| (posted Wednesday, Jan. 8; to be composted Wednesday, Jan. 15) |
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| Movie Beavis and Butt-Head Do America (Paramount). The postmodern twist in this television-show-turned-movie isn't that the farting, belching, heh-heh-hehing cartoon characters have pulled in record box-office receipts since the film opened three weeks ago ($54.1 million). It's that movie critics adore them. Stephen Holden argues in the New York Times that Beavis and Butt-Head are reassuring because they are "cruder and geekier than even their most loutish fans." The Washington Post's Desson Howe claims they're funny because they "embody our trashy media culture." The Village Voice's Gary Dauphin explains Beavis and Butt-Head's deep psychological appeal: "[E]veryone has a pile of shit somewhere they feel particularly and inexplicably fond of." Middlebrow critics offer up their standard objections: "I've witnessed the end of civilization as we know it," says the ChicagoTribune's Mark Caro. (You can follow the Beavis and Butt-Head road trip and enter the "Beavis and Butt-Head Sweepstakes" at the movie's site.) |
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Book Slouching to Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline, by Robert Bork (ReganBooks/HarperCollins). "Bork borks back" is how legal scholar Richard Epstein, writing in the New York Times, characterizes the failed Supreme Court nominee's rant against the evils of modern life. Other critics agree. Even conservative admirers are shocked by Bork's apocalyptic pronouncements. In the Weekly Standard, Tod Lindberg marvels at Bork's "relentless morbidity, [which] leads the author himself into such occasional flights of perversity as a faux longing for the return of the Berlin Wall." Lindberg and Donald Lyons (writing in the American Spectator) deplore Bork's failure to offer a cure for the social ills he diagnoses, but TheNew Yorker's David Denby calls the book itself a symptom of terminal "Moral Certainty": "Bork's diatribe is ... unembarrassed by such events as the postwar disappearance of millions of industrial jobs. ... He cannot, or will not, see that such all but geologic disruptions in American life might produce some negative effect on sociability, religious attendance, child-rearing, and family structure." | | Television Politically Incorrect With Bill Maher (weeknights at 12:05 a.m. on ABC). After four seasons on Comedy Central, Politically Incorrect moves to ABC, and critics wonder how host Bill Maher and his often amusing talk show will fare under Disney, which owns ABC. "The way you can tell the show is changing is when Maher starts having Michael Eisner on the show," predicts Newsday's Marvin Kitman. S LATE's Larry Doyle anoints Maher the unlikely heir of Johnny Carson, but the New York Daily News' David Bianculli credits PI's bookers, not Maher himself, with the show's success: "The guest roster ... and how those guests interact, that's what you won't see anywhere else on television." The New York Times' Walter Goodman is less impressed: "Beware of satire that identifies itself as such." |
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Movie Mother (Paramount Pictures). Critics love the idea behind comedian Albert Brooks' latest paean to neurosis: Loser moves in with mom to try to overcome his feelings of rejection. "There would be no 'Seinfeld' strain of humor on television without Mr. Brooks' pioneering approach to yuppie psycho-trivia," says the New York Times' Janet Maslin. He's an acute "observer of our minor domestic anguishes," says Time's Richard Schickel, who says that the problem with the movie is the execution: "It remains more anecdote than full-scale narrative," he says. Also see David Edelstein's review in S LATE and the Mother page. | | Movie Some Mother's Son (Castle Rock). Critics expected "mere political cartooning" (as the Boston Globe's Jay Carr puts it) from this Irish account of the 1981 hunger strike by Irish Republican Army prisoners (it was written by a former IRA member). They get psychological acumen instead. Credit for this goes to the actresses playing the strikers' mothers, Helen Mirren and Fionnula Flanagan: Mirren as a liberal among extremists "brings the film the gift of a fine-grained consciousness" (Michael Sragow, San Francisco Weekly), while Flanagan as the staunch IRA supporter "conveys a mixture of ominous militancy and maternal vulnerability that is as compelling as it is utterly believable." (Stephen Holden, the New York Times). Too believable, perhaps: the New Republic's Stanley Kauffmann frets that the film devotes insufficient attention to Irish Protestants, who outnumber Catholics 2-to-1: "[I]t might be possible for us to come away from the film thinking it analogous to one about Norway under the Germans, with a few Norwegians who were sympathetic to the invading force." But Time magazine doubts that Americans can tell the difference: "The real Irish trouble is that hardly anyone outside Ireland cares about this endless insurrection." (The Some Mother's Son Web site has not only clips and audio, but also its own partisan account of Irish history going back to the 14th century.) |
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| Books Christian Dior: The Man Who Made the World Look New, by Marie-France Pochna, translated by Joanna Savill (Arcade); and Yves Saint Laurent: A Biography, by Alice Rawsthorn (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday). Did Christian Dior revolutionize couture, or force it into a reactionary past? In a New Yorker essay, Francine Du Plessix Gray argues that Dior's "innovations"--minuscule waistbands and padded hips--amounted to a "counter-revolution" in the history of fashion, which served the purposes of the collaborationist French right after World War II: "[T]he guiltless hedonism of La Belle Epoque was an ideally soothing choice." Gray further deplores the "stunning naïveté" of Pochna's subtitle, which fails to catch the "misogynist ironies of the so-called New Look." In the New York Times Book Review, Holly Brubach also chides Pochna for underestimating Dior's nostalgic anti-modernism. Both Gray and Brubach agree that the book's strength is its coverage of Dior's greatest contribution to design--the art of marketing, which turned fashion into an international industry. Financial Times reporter Alice Rawsthorn's biography of Saint Laurent also focuses on the economics of fashion. "Is it a sign of our culture's seemingly endless fascination with money that both Ms. Pochna and Alice Rawsthorn ... get so caught up--and so bogged down--in the annals of stock quotations and licensee contracts?" (Brubach). --Compiled by Franklin Foer and the editors of SLATE. |
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Illustrations by Mark Alan Stamaty
