Category Archives: Art

UPDATED (8/8): Some Movies That Weather The Storms Of Time

Aesthetics, America, Art, Film, Technology

1 Reply

Movies this viewer can watch again and again every few years: “The Perfect Storm”: I keep hoping George Clooney will scale the Wave, as well as the film about the 50 Year Wave: “Point Break.” Jaws (1 & 2): great. Special effects were better then than today’s digital, computer-generated crap.

As to my kind of feelgood movies: Let us ready the great “Death Wish” series, featuring Charles Bronson as Paul Kersey the avenger. That crime-riddled reality is upon us again, in the USA.

Image

Image  Image

 

A true American movie classic, where values are solid, is “October Sky,” which “tells the story of four [striving] boys in a poverty-stricken corner of Appalachia.” Mining has always been the saddest story of male heroism.

Tell me about your favorites in the Comments Section below. We all agree that “Gone With the Wind” stands unbeaten—it also serves up better history than offered by court historian Doris Kearns Goodwin.

UPDATED (7/31): “The Perfect Storm Swallows Sailors”

UPDATED (8/8):

The Musical ‘HAIR’ Is Not Anti-White; IT’S Quintessentially WHITE And Western

Art, Culture, Film, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Music, Race, The West, War

In mentioning Milos Forman’s formidable musical in “The Kiss,” my latest column,” an Unz Review reader alleges I was promoting an anti-White film.

“Hair” is a magnificent antiwar movie, featuring Western ideas, music and dance at their most triumphant.  This musical is an achievement (and I don’t much like musicals).

Who do you think That War killed? Poor white boys (and millions of Vietnamese).

What kind of music does it feature? Quality Western music. Western dance at its best, too. (No matter the color of the choreographers, I see the great Martha Graham’s influence in there).

What kind of black-Americans does “Hair” the movie showcase? Blacks singing in the Western tradition, dancing in the same tradition (no twerking) and signing-up to the tradition of anti-state war protest.

What kind of Left was featured in “Hair”? The Old Left, the anti-war Left, before “liberal brains became pickled in the formaldehyde of wicked woke, identity politics.”

As I wrote, “At its most effective and substantive, the left once protested against gratuitous wars.” Now, “’the new liberal brand’ amounts to nothing more than ‘commodified and market-tested ‘diversity.’”

Hair is not anti-white; it instantiates Western culture in every respect.

UPDATED (5/26): March Of Mephisto By Kamelot (Music Is Male)

Art, Culture, Gender, Human Accomplishment, Music

It’s so obvious. Music is male. It was male when Johann Sebastian Bach was making it. And it was male until real men fell from favor and were replaced with prancing androgyny.
For the few progressive rockers remaining (check), here’s “March Of Mephisto” by Kamelot, which MUST be cranked-up:

RELATED: “Best Headbanger Ever: Simone Simons Sings ‘The Haunting’ By Kamelot”

UPDATE (5/26):
She forgot about #MeToo and #Masks and reacted like men and women once used to react to one another: naturally. Adorable.

NEW COLUMN: Kubrick’s ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ At 20 — Still Overrated Snoozer

Art, Celebrity, Culture, Film, Sex

In “Kubrick’s ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ At 20,” I revisit my original review of the classic cult film and come to that same conclusion, it’s an Still Overrated Snoozer. The column, “Was Kubrick’s Iconic ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ Ever Sexy?,” can be read on WND, Townhall.com Entertainment, and on The Unz Review, which now surpasses The New Republic and The Nation in traffic.

Excerpt:

Stanley Kubrick’s last film, “Eyes Wide Shut,” turned 20. I had reviewed it for a Canadian newspaper, on August 9, 1999, and found it not only pretentious and overrated, but quite a snooze.

This flick is the last in a series of stylized personal projects for which the director became known. Given the mystique Kubrick acquired or cultivated, this posthumous flop is unlikely to damage the legend.

For all the film’s textured detail, its yarn is threadbare and its subtext replete with clumsy symbolism. The screenplay consists of labored, repetitive and truncated dialogue, where every exchange involves protracted, pregnant stares and furrowed brows. “I am a doctor,” is Tom Cruise’s stock-in-trade phrase. An obscure, campy, hotel desk clerk delivers the only sterling performance. This is cold comfort considering the viewer is stuck with over two hours of Tom Cruise’s halfhearted libidinous quests.

“Eyes” is really a conventional morality play during which Cruise prowls the streets of New York in his seldom-removed undertaker’s overcoat, in search of relief for his sexual jealousy. Cruise’s jealousy is aroused by a fantasy his wife—played by then real-life wife Nicole Kidman—relays in a moment of spite, and involves her sexual desire for a naval officer she glimpsed while on holiday with their family. So strong was her passion, she tells Tom, that she would have abandoned all for this stranger.

The confession follows a society party the couple attends in which they both flirt unabashedly with others. Again, the sum total of the dialogue here consists in back-slapping guffaw-inducing genuflection to doctorness. We are treated to a grating peek at Kubrick’s view of the professional pecking order, a view which is reinforced when Cruise makes one of his house calls to a patient whose father has just died. The woman, body writhing like that of a snake in coitus—is this method acting?—throws herself at Cruise. Sex and death commingle in one of the many larded, symbolic moments in the film. The woman’s fiancé, the geek math professor, is depicted as a lesser mortal than the handsome doctor. ….

 

… READ THE REST. The column, “Was Kubrick’s Iconic ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ Ever Sexy?,” can be read on WND, Townhall.com Entertainment, and on The Unz Review.

* Image courtesy E-Online.