printNever 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.