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July 31, 2010

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Inception
(Reviewed July 30, 2010)
A movie for people who spend their lives in front of computer screens Full Review

Restrepo
(Reviewed July 14, 2010)
An interesting and authentic-looking account of men in combat in Afghanistan but one with a depressingly familiar anti-war subtext Full Review

Joan Rivers, A Piece of Work
(Reviewed July 8, 2010)
A fascinating document for future scholars writing the history of the American celebrity culture Full Review

Air Doll
(Reviewed July 1, 2010)
A strange cinematic fable by Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda that might have gone over my head Full Review

Teach English with a Degree in Elementary Education.

Diary
ENTRY from July 29, 2010

The day before the Afghanistan War Logs were made public by Wikileaks in The New York Times (along with The Guardian in Britain and Der Spiegel in Germany), the Times’s Sunday Magazine ran an essay by Walter Kirn in the series "The Way We Live Now" titled "The Art of the Deal as Entertainment." In it, Mr Kirn notes that, in certain areas of public exhibition — entertainment, sports, politics — "it’s the business that’s the entertainment and the art of the deal that’s the art that draws most notice. We have become a society that is fixated on process and absorbed by the slippery, complex machinations of the middlemen, brokers and executives who conspire offstage to determine what takes place onstage." He calls this "procedural voyeurism" and cites the saga of Lebron James earlier this month and last year’s contretemps at NBC between Jay Leno and Conan O’Brien over hosting duties at "The Tonight Show" as examples, although the interest of ordinary people in a movie’s box office returns as much as the movie or the NFL draft as much as the Super Bowl strike him as comparable.

As if deliberately called forth to illustrate this proposition, a 1500 word story by Howard Kurtz appeared in the next morning’s Washington Post on how the saga of Meltdown Mel Gibson, interesting as it may or may not be in itself, also "forms the lurid backdrop of a blogosphere battle for gossip supremacy in Los Angeles. TMZ, the Web site that made its name by disclosing Gibson’s drunken, anti-Semitic rant to police in 2006, is suddenly being challenged by Radar, a twice-failed print magazine that was reincarnated as a Web site just over a year ago." Gosh! I wonder who will win. Not, of course, that the public’s interest in this titanic struggle for the computer screens of the nation had quite displaced its interest in Mr Gibson’s violent and racialist fantasies, but insofar as these could be said to bear upon his future earning power in Hollywood they were themselves examples of the kind of meta-narrative Mr Kirn had been writing about.

I myself had seen something similar the night before in the season premiere of Matthew Weiner’s "Mad Men" on AMC portrayed its hero, Don Draper (Jon Hamm), as learning that, in order to be a successful advertising man in the new media world of the 1960s, in order to sell his products, he has first to sell himself. And in order to sell himself he has to present himself as the hitherto unsung hero of his new agency, the moody, psychologically "interesting" creative power behind the scenes who is responsible for its success. The episode was bracketed by a pair of interviews, the first of which, with Advertising Age, was seen as a failure because Don adopted the self-effacing, "Midwestern" attitude that had been the desideratum of the previous decade and was typical of his character in Seasons 1-3. The second interview, with The Wall Street Journal, takes place at the end of the episode and is meant to point us forward by its sly self-promotion, its hints of conflict and anger beneath the surface that attract attention to him at the expense of his agency colleagues. Full Entry

My new book Media Madness, is now published and available for order from Encounter Books. Less a polemic than an attempt to understand the origins of the mass media’s folie de grandeur, the book is a warning even to those who are deserting the big networks, newsweeklies and large-circulation dailies not to carry with them into the more attractive world of niche media the undisciplined habits of thought that the old media culture has given rise to. To order this book, click here.

Also available, now in paperback, is Honor, A History, which was first published in 2006. A study of Western cultural artifacts, from the epics of Homer to the movies and TV shows of today, it is focused on explaining why Western ideas of honor developed so differently from those elsewhere — and especially from the savage honor cultures of the Islamic world. The book then goes on to trace the collapse and ultimate rejection of the old Western honor culture from World War I until the present day and to suggest the conditions that would have to prevail for its revival.