Tag: Steven Spielberg

1,558 words

Warning: this review may contain spoilers.

Human fascination with extraterrestrial life has never been merely a scientific curiosity. It belongs, rather, to that deeper region where metaphysics, fear, hope, and civilizational fatigue begin to overlap. The alien is not only an imagined inhabitant of distant stars; it is a mirror placed before mankind, forcing us to contemplate the possibility that our history, our religions, our wars, and our self-importance may be provincial episodes within a far vaster order.

Popular culture has absorbed this fascination with unusual intensity because it allows the cosmic question to enter ordinary life. (more…)

Dresden by Marti Teixidor

2,450 words

Part 1 available here.

OM: Have you thought about writing a series on films set in Francoist Spain, Chile, Argentina, and, more generally, the dictatorial regimes of South America? Would you recommend any films in this genre?

KV: I was just thinking about lifting the veil woven by egalitarian cultural dominance. You know what I mean? Everyone knows Picasso’s Guernica, but what about Dresden by Marti Teixidor? It’s the same with film. (more…)

3,142 words

In the late 1980s I lived in Brixton, South London. The London in England, that is, not the one in Kentucky or the dozen or so other Londons that are dotted across North America. Occasionally, on a Saturday night after the pubs closed, my friends and I would pile over to the all-night movie show. The famous cinema there was called The Ritzy—formerly The Little Bit Ritzy—and it was a flea-bitten old pit, a relic from the pre-TV golden age of British cinemas. (more…)

4,429 words

During the summer of 1945, when Germany’s cities were piles of smoldering rubble and the German people lived like rats in their cellars, the German Jews who had run away during the 1930s swarmed back into Germany lusting for revenge. Plan A is not only based on “a true story,” “this film from Israeli brothers Doron and Yoav Paz dramatizes an astonishing piece of Holocaust history: a deadly plot by a small group of Jewish survivors to poison the water supply in Nuremberg. ‘An eye for an eye. Six millions for six millions.’” (more…)

2,005 words

“You know, I wake up to everything I know either getting sold, or wrecked, or being taken over by people that I don’t like. And they don’t like me. And you know what’s left of all that? The Jets.” — Riff

I finally got around to seeing Steven Spielberg’s new remake of West Side Story, or as I like to call it, Race Traitors in Love.

I must say that despite it being explicitly anti-racist — and by extension implicitly anti-white and Jewish — to the core, I have always had something of a soft spot for West Side Story. (more…)

4,780 words

While Western expansion in the United States really started when English settlers travelled overland from Massachusetts to Connecticut in 1635, a true film of the Western genre is only set west of the 100th meridian in the years between the Confederate surrender at Appomattox and the coronation of Edward VII. While warfare has existed since time immemorial, a true War Movie is only set between 1933 and 1945, during the time of Hitler and the Second World War.

(more…)

3,145 words

Lincoln is essentially Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter with bigger words. The latter said the Confederacy was the product of blood sucking monsters to be destroyed with stakes to the heart and decapitation. The former tells us Southerners simply exist to be killed with bayonet and cannonade. Far from being the “moral relativists” of conservative imagination, Hollywood has given us a version of American history characterized by absolute portrayals of good and evil, with shades of gray permitted to righteous egalitarians only divided by what tactics can best be used to exterminate their foes.  (more…)

522 words

The Debt, which opens in theaters today, is a remake of a 2007 Israeli movie about three Mossad agents (played by gorgeous gentiles of course) who are assigned to catch a Nazi war criminal (the surgeon of Birkenau) who is living in East Berlin and bring him to the west. Well, things don’t turn out quite as planned (those pesky Aryan guards again), and they are faced with the consequences.

When the kidnapping goes awry, all three agents seem to form a conscience, and they refuse to kill the former Nazi, not wanting “to be like the enemy.” (more…)

2,598 words

“The Holocaust has increasingly become, for the democratic world at least, a symbol of all the other Genocides, for racism, anti-Semitism, hatred of foreigners, ethnic cleansing, and mass destruction of humans by humans generally. (more…)

1,711 words

June 25, 2002

Definition: A minority report is a statement of a dissenting viewpoint defeated by majority vote.

I saw Minority Report this weekend. Since I liked the last Tom Cruise movie Vanilla Sky, I thought I might like Minority Report too, even though the quality of a movie has far more to do with the director than the lead actor.

(more…)