Showing 1-18 of 18 results tagged “Politics”

In this campaign season, what can we learn from the performances of An American Carol and Religulous?

The easy conclusion is that audiences aren’t real keen on such aggressively political material, with the two movies finishing ninth and 10th, respectively, in the weekend’s overall box office. The second easy conclusion is that conservatives are slightly hungrier for entertainment than people who don’t like religion.

Neither is correct.

While these two movies brought up the rear here in box office, at least they finished in the top 10, unlike fellow new releases Blindness, Flash of Genius, and How to Lose Friends and Alienate People. All of those opened in more theaters than Religulous, and all but Flash of Genius opened in more than An American Carol.

As for the conservative and whatever-Bill-Maher-is divide, Religulous had the second-best per-theater average in the top 10. An American Carol did better only than Burn After Reading, which had been out for three weekends.

Critics were far kinder to Maher’s anti-religion documentary than the the proudly conservative satire of David Zucker, which garnered worse reviews than anything else in our rankings. That might mean that movie critics hate God and conservatives.

Add it all up and it appears that pandering to right-wingers isn’t enough; they wanted something better than An American Carol.

Continue reading for the methodology and the week’s full rankings.

I find it baffling to read even marginally positive reviews of Sarah Palin’s performance in last night’s debate:

“The 90-second format, with little time for follow-up, favored Palin. She has one answer. She doesn’t appear to have a second one, and she never had to give one. To the television audience, she no doubt looked in command.”

I saw it the same way noted political commentator Roger Ebert did:

“Listening to her voice, you could also sense when she felt she’d survived the deep waters of improvisation and was climbing onto the shore of talking points. When she was on familiar ground, she perked up, winked at the audience two of three times, and settled with relief into the folksiness that reminds me strangely of the characters in Fargo.”

My movie comparison was to a bit in This Is Spinal Tap when Nigel is propped up by a roadie after a solo left him flat on his back. Upright once again, there’s something giddy in his expression suggesting that he’d instantly forgotten how foolish he’d looked just a few seconds earlier.

Palin’s struggle was evident, leading to a visible release of tension mixed with unearned, self-satisfied triumph.

It’s no surprise; she’s basically a local politician thrust on a national stage.

As Ebert wrote:

“If that had been me facing Joe Biden with the same preparation, I don’t know if I could even have walked onto the stage.”

Also, here’s a joke I bet you’ll hear in the coming days, most likely from Jay Leno:

“Sarah Palin said she favors a two-state solution for Israel: New York and Florida.”

In the fifth chapter of his 2007 book Evolution for Everyone: How Darwin’s Theory Can Change the Way We Think About Our Lives, David Sloan Wilson writes:

“It turns out that something very similar to my desert-island thought experiment has been performed on chickens by a poultry scientist named William Muir.”

That probably sounds odd.

It will likely sound even odder when you find out what the desert-island thought experiment is: a set of three hypothetical situations to explore human morality through the lens of evolution.

A foolish person doesn’t recognize that one can learn much from opponents. So liberals have begun to understand that they need God on their side as much as the Christian Right does.

The lesson from conservatives, said Rabbi Michael Lerner, is that it’s okay to base policy on faith and spiritual values, and it’s important to stand up for what you believe in. “When they come to a decision about what they believe in, they fight for it,” he said of the Christian Right in a recent interview. “And they’re willing to lose an election for the sake of what they believe in.”

I am admittedly writing mostly from ignorance, but I can’t see any way that the strike by the Writers Guild of America will succeed unequivocally.

Yes, the writers that generate talk-show monologues, awards-show banter, and television and movie scripts will likely get some concessions from Hollywood, and will end up in a better place financially. But it will be virtually impossible for them to get their fair share — what they deserve.

In the opening of 28 Weeks Later, Don (Robert Carlyle) faces a dilemma: He can leave his wife to die and run like hell on the off chance that he might outrun the “infected,” or he can stay with her and face a gruesome end.

He runs like hell, and looks back to see his wife attacked.

This is the movie writ small, laying the groundwork for more impossible choices.

In Davis Guggenheim’s documentary An Inconvenient Truth, a high-angle shot of George W. Bush is followed by a shot of Al Gore looking down out of an airplane window. The juxtaposition delivers a subtle but forceful message: Al Gore is God, gazing in harsh judgment on this Republican president.

You might quibble with my decision to focus on these two, seemingly throwaway images when the movie itself is dominated by Gore’s lecture on global warming. But this shot pairing is symptomatic; An Inconvenient Truth pretends to be about global warming, but it’s mostly a vanity project, a propaganda film supporting the future candidacy (or canonization) of Al Gore. This is a political document masquerading as altruism, an attempt to position the former vice president at the forefront of the environmental issue in spite of the Clinton-Gore administration’s mixed record. And it’s working.

The film’s subject makes it bluntly political, yet Syriana nearly demands multiple viewings to even understand its plot, let alone its meanings. It is intended to illuminate that the business of oil is a dirty one, yet even people who pay close attention to the movie will come away from it more confused than enlightened.

What’s unfortunate about Michael Haneke’s Caché is that the writer-director has created a movie that requires such intensive decoding at its terminals that it’s easy to overlook the rest of the movie — to, in fact, miss its entire point. By spending so much time and effort on the beginning and the ending, we neglect essential questions: What is the film trying to say? Is this an effective way to communicate that message?

The handsome Good Night, and Good Luck is a joy to behold but short on ideas, drama, and humanity. It ends up being a dull film documenting the dull work of dull television journalists, when it really wants to be a sober but nostalgic reminder of heroic muckrakers bringing down the big bad bigot of the Red Scare. Perhaps most crucially, as a lesson for our times it’s a deeply flawed comparison.

Ladies and gentlemen, your new Bill of Rights. About damn time somebody fixed it.

I’m about 15 years late to this party, but I’ve always planned to write a lengthy piece on my love for Oliver Stone’s JFK. My point would simply be that whatever its failings as a credible history (or even a viable alternative history), JFK excels as propaganda, and should be studied for that reason. In a 1993 essay in The Atlantic, Edward Jay Epstein does a good job explaining Stone’s methods:

“The fictional O’Keefe’s story is supported by Ferrie’s fictional confession, which is then given weight by Ferrie’s fictional murder by the fictional bald-headed Cuban introduced in O’Keefe’s story. Since ... Oliver Stone’s audience is not apprised of the substitutions of fiction for fact, this cross-corroboration makes plausible ... the New Orleans plot.”

The Constant Gardener is about a guy who finally finds a spine. And he’s part of a film that never does.

As a screed against George W. Bush to justify the feelings, suspicions, and thoughts of people who already dislike the president and plan on voting against him in November, Fahrenheit 9/11 is strikingly effective. But as propaganda — as a compelling case to convince undecided voters and GOP loyalists that Bush needs to be voted out of office — Michael Moore’s movie is an utter failure.

As someone who has made the “slippery slope” argument on the implications of legalized gay marriage, it was refreshing to see my friend Dahlia pick it apart.

Because I believe dead horses should be beaten, Snob heroine Dahlia Lithwick writes an amusing but bitter piece on the topic of the U.S. Supreme Court and the death penalty.

Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick is my favorite legal writer, because she invariably cuts through the bullshit and makes the U.S. Supreme Court sound fun and catty. She’s also excellent at clearly laying out the issues of a case and talking about it both legal and practical terms.

Yesterday’s dispatch on the words “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance is a perfect example.

It’s imperative that we indulge our grief, anger, and even hatred, and it’s equally important that we shed those things, however briefly, as we consider our individual and collective responses. Anger is natural. It’s what we do with it that tells us whom we are.