Category Archives: Film

Updated: DVD Distractions

I’ve been promising The Judge a list of reasonable DVD distractions.
We folks might not be able to afford a shopping trip to Paris, as the one Michelle Obama, the Royal Grandma and Girls took courtesy of the taxpayers, but we can all kick back with a reasonable film and some home-made popcorn, and try and forget our odious overlords for a short while.

Here are a few picks, ranked from best to worst.

1) “Doubt” with Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams. Excellent performances and a powerful lesson about gossip. I liked the analogy of a slashed feather cushion. The feathers fly away, irretrievable like gossip. I don’t know about Christianity, but a Jew is prohibited from bad-mouthing another. Of course, this is a sin we all commit.
I suspect the story was also meant to poke at the hierarchical structure of the Catholic Church. However, that minor folly can easily be ignored.

2) “Changelin.” With the edification of our friend Thomas Szasz, we covered the topic in a previous blog.

3) “Hard 8”: excellent acting. This 1996 film is a real old-school flick. The characters are well-developed, the plot unexpected, and an emphasis placed on what drives the protagonists. When I say the storyline was good, I mean this: Most film scripts these days offer such thin gruel for stories that, I don’t know about you, but by the time 10 minutes have passed, I’ve figured out the next 1.5 hours.

4) “Gone Baby Gone.”. A respectable directorial debut from Ben Affleck. More than respectable: this was a good, gripping story. It brought into sharp relief the damage self-righteous, know-it-all do-gooders can cause.

5) “The Stone Merchant”: Starring Harvey Keitel as an Italian convert to Islam for whom terrorism is a religious duty. This [is] a highly improbable tale, which also features F. Murray Abraham, Jordi Molla and Jane March.”
It’s barely passable.

6) “Rain.” An obviously obscure movie, since I am unable to find a trace of it online. And, no; it’s not this “Rain.” The “Rain” I saw was a torrid, Oedipal tale of a woman who kills her husband, and, unbeknown to her, has an affair with her … son. She resolves the latter conflict as ruthlessly as the former (husband). It’s well acted, but morbid.

7) “Lakeview Terrace“ with Samuel L. Jackson is poor, but even poorer is our #eight, “Righteous Kill.” Robert De Niro can do no wrong in my eyes: he’s always good. Al Pacino, on the other hand, is the most overrated actor living. He can’t act, even though he has had the benefit of good roles. He bellows and screams and gesticulates and annoys the hell out of me. But you may be more patient than I with Pacino’s once-you’ve-seen-one-you’ve-seen-’em-all performances. He gives me a fat headache. The script is weak too.

Have fun.

Update (June Eighth): I must have seen “October Sky” at the same time Dan did, and had the same thoughts he expresses hereunder. It’s a true story. I loved it so much, I looked-up the title and hero at the time. The young man went on to great achievements.
There is another fine film I stumbled on in the manner Dan described. It’s with Robert Redford as a frontier man; fabulous too. Anyone recall the title? In fact, I think the Judge will find the last two films mentioned the best of the bunch.

Updated: The More Things Change In Psychiatry, The More They Remain The Same

BAB's A List, Film, Hollywood, Pseudoscience, Psychiatry, The State

“Changeling,” directed by Clint Eastwood and starring Angelina Jolie, is a welcome surprise. I’ve never thought much of Jolie as an actress; she emotes on stage more than she does as an activist. But she may be maturing into a good performer. Jolie captures the character and the period extremely well and doesn’t overact, or introduce “You Go Girl” elements into this period piece (Los Angeles circa 1928). In short, Jolie is very good as a fragile, single mother who goes up against the profession that has always operated hand-in-glove with the state: psychiatry in all its corrupt permutations.

I am hoping to reproduce for you, on Barely a Blog, a piece BAB A-Lister Thomas Szasz wrote about the film.

Update: As promised:

The Therapeutic State
Psychiatry: The Shame of Medicine
by Thomas Szasz

The practice of medicine rests on cooperation and the ethical-legal premise that treatment is justified by the patient’s consent, not his illness. In contrast, the practice of psychiatry rests on coercion and the ethical-legal premise that treatment is justified by the mental illness attributed to the patient and must be “provided” regardless of whether the patient consents or not. How do physicians, medical ethicists, and the legal system reconcile the routine use of involuntary psychiatric interventions with the basic moral rule of medicine, “Primum non nocere,” a Latin phrase meaning “First do no harm”?

The answer is: by the medicalization of conflict as disease, and coercion as treatment. Carl Wernicke (1848-1905), one of founders of modern neuropathology, observed, “The medical treatment of [mental] patients began with the infringement of their personal freedom.” Today, it is psychiatric heresy to note, much less emphasize, that psychiatry-as-coercion is an arm of the punitive apparatus of the state. Absent the coercive promise and power of mental health laws, psychiatry as we know it would disappear.

Ever since its beginning approximately 300 years ago, psychiatry’s basic function has been the restraint and punishment of troublesome individuals justified as hospitalization and medical care. For two centuries, all psychiatry was involuntary psychiatry. A little more than 100 years ago individuals began to seek psychiatric help for their own problems. As a result, the psychiatrist became a full-fledged double agent and psychiatry a trap. The film “Changeling”–written by J. Michael Straczynski and directed by Clint Eastwood–is a current example.

The story, set in Los Angeles in 1928, is said to be the “true story” of a woman, Christine Collins, whose son, Walter, is kidnapped. The police are corrupt, and little effort is made to find Walter. Months pass. To repair its damaged image, the police decide to stage a reunion between an abandoned youngster pretending to be Walter and his mother, played by Angelina Jolie. Unsurprisingly, she realizes that the fake Walter is not her son. After confronting the police and city authorities, she is vilified as an unfit mother, branded delusional, and incarcerated in a “psychopathic ward,” where she is subjected to the brutalities of sadistic psychiatrists and nurses, and watches fellow victims being punished by electric shock treatment–ten years before its invention. So much for the truth of the story.

Clueless about the true nature of the psychiatric terrorization to which the Jolie character is subjected, film critic Kirk Honeycutt praises Clint Eastwood who “again brilliantly portrays the struggle of the outsider against a fraudulent system. . . . ‘Changeling’ brushes away the romantic notion of a more innocent time to reveal a Los Angeles circa 1928 awash in corruption and steeped in a culture that treats women as hysterical and unreliable beings when they challenge male wisdom.’”

The Jolie character does not simply challenge “male wisdom.” Instead, her actions illustrate the insight of the Hungarian proverb, “It is dangerous to be wrong but fatal to be right.” The psychiatrist as brutal agent of the state enters the story only after the mother proves–by securing the testimony of her son’s teacher and dentist–that “Walter” is an impostor. The psychiatrically incarcerated individual’s greatest crime–for which psychiatrists cannot forgive her–is that she is innocent of lawbreaking and objects to being deprived of liberty.

Psychiatric coercion is medicalized terrorism. So-called critics of psychiatry–who often fail or refuse to distinguish coerced from contractual psychiatry–are unable or unwilling to acknowledge this disturbing truth. As a result, the more things change in psychiatry, the more they remain the same, as the following conveniently forgotten example illustrates.

On May 21, 1839, Elizabeth Parsons Ware (1816-1897) married the Reverend Theophilus Packard. The couple and their six children resided in Kankakee County, Illinois. After years of marriage, Mrs. Packard began to question her husband’s religious and pro-slavery beliefs and express opinions contrary to his. In 1860 Mr. Packard decided that his wife was insane and proceeded to have her committed. She learned of this decision on June 18, 1860, when the county sheriff arrived at the Packard home to take her into custody. The law at the time stated that married women “may be entered or detained in the hospital [the Jacksonville State Insane Asylum] at the request of the husband of the woman or the guardian . . . without the evidence of insanity required in other cases.”

Mrs. Packard spent the next three years in the Asylum. In 1863, due largely to pressure from her children who wished her released, the doctors declared her incurable and released her. Mrs. Packard stayed close to her children, retained their support, founded the Anti-Insane Asylum Society, and published several books, including Marital Power Exemplified, or Three Years Imprisonment for Religious Belief (1864) and The Prisoners’ Hidden Life, Or Insane Asylums Unveiled (1868).

The Beginning, Not the End
Little did Mrs. Packard realize that she was living at the beginning, not the end, of the Psychiatric Inquisition. Today, “inquiry” into the minds of unwanted others is a pseudoscientific racket supported by the therapeutic state. Millions of school children, old people in nursing homes, and persons detained in prisons are persecuted with psychiatric diagnoses and punished with psychiatric treatments. Nor is that all. Untold numbers of Americans are now psychiatric parolees, sentenced by judges–playing doctors–to submit to psychiatric treatment as so-called outpatients, or face incarceration and forced treatment as inpatients.

The subtext of films such as “Changeling” is always subtle psychiatric propaganda seeking to make people believe they are witnessing past “psychiatric abuses.” The truth is that every new psychiatric policy or practice labeled an “advance” is a step toward making psychiatric deception and brutalization more legal and more difficult for the victim to resist. As I write this column, I learn from an “antipsychiatry” website that a man named Ray Sandford is being subjected to court-ordered outpatient electroshock treatment.
“Each and every Wednesday, early in the morning, staff shows up at Ray’s sheltered living home called Victory House in Columbia Heights, Minnesota, adjacent to Minneapolis. Staff escorts Ray the 15 miles to Mercy Hospital. There, Ray is given another of his weekly electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) treatments, also known as electroshock. All against his will. On an outpatient basis. And it’s been going on for months.”

As the forced psychiatric treatment of competent adults living in their own homes becomes the “standard of medical practice,” the failure to provide such betrayal and brutality becomes medical malpractice. In a democracy people are said to get the kind of government they deserve. In a pharmacracy they get the kind of psychiatry they deserve.

Thomas Szasz (tszasz@aol.com) is professor of psychiatry emeritus at SUNY Upstate Medical University in Syracuse. His latest books, both from Syracuse University Press, are The Medicalization of Everyday Life: Selected Essays and Psychiatry, The Science of Lies.

Update III: A Cow Is Born (About The Title)

America, Ann Coulter, Film, Intelligence, John McCain, Pop-Culture, Relatives, The Zeitgeist

“Ann Coulter could have easily dispatched of the ding-dong, as she did Keith Olbermann. A couple of masterful syllogisms mixed in with a few devastating facts, and that would be it. Alas, by denying Meghan McCain the satisfaction, Annie Orkin has left us with a pest-control problem.”

The excerpt is from “A Cow Is Born,” my latest WND column. You can catch it now on Taki’s Magazine, where the weekly column appears each Saturday. The current column is titled deliciously, “Media Discovers Woman Even Dumber Than John McCain.” Here’s more:

“… Just as you thought American pop-politics could go no lower, a woman with real curb appeal appears on the political scene. Meghan McCain might just be the greatest ditz to date to emerge from that big tent Republicans keep touting.

… Ms. McCain is not working with much—and is eminently qualified to dim debate in the Age of the Idiot. …

Yes, idiots have come into their own in a big way, courtesy of depraved consumers, and complicit TV producers and publishers, of pixel and paper alike. The duller you are and the louder you crow in contemporary America, the better you do. …

The housing house-of-cards was not the only ‘bubble in search of a pin’ in the modern-day USA. The intellectual bubble is also begging to be burst.

As for Republicans, if they don’t stop their love affair with idiots, it’s not a bigger tent they’ll be seeking, but a giant tin-foil hat.”

Read the complete column, “Media Discovers Woman Even Dumber Than John McCain,” now on Taki’s.

Update I (May 8): ABOUT THE WND TITLE. The original column came with an asterisk near the title and the following explanation and link:

*Title: “A Star Is Born” was a 1976 film starring Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson, about a love affair between two rock stars; one a has-been, the other a wanna-be.

Ira, a reader (and BAB resident composer), was the only one to date who was familiar with the reference. I see that Free Republic has a lengthy thread about the title, asserting that the reference is to the heft of the heifer discussed.

An email to me would have clarified the matter, but, hey, this is the Age of the idiot. Complete knowledge is assumed. Conjecture soon morphs into assertion and certainty, and no one is the wiser. Curiosity can kill.

Incidentally, I owe the Age of the Idiot concept to my father, Rabbi Ben Isaacson. He truly captured the Zeitgeist with that one.

Update II: My dear WND editor added the original asterisked title explanation. I’ll have to avoid esoterica; it dates me. My editor at Taki’s simply chose to improve the title. Good call.

Oscar Offal

Aesthetics, Film, Hollywood, Pop-Culture, The Zeitgeist

I haven’t seen any one of the films nominated, so I’ll withhold judgment. I’m curious about what appears outwardly to be a thriller, “No Country for Old Men.” Although it’s not impossible, knowing Hollywood’s devotion to the Goddess Gaia, that it’s a disguised message about global warming.

I’m certainly not likely to put myself through a “sensitive” flick that deals with teen turmoil. “Juno” was written by Hollywood’s latest IT girl. You know Diablo Cody is an authentic individualist, at least as defined by Hollywood hollow heads and public school pedagogues. Her “originality” is evident from her outré sense of dress, tattoos, and the knack for spluttering mind-numbing clichés. She also speaks in that Anna-Marie-Cox (Wonkette) inflection used in commercials directed at the cool crowd that reads the New York Times.

Marion Cotillard: a delightful French singer/actress who portrayed Edith Piaf in “La Vie En Rose.” Not my idea of a fun film, but the lady was delightful and was dressed ever-so elegantly. How long before she gets skankified? Make haste, Marion, go back to France.

All the hype about red gowns, notwithstanding, no one but Heidi Klum can carry off bright red. Klum is indeed a ravishing beauty, but she’s looking like a “Muselmann”—her total weight must equal the weight of her bones.

Cameron Diaz: The John Galliano frock did not finesse those flat, coarse features and thick leathery skin. All in all, the off-the-shoulder look requires perfect neck-jaw-bosom line. Although I don’t much care for Cruz, Penélope’s off-the-shoulder black number did it for me; she looked lovely. The dress didn’t plunge, but had been softened with a few fluffy plumes. Bedsides which she has the slight build to pull it off.

I am none the wiser about the silly, slushy movie “Enchanted” and its stars, but I’ll say this much about Amy Adams, who ever she is: The reddish locks, white flawless skin, and greed gown made for a beguiling blend.

Not well turned-out was Daniel Day-Lewis in gold pirate earring and a carefully disheveled coiffe. He is compared to Robert De Niro, but the latter is as manly as you get. A good actor too.

This here is a photo of a very great beauty. Here Julie Christie is again. This here is a photo of someone who is not a great beauty: The large, manly, expanses of forehead, the stupid smile, and the less-than-chiseled jaw. The eyes are more cow-like than captivating. It’s fine to find this common Hispanic look attractive, but it isn’t beautiful.

America’s idea of beauty now resembles its idea of good food; cheap and nasty.

The less said about Nicole Kidman the better. I liked her when her hair flowed in red ringlets, her blue eyes pierced, and her lips were thin. I tried to locate photos of Kidman before her make-over, but my PC was mysteriously assailed, and, subsequently crashed. Seriously, it’s impossible to find old images of the woman on the Internet. Oh, here are some from Malice.

Her acting too has become awfully affectatious. I watched Kidman in “Birth” (on TV; I’d never pay to see that bit of torture) with the fascination with which you’d watch maggots crawl in and out a CSI corpse. She was repulsive: she must have just had her mouth inflated, because she wouldn’t stop working it—the drooling thing assumed a life of its own. The object of her spittle was a ten year old boy—yeah, I know.

Lastly, Jon Stewart was rather weak.