Cold Type

Unearthing Redemption

Thomas S. Hibbs reviews Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada on National Review Online:

The film's implicit questions, which transcend politics, concern our treatment of the dead, where they rest and why we remember them. There are indeed three burials: the first is illegal but socially acceptable because the dead man is insignificant to the community; the second is legal but fails to fulfill what is due out of friendship; and the third fulfills what this debt, surpassing mere legality, in a quasi-sacramental way, the efficacy of which is intended not just for the dead man, but even more for those who must go on living.

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Match Point

Thomas S. Hibbs on Woody Allen's Match Point:

For Woody Allen's sake, it is a good thing that the majority of the country—namely movie reviewers—aren't casually reading great books like Crime and Punishment, a book the main character, Chris Walton (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers), reads in an early scene in Allen’s latest release Match Point. As if insisting that we need to know Dostoevsky to appreciate his film, Allen frames the cover of the book at the very center of the camera and then holds that shot. The more one thinks about the characters, plot, philosophical content, or even the humor of Dostoevsky’s classic, the more disappointing is Allen’s film. Still, on its own terms, Match Point is worth seeing and worth puzzling over, even if in the end it suggests certain possibilities that Allen may never have entertained.

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A New Normal

Thomas S. Hibbs on film and television in anxious times, in the New Atlantis:

We seem suspicious that what we take to be real in our experience is in fact a fiction, that technological construction obscures what is natural and authentic. We are also anxious that technology, the chief instrument of progress in our culture, will be turned against us by terrorists, destroying our entertainment-seeking way of life. We hunger at once for restored innocence and unifying epics; we lament what we are and we fear losing what we have. Taken together, film and television seem to mirror the confusions of our age. Real love, real danger, and real grief intermingle in the popular imagination with pulp fact and pulp fiction, with the worst delusions and highest aspirations both taking shape on the big and little screen.

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Brokeback Mountain

Thomas S. Hibbs on the "gay cowboy movie", on National Review Online:

The gifted Ang Lee is focused on telling a story, not on preachy moralizing; indeed, where moral judgments enter in, they do so as part of the fabric of the story. The problem with Lee’s occasionally-gorgeous and often-moving film is that it has at its core a tired and unconvincing thesis about forbidden love, embedded within a classically romantic dualism of natural harmony versus alienated civilization.

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(What) Should Your Kids Be Watching?

An answer from Thomas S. Hibbs, author of Shows About Nothing, on National Review Online:

We might want to resist the eclipse of the written word by the visual image in our schools and homes. Of course, the written word and the moving image, accompanied by sound, are distinct media, embodying divergent artistic excellences. One of our tasks no doubt is to teach students to move between the two and not to judge one by the standards of the other. But it is also significant that, when avid readers compare their beloved books with their cinematic versions, they find the latter wanting. They have the sense that film fails to capture the imaginative richness of the written word, a richness paradoxically founded on what the written word is not compelled to supply for us.

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