Lincoln Kept Pegging Away
By William J. Bennett
Abraham Lincoln, whose 200th birthday we celebrate today, entered this world accompanied by a less-than-hopeful prophecy.
“He’ll never come to much,” his cousin Dennis Hanks commented as the newborn fussed in his arms.It should have been a safe prediction. Raised in the wilds of Kentucky and Indiana, Lincoln went to school “by littles,” as he put it—a little here and a little there—his formal education amounting to less than a year of study in one-room schoolhouses. His father put an ax in his hands when he was eight years old. Frontier life valued hard labor over too much book learning.Yet Abraham would learn. He thought nothing of walking miles to borrow a book. His stepmother recalled that “he read all the books he could lay his hands on.” He once worked three days in the cornfield of neighbor Josiah Crawford to pay for a biography about George Washington that had been water-damaged in his possession.Words fascinated him. As a boy, he would mount a tree stump and repeat the sermons of itinerant preachers for anyone who would listen. When he lacked paper to write on, he scribbled on boards and the flat sides of hewn logs.
Read “Lincoln Kept Pegging Away” — By William J. Bennett
Defining Dubya Down
By Kevin Williamson
A smug buffoon with a mean streak, overmatched by events and by the role he’s taken on: One gets the feeling that Will Ferrell’s take on George W. Bush isn’t exactly a stretch for the comedian.Ferrell’s (almost) one-man show, You’re Welcome America, is something less than a play but something more than an extended Saturday Night Live skit. There is much in it that is lamentable—because unfunny—but it’s not exactly a tedious Michael Moore philippic, either, and at least one right-winger from Texas laughed most of the way through it. What’s strangest is the impression that Ferrell’s performance is a parody of a parody, a cartoon of a cartoon. Bush is a reserved individual, and the media have never been much interested in constructing a deep (even nuanced?) account of the man or his ideas. The Bush we know, the mediated Bush of MSNBC and the New York Times, is already a caricature, and it is this caricature, not the conflicted man who served twice as president of the United States, that Ferrell inhabits.But how he inhabits it! There is a kind of cracked genius to Ferrell’s Bush, from the strut and the loose-jointed body language to the cubist locution. Ferrell uses this gift mostly for the broadest sort of comedy—now augmented with copious profanity and pornographic imagery; Broadway ain’t the family hour on NBC—but he can, it turns out, also use it for genuine dramatic effect. Ferrell performs a momentarily solemn monologue, apparently derived from Bush’s interview with John Draper, in which the president confesses, “I do a lot of crying in this job. I’ll bet I’ve shed more tears than you can count, as president.” And as he considers the awful costs of war and the uncertainty of judgment, Ferrell’s Bush looks and sounds uncannily like the man himself. But this is Will Ferrell, so the moment ends abruptly and it’s back to explorations of “western grip” sex acts.
Read “Defining Dubya Down” — By Kevin Williamson
Yeah, Yeah, Yes
By Mark Goldblatt
Forty-five years ago this week—February 9, 1964—the Beatles made their first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. I was six years old and don’t remember much about it, but my mother never tired of telling the story of what happened that night in the Goldblatt household.
We owned one television, a black-and-white Motorola monster built into a battleship of walnut cabinetry that also housed a record player, a radio tuner, and stereo speakers. My five-year-old sister and I functioned as remote controls for my father, who, when he was home, would lie on the couch and exercise absolute dominion over programming. The arrangement was more onerous than it sounds; wherever we were in the house, whatever we were doing, if my dad wanted to change channels, one of us had to run into the living room and do it.
Read “Yeah, Yeah, Yes” — By Mark Goldblatt
A Spanish Spine-Tingler
By Thomas S. Hibbs
“One short sleep past, we wake eternally, / And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die.” — John Donne, Death Be Not ProudThe Orphanage, Juan Antonio Bayona’s debut film, produced and presented by Guillermo del Toro, features a spectacular setting for a ghost story — a large, old house, surrounded by thick woods, and just yards from the coast, where the sea has carved out hidden caves along the strand of an isolated cove. With echoes of The Sixth Sense and The Others, The Orphanage is a crisp and well executed film, with outstanding performances from the lead roles of mother and son, moments of genuine suspense, and an ending that poses the question whether — as Donne puts it — death is nothing more than “one short sleep past.”
Read “A Spanish Spine-Tingler” — By Thomas S. Hibbs
The Wire Returns
By Jack Dunphy
“It’s not TV, it’s HBO.” I’m not sure if HBO is still using that one in their advertising these days, but to a small but dedicated group of fans it’s much more than a tag line. Nowhere in the medium is the line more brightly drawn between the standard fare of “Tee-Vee” and the truly excellent than it is between a remarkable HBO program and any network show one might compare it to. Yes, The Wire, the cable network’s critically acclaimed but largely unknown drama is, at long last, back on Sunday nights, alas for its final season. Only the first of this year’s ten episodes has aired, yet already I mourn the show’s passing.
Read “The Wire Returns” — By Jack Dunphy
Mayhem, Manipulation, and Myth
By Thomas S. Hibbs
For family viewing this holiday season, there are a number of attractive options, some of which will make you glad you went to the theater and at least one of which approaches the level of great film-making. There is of course Alvin and the Chipmunks, a film I have not seen but which my kids described as funny if not much of a movie, and Enchanted, a film with a beautiful message marred somewhat by its overly earnest and saccharine delivery. Newly released films include the inevitable sequel, National Treasure: Book of Secrets, the Denzel Washington vehicle, for which he is both director and star, The Great Debaters, and Walden Media’s latest winning fantasy film, The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep.
Read “Mayhem, Manipulation, and Myth” — By Thomas S. Hibbs
Mysterious Encounters
By Michael Knox Beran
In a recent address to the bishops and priests of St. Peter’s, Pope Benedict called for a greater “continuity with tradition” in the music of the Church, and spoke of the value of the Church’s older musical traditions, among them the baroque sacred music of the 17th and 18th centuries and Gregorian Chant. The address followed the pope’s issuance, in July, of an Apostolic Letter (accompanying letter in English here) in which he permitted broader use of the Latin Mass, the “Tridentine” rite authorized by the Council of Trent in the sixteenth century and promulgated most recently by John XXIII in 1962.The pope’s pronouncements were received with skepticism by those who regard his views on sacred music, like his sympathy for the Latin Mass, as so much reactionary old-fogeyism. But neither the pope’s critics nor even many of his supporters appear to have grasped what His Holiness is up to.
Read “Mysterious Encounters” — By Michael Knox Beran
Aaron Sorkin Goes to War
By Peter Suderman
Charlie Wilson’s War, the new film from director Mike Nichols and West Wing creator Aaron Sorkin, begins in one of those cavernous military airplane hangars, the kind so gargantuan you feel like you can’t actually look all the way to the other side. Across the floor, the camera slowly glides toward Congressman Charlie Wilson (Tom Hanks), a Democrat from Texas, who is speaking from a portable stage. He’s just a speck in the center of the frame, but behind him hangs an enormous American flag, one whose presence dominates the room. It’s a striking image, and an apt one as well, the great big symbol and its tiny representative: Even as a congressman, he’s just a little man almost completely dwarfed both by his country and the ideas it stands for. It’s also a fitting picture of the film itself, a relatively small, and too often small-minded, movie that attempts to wrap its arms around a sizable chunk of America’s foreign-policy history. By the end of the film, Wilson has proven himself a rather savvy defender of what he sees as America’s ideals. Sorkin and Nichols, however, are less successful. Though intermittently amusing, War is unconvincing and largely superficial, marred by Sorkin’s various tics and hampered by the competing interests of public accessibility and political passion.
Read “Aaron Sorkin Goes to War” — By Peter Suderman
The Low Cost of High Price
By Shawn Macomber
Whatever other quibbles may be had with the off-Broadway musical Walmartopia, at $60 a ticket no one can reasonably accuse the show’s producers of engaging in what documentarian Robert Greenwald memorably decried in as “The High Cost of Low Price” in the subtitle of his 2005 Wal-Mart documentary.The “high cost” of Walmartopia, however, serves a purpose greater than simply establishing attendees’ ability to afford a keenly developed social consciousness along with their trips to the all-organic grocer. It also prices out anyone frugal or poor enough to actually shop at Wal-Mart, thereby ensuring a house filled with only those who harbor the same irrational, epicene fears as the show’s creators. There is no need, then, to ask the audience to suspend disbelief when Wal-Mart shoppers are depicted in Walmartopia as ill-mannered rednecks looking to buy ammo, Spam, and duct-tape. “We’re getting ready for the Rapture,” a wife coos as her husband spits on the floor. The audience giggles. This is conventional wisdom in these circles.
Read “The Low Cost of High Price” — By Shawn Macomber
Stunningly Silent
By Thomas S. Hibbs
N ietzsche once trenchantly quipped that “...our modern noisy, time-consuming industriousness, proud of itself, stupidly proud, educates and prepares people more than anything else does, precisely for unbelief.”The truth in that statement is perhaps never more on display than during the Christmas season. Slogans urging us to “keep Christ in Christmas,” or “recall the reason for the season,” sound about as hollow as the Christmas jingles that reverberate in our ears every time we enter a store. Those in search of an antidote might consider watching the newly released DVD Into Great Silence, Philip Groening’s movingly observed study of the daily lives of Carthusian monks at La Grande Chartreuse, founded in the French Alps in 1084. A prize winner at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival, the film has received universal acclaim for its minimalist style, its cinematography and especially its attentiveness to the spiritual dimension of existence to which the Carthusian life aspires. Given that contemporary entertainment fosters an attention deficit in all of us and that the film makes no effort to provide even the scaffolding of a plot, this is not, initially at least, an easy film to watch. But as it unfolds, the virtue of taking one’s time becomes evident. The virtue is most profoundly captured in one of the texts interspersed through the film: “Behold the silence that allows the Lord to speak a word in us: That He is.”
Read “Stunningly Silent” — By Thomas S. Hibbs
The Kite Runner Flies
By Rebecca Cusey
This weekend, a faithful adaptation of the Khaled Hosseini’s popular novel The Kite Runner, a story of betrayal and redemption in Afghanistan, flies into theaters. A distressing and uneven book creates a similar movie, but with enough cultural insight and redemption to be worthwhile to those wanting to interject a little social justice into their holidays.Told in long, subtitled flashback, the story follows Afghan immigrant Amir (Khalid Abdalla) as he adjusts to life in the United States and tries to make amends for a childhood betrayal that haunts him.
Read “The Kite Runner Flies” — By Rebecca Cusey
The Legend of Will Smith
By Peter Suderman
When it comes time to save the world from an inhuman menace, it seems the votes are in: Will Smith is our man. After fending off aliens in Men In Black and Independence Day, a giant mechanical spider in The Wild, Wild West, and scheming androids in I, Robot, Smith is back, once again, to save the planet (or at least what’s left of it) in I Am Legend. This time, he’s thwarting CGI vampire-zombies — gurgling, growling, vein-exposed post-humans who’ve been infected by a human-created virus and now feed off the living — who’ve taken over New York after most of mankind has died or been killed off. And, as with his previous outings as planetary hero, Smith proves himself a captivating action star, as well as a genuinely entertaining star, imbued with just the right blend of cockiness, quirkiness, and tenacity. He’s got the wisecracks, sure, and the gym-toned physique (which Legend gives him ample opportunity to show off), but he’s also refreshingly wholesome, as befitting the guy behind “Parents Just Don’t Understand.” Against all odds, he’s exactly the person you’d want to save the world. Who knew the Fresh Prince of Bel Air would make such a formidable foe to zombies, robots, and aliens alike?
Read “The Legend of Will Smith” — By Peter Suderman
|
|
|
|
