Winston & Julia, 1984

2,699 words

Love is best. — last line of Robert Browning’s “Love among the Ruins”

He loved Big Brother. — last line of George Orwell’s 1984 (more…)

2,542 words

Anthony Burgess
1985
London: Hutchinson, 1978

Anthony Burgess of A Clockwork Orange fame celebrated thirty years of Nineteen Eighty-Four with his 1985. It is in two parts: a discussion of Orwell and freedom, and a novella updating Winston Smith’s struggle. (more…)

1,618 words

How do you break into Hollywood? Director Grant Sputore and writer Michael Lloyd Green might have a few tips for you in their first full-length feature film for Netflix. Released in 2019, their debut, I am Mother, does all it can to please the Hollywood elite and bring a warm glow of smug satisfaction into the bleeding hearts of their old college professors.

It takes a man to write a great feminist movie, and with their all-female cast, these two guys lay it on twice as thick. (more…)

2,206 words

Ash Donaldson’s novel From Her Eyes a Doctrine accomplishes several striking things which make it stand out among dissident literature. For one, it does what all novels should do: It tells an entertaining story – although in this case, we have multiple stories, some new, some old, some present, some past. A few of these stories are discrete; others are dropped off and revisited later. (more…)

1,325 words

The third season of The Handmaid’s Tale is well-crafted in almost every way. The cinematography is outstanding. The dialogue is good. The acting is excellent. Its fictional universe is interesting, and it has a dark, dystopian beauty to it. However, the season doesn’t hang together. I got quite bored with it and stopped watching after getting enough information to scrape together a review. (I know what happens in the rest because I cheated and read the plot summaries after watching two-thirds of the season.)

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65 words / 52:55

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June 8th is the 70th anniversary of the publication of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Greg Johnson interviews Margot Metroland on some of Orwell’s sources and influences, the loosely “Trotskyite” political context in which he wrote, and the possibility that he was bumped off by Stalinists. (more…)

3,232 words

Connolly, Burnham, Orwell, & “Corner Table”

“In the torture scenes, he is merely melodramatic: he introduces those rather grotesque machines which used to appear in terror stories for boys.”
—V. S. Pritchett, The New Statesman, June 18, 1949

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2,498 words

“When I was little, this was a large village. And that was not too many years ago; now, there’s not so much as a single shadow. The destruction of an entire people can come about very easily!”[1]

Lao She’s Cat Country is one of the finest pieces of literature I’ve read. Written in 1932 in the long shadow of the Bolshevik Revolution and foreshadowing the Maoist terror that would wrack China, (more…)

828 words

Mexican director Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men (2006) is loosely based on P. D. James’ 1992 novel of the same name. Cuarón is solidly Leftist, but Children of Men seems more and more like a Right-wing vision of dystopia with each passing year. (Cuarón’s 2001 film Y Tu Mamá También, is basically Marxist propaganda and soft-core porn, but his 2013 hit Gravity could be seen as an argument against putting women in the military or space, although I don’t think this was the director’s intention.)  (more…)

1,176 words

The Handmaid’s Tale, Season 2 (2018)
Produced by Hulu
Starring: Elisabeth Moss, Yvonne Strahovski, Ann Dowd, Sydney Sweeney, Max Minghella, Joseph Fiennes, etc.

The Handmaid’s Tale (Season 1) is based on the book of the same name that is both a femi-porn rape fantasy like Fifty Shades of Grey and a hard, alarmist look at the drop in the fertility of high class, intelligent, white women. (more…)

2,810 words

The Handmaid’s Tale, Season 1 (2017)
Produced by Hulu
Based on the 1985 book The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
Starring Elisabeth Moss, Max Minghella, Yvonne Strahovski, Joseph Fiennes, & Ann Dowd

I decided to watch The Handmaid’s Tale with some trepidation, (more…)

1,979 words

Fenek Solère
Rising
San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2017

“Tom had long harbored the suspicion that because the Slavs escaped most of the corrosive influence of political correctness, they would act as a catalyst for a White revolution.”

Russia. Less than a decade into the future and the Third Rome is under siege. (more…)

992 words

Ernst Jünger (1895–1998) was a prominent member of the German nationalist Conservative Revolutionary movement of the 1920s that was opposed to the feckless Weimar Republic. The son of a wealthy chemist, Jünger rejected the staid bourgeois world of his upbringing and instead sought adventure wherever he could find it. Running away from home and joining the French Foreign Legion while a minor, Jünger was sent to Algeria and Morocco. Through the intercession of his father, Jünger got out of the Legion in time to join the German Army at the outbreak of World War I.  (more…)

1,818 words

Blade Runner opened in movie theaters in the summer of 1982 just two weeks after Steven Spielberg’s more heralded E.T., which went on to become the all-time box office moneymaker. Blade Runner, with a $27.5 million budget, took in $27 million at the box office on its first run—hardly a smash—yet it proved its worth in the long run. Almost every science fiction film made since 1982 has been influenced by its production design, photography, and special effects. A new generation of fans has materialized and the film has spawned dozens of Websites on the Internet.  (more…)

Thomas Hart Benton, Cradling Wheat

2,006 words

Kevin Beary
Savaged States of America: A Futuristic Fantasy
In Qua Urbe, 1998

“Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”—Lewis Carroll, the White Queen, Through the Looking Glass  (more…)

2,989 words

Dave Wallis
Only Lovers Left Alive
London: Anthony Blond, 1964
Richmond, Va.: Valancourt, 2015

“In those days, before the death of the last square . . .”

At some point, I suppose with Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange,[1] the “youth in trouble” genre, already fairly exploitative beneath its standard moralistic framework,[2] mutated into a “cult of youth” format, (more…)

838 words

Alex Kurtagić
Mister
Guildford, U.K.: Iron Sky Publishing, 2009

Gosh, I sure would have enjoyed being present when this book came under the eye of a generic editor at one of the generic American or British publishers, assuming Alex Kurtagić had been innocent enough to submit it. No, I don’t claim such an editor would actually have fainted, or been stricken suddenly by one of the new diseases, not at all. (more…)

4,856 words

Alex Kurtagic
Mister
Foreword by Tomislav Sunic
Guildford, U.K.: Iron Sky Publishing, 2009

Imagine a novel that is a marriage of George Orwell’s classic Nineteen Eighty-Four and Jean Raspail’s depressing account of the genocide of Europeans, The Camp of the Saints.

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