http://www.jamesbowman.net/rss/jamesbowman.xml James Bowman's Articles, Movie Reviews and Diary en-us (c) 2004, Jamesbowman.net Fri, 11 Apr 2014 23:00:02 EST http://feedvalidator.org/docs/rss2.html www.eResources.com (Generator) james@jamesbowman.net (James Bowman) support@eresources.com (webmaster) 30 http://www.jamesbowman.net/diaryDetail.asp?hpID=612 "If you insist upon fighting to protect me, or ’our’ country," wrote Virginia Woolf in Three Guineas, a book which Theodore Dalrymple thought ought rather to have been called How to Be Privileged and Yet Feel Extremely Aggrieved, "let it be understood, soberly and rationally between us, that you are fighting to gratify a sex instinct which I cannot share; to procure benefits which I have not shared and probably will not share. . . For as a woman, I have no country. As a woman, I want no country. As a woman, my country is the whole world." Writing in The Guardian, Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett quotes these words and heartily approves of Mrs Woolf’s view of war and patriotism, noting that "the feminists of the past did not want equal rights in Fri, 11 Apr 2014 12:52:00 EST james@jamesbowman.net (James Bowman) Diaryhttp://www.jamesbowman.net/diaryDetail.asp?hpID=612#4-11-2014_12:52:00_PM http://www.jamesbowman.net/reviewDetail.asp?pubID=2335 An unfunny comedy whose reason for being appears to be a celebration of the extravagant self-pity of its central character Fri, 11 Apr 2014 00:00:00 EST james@jamesbowman.net (James Bowman) Movie Reviewshttp://www.jamesbowman.net/reviewDetail.asp?pubID=2335#4-11-2014 http://www.jamesbowman.net/reviewDetail.asp?pubID=2334 More evidence, if evidence were needed, that the movies are not very good at re-imagining the myths and legends of the past, especially not Biblical ones Tue, 08 Apr 2014 00:00:00 EST james@jamesbowman.net (James Bowman) Movie Reviewshttp://www.jamesbowman.net/reviewDetail.asp?pubID=2334#4-8-2014 http://www.jamesbowman.net/articleDetail.asp?pubID=2336 When politics is all a matter of good guys and bad guys, it’s only a matter of time until the bad guys become Nazis — From The New Criterion of March, 2014 Mon, 31 Mar 2014 00:00:00 EST james@jamesbowman.net (James Bowman) Articlehttp://www.jamesbowman.net/articleDetail.asp?pubID=2336#3-31-2014 http://www.jamesbowman.net/articleDetail.asp?pubID=2337 Some entertainers who dare to take on, or at least to ignore, political correctness — From The American Spectator of March, 2014 Mon, 31 Mar 2014 00:00:00 EST james@jamesbowman.net (James Bowman) Articlehttp://www.jamesbowman.net/articleDetail.asp?pubID=2337#3-31-2014 http://www.jamesbowman.net/diaryDetail.asp?hpID=611 Here we go again. Ezra Pound said that poetry is news that stays news. If so, the news that we don’t have to worry about our grammar anymore has got the Cantos beaten all hollow, as it has been making headlines since long before ol’ Ez kicked the bucket more than 40 years ago. The latest herald of these linguistic liberators is Tom Chivers of the Daily Telegraph, which headlined last week: "Are ’grammar Nazis’ ruining the English language?" The answer is: not if he can help it. As the sub-head has it: "Split infinitives make them shudder and they’d never end a sentence with a preposition. But linguist Geoffrey Pullum has a message for all grammar pedants: you’re wrong." For someone purporting to pooh-pooh ideas of grammatical correctness, linguist Geoffrey Pullum (co-author of the massive Thu, 27 Mar 2014 12:35:00 EST james@jamesbowman.net (James Bowman) Diaryhttp://www.jamesbowman.net/diaryDetail.asp?hpID=611#3-27-2014_12:35:00_PM http://www.jamesbowman.net/reviewDetail.asp?pubID=2333 Another example of old-fashioned, plot-driven movie-making for grown-ups from the director of A Separation Thu, 27 Mar 2014 00:00:00 EST james@jamesbowman.net (James Bowman) Movie Reviewshttp://www.jamesbowman.net/reviewDetail.asp?pubID=2333#3-27-2014 http://www.jamesbowman.net/diaryDetail.asp?hpID=610 Lately, I found that I was being Twitter-bombed by the sort of person — and what a lot of such people there are on Twitter! — who seem to think it a devastating retort to someone they disagree with politically to call him "moron" or "racist." My sin, in case you haven’t heard about it already from one of these people, was to have suggested last year, in a review of Steve McQueen’s now Oscar-winning film 12 Years a Slave, that it could only have been improved by the addition of a contented slave or two, or a kind master — just as a token or signal to the audience that the film-makers were at least as concerned with questions of historical authenticity as they were with the starkly-presented moral drama of its main story and all that it implied of polemical or hortatory motives. I thought, perhaps wrongly, that this would Tue, 18 Mar 2014 13:25:00 EST james@jamesbowman.net (James Bowman) Diaryhttp://www.jamesbowman.net/diaryDetail.asp?hpID=610#3-18-2014_1:25:00_PM http://www.jamesbowman.net/reviewDetail.asp?pubID=2331 Impossible to be taken seriously, the movie is nevertheless quite a lot of fun, mostly because of its star. Tue, 18 Mar 2014 00:00:00 EST james@jamesbowman.net (James Bowman) Movie Reviewshttp://www.jamesbowman.net/reviewDetail.asp?pubID=2331#3-18-2014 http://www.jamesbowman.net/reviewDetail.asp?pubID=2332 A touching and well-made movie from India whose motto, worthy of emulation by Hollywood, is "less is more" Tue, 18 Mar 2014 00:00:00 EST james@jamesbowman.net (James Bowman) Movie Reviewshttp://www.jamesbowman.net/reviewDetail.asp?pubID=2332#3-18-2014 http://www.jamesbowman.net/articleDetail.asp?pubID=2330 Wars in history and history wars in Britain and the U.S. — From The New Criterion of February, 2014 Fri, 28 Feb 2014 00:00:00 EST james@jamesbowman.net (James Bowman) Articlehttp://www.jamesbowman.net/articleDetail.asp?pubID=2330#2-28-2014 http://www.jamesbowman.net/diaryDetail.asp?hpID=609 One problem with being the proud possessor, as so many people are these days, of a change-the-world ideology of your very own, is that you come to think of the world as having already been changed in accordance with your ideology’s specifications — which can lead to further problems. Charles Krauthammer called attention to the phenomenon in yesterday’s Washington Post when he ridiculed the claim of the President of the United States that what we are now supposed to call "climate change" is "settled science" and therefore no longer open to question or doubt by anyone who doesn’t want to get on the wrong side of science. "There is nothing more anti- scientific," wrote Dr. Krauthammer, himself a trained physician, "than the very idea that science is settled, static, impervious Sat, 22 Feb 2014 13:32:00 EST james@jamesbowman.net (James Bowman) Diaryhttp://www.jamesbowman.net/diaryDetail.asp?hpID=609#2-22-2014_1:32:00_PM http://www.jamesbowman.net/reviewDetail.asp?pubID=2329 An awful movie on a subject that deserves — and has received — a lot better Sat, 22 Feb 2014 00:00:00 EST james@jamesbowman.net (James Bowman) Movie Reviewshttp://www.jamesbowman.net/reviewDetail.asp?pubID=2329#2-22-2014 http://www.jamesbowman.net/diaryDetail.asp?hpID=608 In the forthcoming number of The New Criterion, I return to my theme in the magazine of last December and October of 2012, when I discussed the growing penchant in our political culture for each side to make frivolous, reckless and often quite unfounded accusations of bad faith against the other. This is true on both sides of the political divide, but more ingrained, perhaps, on the left after eight years of its remarkable fulminations against the last Bush administration. Now, in a mailing I have received from The Nation magazine, I see that such gratuitous belligerence — and I am old enough to remember when the question, "Are you calling me a liar?" was invariably the prelude either to a retraction or to a fist-fight — appears to have become part of what nowadays we call the left-wing Wed, 19 Feb 2014 10:35:00 EST james@jamesbowman.net (James Bowman) Diaryhttp://www.jamesbowman.net/diaryDetail.asp?hpID=608#2-19-2014_10:35:00_AM http://www.jamesbowman.net/articleDetail.asp?pubID=2327 Pop cultural fantasy as a re-mythologization of the culture in the "progressive" interest — From The American Spectator of January-February, 2014 Wed, 19 Feb 2014 00:00:00 EST james@jamesbowman.net (James Bowman) Articlehttp://www.jamesbowman.net/articleDetail.asp?pubID=2327#2-19-2014 http://www.jamesbowman.net/diaryDetail.asp?hpID=607 In Monday’s Daily Telegraph blogs, I noticed the following piquant headline to a posting by Cristina Odone: "Vladimir Putin has made it impossible for me to be against gay marriage." Gosh! I have a lot of respect for Vlad’s powers of persuasion, but how did he do that? "I have written before," writes Ms Odone, again — I have written before about my fear that legalising gay marriage would affect the special status of marriage as a sacred institution. I have argued that once gay people could demand to be married, believers who refused to open their churches or even church halls to the ceremony would be punished. But Putin’’s homophobic measures have changed my mind. If I oppose gay marriage I may be seen as condoning his anti-gay campaign. I couldn’’t live Wed, 12 Feb 2014 11:15:00 EST james@jamesbowman.net (James Bowman) Diaryhttp://www.jamesbowman.net/diaryDetail.asp?hpID=607#2-12-2014_11:15:00_AM http://www.jamesbowman.net/reviewDetail.asp?pubID=2324 An enjoyable account of Charles Dickens’s love affair with a much younger woman whose historicity, however, must remain largely speculative Mon, 03 Feb 2014 00:00:00 EST james@jamesbowman.net (James Bowman) Movie Reviewshttp://www.jamesbowman.net/reviewDetail.asp?pubID=2324#2-3-2014 http://www.jamesbowman.net/articleDetail.asp?pubID=2326 Medicine as metaphor for the Western Front — From The Weekly Standard of February 3, 2014 Mon, 03 Feb 2014 00:00:00 EST james@jamesbowman.net (James Bowman) Articlehttp://www.jamesbowman.net/articleDetail.asp?pubID=2326#2-3-2014 http://www.jamesbowman.net/reviewDetail.asp?pubID=2323 A thrilling, true-life account of American heroism in Afghanistan in 2005 and an end-around Hollywood’s leftist politics Fri, 31 Jan 2014 00:00:00 EST james@jamesbowman.net (James Bowman) Movie Reviewshttp://www.jamesbowman.net/reviewDetail.asp?pubID=2323#1-31-2014 http://www.jamesbowman.net/articleDetail.asp?pubID=2325 On the crafting of some media "narratives" — From The New Criterion of January, 2014 Fri, 31 Jan 2014 00:00:00 EST james@jamesbowman.net (James Bowman) Articlehttp://www.jamesbowman.net/articleDetail.asp?pubID=2325#1-31-2014