Gone Away to Another Place

Hi there, readers (yes, all three of you). From now until Reihan regains his senses, I'll be blogging with about half the rest of the blogosphere over at the new and extremely spiffy American Scene. (My first post is up now.)

I can't promise I won't post here again, but I also won't promise that I will. In all likelihood, I'll randomly, irregularly post things that I don't really want to discard entirely but don't really want read either. And then, eventually, I'll just turn this into a portfolio or list of publications or something self-obsessed and American and internety like that. So flock toward the new URL, dear readers, and enjoy the many rhetorical wares being peddled--or, perhaps more accurately, scattered with reckless abandon--there. Bless this lively new internet group home with your traffic and comments. Thanks for reading, even if it was just a result of accidentally stumbling upon this URL (likely, I suspect). It's been fun! Now the party continues elsewhere.

AFF Radio

I'm on AFF's Inside Washington Weekly podcast talking about various events in the news this week. I've joined a regular panel and will be on the show every four weeks or so.

Fido Review at NRO

I've got a review of Fido at NRO today. I know fanboy love is with this one, but I wasn't impressed.

...Like Edward Scissorhands, Fido sees itself as suburban social satire. But who, outside the mansion-lined streets of ritzy Hollywood communities, really wants yet another movie decrying the soul-crushing conformity of suburbia? Yes, the Sopranos had an original take on the topic, but for the most part, it’s a genre that, like the residents of Willard, deserves to stay dead. Fido, though, rolls out every suburban-hell cliché in the community owner’s guide: the homes all look alike, strivers and social climbers derive status from acts of ostentatious conformity, and everyone pretends to be happy to hide frustration and dissatisfaction. Can I get a big, undead grooaaaan? Curry has simply given us a brightly colored, zombiefied American Beauty; wake me when David Lynch decides to make Blue Velvet II.

Me on the FCC

I've got a short piece on the court's rebuke of the FCC's indecency calls against Fox in today's NRO.

“I cuss, you cuss, we all cuss for asparagus.” Now, thanks to a decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals, we’ll all be able to do so on network television. Last week, the court took a look at an indecency charge leveled by the FCC against Fox for on-air profanity and said, roughly, “To heck with that!”

I Always Cry at Endings

The Sopranos ends its six-season run this Sunday night. It's a great show on numerous levels--the rare entertainment that is popular, critically acclaimed, and recognized as a lasting classic in its own time--and scholars of television, drama, and pop culture will almost certainly devote thousands of pages to reexamining the show over the next few decades. There's undoubtedly a lot to the series, but a crucial point that's I think has been somewhat overlooked is... well, to find out, you'll have to pick up the new issue of National Review. Although, if you do, I have to ask: Why aren't you a subscriber already?

Flock of...

I've got a piece on the much-acclaimed, long-held-from-release Killer of Sheep in The Washington Times. I probably lose all sorts of film crit and geek cred for this, but I just wasn't all that awed. I saw it twice, and though I liked it better the second time, both viewings I kept on thinking, "Well, I suppose I could come up with all sorts of lofty-sounding pablum for why this is some sort of masterpiece -- hailing it for its realism, its resistance to narrative convention, its documentary grit, its debt to the Italian neorealists -- but that's just not what I'm actually seeing." I sort of wonder if there were other critics who saw it and made the other choice.

Me on the G.I. Film Festival

Because you really wanted to read more articles by me this week (this is four now that I've posted, I think)... I've got a piece on my Memorial Day weekend trip to the G.I. Film Festival in D.C. Here's the opening:

“Support the troops!” It was an exclamation you couldn’t miss this weekend at the first-ever G.I. Film Festival. It was everywhere: on bumper stickers, in conversations, on stage, and on screen.

It became the weekend’s all-purpose response, like saying “Jesus” at vacation Bible school. What are you here to do? Support the troops! Are you enjoying the festival so far? Yes. It supports the troops! What’d you eat for breakfast this morning? Bacon and eggs. Did I mention I support the troops? Eventually I simply started writing “STT!” in my notes every time it came up. There were variations, of course: giving back to those who serve, respecting the men and women in uniform, and, from the festival’s official statement of purpose, celebrating “the successes and sacrifices of the American military through the medium of film.” In fact, festival cofounder Brandon Millett told me that the idea for the weekend came as a reaction to an Los Angeles Times column in which Joel Stein wrote, “I don’t support the troops.”

This, then, was an appropriately powerful, American-military-style response: Joel Stein wrote a single line in a single column; he got a 22-film, three-and-a-half day festival in return. How’s that for U.S.-military might? From Friday evening through Monday night at the Ronald Reagan International Trade Center in downtown Washington, D.C., the troops were supported — and supported and supported and supported. And whether you were watching movies, singing songs, or meeting the many “special guests” it was, at all times, earnest, sincere, and proudly patriotic, whether in the screening room or outside of it.

Whole thing here.

Movies!

Over at NRO, I've got a review of a couple of movies I saw at the G.I. Film Fest this weekend. I've got about a zillion and a half (roughly) articles to write in the next week or so, but I promise I will shortly return to regular blogging/boring you to death with vapid posts about giant robots and long-winded discussions of George Lucas. Honest. I swear.

Addendum: I also have a slightly longer piece on surveillance technology in 24 and The Wire in the new issue of The New Atlantis, which is now online. Starters:

Two hit television dramas exhibit the complex human response to technological surveillance: 24 and The Wire. Both shows shed light on the growing societal awe of surveillance technology while also reflecting our fear and uncertainty about our ability to master it. Although surveillance technology dominates the worlds of both shows—24’s built-up city of Los Angeles and The Wire’s decaying Baltimore slums—the shows’ overarching attitudes towards surveillance differ greatly. Fox’s 24 bows in awe of the omnipotence and omnipresence of satellites and fiber optics, while HBO’s The Wire regards phone taps and recording devices suspiciously, as flawed tools that reveal the corrupt nature of bureaucracy and are, at best, necessary evils. Thus, the difference between the two shows is one of belief: one’s view of surveillance technology is based in faith, the other’s in doubt.

Ron Paul piece at NRO

I've got a piece on Ron Paul up at NRO today. Internet Paulites (is there a nickname for the die hard web Paul fans yet?) commence swarming... now.

Update: I see that I'm getting a lot of hits from Facebook, and that at least one person has written that I "actually want to be swarmed." Well, I mean, I know that's what I wrote, but I was at least a little bit kidding. From talking to some other journalists, I'd sort of been under the impression that anyone who wrote anything about Paul automatically got a dump truck full of email delivered 15 minutes after the piece went live. So I figured I'd just pull the starting gun myself.

That said, I encourage email, comments, etc. and certainly won't argue if anyone links to this site.

Day Night Day Night

I've got a review of Day Night Day Night, the new low budget indie terror flick, up at NRO today.

Julia Loktev’s debut film, Day Night Day Night, about a female suicide bomber who sets out for Times Square, is the type that critics love to praise for “possessing an artful ambiguity” and “resisting easy answers.” And when they do, they’ll be right, except that Loktev’s film, for all its art-school bravado and post-modern elusiveness, never gets around to asking very tough or very interesting questions. Day Night is concerned only with terrorism at its most quotidian and banal, willing only to explore the personal at the total expense of the political. It may be the first movie about a terrorist that doesn’t care about terrorism.

Spider-Man 3 Review

My review of Spider-Man 3 is up at NRO:

In Spider-Man 3, director and co-writer Sam Raimi seems to have taken the line from the franchise's old theme song — does whatever a spider can — to heart. He's got Spidey doing practically everything, mixed up in a massively tangled web of plots, subplots, and back-story revisionism that threatens to crash under its own weight. But like the Webslinger himself, Raimi's direction is nimble enough to dart through the mess he's created and end up, if not entirely unscathed, pretty well-off. Spider-Man 3 swings both high and low, and though it isn't always as graceful as its predecessors, it always stays up in the air.

To enter into the world of Spider-Man is to enter into a four-color fantasy realm culled from the pages of comic books. In it, every building in New York is a skyscraper, newspapermen are all gruff and pitiless cigar-chompers, criminals running from the police encounter chain-link fences with signs that read, "DANGER: Particle Physics Laboratory," and shy nerds can slip into brightly colored underwear and save the world. Females are strange and mysterious, parental figures have all the wisdom, and day-to-day existence is marked primarily by high-flying adventure and everyday troubles. It's adult life as simplified and romanticized by 14-year-old boys everywhere. Which means that, done right, it can be a lot of fun.

"Gaming the System" at NRO

I've got a piece on a proposal to regulate the video game industry's rating system over at NRO today. Not surprisingly, I'm skeptical:

Video gamers everywhere get a thrill out of manipulating imaginary characters with their game controllers. Sometimes, though, it seems as if politicians are just as thrilled to get their hands on the video-game industry’s regulatory controls. Since 1993, when the game Mortal Kombat was denounced in Congress by Joe Lieberman, the industry has been subject to repeated political attacks. In the wake of the Virginia Tech shootings, then, it’s hardly surprising that, as pundits and ideologues of all stripes shifted blame to their favorite targets in order to support their pet policy initiatives, video games made the list. On MSNBC’s Hardball recently, longtime video-game opponent Jack Thompson insisted that, despite roommates claiming never to have seen the killer playing games, the killings must have motivated by game playing.

But, like an in-game damage meter during a blistering video-game attack, the pressure was already building. Just a few days before the Virginia Tech rampage, the FTC released a report noting that the game industry’s rating system is increasingly effective, but still recommended a universal rating system and more prominent display of ratings information. And at least one congressman already had a bill dealing with game ratings in the works.

Earlier this spring, Rep. Fred Upton (R., Mich.) introduced the Video Game Decency Act, a law which would give the FTC the power to oversee privately run video-game ratings systems. The law would make it illegal for video-game companies to mislead private ratings boards — specifically the Entertainment Software Ratings Board (ESRB), which currently rates most major video-game releases — in order to obtain a less restrictive rating. Anyone who’s ever seen a legislator put on his Serious Face and talk about video games before can guess that the underlying reasoning had something to with, yep, “For The Children.” The Children, of course, can’t vote, so “For The Children” usually means “For The Parents,” and in this case, Upton made that explicit. “Parents across the country will be able to breathe a sigh of relief,” he said in a statement, “as this legislation goes hand in hand with the mission of the industry’s own ratings system.”

Whole thing here.

Fracture Review

I've got a review of the new Anthony Hopkins thriller up at NRO today:

In the courtroom thriller Fracture, Anthony Hopkins stars as an engineer with a gift for finding a structure’s tiniest, most difficult-to-spot weak points. You don’t need to be much of expert in anything, though, to see the myriad flaws in the movie. Smart thrillers are all about carefully constructed story, and this one is built about as solidly as a North Korean skyscraper — it’s a wonder it manages to hold up at all.

Read the whole thing.

Me VS. Nine Inch Nails

I'm probably the first conservative pundit ever to have something positive to say about Nine Inch Nails -- but of course, not too positive.

What to make of Trent Reznor?

Since the release of "Pretty Hate Machine" in 1989, Mr. Reznor, the frontman and creative force behind the gloomy techno-rock outfit Nine Inch Nails, has raised hell with parents by serving as an icon to sullen teenagers whose taste in clothes runs to black, black and more black.

With his virulent, profanity-laced tirades against Christianity, suburban conformity and whatever else irritates teen outcasts at any given moment, he has become an established voice of rage for the juvenile and surly, teaching a new generation of rebels how to be "different" (just like all the other "different" youths).

Now he's back again with "Year Zero," another foray into angst and attitude, flipping off and showing off with Bush bashing and religion trashing. It ought to be easy to dismiss Mr. Reznor as no more than another grumbling rocker cashing in on the perpetual disaffection of youth -- except that he also happens to be one of the most uniquely talented musicians in mainstream music.

Doublethink, Spring Issue

While I sit on my couch and contemplate the various tastes and textures of cold-phlegm, let me encourage you to take a look at the new issue of Doublethink. Movie fans, as I believe this site has a few, will enjoy Project Greenlight winner Erica Beeney's piece "Words on the Big Screen." Also,
Bill Goodwin's story about life as a party clown is particularly strange and wonderful, and for a more personal perspective on one of the blogosphere's A-listers, check out Cheryl Miller's profile of Megan McArdle, aka, Jane Galt. Of course, you should just read the whole thing -- or better yet, subscribe. (If you're in D.C. tomorrow night, stop by the writer's party at the Science Club. Sadly, the whole living-in-NY thing will prevent me from attending.)

Be My Friend, Obama?

At NRO, I've got a piece on Obama's Facebook cult today...

In 1841, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “A man’s growth is seen in the successive choirs of his friends.” If that’s true, then no man, or at least no politician, has grown as much in recent months as Barack Obama.

Of course, when Emerson wrote the line, a “friend” was still likely to be someone you’d met in person, and the word itself was still a noun. These days, a “friend” might be any random Internet onlooker, and the verb “to friend” has surfaced on our lexicon’s fringes. Social-networking websites like Facebook and MySpace have made “friending” so easy as to be meaningless, and have established the Internet “friend count” as a status symbol. Politicians have always been at the forefront of the fake-friend game, so it’s hardly surprising that all of the top-tier 2008 presidential candidates are using social-networking sites to reach out to prospective voters. But while all the contenders have come to play in the online sandbox, it is Obama who has reaped the most rewards.

Obama’s social-network campaigning is unmatched, with more than double the MySpace “friends” of any other candidate, as well as thousands more Facebook messages and a customized social-networking site of his own. In these online communities, the barriers between politician and citizen are reduced, and the formal conventions of politics dissolve amidst the casual protocols of IMs and text messages. Instead of showing up on a field to wave signs from a distance, Obama’s Internet fans come to hang out, to chat, to talk about themselves and their lives, to send “virtual gifts”—in other words, to be Obama’s friend.

Hammer & Tickle

I've got a piece in NRO today on Hammer & Tickle, a documentary about Communist jokes. Also, I promise to begin regular blogging again soon. Maybe.

Me, the Oscars, CBS News

I know you all already read my column on the American Film Renaissance and the Oscars, but in case you want to read it again, CBS News reprinted it on their website today.

Me on the movies at NRO

I've got a piece on the Oscars and a new conservative film poll at NRO today. Here's a starter.

On Sunday night, Hollywood will roll out the red carpet and rev up their limousines for the 79th Annual Academy Awards. The four-hour long nationally televised ceremony gives us what is perhaps Tinseltown’s most honest depiction of itself — by which I mean the most glitzy, ditzy, and shamelessly shallow. At their core, the Oscars are a way for the movie industry to publicly congratulate itself for its brilliance and generosity — for really, who needs attention more than movie stars?

New Me

I've got a quick review of Ghost Rider (way worse than you thought possible) over at The Corner, and I've also got a piece up on the Bush administration's recent promise to veto card check legislation.