Came out of the theater and was confronted by an excited guy with his very young daughter. He asked me what I'd seen: I told him. With joy in his voice he asked me if it was good or bad and I said it was terrifying, which is true. He said, "Good or bad?" again. I said good. This pleased him. "Great," he said, eyes afire, "because the last guy I asked said it was dumb." Then he turned to…
Exactly the movie I needed to watch a couple of nights ago: sincerity and gallantry and derring-do and Timothy Dalton in excelsis. The second act is still a bit of a drag—lots of running back and forth between a couple of locations to little dramatic effect—but that finale works like gangbusters.
Alejandro Amenábar’s ambitious, big-budget biopic of philosopher Hypatia – The Passion of the Christ for atheists – struggled to find distributors around the world, was dumped into cinemas with barely any publicity, and was criticised by Catholic groups in Spain for defaming Christianity: the polar opposite of Mel Gibson’s berserk Passion Play. Who knows why audiences didn’t connect with this tragic epic: it has the requisite visual wow-factor, moves at a clip, and is easily accessible.
Perhaps no one wants…
The book Atlas Shrugged is a vile thing partially redeemed by the rubberneck value of seeing an author’s scarred psyche and bigotry transformed into a meticulously thought-out yet repellent philosophy that denies the existence of abstract beauty or humanity. Reading it is an alternately hilarious and disturbing experience, but it helps you understand the workings of the moneymen who arrogantly and incorrectly assume that their blind luck and ruthlessness in gaming the system is evidence of their Übermenschian superiority over…
