeback?
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If you believe the sole purpose of films is to "inspire" you're no better than the sanctimonious, hypocritical left. Nearly all of the films nominated this year fail on traditional esthetic grounds. "Crash" is two-dimensionally didactic rubbish made only slightly more palatable than other two-dimensional didactic rubbish like"The Contender" and "Pay it Forward" by reasonably good directing (although it is as badly lit as almost every film made today [what the hell is the use of all these film schools if no one can even light a room anymore?]). "Capote" fails in the same way most biopics fail. Real lives are messy and circuitious; they rarely hew neatly to classical narrative structures. "Nixon" was problematic, but the real life Nixon's tragedy was worthy of a great film (this is rare). Hearst's real life wasn't quite tragedy, but Orson Welles understood that it needed to be so in order to be a great film. There are genuinely great, overtly political films, and some of them are satires (think "Dr. Strangelove"). "Brokeback Mountain," while falling short of classical tragic dimensions (again it ought to have been a revenge flick) was the best of a mediocre lot, and the only reason it lost was because Hollywood (or at least the academy voters) is more conservative than people think.
Posted at March 6, 2006 4:19 PM in response to Red State Brokeback?
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As someone who is actually in the business, let me say that you have no idea what you're talking about.
Posted at March 5, 2006 9:58 PM in response to Red State Brokeback?
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"It is impossible to underrate human intelligence - beginning with one's own." Henry Adam Wow, so apparently Oscar voters are liberal dogmatists who prefer propaganda to art, and yet homophobic at the same time. I think that pretty well sums up Hollywood today. None of these films comes close to last year's winner "Million Dollar Baby" but "Brokeback Mountain" was the closest to greatness of any of them.
Posted at March 5, 2006 8:24 PM in response to Red State Brokeback?
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"It is impossible to underrate human intelligence - beginning with one's own." Henry Adam I agree. Hollywood is ahead of the country on outsourcing good, unionized jobs to countries where production costs are less, and ahead of the country on replacing good jobs at home with low wage service sector jobs (notably in television, where writers and actors are being replaced by a reality TV culture that doesn't pay virtually anything other than travel expenses in any number of cases). Then there are other varieties of hypocrisy, wagging their finger at homophobic America while sustaining a culture in Hollywood where leading men and women can't come out and still have careers as leading men and women, to say nothing of their making movies like "Crash" while themselves never venturing south of the 10 freeway after dark.
Posted at March 5, 2006 5:49 PM in response to Red State Brokeback?
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The generally irritating Mickey Kaus is right about one thing vis a vis "Brokeback Mountain" : it is a B+ film (although Kaus clearly has no idea what makes it so).<p> If the surviving lover had avenged the murder of his partner, and possibly taken his own life afterward, it would have risen to the level of revenge tragedy, and might have been one of the thirty or so best films in American history.<p> But as it is it is beautifully filmed and two-dimensional, politically correct. In that sense its conservative critics have a point.<p> Sadly, it is also the best movie in the running this year.<p> "Crash" is didactic liberal propaganda (if you want to make an overtly political film make a satire), as is "Munich". "Capote" like "Kinsey" (the latter of which distorted the questionable ethics of the mid-century psychiatric industrial complex) is a boring biopic (the only un-boring ones are fictionalized, and stylized like "Citzen Kane"), and was only partially redeemed by Hoffman's stellar performance (someone should hire him to play Bloeckman in an adaptation of F Scott Fitzgerald's "Beautiful and Damned"). And what was that other film?<p>PS Anyone have a clue why I a) need to code the HTML myself to get paragraph breaks, and b) why it appears not to be working?Posted at March 5, 2006 5:14 PM in response to Red State Brokeback?
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Why are liberals so afraid of the "I" word?
This country was founded in part on the premise of trade with all, entangling alliances with none; it's in our political DNA.
Of course, the idea of wholly extricating ourselves from the troubles beyond our borders is today a fantasy - many problems are regional and global in scale - but Democrats need to learn again the value of isolationist rhetoric as a corrective to the rhetoric (not to mention actuality) of interventionism gone wild.
We're already borrowing billions per day to pay for our domestic and foreign commitments. In a few more years tens of millions of Americans will begin collecting entitlements. Without a major fiscal and economic course correction, taxes will (contrary to Democratic propgaganda) need to be raised in 2018 or thereabouts to pay for Social Security. The Medicare trust fund is set to go broke in the same time frame. The estimated deficits for Medicare alone in coming decades are projected to be in the tens of trillions of dollars.
And seeing that aging Americans are not (thankfully) going to be willing to forego their cancer and diabetes treatment so Mr. Bush (or his successor) can play emperor, and younger Americans are not going to be willing to pay double and triple digit tax increases, *someone* needs to begin laying the rhetorical groundwork for a major drawdown of the American military presence abroad (and not just in Iraq and Afghanistan). Global security needs to be genuinely multilateralized in the next decade or two, and given the unlikelihood of the GOP be willing to admit it, the Democrats had better do so.
PS Mr. Bush's jab wasn't aimed at conservative isolationists, who today make up a marginal part of the GOP coalition. It was in anticipation of the coming assault from younger, left-libertarian Democrats like Hackett.
Posted at February 1, 2006 4:19 PM in response to Defining Isolationism Down
