Film
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Mud (again)
[I posted this thought piece on the film Mud in June when it was in the theaters, but since the movie is out in DVD now, I thought I'd post it again. It might help those of you puzzled about what that post about Mandela and Che was all about–this angel/imp, Huck/Tom polarity is for
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It Is Futile to Reason with Them
From "Misreading Eichmann in Jerusalem" by Roger Berkowitz in yesterday's NYT: That evil, Arendt argued, originates in the neediness of lonely, alienated bourgeois people who live lives so devoid of higher meaning that they give themselves fully to movements. It is the meaning Eichmann finds as part of the Nazi movement that leads him to do anything
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The Limits of Authenticity
Simon Critchley in a recent NYT piece: Unlike the conversions that transfigure the born-again’s experience of the world in a lightning strike, this one occurred in stages: a postwar existentialist philosophy of personal liberation and “becoming who you are” fed into a 1960s counterculture that mutated into the most selfish conformism, disguising acquisitiveness under a
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Mud
I saw Jeff Nichols' film Mud last night, and it's one of those couple-of-times-a-year movies you wake up the next morning with on your mind. It's very, very rich. This movie asks important questions about love and truth, about the truth of youthful idealism, and its fierceness in a spirited, young soul, and also about its limits, its
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Being in the Grip of Compulsions We Don’t Understand
I have been getting this feeling lately about the big historical sweep of things and of our individual seemingly insignificant part to play in it. It’s a feeling of how mostly things don’t change, and yet how they do, how greed and powerlust seem to be in the driver’s seat, and yet that they are
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Les Miserables, Lincoln, Zero Dark Thirty, et al.
I wanted to like Les Miserables because I am so sympathetic to the underlying Christian mythos of the original Hugo story, but it took all my control to stay in the theater after about a half hour of this musical version of it. This film lacked emotional texture. It was the same song over and
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The Corporate Empire State 1
I've just started rewatching the Star Wars trilogy. I can't say that I was ever much of a fan–I could never get past the dreadful acting, stilted dialogue, and the cheesy costumes. And I have always been surprised when people I respect praised it. Joseph Campbell was a fan, and I respect a guy like
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“Inception”, “Solaris”, and the Unconscious
In the past week I've watched both Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris and Christopher Nolan's Inception. Both in very different ways try to grapple with the question: What is the human unconscious? First, a little riff on that question, and then maybe I'll get around to the movies. We all heard when we were children that that the human brain
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How Far We’ve Come since 1940
In greed and meanness, that is. This speech might be full of cliches, but it envisions a cliche world I wouldn't mind to live in. Charlie Chaplin in The Great Dictator
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We’re All Pottervilleans; We Always Were
I'm up early this Christmas morning waiting for my sleep-deprived family to wake up and came across this article by Rich Cohen in Salon. He has a somewhat different but I think intriguing angle on Capra's famous Christmas film. The idea that It's a Wonderful Life is sentimental swill is nonsense according to Cohen–the real