3,863 words
If you’re old enough to remember your teacher threading film from a small reel into a projector about the size of a sewing machine, chances are that you’ve seen a few social guidance films. You might remember the deep and authoritative voice-overs which often narrated these flicks. (more…)
2,785 words
One of the great unexpected pleasures of the Covid lockdown last spring was discovering oddball television series you otherwise wouldn’t have approached with a barge pole. Producers and programming executives detected a nice angle here, so they moved up launch dates by a few months. This is what happened with Mrs. America, a nine-part FX series with Cate Blanchett that debuted on Hulu last April and May, instead of its originally scheduled launch in July and August. (more…)
2,207 words
Dirty Harry (1971) is a compelling neo-noir thriller about San Francisco Police Inspector Harry Callahan (Clint Eastwood), who is increasingly forced to choose between liberal legal norms and bringing a sadistic serial killer known as Scorpio to justice. Once Harry kills Scorpio, the movie ends (more…)
2,056 words
Bryan Burrough
Days of Rage: America’s Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence
New York: Penguin Books, 2015
What the underground movement was truly about — what it was always about — was the plight of black Americans. (p. 27) (more…)
Voyager 2, loading into a Centaur rocket.
2,806 words
I suspect most people have particular topics that affect them profoundly and cause a welling up of emotion that most other people would find a bit strange. For me, the topic is space probes. When I watch documentaries or read articles about them, I tear up the way we all tear up at a piece of heartbreakingly beautiful music or a cynic-proof rendition of the national anthem. After the unmanned spacecraft Cassini completed its mission in 2017 and sent back its stunning images of Saturn, the probe’s creators issued (more…)
2,271 words
Jon Ward
Camelot’s End: Kennedy vs. Carter & the Fight that Broke the Democratic Party
New York: Twelve, 2019
The US Presidential Election of 1980 turned into a vicious civil war within the Democratic Party. The conflict centered upon the incumbent President Jimmy Carter and Senator Edward “Ted” Kennedy of Massachusetts. (more…)
3,754 words
John Huston’s Wise Blood (1979) is one of his lesser-known films, but it deserves a wider audience. Based on Flannery O’Connor’s 1952 novel of the same name, Wise Blood is the most faithful screen adaptation I have ever seen, largely because the screenwriter truly loved and understood the source material. The script was written by Benedict Fitzgerald, who knew Flannery O’Connor from childhood. (more…)
2,576 words
Anita Bryant
The Anita Bryant Story: The Survival of our Nation’s Families and the Threat of Militant Homosexuality
Old Tappan, New Jersey: Fleming H. Revell Company, 1977
The culture wars of the 1970s deserve considerable study. One of the cultural warriors was Anita Bryant. When I saw a used copy of her book denouncing the militant homosexual movement, I snatched it up immediately. (more…)
2,405 words
Death Wish
Directed by Michael Winner
Screenplay by Wendell Mayes
Starring Charles Bronson, Hope Lange, Stuart Margolin
1974
By the early 1970s, Americans had begun to notice a change in their big cities. After the Civil Rights movement and the 1965 Immigration Act, the multiracial rot – the inevitable by-product of the Left’s ascendancy in the West – began to set in. (more…)