Hurricanes and Hitler are often cited as the most difficult challenges to the belief that God is good.  A more compelling answer is He has deprived us of the chance to have a young Clint Eastwood play President Andrew Jackson.

Old Hickory	Young Easty

Tom posted this at 2:00 PM EST on Thursday, November 20th, 2008 as Faith, Film Rants

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The teaser trailer for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is simply beautiful.

Look at just how much storytelling can be made in a just under two minutes, and with only three sentences of dialog and a minute and a half of music.  Stunning.

At the risk of sounding like Apollo, the Oscars are filled with crap nobody cares about. A ‘best trailer’ category would be fun, interesting, and would honor an art form that — though hardly neglected — is certainly unappreciated.

NB: I haven’t seen W., but the trailer contains ironic use of “What A Wonderful World.”  This is blasphemy against cleverness.

Tom posted this at 3:04 PM EDT on Wednesday, October 22nd, 2008 as Film Rants

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• You’ll note that there has yet to be a Bubba, or whatever a movie about Clinton would be called. I guess Primary Colors and Wag the Dog were about Clinton, but no one seems as interested in him as they are in W.
• There was a tv movie about the Reagans. Nothing about the Carters. I never saw the Reagans movie, but I read that it was a hit job.
• Also a movie about Nixon. Nothing about Johnson that I can think of, except that clip in Forest Gump. However, I think that Johnson is as enthralling as Nixon. In terms of character studies, they are perhaps the two most fascinating presidents. It’s a real shame that there’s no Johnson movie, and I think there’s a chunk of money out there for someone willing to make a good movie about the man.
• That last offer does not extend to Oliver Stone. Please do not tell him about it.
• The major movie about JFK focused exclusively on the period after his death. There was also PT-109, but other than that I’ve only seen him as a side character. He doesn’t seem terribly interesting to me, but then I’m not a baby boomer.
• The Kennedy administration participated in the casting of PT-109, and had veto powers over any of the producers’ decisions. Anyone wonder if the Bush administration had similar privileges with W. . . .
• There has been a movie about Truman. It was good, and I’m probably one of half a dozen people who think “Truman” when they see Gary Sinise.

I’m not sure what any of this means, except that Hollywood writers enjoy making movies that portray Republicans in a bad light.

Apollo posted this at 2:44 AM EDT on Sunday, October 19th, 2008 as Amer-I-Can!, Film Rants

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Fact 1: Oliver Stone keeps making movies that cover topics I’m interested in. See 1, 2, 3, 4.

Fact 2: Oliver Stone keeps making movies that bore me to death. See 1, 2, 3, 4. See again 1.

Fact 3: The previews for W. make it look interesting.

Fact 4: The previews for Alexander made it look interesting.

Fact 5: There is a fantastic movie to be made about George W. Bush. And it may include a [tiny] part of the left’s weird insistence that the last 8 years are best understood as a mediocre son trying to outdo his heroic father.

Fact 6: That movie will not be made by Oliver Stone.

Existential Whine 1: Why must the Hollywood director whose interests most closely correspond to mine be an unrepentant Communist?

Apollo posted this at 7:47 PM EDT on Monday, October 13th, 2008 as Ourselves, George Bush Rules!, George Bush Sucks!, Film Rants

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In 1984, Rob Riener, Christopher Guest, Michael McKean, and Harry Shearer introduced us to Spinal Tap — a fictional British rock band that is at varying times a satire on the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and probably half a dozen other British Invasion bands — with their fake documentary This Is Spinal Tap.

For anyone who hasn’t seen This is Spinal Tap, I cannot possibly recommend it too much. Besides having a hilarious script and some of the best chemistry between actors I’ve ever seen, the songs in the film manage to be just good enough for you to believe ‘Tap had once been to popular, while being just bad enough enough for you to be certain that you wouldn’t have been one of the people who would have liked them.

In one of the deleted scenes, the band endorses a meat pastry with the painfully awful brand name of ‘Rock ‘n Rolls’:

While shopping at the supermarket the other day, my girlfriend called my attention to this new product endorsed by Hannah Montana:

Read the rest of this entry »

Tom posted this at 12:03 PM EDT on Thursday, September 25th, 2008 as Nerdom, Film Rants

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Last month, Andrew Klavan argued that The Dark Knight is a simple

“paean of praise to the fortitude and moral courage that has been shown by George W. Bush in this time of terror and war (and) …a conservative movie about the war on terror. And like another such film, last year’s “300,”* “The Dark Knight” is making a fortune depicting the values and necessities that the Bush administration cannot seem to articulate for beans.

On National Review’s Uncommon Knowledge, Peter Robinson attempted to Klavan to task for this, put found himself unequal to Klavan’s rejoinder that “‘Aw, come on’ is not an argument.”  But to quote myself, this is:

[Klavan’s fallacy is to make a] one-to-one equation of Batman and his tactics to President Bush and his efforts to fight terrorism domestically.

President Bush is an elected public official responsible for ensuring the safety of his constituents and the protection of their rights. Now, does that make him more like the Gotham’s A) millionaire playboy turned chiropterian-themed vigilante, or B) its district attorney?

And what did the movie have to say when Harvey Dent adopted Batman’s modes of crime-fighting? It condemned them and not only because Dent/Two Face went too far: but because it acknowledged that some things that are appropriate for vigilante Batman are not appropriate for DA Harvey Dent.

One other thing of note is that Batman “push[es] the boundaries of civil rights” under much more limited circumstances than President Bush does. When Batman tortures the Joker, he’s doing it in response to a literal ticking time bomb; when uses his sonar-thingy to tap into all of Gotham’s cell phones, he gives control of it to a man who he knows will destroy the device as soon as the crisis is passed. The Bush administration has seen little need for this kind of sunsetting, and when it does provide provisions to allow new government powers to lapse, it insinuates that anyone who would allow such a thing to happen is a squishy-dove liberal.

Geoffrey sometimes speaks of some conservatives’ masturbatory fantasies of a real show down with Islam; this Batman-equals-Bush thing is its kissin’ cousin.

Tom posted this at 10:12 AM EDT on Friday, September 12th, 2008 as Conservatism, Film Rants

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