still more movies

Posted on Friday, 2004 November 12 by Anton

隠し砦の三悪人 (Hidden Fortress) (1958, dir. Kurosawa). Good fun. — I don’t understand Japanese, but noticed that the princess seemed to use her title hime as pronoun.

Rio Bravo (1959, dir. Hawks). Drags some. — When I saw this years ago on AMC(?), the presenter told the story that, when Howard Hawks started to pitch the plot, John Wayne quickly recognized it as one they had made before (which I think I had also seen, though its title now escapes me) and asked, “Do I get to be the drunk this time?”

Les Quatre Cents Coups (The 400 Blows) (1958, dir. Truffaut). My One True Ex warned me that it’s quite boring. I watched some of the beginning, and a bit near the end, and concluded that she was likely right. — The translation of the title is unfortunate: coups here is better rendered as strokes, and anyway the phrase really means, roughly, every trick in the book. — Most movies on DVD have twenty or thirty scene-markers; this has only six.

Ohayô (Good Morning) (1959, dir. Ozu). Amusing slice of suburban life. — Someone says “sayonara” and I think, is this the first time I’ve ever heard a Japanese use that word?

Orfeu Negro (1959, dir. M.Camus). Pretty but unsatisfying: the drivers of the plot – Eurydice’s nemesis, and Orfeu’s love for her – are never motivated. — I was surprised to understand so few words of a Romance language; and more surprised at the frequency of the pronoun você. Is tu as dead in Brazil as thou in the Anglosphere?

The Immaculate Collection, Madonna videos of the Eighties. It turned out to include only two that I hadn’t seen a hundred times (“Borderline” and “La Isla Bonita”), plus a staging of “Vogue” that’s even sillier than the familiar one. I was hoping it would have “Justify My Love” which was deemed too racy for MTV. No luck. — When she wore that sheer top in “Vogue”, where did her nips go?

An Ideal Husband (1999, dir. O.Parker). Not all of Oscar Wilde’s plays, I find, are as fluffy as Earnest. Excellent performances, too.

I forgot to mention last week that my One True Ex dragged me to see Stage Beauty (2003, dir. R.Eyre), a comedy about gender issues during the Stuart Restoration. It’s a treat.

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what’s humane?

Posted on Thursday, 2004 November 11 by Anton

Greg Perry, born with one leg and three fingers, passionately denounces the Americans with Disabilities Act in the December issue of Liberty.

In 1990, I thought about going to Washington to campaign against this farce when Congress was discussing it because I knew it would be horribly misused, cost America far more than estimated, and end up causing more problems for those who were truly handicapped. I decided not to go. I had severely underestimated the ADA; I still kick myself. (And believe me, kicking myself is a challenge!)

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Jesusland

Posted on Thursday, 2004 November 11 by Anton

I guess you’ve all seen the secession map by now, in one form or another. I’m not keen on being governed from Ottawa or México, myself, but how much worse can it be than a “Jesusland” relieved of its inhibitions?

Assuming for the sake of argument that the “Blue States” do withdraw from one federation and seek to join another, would they have us? The population of New York is equal to that of Ontario and Quebec (Canada’s biggest provinces) combined. California is about equal to all of Canada, or one-third of Mexico. Once they’ve got the gloating out of their system, the legislators to north and south will find plenty of reasons not to welcome all of the putative applicants.

So: if a realignment of boundaries does occur, I reckon it’s sure to increase the number of sovereignties in North America. Though most of them may be more distateful than the present selection, I only need one libertarian country.

Furthermore, if movement between the new states and federations is not seriously impaired (as should be politically difficult), competition is likely to drive most of them in a vaguely libertarian direction.

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socialist paradise

Posted on Thursday, 2004 November 11 by Anton

It amuses me to have a go at translating this Livejournal entry by François-René Rideau (“Faré”):

. . . in taking positions based on static emotions disconnected from causal mechanisms, [the socialists] come to advocate absurdities. The more Swiss cheese, the more holes; the more holes, the less cheese; therefore, the more cheese, the less cheese. Correlations with moving referent, variation of the constant, semantic slippage — an anti-conceptual mentality, impaired from proper reasoning, exposes itself to such sophisms.
. . .
Enemy of the people and of the other enemies of the people, alone in the world where man is man’s wolf, where each is the enemy of all — behold at once the spectre that socialism demonizes and the prophecy that socialism realizes.

To which I suppose a socialist would say, I know you are but what am I?

Some of Faré’s entries are in (excellent) English, by the way.

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fun with an easy target

Posted on Wednesday, 2004 November 10 by Anton

The Manchester Guardian (Oct.27):

Torture is simple – amazing results can be achieved with the everyday household objects that any Blue Peter presenter might recommend. And it’s really sexy – think of all that painstaking attention to genital areas. Better yet, it’s about power – having the power to make somebody into something. The kind of exhilarating stuff you’re not supposed to try at home. Never mind that even Malleus Maleficarum (the original torture manual for the Spanish Inquisition) cautioned that its victims might say anything to make it stop – torture is definitely about truth and about justice springing in a really surprising and frankly rather ill-defined way from unjust and criminal acts, and don’t forget, if we don’t do it to them, they’ll do it to us.

Cited by the Future of Freedom Foundation. There’s a daily mailing of links, but I don’t see offhand how to subscribe.

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maybe it shoulda been called the Kallikak monkey trial

Posted on Wednesday, 2004 November 10 by Anton

Inherit the Wind somehow never mentioned that the evilutionist textbook used by John Scopes was racist and eugenist. Jim Lindgren, Volokh Conspirator, has the story.

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the L-word

Posted on Wednesday, 2004 November 10 by Anton

About a decade ago, someone or other wrote in The Nation advocating that the Left reclaim the word populist. I was tempted to send a letter asking whether, in that case, we individualists could have liberal back.

The Economist, in its current issue, makes a similar plea for liberal, remarking:

“Liberal” is a term of contempt in much of Europe as well – even though, strangely enough, it usually denotes the opposite tendency. Rather than being keen on taxes and public spending, European liberals are often derided (notably in France) for seeking minimal government – in fact, for denying that government has any useful role at all, aside from pruning vital regulation and subverting the norms of decency that impede the poor from being ground down. Thus, in continental Europe, as in the United States, liberalism is also regarded as a perversion, a pathology: there is consistency in that respect, even though the sickness takes such different forms.

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