Archive | Culture RSS feed for this section

Movie Review: 42

By on April 11, 2013 in Culture, History, Movies, Sports

MV5BMTQwMDU4MDI3MV5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwMjU1NDgyOQ@@._V1_SX214_Jackie Robinson is the subject of the poorly named 42, an overly sentimental movie about how to change a culture one man at a time that can’t help but be powerful and moving. Unlike other fact-based historical films centering upon an individual, such as Good Night, and Good Luck and Schindler’s List, there is fundamental truth at the core of 42, that one should be judged on his character and rise or fall on his ability, and it helps that the writer and director of the thoughtful, old-fashioned, heartstrings sports movie is the same person. His name is Brian Helgeland (Man on Fire, Robin Hood) and he is white.

That a white artist is so moved to tell this tale of an American baseball player who broke the color barrier, led by a Bible-thumping sports businessman who simply wants to get into heaven (Harrison Ford) and that he tells it with honorable intentions and skill is a sign of how much has changed since the Dodgers first hired a black athlete to play ball. The writing is crisp, for the most part, with some outstanding lines that make you want to cheer and the leisurely plot moves along. The score by Mark Isham is too much and the cliches seem inevitable since we’ve seen this kind of movie many times and some inconsistencies – rows of little pig-tailed girls asking for a baseball player’s autograph in 1947 and Pittsburgh being the butt of jokes – are off the mark but 42 offers an important and uniquely American tale.

That’s why you shouldn’t expect the usual race-baiters (you know who they are) to praise this movie, unless they think they can gain from doing so. With an actor I’ve never heard of named Chadwick Boseman, who’s a dead ringer for the good-looking Jackie Robinson, with Nicole Beharie as his wife, playing talented Robinson as an intelligent, proud athlete who used both his charm and being underestimated to his advantage on and off the baseball diamond, 42 does right by Mr. Robinson. As with Walk the Line, Lincoln and other well-made biographically-themed pictures, (including The Iron Lady, about the late Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher), we don’t really get to know the subject in the deepest sense. Instead, we get a glimpse of his essential characteristics at particular points in time.

But it is a look at the whole man, from his rejection of a moral obligation to serve others – “we don’t owe the world a thing” – to his insistence on knowing why Dodgers general manager Branch Rickey, who recruited him to play baseball for Brooklyn, did so and what’s in it for him. In one of the best scenes, and contrary to sports and black stereotypes, Jackie Robinson is an equal to his wife during a scene in which he admits that a racist almost got the best of him and it is refreshing to see a hero with fallibility, not feet of clay. As we move from racist Florida and the South, which get off too easy as far as I’m concerned, to Philadelphia and southern Ohio, regions hardly known for racial tolerance, Jackie Robinson faces irrational ideas and actions from teammates, fans and other teams. Some of them change, some do not, and the young black couple from southern California – where the Dodgers play today – adjust to the new normal. Rickey, capably portrayed by Ford playing crusty to the hilt, guides Jackie Robinson and the ball club along the way, dodging Catholics, bureaucrats and others who stand in the way of justice and objectivity about what it means to play – and what it takes to win.

In fact, playing to win and make money is one of the better themes in 42, which unabashedly endorses money as the root of all good; money is neither black nor white, as one character says, it’s green. Though there’s not enough baseball in the sepia-toned film, which features too many characters tagging along, sports scenes and the plot’s pace feel a bit like a day at the ballpark. Time is suspended and winning is everything which, in this case, means winning men’s minds one by one, inning by inning, run by run. Evoking America’s racist past with key symbols, from buses, trains and fields to Pittsburgh’s Cathedral of Learning towering in the background as a team struggles to unite, 42 cashes in its lessons about a great baseball player and honorable man who should be remembered for refusing to sit in the back of the bus – yes, Jackie Robinson did that, too – so he could be his best and play ball just like everyone else.

Maher’s Hard Left Turn

By on April 8, 2013 in Ayn Rand, Culture, Politics, Television

Maher-lib-620x363Comedian Bill Maher recently railed against Ayn Rand in his repudiation of libertarianism in an amusing if ignorant display (watch it here) that underscores that the woman who created Objectivism is right to reject libertarianism.

Maher has been a left-wing libertarian and his renunciation, which is putting his comments kindly, is both a full hard turn to the left (i.e., environmentalism and welfare-statism) and a drop of any pretense that Maher takes ideas seriously, as anyone who has seen his biting shows figured out long ago. He’s a clever comedian with a vague, passing interest in ideas – he once booked Ayn Rand’s heir on his show – who has finally put himself in his place as a lazy shill for what amounts to dictatorship.

But part of what makes the cynic’s diatribe humorous is that he’s right to suggest that libertarians are inconsistent and to imply that the nation’s top libertarians, such as Senator Rand Paul and Congressman Paul Ryan, are unserious about advancing liberty and more interested in just being self-centered. Libertarians are anti-government, not anti-government control, and they fail to articulate a coherent position on anything relevant to people’s lives because they stand for nothing. Both Sen. Paul and Rep. Ryan graft Ayn Rand’s consistently rational philosophy – which is not anti-government, contrary to Maher’s monologue – onto their Judeo-Christian politics of theocracy. What results is a confusing presentation of fragments of good ideas mixed with bad ideas that remind us that libertarians, such as the Cato Institute, Rand Paul and Paul Ryan, are at best misguided in attempts to advance liberty and capitalism and at worst they propagate the ethics of the totalitarian welfare state.

If Objectivists infiltrate what is more of a loose political movement made by scuzzy hippies than a political philosophy that makes sense and have some degree of influence for restoring individual rights, I say way to go and have at it. But I think it’s a waste of time and I think we’re better off just being Objectivists – selfish, honest, proud, productive and rational – and trying to persuade people who think. Having a biting, leftist libertarian comedian ditch libertarianism for leftism while denouncing Ayn Rand on the wrong grounds may be marginally interesting, but it is not a sign of progress and I doubt that differentiating libertarianism from Objectivism will move the culture toward reason.

Goodbye to Kathy

By on January 3, 2013 in Culture, Journalism

KTYI lost a friend this past Christmas. Kathy was a fellow writer and journalist, as well as a wife and a mother. I’m sad to say that she ended her own life.

Most readers may know of my past coverage of suicide, most recently in a newspaper article about teen depression and suicide in the suburbs north of Chicago, from my 1998 book review of The History of Suicide (Johns Hopkins University Press) and 2011 blog series about journalist Leanita McClain to last month’s post about a nurse who killed herself after a humiliating prank. In that post, I denounced today’s cultural nihilism, including cynical jokers: “Ask the family of those who lost wife, mother, friend and nurse Jacintha Saldanha if what one laughs at matters and has consequences in daily life.” In that sense, Kathy’s death hits home.

We had shared so many aspects of our lives. We took our families to Disneyland, where we attended a candlelight procession and celebrated Christmas with a festive dinner followed by well-told tales by the fire. We cheered for the Trojans at USC, toured floats after the Tournament of Roses parade and we rooted for one another’s success, such as when she published her children’s story about cooking on Christmas Eve, which she had written and read to her children in their youths. When things took a turn for the worse, and she had to sell the house she loved, we embraced, taking one last look with her husband at what they had made. Through lost homes and loved ones, break-ups and snaggle-toothed dogs, Halloween-costumed kids and fairy tale weddings, Kathy was a comrade in the combat of life, soldiering on and cashing in. So it seemed, though I know one can never know the truth of another’s innermost thoughts.

We met at 20th Century Fox. She sat next to me during a press screening, having smiled as I made my way to an empty seat. As we mutually groaned at the godawful movie, she leaned over and whispered something that struck me as a perfect combination of biting and outrageous and spot on. Kathy had a knack for that. I sat there and couldn’t stop laughing and we were instant pals. Her humor was dry, ironic and usually rooted in truth. She liked movies that were positive, light and cheerful and above all Kathy observed and reported about motion pictures with wit and intelligence. At one point in our relationship, I tried to recruit her to write for Box Office Mojo, which I edited. We’d tried several other critics to bring a different view from my own reviews, though none worked out. Kathy preferred to give voice to her words in audio reviews, courtesy of her distinctively Midwestern accent.

When I learned that she had killed herself, I felt suicide’s aftermath like I was walking into a brick wall; as a swift, single, negative force. You knew when Kathy, who was tall, blonde and always looking sharp, was in the theater, or room, and hers was often a voice of encouragement. She would send notes about scripts she thought I should write, cheering me on and knowing – and stating – exactly why. She never failed to make me laugh. I had known that she was troubled. I had also known that she hated the left’s lock on academia, the culture and the government and was horrified at the possibility that Obama might be re-elected. Kathy struggled with the challenge of coping with difficulties and clearing life’s obstacles. Life is serious and life is hard and I know she knew that. Whatever her flaws, doubts and fears, Kathy could be full of life. From my viewpoint, I think she did her best to hold on.

When I told a friend of Kathy’s suicide, she stepped back as her jaw dropped and her hand went straight to cover her mouth as she gasped: “another one!” She’d lost someone she knew, too, and there are others. I have reason to think, as I wrote last month, that despair is coming to define our times. I know that Kathy’s suicide is a horrible thing, especially for those who agonize over the loss, though I always smile when I think of Kathy at her best. But I will always associate her choice to end her life with the rise of Obama and the end of America, which is confirmed to me by her widower; her final exit is, for me personally, another warning sign of the horror yet to come.

On Mass Murder

By on December 16, 2012 in Culture

I am horrified by Friday’s mass murder in Connecticut. Exterminating children is especially gruesome and evil. I am, however, neither shocked nor surprised in the context of today’s times and I wish people would be a fraction as outraged by the mass murders that happen every other month to innocent, unique and unrepeatable individuals who deserve to live, too. Or post a single picture of a dead American soldier with commensurate outrage at the systematic mass sacrifice by our government of the young being annihilated for the sake of nothing, as I did last week in a post that was noticed and reprinted by a national security blog (read my post, “Sacrifice for Sacrifice’s Sake”, here). Ours is a culture in which people deny, abet and evade the rise of the irrational every day, as I recently wrote about here, and spurts of emotionalism are no substitute for real progress toward eliminating acts of evil. I stand by what I observed this summer (posted here , “Today’s Movie Theater Massacre”) on the day of the last major mass murder. Everyone should be outraged by Friday’s mass murder, an act of evil which is becoming more common in a death-worshipping culture. But if you want to change the world, change its philosophy.

Death of a Nurse

By on December 13, 2012 in Culture

So this is how it feels to lose a nation’s sense of life. There are so many examples in Western culture of rampant nihilism that, to me, it is evident that the American sense of life is gone. Remnants remain here and there, in relatively sentimental TV shows such as ABC’s Modern Family, popular movies such as The King’s Speech and The Artist and the hero worship for Steve Jobs. But since the economy went bad in 2008 – and, more measurably, since Obama’s re-election – I don’t recall such outward disdain and pronounced hostility for the decent and uniquely American values that yield a sense of life. Even the word American is gone. And, this time of year, and in this sense bombastic Bill O’Reilly is right, there certainly is a war on Christmas (not for the reasons he cites) if by Christmas we mean the commercial, the joyous, the unfiltered sense of cheerful, secular optimism that was once shared by most Americans in happy Christmas songs, twinkling lights and abundant displays of cheer and goodwill. It’s true; there is hatred for ‘Merry Christmas’. I hadn’t thought such hatred was possible and, contrary to O’Reilly’s rants about secularism, it is rooted not in rejection of religion but in what Ayn Rand called hatred of the good for being good.

America’s happy days are gone and the West, clinging to life support, is dying, as was made clear again – between daily reports of suicides, sacrifices and mass shootings – when a British nurse, whatever her psychology, was driven to commit suicide by radio disc jockeys in Australia. The DJs have apologized for impersonating the Queen of England in a phone call about a sick pregnant princess placed to the hospital where nurse Jacintha Saldanha worked, and they’ve apparently been suspended, which is fine. The culture of prank calls has been upon us for some time. But their call, their cruelty, their wicked sense of humor, which has thoroughly infected the culture, is a catalyst for her death. That’s not to say they do not have the right to spout their nonsense, their nothingness; they certainly do have that right. But as we tolerate these uncivilized antics – by cretins such as Howard Stern, Stephen Colbert, Jon Stewart, Bill Maher – we will get what we deserve: a backlash against their jaded, nihilistic, death-worshipping humor toward what’s most likely to fill its void: religious control of our lives through government.

With the nanny state rising, from the left as well as from the right, and zombie-like conservatives touting and tolerating any outrageous form of dictatorship, such as the TSA, while zombie-like leftists tout and tolerate any other outrageous form of dictatorship, such as ObamaCare, the demand for stomach-turning jokes, pranks and catcalls is likely to increase, with humor as a salve for what ails us. As it does, calls for putting controls on free speech will increase, too. So, it’s a cycle. What may have seemed like an apparently innocuous jab 50 years ago has worsened, and coarsened, and now we have Will Ferrell’s Funny or Die with fart jokes as the vanguard of humor. That cesspool of bad, blank jokes, Saturday Night Live, still dominates the rotting culture, now mainstreaming the killing of white people and other forms of racism as a knee-slapper. Seinfeld, the opposite of neurotic but happy family-themed Frasier, has no point – neither does its cousin, the humorous and equally vacant Sopranos on HBO – and anyone can see that The Simpsons, South Park, and anything made with or by Seth MacFarlane or any other sniveling jokester is gaining, not losing, acceptance and legitimacy. MacFarlane is scheduled to host the next Oscars, previously and disastrously hosted by David Letterman with his Uma-Oprah absurdism. Nihilism is not a left or right issue; God-fearing Dennis Miller and absurdist Greg Gutfeld and their cohorts are as bitchy as the bitchiest Kathy Griffin routine. There is no better example of the irrational in popular culture than Sacha Baron Cohen, an anarcho-absurdist who is co-starring in the most anticipated serious movie of the season, an adaptation of the musical version of Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables.

The list goes on and I’m sure some of the jokes are humorous, even hilarious. But it is time to acknowledge – as I did when I called out Jon Stewart a couple of years ago – that the cultural onslaught of stupid pet tricks and low humor adds to – rather than offers a temporary reprieve from – the sense that ours is an incomprehensible world.

Whereas once we were delighted by light, gay and ironic humor by Ernst Lubitsch, Buster Keaton, Fred Astaire, Jack Benny, Marilyn Monroe, Howard Hawks, Tracy and Hepburn and Cary Grant now we are bombarded with material intended to denigrate life on earth. We can’t be surprised to find that the joke snuffed someone out. We should realize that with every sanction of a joke, show, routine and trend – from laughing at cheap Kardashians and pregnant Snookis to laughing at the child abuse of a girl called Honey Boo-Boo or one of Octomom’s kids – we undermine the good and aid the rise of its logical overcorrection: religious totalitarian control over our lives. It is that serious, this jaded culture with its incessant death worship – whose leader in the White House has the face of the Grim Reaper – and it can only lead to state-sponsored calls for restoring decency, so there’s nothing funny about it. Ask the family of those who lost wife, mother, friend and nurse Jacintha Saldanha if what one laughs at matters and has consequences in daily life. What we think and what we accept matters.

As I’ve said before, to the point that people are probably sick of hearing it, much of what people choose to consume amounts to death worship. We are surrounded by demand for nonsense in humor, zombies and vampires on screen and shows, jokes and pranks about nothing. Nihilism erodes our sense of decency and eradicates our sense of life. Because total government control is rising, this means we are laughing on the way to our doom – and I think laughter like this propels the rate of acceleration. We should stop laughing, get serious and hold life – not death – as the standard of value, with happiness here on earth as the highest aim. We should strive to find the good and praise, feed from and live by what is left of it and we should focus on making more of it.

A cruel, prank call doesn’t kill someone, but its purpose is to make one feel small and unimportant which may be deadly for anyone tempted to give up and let life go. No one knows what went on in Jacintha Saldanha’s mind that made her want to let it go. As times get worse, and life gets darker, more among us will feel that way, too, and we will feel it more often. When we do, finding and practicing the good – going by reason and egoism – instead of laughing with cynics and malcontents is the only way to hold on.