Film Archives
July 17, 2007
The strange decline of privacy.
It is not obvious that true privacy in our day will endure the ministrations of its narrow partisans. There is a bizarre sort of double pressure on the idea of privacy right now: a simultaneous exaggeration and diminution. Its deterioration as a firm principle of life proceeds at once with the most horse and desperate cries in its defense; almost as if a howling mob of revolutionists, their hands bloodied from the work of expropriating and uprooting, now turn around and with all the sincerity of madmen, demand that their appointed despots reinstate Tradition, so that they may live by the simple customs and prejudices by which simple men lived before the Revolution. It is like the most ferocious Jacobin turning monarchist just as the guillotine’s blade falls on the King; and stridently claiming he was monarchist all along. It has an air about it, undoubtedly inspiring a certain human sympathy, of furtive penitence; perhaps it is the confession of faithless men. In any event, it is an intriguing phenomenon.
August 5, 2007
Mysteries of Conservatism, Item 794
In an otherwise excellent review of the latest installment of the Bourne franchise, Peter Suderman, amidst discussions of character development and depth, and the mirroring of content in cinematic form, throws out this baffler concerning the politics of the flick:
Greengrass tries to supplant Bourne’s emotional blankness with some fairly obvious and simplistic liberal politics at the end. Most of these bits, though, seem thin, even desperate, groping for something the series hasn’t earned rather than letting its cool, detached brutality speak for itself. And really, is there any need to spell it all out? It’s always been plain to see that Bourne was what Nathan Lee smartly calls “action hero as blowback.”
The mystery in this concerns what, specifically, is supposed to be liberal - understood as antipodal from conservatism - in the "blowback" thesis. Professed liberals may discuss the thesis and instances thereof, and may even write books on it; conservatives may discuss various theories of interventionism, and may even pen tomes on it, but this does not make interventionism any more conservative than it has been liberal and progressive. In fact, the blowback thesis is really nothing more than a particular formulation of the law of unintended consequences: America, or any other power, does X in order to achieve Y, where doing X has consequence (whether foreseeable or not) Z (regardless of whether Y is attained), and Z returns upon America (or other power) in way B. Now, liberals, or those identified as liberals because they have dissented from recent American foreign policy decisions, may argue that American involvement in this or that nation of Western Asia has resulted in blowback, but this is properly a matter of historical fact. Unless the facts themselves are liberal (which might explain recent conservative aversions to them), it is difficult to perceive how an argument about an alleged case of blowback is liberal.
December 28, 2007
Film review: The Kingdom
The Kingdom is a noteworthy film for several reasons. First and foremost, its depiction of Islamic terrorism is about as clearheaded as anything I’ve seen out of Hollywood. The bad guys are Muslims acting as Muslims, and there is hardly even a gesture toward “religion of peace” or “perversion of a great religion” sophistry. To be sure, the film makes no real attempt to examine the ineradicably Islamic character of the Jihad, exhibits little curiosity about the whole sanguinary tradition of holy war: but that is just as well, as most Hollywood curiosity along these lines descends rapidly into sentimentalism, illusion, or bewilderment.
Secondly, it is noteworthy for several masterful action sequences, culminating in a rolling firefight that moves from street to cramped apartment complex, which frankly left this viewer breathless.
Finally, the film is noteworthy for the surprising preeminence achieved by an unlikely character: a Saudi police colonel (played by a newcomer named Ashraf Barhom) who begins as the babysitter for a team of FBI agents investigating a series of attacks on Westerners in Saudi Arabia, and ends their comrade-at-arms. This guy steals the show.
The film is not without flaws. It’s pacing is ineffective at times. The plot is pedestrian. The brief denouement seems exceptionally forced, as if the filmmakers just tacked it on at post-production. Stars Jamie Foxx and Jennifer Garner manage only mediocre portrayals of their characters. But the finely-rendered action, the firm resistance to PC nonsense on Islam, and the unexpected brilliance of Mr. Barhom, make it, in my judgment, a worthwhile movie.