1,352 words
I wanted to like it. Going in I told myself, “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Give it a chance.” But nothing could prepare me for this big-buck adulteration.
Jake Gyllenhaal’s Road House is similar in name only to Patrick Swayze’s Road House from 1989. It takes some of the latter’s key lines, themes, and characters only to rework them badly and bury them in a bucket of banality. (more…)
You can order Derek Hawthorne’s book Being & The Birds or: Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Heidegger (But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock) here.
You can order Derek Hawthorne’s book Being & The Birds or: Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Heidegger (But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock) here.
324 words / 2:05:56
Derek Hawthorne‘s new book, Being and “The Birds,” was the subject of the latest broadcast of Counter-Currents Radio. Philosopher and film critic Hawthorne draws on the thought of Martin Heidegger to illuminate Alfred Hitchcock’s 1963 classic film The Birds, about a series of savage and inexplicable bird attacks on Bodega Bay, a sleepy California fishing village. Hawthorne argues that The Birds depicts a Heideggerian “event” (Ereignis): a sudden and fundamental transformation of the meaning of everything. Modern men believe we are masters of our own destiny. Heidegger calls this “humanism” and rejects it completely. The Birds is an anti-humanist film. In the space of one weekend, all pretensions to the understanding and mastery of nature are shattered, and man is reduced to helplessness in the face of unfathomable mystery. (more…)
1,872 words
It’s high praise indeed when a documentary calls the least possible attention to itself and still conveys the maximum emotional impact to its viewers. Of course, it helps when the subject matter is both riveting and timely. We have both and then some in Liz Collin and J. C. Chaix’s documentary The Fall of Minneapolis (also reviewed for Counter-Currents by Morris van de Camp). (more…)
791 words
There aren’t a lot of good movies these days. Jeff Nichols’ The Bikeriders is the best new film since Todd Field’s Tár, which came out in 2022. The Bikeriders is set in the Chicago area in the mid-to-late sixties. It tells the story of the Vandals Motorcycle Club.
The movie is based on Danny Lyon’s book of photographs, also called The Bikeriders, about a real-life club called the Outlaws. Lyon also recorded interviews with the club, and some of the script is simply copied verbatim from Lyon’s tapes.
4,457 words
Something that I see being referenced a lot on the dissident Right is the attack on the USS Liberty during the Six-Day War in June 1967 as an ironic statement on the “greatest ally” myth. It’s usually merely a mention: the Liberty. Everybody is simply expected to know what it is all about.
I find that there are a number of misconceptions floating around, stemming from outdated information and speculation on the part of the survivors themselves. “Israel attacked our ship, and then Lyndon Johnson hushed it up.” Well, that’s the very basic of basics. (more…)
2,387 words
Urban myths are insidious enough when they are false. But when they assume universality in the broader culture — while reflecting negatively on that culture — then they can cause people to lose faith in themselves. This is one way in which civilizations begin to decline.
For the last 60 years, one such myth is that of Kitty Genovese.
Thanks to the New York Times reporting of her grisly 1964 murder in the Kew Gardens neighborhood of Queens — during which 38 people supposedly watched and did nothing while she was stabbed to death — her name has become synonymous with bystander apathy. (more…)
2,075 words
The Dead Don’t Hurt — the new Western directed, produced, written, and starring Viggo Mortensen, begins not with a showdown but a mounted knight in armor making his way through a forest. Then the camera cuts away — not to a showdown, but to Weston Jeffries (Solly McLeod), who is in the process of completing a mass murder in a saloon, then knocks off a slow-on-the-trigger deputy for good measure. These scenes are very much part of the story, and the film dispenses with linear plot in order to create a visual essay on the West, America, and nobility — both in terms of human independence and making spiritual deals with a strange land. (more…)
2,916 words
Where would cinema be without its paid assassins, hired guns, and hitmen? The profession of hitman seems a fairly straightforward job description, but the great hitman movies both differ enormously and are far from straightforward. The target, the contract, the money, the hit, right? Wrong. These various tales of men hired to kill other men forms a genre which comes at you from different perspectives and in varied cinematic styles. (more…)
Alan Clarke (Source: Wikipedia)
Alan Clarke (Source: Wikipedia)
2,494 words
Underground filmmakers are often cited as an influence by subsequent directors while going unrecognized in the mainstream of their time. But during the peak years of his truncated career, and although never exactly a household name, British director Alan Clarke was far from being underground. (more…)
2,356 words
Satire is a lesson. Parody is a game. — Vladimir Nabokov
The devil, the proude spirit, cannot endure to be mocked. — Thomas Moore
In 2005, a London production of Christopher Marlowe’s sixteenth-century play Tamburlaine the Great was subject to minor editing by its director. A part of one of the scenes needed to be cut, it was decided — not cut down, but cut out. The scene in question showed the burning of books, one of which was the Koran (which the BBC went through a phase of referring to as “the holy Koran”). (more…)
1,829 words
As you probably already know, the “Left wing” versus “Right wing” political chasm first appeared when it cracked through the French National Assembly during the Revolution of 1789, when defenders of France’s monarchy and the Catholic faith positioned themselves on the right side of the Assembly, and supporters of the republican revolutionaries aligned themselves on the left side. The most technically correct and pedantic definition of “Right wing”, therefore, is a political system or ideology which favors hierarchy, aristocracy, monarchy, tradition, and Catholicism. (more…)
1,501 words
Civil War: based or cringe? That is the million-dollar question.
Your gut tells you that because it is a Hollywood film, it will be an evil MAGAs versus virtuous libtards cringefest with lots of woke anti-white messaging. Yet, part of you holds out hope that maybe it will be unintentionally based. Jews will sometimes screw up and accidentally create Right-wing anti-heroes such as Archie Bunker or Michael Douglas’ character in Falling Down. Maybe there will be some Right-wing villain who delivers nationalist monologues that are meant to come off as ominous to normies but which sounds perfectly sensible to the red-pilled viewer. (more…)
3,376 words
“We are the natives of Trizonesia,” as the singer Karl Berbuer once put into words the feeling in “colonized” West Germany, the three-way occupation zones of the United States, Britain, and France. A film that was produced on that topic is The Big Lift (1950), filmed on the heels of the now famous Berlin Airlift of 1948-49.
Reviewers have made fun of all the technical information the audience is subjected to in it: How does radar work, and how is the ground crew handling all that air traffic? (more…)