Do the Movies Have a Future?

The first of a four-part series

In his new collection of essays addressing the art and the business of the entertainment world, New Yorker film critic David Denby expresses a deep concern about the decline of the artistic preeminence of films in the face of new technology and a new Golden Age of television. He covers too much fascinating ground to do justice to here; but at the heart of his book is an intriguing question: Do the Movies Have a Future?

Denby laments the waning vigor of a cinema that matters – movies like There Will Be Blood, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, and The Tree of Life. That vigor is threatened by “the way the business structure of movies is now constricting the art of movies.” Sure, Hollywood studios halfheartedly get behind the usual rom-coms, horror flicks, and thrillers; but for the most part, their business model depends on massively-budgeted but shallow spectacles. The problem is that the big profits from those blockbusters don’t get steered toward more adventurous projects; they go instead into the next sequel or franchise.

As an example, he notes that 2010’s Transformers: Dark of the Moon, which he calls “a thundering farrago of verbal and visual gibberish,” grossed $1 billion worldwide in a month: “Nothing is going to stop such success from laying waste to the movies as an art form.”

Kim Kardashian’s Prayer for Israel Draws Death Threats

Woe to any celebrity who dares even publicly hint at support for Israel, lest he or she feel the wrath of fans lusting for the destruction of that embattled Middle Eastern democracy. Like pop singer Katy Perry last year, reality TV megastar Kim Kardashian found that out the hard way last week.

As Israel pushed back against Hamas recently with Operation Pillar of Defense, the normally apolitical Kardashian tweeted this simple note of concern: “Praying for everyone in Israel.” Well-meaning, right? Harmless, right? Not to the Israel-haters among her nearly 17 million Twitter followers, whose illiterate response was fast and furious. They bombarded her with angry, insulting tweets, some of which wished death upon her. “Ill pray you will die kim” spewed someone with the Twitter handle nashauzir. AishaJamil tweeted “pray for palestine not that f***ing israel. U're so stupid!! U should die at there! Bitch.” “Go die in a hole full of sh*t” wrote MusUp_.

Realizing that she had accidentally stepped out of her depth into shark-infested political waters, Kardashian quickly backpedaled, tweeting that she was now “Praying for everyone in Palestine and across the world!” A saintly sentiment, but there are two problems with that. One, there is no Palestine (except on Arab maps, which feature no Israel), and two, it is a retreat into a moral neutrality so broad as to be meaningless.

"The Soup" – A Smorgasbord of Guilty Pleasures

Pop culture today is bursting with so many guilty pleasure possibilities that it’s impossible to indulge in as many as you’d like without abandoning your job and other responsibilities, like showering. It’s necessary for the serious pop culture observer to keep up, however, not just with the Kardashians but with the whole fascinating, lurid tapestry of it, partly for fun and partly to gauge just how quickly that handbasket with civilization in it is going to Hell. For such aficionados-on-the-go like myself, I’ve found that the most efficient way to get a weekly recap of pop culture is to tune in every Wednesday to E! Entertainment’s The Soup and get a feel for what I’m missing (or not, as the case may be.)

The half-hour show delivers a loopy roundup of television highlights (lowlights, actually) of the past week – the most outrageous, ludicrous moments from the lowest common denominator of pop entertainment, from the unreality of reality shows, to the bombast of Mexican telenovelas, to the manufactured melodrama of singing competitions. Host/comedian Joel McHale adds his (mostly) scripted, snarky commentary to the clips, and a small (and very likely loaded) live audience laughs and hoots along.

How Do You Solve a Problem Like Sharia?

“Sharia-compliant Islam is ascendant.” So writes the incomparable Andrew C. McCarthy in his foreword to Andrew Bostom’s timely new book, Sharia Versus Freedom: The Legacy of Islamic Totalitarianism. And “Western elites have abandoned the field – or better, put it up for sale to Islamic activists and their apologists.” This leaves Bostom as “one of the precious few who dare” to put their considerable scholarly energies into exposing sharia for what it truly is.

Dr. Andrew Bostom, Associate Professor of Medicine at Rhode Island Hospital, has published articles and commentary on Islam here on FrontPage and in the Washington Times, National Review, American Thinker, and elsewhere in print and online. Bostom is the author of two essential, extraordinary, and meticulously documented works of scholarship, The Legacy of Jihad: Islamic Holy War and the Fate of Non-Muslims and The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism: From Sacred Texts to Solemn History (about which I interviewed him here and here for FrontPage). Now he has built upon and transcended those books with his newest and most important work thus far.

Sharia Versus Freedom is a sobering collection of Bostom’s recent essays elucidating what is arguably the most threatening ideology of our time. His distinctive erudition is on full display in this impossibly encyclopedic work. Allow me to break the book down to present an idea of the depth and breadth of its wide-ranging contents:

Judd Apatow’s Family Values

I’ve done more than my share of decoding culture for political subtexts. But sometimes cultural messages are best articulated in terms of values rather than politics.

Last week, for example, an interviewer for Film Comment commented to director Judd Apatow that

Time and again, you show us couples trying really hard to work out their problems rather than simply calling it quits and getting that divorce (or, in the case of Knocked Up, that abortion), which is something I think some critics have misconstrued as a strain of neoconservatism or family-values propaganda in your work.

I was struck by the phrase “family-values propaganda,” which implies an insidious political agenda. Critics have indeed fretted over whether there is a strain of social conservatism in Apatow’s movies. But he responds to them in terms of relationships, not politics:

I grew up on The Mary Tyler Moore Show and M*A*S*H and All in the Family and Taxi, and what that imprinted on me was that families are complicated but we love each other and at the end of the day we’re there for each other.

The Last Man: An Interview with Vince Flynn

Vince Flynn is the author of fourteen thriller novels, every one of which has hit the New York Times bestseller list, and all but one of which feature Flynn’s no-nonsense, politically incorrect, scourge-of-Islamic-evil, protagonist Mitch Rapp. Flynn is so clued in to our national security apparatus that his books have actually been put on security review by the Pentagon before being released, and used by the Secret Service to modify their protocols. One high-ranking CIA official has even told his people, “I want you to read Flynn's books and start thinking about how we can more effectively wage this war on terror.”

I received an advance copy of Flynn’s latest, The Last Man, which releases November 13. A typical Flynn page-turner, it revolves around the kidnapping of a valuable CIA asset in Afghanistan, and Mitch Rapp’s mission to retrieve him.

Mark Tapson: The Last Man is your thirteenth novel to feature Mitch Rapp. What is it about him that you think resonates with so many readers?

Vince Flynn: I go back to that Churchill quote, “We sleep soundly in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.” Most Americans know there are bad people out there who want to do bad things and hurt Americans.

When I sat down to create the character, I’d graduated high school and college in the ‘80s, and I had seen the rise of Islamic radical fundamentalism and also the decline of communism. So I thought, what’s going to be the next big threat? And I thought these crazy, racist, bigoted Islamofascists were going to be the problem, and we’d better go on the offensive. This sounds harsh, but I thought we’d better start killing them before they kill us. I think a lot of Americans would prefer it if they could live their lives and have somebody like Mitch Rapp go over there and take care of these problems before they get to our shore. Unfortunately our politicians don’t often have the stomach to handle these problems that way.

MT:    Speaking of politicians, not only are Presidents Clinton and Bush both big fans, but you’ve heard now that even Obama may be. Are you surprised that a politically incorrect character like Mitch Rapp has fans on both sides of the political aisle?

In Praise of American Warriors

(The following is a Memorial Day piece I wrote for Big Peace in 2009. I usually repost it every Memorial Day, but not this year, so here it is for Veteran's Day instead)

My father Roger E. Tapson, a former United States Army Staff Sergeant and veteran of World War II, died five years ago and was buried near a small lake in the rolling, pastoral grounds of the Dallas-Ft. Worth National Cemetery alongside thousands of other veterans - their names, as poet Stephen Spender might say, "feted by the waving grass, and by the streamers of white cloud, and whispers of wind in the listening sky, the names of those who…left the vivid air signed with their honor." It’s exactly the kind of place my dad would have described – without a hint of Oprah-fied, feminized, New Age devaluation of the word – as “spiritual.” It was the way I once heard him describe a still, brisk, early autumn morning on a gorgeously wooded golf course, his favorite place to be.

Spiritual indeed, but not in the same degree or kind as "civilian” burial grounds. Not to diminish the final resting place of anyone interred in the latter; but to stand in a military cemetery among the unadorned, uniform white markers that stretch out in precise rows like an army-in-waiting, is to feel a spiritually heightened quality to your surroundings that demands humility, gratitude, and a more solemn reverence. The “vivid air” of a military cemetery is undeniably suffused with something extra, because it’s not merely a graveyard, but a memorial to qualities that constitute the best of humanity – honor, courage, dignity, service and sacrifice – and to warriors who once embodied them. Their grave markers stand as a challenge to those of us who remain.

The Lesson of Mr. Holland’s Opus

Earlier this week, Ryan Murphy posted a thought-provoking piece on Acculturated that posed the question, “If we have a career dream, should we go after it at all costs?” He answered it by noting that the single-minded pursuit of one’s passion is fine for those who can afford the risk, but in the real world, few have the luxury of committing themselves wholly to achieving their dreams and maybe even stardom. Most of us must make sacrifices for real-world responsibilities like bills and families.

But that doesn’t mean we must abandon our dreams, Murphy says:

Instead of looking at dreams as a yes or no, maybe it’s best to look at dreams on a continuum, allowing enough time outside of work to quench that thirst and keep that passion alive. This can ensure that down the road, after working for twenty five years in that cubicle in order to give your child a better life, you can tell him or her (while juggling four balls at once) that you did pursue your dream, just part time.

Pursue your dream part-time? To many, this may seem like what was called, in the idealistic 1960s, a cop-out. But I was reminded of the 1995 movie Mr. Holland’s Opus, starring Richard Dreyfuss as an aspiring young composer with dreams of stardom, who grudgingly takes a position teaching high school music. In his mind, this is merely a temporary day job.

Alone, Together

In Program or Be Programmed, his compelling short guide to seizing control of your life back from the seductive embrace of technology, Douglas Rushkoff describes the oddly detached lifestyle of a young trendsetter named Gina who has an “always on” relationship to her social media. She hops from one hip party to another, but is never truly present:

Instead of turning the phone off and enjoying herself, however, she turns her phone around, activates the camera, and proceeds to take pictures of herself and her friends – instantly uploading them to her Facebook page for the world to see…

She relates to her friends through the network, while practically ignoring whomever she is with at the moment. She relates to the places and people she is actually with only insofar as they are suitable for transmission to others in remote locations. The most social girl in her class doesn’t really socialize in the real world at all. [Emphasis added]

In this era of easy worldwide connectedness, our youth are suffering an unprecedented degree of emotional detachment, depression and loneliness. “The more connected we become, the lonelier we are,” argues Atlantic writer Stephen Marche in “Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?” MIT’s Sherry Turkle, in her book Alone Together, concurs that our relentless online connection ironically leads to alienation and solitude. Marche nails it: “A connection is not the same thing as a bond.”

Hollywood’s Last-Minute Push for Obama

Right on the heels of President Obama’s very revealing statement encouraging his supporters to vote out of a sense of revenge, comes a spate of last-minute pushes by his loyal (but gradually dwindling) supporters in Hollywood, attempting to help him get those voters to the polls.

In a video posted Saturday on the Obama campaign camp’s YouTube Channel, comedian Will Ferrell addresses the camera with “I will do anything to get you to go out and vote November sixth. I’m not kidding.” In a smoking jacket adorned with an Obama 2012 pin, he promises to do a little dance, eat anything we tell him to, even punch himself in the face, if we go to the polls and vote Obama. Ferrell helped raise funds for Hollywood’s President in 2008, and co-hosted a $38,000 a person fundraiser for him in February.

An anti-Romney political spot, paid for by the pro-Obama Jewish Council for Education and Research, was released by former singer Cher and buzzsaw-voiced comedienne Kathy Griffin. The idiotically-titled “Don't Let Mitt Turn Back Time on Women's Rights” features footage of Romney stumping for Richard Mourdock, the U.S. Senate candidate who came under fire for saying that “even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something that God intended to happen.” The video also attempts to link Romney to Senate candidate Todd Akin, who said in August that women’s bodies could prevent pregnancy in instances of “legitimate rape.”

What the Cher-Griffin ad doesn’t mention is that the Romney camp stated that “he disagrees with Richard Mourdock's comments, and they do not reflect his views." Romney also denounced Akin’s comments as “inexcusable,” “insulting,” and “wrong.”