Enjoying the view from Limbo
Having now seen part of one of the trailers for Ridley Scott’s “epic” “historical” “biopic” Napoleon, and having been urged by no one to divulge my own impressions of this important cinematic event (i.e., box office smash), I feel that it is time at last to add my two cents — more than I would waste on watching a modern Hollywood movie —...
Can someone tell me why a Hollywood biopic (an “epic,” as they say) about Napoleon would be relevant to a culture in which ninety-seven percent of the population would not know what country Napoleon was from, when he lived, what he is famous for, and what significance his life and actions had for future generations of thinkers and statesmen? Or why a man...
Denzel Washington, who outdid himself at the Academy Awards in his career-defining performance as a fake mediator between an unprovoked assailant and his victim, and then as a fake crier in sympathy with Will Smith’s temptation by the devil — who, he supposedly told Smith with fake sagacity, “comes for you” at your highest moment — has now attempted to take the most...
Random musings on the piddling celebrity ugliness of Will Smith slapping Chris Rock during the Academy Awards show: What a wonderful distraction this has made for people who thought the invasion of Ukraine was great fun until it started to look like an actual war, rather than one of those tasty crisis-of-the-week things that, when the dust settles, dutifully leaves everything that matters...
Allow me to state the main conclusions of this essay right up front: I would not care if I never saw another Hollywood movie or television program as long as I lived. I do not think there is a single actor or director in Hollywood today who has enough intelligence or artistic talent to justify my spending thirty minutes or more of my...
I am not a collectivist. Nor am I in the least bit inclined, either by philosophic temperament or by close observation of current civilizational trends, to believe that there are very many lives today — black, white, yellow, or mauve — that “matter” in the big scheme of things. In any case, those lives which do matter will always be the lives of...
Sunday night, during the Golden Globules of Self-Righteousness Awards ceremony, Oprah Winfrey received this year’s Clooney Prize, for rousing the emotions, and even presidential fantasies, of hundreds of her fellow Hollywood enablers, thousands of her fellow public purveyors of pop-pornography, and millions of people around the world who always conveniently assume their overflowing toilet must have been clogged by someone else. Winfrey’s speech...
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