Counter-Currents
Tag: movie reviews
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2,878 wordsField of Dreams (1989)
Written and directed by Phil Alden Robinson
Starring Kevin Costner, Amy Madigan, James Earl Jones, & Ray LiottaW. P. Kinsella
Shoeless Joe
Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1982The most magical movie of 1989 was the baseball film Field of Dreams, which is based on the 1982 book Shoeless Joe by William Patrick “W. P.” Kinsella (1935-2016). (more…)
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2,841 wordsNow that we are wallowing in a major war in Ukraine and are caught in the throes of a cultural and political revolution in the United States, I recall an interesting arthouse film I discovered some years ago when I lived in Boston at one of the queens of arthouse theaters: Memorias del Subdesarrollo, or Memories of Underdevelopment, (more…)
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3,199 wordsThe 2020 film Irresistible, written and directed by the well-known former Daily Show host Jon Stewart, is a much-underrated political comedy in which a small-town mayoral campaign becomes a partisan battleground. At first I thought it might cover the same ground as The Candidate. (As I remember from when I watched it around 1979, a young greenhorn campaigns for a Senate seat, has to tone down his far-Left politics for optics purposes, and is furious because he wins after compromising himself.) Instead, it went in some surprising directions. (more…)
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3,519 wordsPeople under the age of 55, to the extent that they know who Linda Blair is at all, know her for one thing: her iconic Oscar-nominated dual performance as the 12-year-old child Regan MacNeil and Supreme Master of Evil, Satan, in the legendary 1973 horror film The Exorcist.
People over the age of 55 know Linda Blair for two things: for playing Satan in The Exorcist and for the slew of scandalous made-for-TV movies she was in during the mid-1970s. The most explosive of these was Born Innocent, owing largely to a scene depicting a brutal lesbian rape which many found more horrifying than anything in The Exorcist. (more…)
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5,476 wordsI have been watching 1970s Nazisploitation movies lately. This started when, on a whim, I thought it would be funny to write a review of Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS, which is one of those movies that everyone has heard of — because, credit where it’s due, it is one hell of a name — but which very few people have ever actually seen. Nonetheless, you still hear people drop the name as a punchline all the time. If some conservative bimbo offers a milquetoast take that is mildly critical of Black Lives Matter, someone will inevitably say, “Who does she think she is, Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS?” So I thought I’d watch it just to know where the joke came from. (more…)
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1,528 wordsSince I am avoiding Oppenheimer and Barbie, I went back into the archives. While reading Arthur Miller’s The Price, I conjured YouTube and watched 1948’s All My Sons, where Edward G. Robinson and Burt Lancaster brought a tragedy by Henrik Ibsen to Middle America. I continued my sortie into post-war American cinema with Clash by Night, a 1952 Fritz Lang film based on a 1941 play by Clifford Odets. Considered a strong melodrama, it is a very watchable film dealing with emotions and relationships in post-war America in a semi-noir setting. (more…)
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3,203 wordsThe recent film Oppenheimer brought a renewed interest in the history of atomic espionage. The names certainly echo throughout history: Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, David Greenglass, Morton Sobell, William Perl, Harry Gold, and more. Then there are other notables, more obscure but whose activities were considerably more damaging than the above-named. One was known in the Venona decrypts — a batch of intercepted Soviet cable traffic in the 1940s — by the codenames FOGEL and PERS. It still remains a mystery who “Perseus” really was, but this might have been Oppie himself, among other possibilities. (more…)
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1,629 wordsLeftists ruin everything. Nothing, not even children’s toys, is immune from their hateful ideology. A case in point is Greta Gerwig’s Barbie. There are countless women who played with Barbie dolls as children, put them aside when they grew up, and occasionally think nostalgically about them without ever suspecting that they were the targets of Leftist consciousness-raising. But from the very start, Barbie sets them straight.
Barbie begins with a voiceover that sounds like a witch. In the bad old days, little girls only played with baby dolls, which their cunning parents foisted on them to brainwash them into wanting to become mothers. (more…)
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1,266 wordsChristopher Nolan is one of my favorite living directors. The Dark Knight Trilogy, Inception, Interstellar, and Dunkirk are all big, eye-catching Hollywood spectacles, but with a difference. They are highly imaginative, deal with serious themes, have compelling dramatic conflicts, and are often quite moving. Nolan is not particularly politically correct, either. Granted, his last film, Tenet — with its ludicrous Affirmative Action Hero — was a major disappointment. But with Oppenheimer, he returns to form.
Oppenheimer has a highly literate script with important ideas and powerful dramatic situations, striking visuals without digital hokum, and superb performances from a vast cast. (more…)
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1,942 wordsI am not ashamed to say that I cried throughout this entire movie. It’s those who see it and don’t have to at least fight back a few tears who should be ashamed. Indeed, the wildly different reactions provoked by this film reveal a great deal about our ever-deepening cultural divide — and how some of the most vocal and high-profile people on one side are really just downright evil. But you had probably already come to that conclusion.
As everyone knows by now, Sound of Freedom — the film’s title contains no definite article — is the story of Tim Ballard, a special agent for Homeland Security Investigations who sets off on a crusade to rescue children from sex traffickers in Colombia. (more…)
