Category Archives: Hollywood

Hollywood’s Constant Kvetching

Hollywood

Never again will I be seduced by The New York Review of Books’ professional rates. The Review is an ideological rag; it’s in the pamphleteering business, there to promote a left-liberal political perspective. It offers obtuse critiques of books and art, ever tethered to politics.
Not so the rigorous and generally apolitical Times Literary Supplement. Here’s an appropriately cynical sampler from the TLS. It’s Keith Miller’s review of The Constant Gardener, for which Rachel Weisz won an Oscar:

[I]f you, too, believe that Rachel Weisz can a carry a movie, then The Constant Gardener is for you…
A giant corporation has been testing its wares on desperate locals, drowning in want, and in many cases already dying of AIDS. Since [Weisz’s] idea of deep cover is tying a succession of brightly colored cloths around her ala Lady Hesther Stanhope (to the delight and gratitude of the natives), and loudly barracking corrupt officials at parties, it is not long before the forces of darkness realize she is on their trail, and violence inevitably follows…
There is little or no moral ambiguity… All the colonials are bad, except our hero and heroine. All the black Africans are good, except one token despot glimpsed at a party, and several anonymous machete-wielding thugs whose badness is made to seem conveniently elemental.

Hollywood's Constant Kvetching

Hollywood

Never again will I be seduced by The New York Review of Books’ professional rates. The Review is an ideological rag; it’s in the pamphleteering business, there to promote a left-liberal political perspective. It offers obtuse critiques of books and art, ever tethered to politics.
Not so the rigorous and generally apolitical Times Literary Supplement. Here’s an appropriately cynical sampler from the TLS. It’s Keith Miller’s review of The Constant Gardener, for which Rachel Weisz won an Oscar:

[I]f you, too, believe that Rachel Weisz can a carry a movie, then The Constant Gardener is for you…
A giant corporation has been testing its wares on desperate locals, drowning in want, and in many cases already dying of AIDS. Since [Weisz’s] idea of deep cover is tying a succession of brightly colored cloths around her ala Lady Hesther Stanhope (to the delight and gratitude of the natives), and loudly barracking corrupt officials at parties, it is not long before the forces of darkness realize she is on their trail, and violence inevitably follows…
There is little or no moral ambiguity… All the colonials are bad, except our hero and heroine. All the black Africans are good, except one token despot glimpsed at a party, and several anonymous machete-wielding thugs whose badness is made to seem conveniently elemental.

Cruise And The Psychiatric Shamans

Celebrity, Hollywood, Pseudoscience, Psychiatry, Reason, Science, The Therapuetic State

The psychiatric peanut gallery has blasted actor Tom Cruise for insisting correctly that there’s more voodoo to the profession than veracity. Cruise’s instincts are good: “Psychiatrists don’t have a test that can prove that a so-called mental illness is actually organic in origin, I wrote. Rigorous clinician —members of the Society for a Science of Clinical Psychology come to mind —concede that drawing causal connections between “mental illness” and “chemical imbalances” is impossible. That prescription medication often helps misbehaved or unhappy individuals is no proof that strange behavior is an organic disease —placebos or cognitive-behavioral therapy, for example, are as effective.

The shameful shamans depend for their livelihood on diseasing every aspect of behavior (and especially bad behavior). And they evince no qualms about “junking free will, responsibility, and agency for an unproven biological determinism, riddled with logical, factual, and moral infelicities. Cruise, of course, is not the most eloquent spokesman. Actress Kelly Preston is. Her arguments against Ritalin are lucid.

Male biopsychology has been demonized in the schools. As I explained in Broad Sides, boys are boisterous. They are also “naturally predisposed to competition. But a “progressive,” public-school system, populated by female feminists, forces boys to conform to the feminist consensus about appropriate male behavior. One consequence of the last is that instead of challenging, disciplining, and harnessing their energies, boys are often medicated with Ritalin. Cruise, however, ought to have arrived at his perspective not via Scientology, but by studying the works of Thomas S. Szasz, MD, the genius who delivered the deductive death knell to the psychiatric house of cards.