The deadline for submitting papers to the Molinari Society’s symposium on intellectual property is now one month away.
Archive | April, 2009
Duplex Perplexity
I saw Duplicity, which I thought was a lot of fun. Clive Owen strikes me as being much better suited to playing James Bond – I mean the James Bond of the books – than anyone who’s actually played him. And for what it’s worth, based on her performance in this film Julia Roberts now strikes me as a viable albeit imperfect Dagny Taggart.
The movie also has a terrific theme song: Being Bad by bitter:sweet.
But what’s up with the reviews of that movie? I’ve seen review after review moaning not just that the plot is complicated (which it is) but that it’s a hopeless incomprehensible tangle (which it isn’t).
This review, which calls the film “inscrutable” and “too confusing for its own good,” is typical – as is this one, which calls the film “stylish but muddled,” and complains: [MILD SPOILER follows:]
the movie never does reveal, at least not with enough precision to be truly satisfying, just what Claire and Ray’s prefab conversation (which will recur at intervals throughout the movie) is all about.
Um … yes it does. It’s explained completely. Were we watching the same movie? The third enactment of the conversation contains an explicit backward reference to the second one and an explicit forward reference to the first – spelling it out loud and clear for the audience just in case there could be any doubt. [SPOILER OVER]
Admittedly the movie cuts forward and backward in time, and we often don’t fully understand what was really going on in one scene until we see a later (i.e. later for us, but earlier in internal chronology) scene. But this is not exactly some bewilderingly innovative postmodern narrative technique, and it’s a bit odd to be thrown by it. By the end of the movie there are no major puzzles left unexplained – at least to audiences that were paying attention.
But the reviews that complain about the movie being bewildering aren’t the most bewildering reviews. That prize would have to go to this one: [SERIOUS SPOILER follows – and I mean SERIOUS, as in IF YOU’RE PLANNING TO SEE THE MOVIE, STOP READING NOW:]
It’s pretty people versus ugly people. Guess who wins? … the movie boils down to this rudimentary formula: morality and success are functions of beauty.
Here I have to ask once again, in a still more incredulous tone: Were we watching the same movie? You can debate about who wins the morality points in the movie – it’s not obvious that anyone does, really – but success? The pretty people lose. That’s what that whole scene was about at the end, you know, with the two pretty people sitting there looking all depressed? Remember the end? You did stay for the whole movie, right? [SECOND SPOILER OVER]
Okay, rant over.
In the Footnotes
Often topics arise in the comments sections that are only tangentially related to the original post. In case you missed these:
My post on cultural literacy has generated a debate on feminism; my post on W’a L’ma R’t has generated two pages of debate on left-libertarianism (I’ll try to answer some more of the comments tomorrow); and the L & P version of my post on the Atlas Shrugged movie has provoked a whole new post there by William Marina on Rand’s awful awfulness.
Pattern Patter
Check out this 1916 poem by Amy Lowell (of the same family as fellow poets James Russell Lowell and Robert Lowell).
A Gun Law I Can Support
Just saw some talking head on tv defending gun control; he said: “People talk about the 2nd Amendment, but the 2nd Amendment doesn’t give you the right to go out and gun down a bunch of people. We need stricter laws.”
You mean it isn’t already illegal to go out and gun down a bunch of people? I did not know dat.
Kulcherel Littorasy
I’ve read almost everything on this cultural literacy test, but it only goes through the 19th century. I have a feeling my score will slip severely once the second half of the test comes out.
Of the works on this list, how many were actually assigned to me in either high school or college? By my count, six. Or seven, if being assigned Henry V counts as being assigned “Shakespeare’s Plays.”
I have to gripe about some of the “signing statements” attached to the list – such as “Ignore any critic who downplays the Bard’s Christian vision or who tries to make him into a feminist or commentator on colonialism.” Any reading of Shakespeare that misses his deep skepticism concerning traditional theology, authority, imperialism, gender roles, and the like is simply missing Shakespeare. (It’s always worth remembering how deeply Shakespeare was influenced by Montaigne; the plays are filled with references to the Essais.)
Moreover, the claim that Elizabeth Bennet “must jettison Romantic sensibilities to find real love” is a very odd thing to say about Pride and Prejudice (it would be more accurate if said of Marianne Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility, though even there not perfectly so), given that the man Elizabeth ends up with is a quintessential arrogant brooding proto-Randian romantic hero.
I also have to gripe about some omissions from the list. In particular: No Herodotus or Thucydides?