Unca Darrell

MARCH 26, 2018 / The finest movie I've ever seen is . . .

. . . Ida. 

It’s a 2013 Polish film by director Pawel Pawlikowski. It was shot in a spare and beautiful black-and-white. Wikipedia summarizes the plot this way:

 

January 8, 2018 / Patricia Arquette (unintentionally?), on . . .

. . . cause and effect.

Everyone in the commune [to which my parents moved in 1972 when I was four) looked down on ownership and had to contribute their income to the common good. Before long . . .  

DECEMBER16 / On the brilliance of the Coen brothers

For more than a century, artists and intellectuals have castigated everyday folks who believe in hard work, personal responsibility, family, and God. The elite see middle-class Americans as drudges, materialists, consumerists, and exploiters, mired in commerce and industry, holding to pre-Enlightenment values and beliefs, ignorant of art. They give us unflattering (in their view) names: the bourgeoisie, philistines, Tea Partiers. Our president, Barack Hussein Obama, indirectly coined the term "bitter clingers," referring to guns and God and antipathy "toward people who aren't like them." So powerful is the disdain of the elite for the common man and woman that the Clever Ones now put great effort into saving children from their misguided, uncultured, immoral parents. See, e.g., unrepentant terrorist Bill Ayers, now a retired and, it is said, distinguished professor of public education. Karl Marx would have broken the grip of the bourgeoisie through revolution; modern radicals hope to do the same by corrupting the schools, mocking the bourgeoisie, and fundamentally transforming the institutions and processes of civilization itself. You can see this process at work on any given day by reading the editorial page of the Houston Chronicle, a self-anointed vanguard against the likes of you and me. We are unlovely, uncultured men and women of little brain and less heart, unlike our betters in, say, the Occupy movement. Modern artists, many of them, self-consciously set out to shock and insult common folks (épater la bourgeoisie, at they say).

What a shock it is, then, to see the most gifted American filmmakers of our time -- Ethan and Joel Coen -- dismantle the pretensions of the elite in one of the most brilliant scenes . . .

SEPTEMBER 3 / Do not! I repeat . . .

. . . do not buy tickets to the Alley Theatre's first offering of the new season -- "The Old Friends." 

The problem is not (with one exception) the acting. The problem is not the proscenium stage at the University of Houston, the Alley's home during a massive remodeling project. The problem is . . . 

JUNE 24 / Movie tout

Ida. Don't miss it. It's as good as . . . 

FEBRUARY 13 / "Captain Phillips" illustrates the traditional American response . . .

. . . to sea piracy: Shoot the bastards. 

A fine Danish film -- "A Hijacking" -- illustrates the alternative and more common response: . . .

SEPTEMBER 21 / Shane! Shane! Shane!

YOU'LL FIND a nice retrospective essay in today's Wall Street Journal's "Review" section on the great western movie, "Shane," on the occasion of its sixtieth birthday. It's the best movie ever made about the myth (in the nonpejorative sense of the word; see below) of the gunfighter as chivalric hero.   

The law did not exist on the frontier, and the nearest marshal . . .

MAY 4 / Lapidary sentences

FROM AN ESSAY on how ripped today's male movie stars are:

It wasn't always this way. The silent-movie star Rudolph Valentino had the body of . . .

FEBRUARY 26 / On Michelle Obama's star turn at the Academy Awards

HOLLYWOOD has enough of a reputation for being in the pocket of the Democratic Party, but now they are not only in the pocket, they're in the . . . 

DECEMBER 7 / "Killing Them Softly" is . . .

. . . a sick movie. Don't go.