Does The "stupid Party" Need To Be Stupider?
Lee Harris at TCS Daily makes the case: READ MORE >>
The Movie Review: 'Charlie Wilson's War' and 'The Savages'
After the litany of awkward antiwar polemics foisted on filmgoers in the fall (In the Valley of Elah, The Kingdom, Rendition, Lions for Lambs, Redacted), it seemed fair to ask what it would take for Hollywood to make a good movie about war and politics. The answer provided by writer Aaron Sorkin and director Mike Nichols is simplicity itself: Leave out most of the war and all the politics. READ MORE >>
The Movie Review: 'Juno'
The Movie Review: 'Atonement'
The Movie Review: 'The Golden Compass'
"The Lord of the Rings is fundamentally an infantile work," Philip Pullman famously told The New Yorker back in 2005, drawing an unflattering comparison to his own epic fantasy trilogy, His Dark Materials. "Tolkien is not interested in the way grown-up, adult human beings interact with each other. He's interested in maps and plans and languages and codes." It is a cutting assessment, but one that may be dulled by the release of The Golden Compass, the first film based on Pullman’s trilogy. READ MORE >>
The Dumbledore Candidate
Daniel Larison takes one look at Mike Huckabee's inane new foreign policy metaphor-- READ MORE >>
The Movie Review: 'Revolver'
Where does Guy Ritchie end and Madonna begin? It’s a question posed, and perhaps answered, by Ritchie’s film Revolver, one of the most ill-conceived cinematic experiments in recent memory. The movie, which has finally arrived in the U.S. two years after flopping in Great Britain, is an unlikely hybrid of Ritchie’s trademarked cockney gangsterism (Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels; Snatch) and his wife’s Kabbalah Centre psychobabble, and it is a child only a parent could love. READ MORE >>
Flopman
“I’m going to ask you a question,” a bald assassin (Timothy Olyphant) tells the Interpol agent (Dougray Scott) he’s holding at gunpoint early in Hitman. “How you answer it will determine how this night ends.” The question is about when one is justified in taking the life of another, and though the movie ultimately offers an answer (roughly, “who knows?”), it doesn’t spend a great deal of time meditating on the subject. Hitman is, after all, based on a video game, and too much abstract moral theorizing might get in the way of its body count. READ MORE >>
Enchanting
Atrocities
Toward the end of Brian De Palma’s Redacted, a pierced and tattooed antiwar protester hisses into the camera, “You don’t see the My Lai massacre in the movies because the truths of that fascist orgy are just too hellish for even liberal Hollywood to cop to.” This is the director’s backhanded way of complimenting himself. READ MORE >>
