Shooting fish in a barrel

Quoting Amanda Marcotte in illustration of Sailer's Law of Female Journalism (That the issue that will tend to most passionately engage non-self-aware female journalists is that society should be turned upside down so that she, personally, would be considered hotter-looking) is kind of a cheap shot because Ms. Marcotte notoriously combines self-absorption, lack of self-awareness, vast reserves of hate, and dimness, but sometimes I can't pass her up:

Boycotting the Hollywood Age Gap 

Well, I'm proposing a test of my own, to save myself the pain of seeing a movie that's advertised as being some kind of intelligent indie film but is yet another example of cliched sexist fantasies being passed off as realistic story-telling. Call it the "Marcotte Test": no more movies or shows where the hero is a decade or more older than his love interest.  And if she's under 25, the time span gets shortened to five years.  Exceptions will be made for anti-heroes whose attraction to younger women helps establish how deeply flawed they are as people (see: Don Draper).

Right. Women of the blogging class all watch Mad Men because Jon Hamm's character is so pathetically flawed.

I hate to be a hard ass about this, because I do believe that there are many happy romances between people who are more than ten years apart, but in reality, most people tend to partner off with those who are close in age to themselves. (The average age at first marriage is less than two years difference in the United States.)  And when people do expand beyond the few-year range, there is usually some discussion about the age gap, and some struggle to overcome it.  But if you only learned about love from Hollywood movies

Perhaps movies should come with a bold type notice from the Surgeon General: Warning: Don't only learn about love from Hollywood movies! (Also, don't attempt to use a broomstick to fly.)

you'd think that most women needed a man who was nearing or past puberty when she was born, and men are disgusted by women with whom they share generational touchstones with. Sorry, but I just don't know many dudes who say things like, "Yuck, I can't be with someone who was actually buying records when Kurt Cobain was still alive. We'd have way too much in common!" 

This test was developed while I was mindlessly reading the preview for the new Ewan McGregor movie "Beginners" in Entertainment Weekly.  It's supposed to be one of those quirky comedies about a man who faces some hard times and learns to grow up and find true love, but my enthusiasm for the movie drained when I realized that McGregor, born in 1971, was being paired off with Mélanie Laurent, born in 1983.  If you want to make a romance a symbol of someone's maturation process, it seems uniquely stupid to make said romance with someone who was still pooping her diapers while you were starting to get your first real crushes. 

Once noticed in this movie

In other words, this 33-year-old professional pundit hadn't noticed that there tends to be an age gap between leading men and leading ladies in movies until a few weeks ago.

it began to bug me across the board: Ryan Reynolds is 11 years older than his love interest Blake Lively in "The Green Lantern."  

In other words, there's ample disparate impact evidence that Hollywood sex discriminates against younger male actors. Unless, like Shia LeBeouf, you remind Steven Spielberg of himself at your age, it's much harder to get cast as the male lead in summer blockbusters until after you've paid a lot of dues than it is to get cast as the female lead. Call the EEOC!

Ryan Gosling, who is 30,  is being paired off with 22-year-old Emma Stone in "Crazy, Stupid, Love". Even Tom Hanks in "Larry Crowne" is 11 years older than Julia Roberts.  I'm sure there are more that have passed my notice; these were just the highlighted movies in the magazine. 

Or how about in last winter's indie version of Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, in which Michael Fassbender as Mr. Rochester is 12-years-older than 21-year-old Mia Wasikowska as Jane? Or how about all those mangled adaptations of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice where the actor playing Mr. Darcy is substantially older than the actress playing Miss Bennett? What woman ever liked 36-year-old Colin Firth as Mr. Darcy in the BBC version of P&P? Or what about how Hollywood ruined Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind by casting Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh? It's all the fault of Hollywood moguls for leaving out popular female romance novelists' commitment to gender equality in age just to stoke their own aging male vanity.

Again, none of this would bother me if it was dealt with honestly or was rare as it is in real life.  But when it sits on the screen with no acknowledgment or explanation, it leaves the impression we're supposed to think of the characters as peers, since they're still just close enough in age you can assume they're supposed to be the same age. Which, in turn, thwarts the onscreen image of what a woman actually looks like at any given age.  Ryan Gosling is allowed to be and look 30, but are we meant to assume that a woman around that age should look 22?  Are we really meant to believe that still-radiant Julia Roberts is the same age as puffy-eyed Tom Hanks?  What women look like at any given age is being subtly erased in movies when we're supposed to assume smooth-faced Mélanie Laurent is roughly the same age as Ewan McGregor, whose face is replete with the lines of looming middle age.

Okay, now I get it, it's a double bankshot version of Sailer's Law. The problem with casting a 28-year-old actress opposite 40-year-old Ewan McGregor is that audiences will assume the beautiful 28-year-old is actually a beautiful 40-year-old, which will make the 33-year-old Marcotte seem less hot in comparison. I strongly doubt that audiences will do any such thing, but to alleviate Marcotte's worries, I propose:

Memo to Hollywood: the surest way to ease Armanda Marcotte's concerns that the women in movies are hotter than she is would be to cast Armanda Marcotte as the sexy lead in all your 2012 releases. Is that too much to ask?

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Italian theater accidentally improves "Tree of Life"

Terrence Malick's movie The Tree of Life begins and ends boringly, but is pretty good (if plotless) in the middle. A movie theatre in Bologna, Italy managed to get the reels of film in the wrong order and showed a jumbled up version for nine nights in a row, to no complaints and, indeed, to applause from ticket-buyers (which it didn't get from the audience at the correctly ordered version I saw). I can well imagine that this version was a more enjoyable viewing experience than the one Malick picked.

It's not like the notorious critic's screening of Death Wish IV where the reels were shown out of order, so a character decapitated in one reel was looking hale and hearty in a later one. Much the same thing happens in Pulp Fiction, of course, but Tarantino has enough panache to make you wonder what transcendent reason there is for John Travolta to resurrect, other than that the film was pretty dull when Travolta wasn't on screen

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

All Things 1962

The new movie X-Men: First Class is set in the year 1962, with a vengeance. It's so 1962ish that after awhile I started wondering about stuff from 1962 that wasn't in the movie: "Hey, how come there aren't any astronauts in this movie? What's more 1962y than astronauts?"

It got me thinking about how it gets easier to figure out what is redolent of a particular year the farther away in time you get. If you started out making a movie about 2011, you'd miss lots of stuff that people in a half century will consider iconic about 2011.

For example, in First Class, one of the mutants designs the Mach 3 SR-71 Blackbird, which they then fly to the West Indies where the U.S. and Soviet navies are squaring off during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Indeed, the SR-71 first flew in 1962, but you couldn't have put it in a movie in 1962 because it was top secret (and it wasn't even called the SR-71 until 1964 -- the early version that began flying in 1962 was called the A-12). When an A-12 crashed in 1963 in Utah, the only witnesses, a passing family, were both threatened and paid $25,000 each by the CIA.

Michael Fassbender plays one of the leads, Magneto, in the mode of Sean Connery, who became a star in 1962 with Dr. No. But James McAvoy plays Professor X, who was famously bald in the earlier/later movies. But McAvoy plays him with a full head of shaggy hair. Why? Because 1962 is now in the history books as the year of the first Beatles single, Love Me Do, so it makes sense for a movie made in 2011 to make a nod to the Beatles. From the perspective of 2011 the historical importance of cute British boys with shaggy hair seems obvious. But it didn't seem obvious in 1962, when Love Me Do, which is a pretty awful song, only reached #17 on the British pop charts.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

"X-Men: First Class"

Here's an excerpt from my review of the new Marvel comic book movie in Taki's Magazine:

X-Men: First Class is the fifth screen adaptation since 2000 of the Marvel Comics series. What’s the appeal of these Homo superior mutants whose superpowers cause them to be oppressed by the bigoted and backward majority, us genetically inferior Homo sapiens?

Read the whole thing there.

By the way, the "First Class" in the title refers to the initial cohort of students in 1962 at Professor X's school for mutant superheroes. There really does sometimes exist a "first class phenomenon" where the first year of students at a new elite academy or program goes on to great success. This is most notable in Hollywood, where the first class of the American Film Institute school included Terrence Malick, David Lynch, Paul Schrader, and Caleb Deschanel. Similarly, the first students of CalArts in Valencia in Character Animation in the 1970s included Brad Bird, Tim Burton, John Lasseter, and John Musker. Congregation of talent or old boy's network?

Here's Matthew Yglesias's posting "Magneto Was Right" on why the mutant supremacist Magneto is right and the nice integrationist Professor X is wrong:

... if you restrict your attention to what’s actually in the text Magneto is clearly in the right and Xavier’s X-Men are a bunch of dupes. The film is a pretty serious departure from the conventional depiction in this regard, but it’s quite thoroughgoing. Magneto’s mutant pride attitude is in every way more admirable than Xavier’s preference for the closet, and Xavier’s political view that mutants and humans can coexist peacefully if mutants avoid provocations is directly contradicted by the events at the end of the film. When Xavier is trying to convince Magneto (and the audience) that Magneto’s more militant methods will cost innocent life he literally says—to a Holocaust survivor!—that “they were only following orders” and therefore their sins are forgivable. 

The mutant pride message is a radical one. It’s too radical for those whose WASP male privilege in their non-mutant lives makes them instinctively want to identify with existing power structures. But a mutant who’s also a Jew, or a woman, or a racial minority, or has had blue or red skin all of his or her life doesn’t suffer from that kind of false consciousness and gets ahead of the curve.

My take is similar but less impressed:

The basic conflict in X-Men between the Martin Luther King-like Professor X and the Malcolm X-like Magneto over whether to tolerate the majority’s prejudice or to give them what they have coming is similar to the struggle in the Harry Potter series between the saintly Dumbledore and the sinister Voldemort. 

In contrast to J. K. Rowling’s tale, however, First Class sympathizes less with Professor X, the outdated assimilationist, and more with Magneto, the mutant supremacist who learned not to trust the majority during the Holocaust. In First Class, one mutant has an epiphany: “We shouldn’t try to be more like them. Society should aspire to be more like us.”

Read the whole thing there.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Stop the Presses!

The Washington Post's banner headline is:

Report: Afghan nation-building effort in peril 

Karen DeYoung 4:25 AM ET 

EXCLUSIVE | Hugely expensive U.S. effort has had only limited success and may not survive an American withdrawal, according to the findings of a two-year congressional investigation to be released Wednesday.

I figured that out from watching a movie on VHS in September 2001.

Fun fact:

The report also warns that Afghanistan could slide into a depression with the inevitable decline of the foreign military and development spending that now provides 97 percent of the country’s gross domestic product.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

"The Tree of Life"

From my movie review in Taki's Magazine:

The movie industry cares only about money, not art. Right? Yet Terrence Malick’s four-decade-long career demonstrates how much money and talent film folk will lavish on an occasional prodigy. 

The exquisite middle section of the 67-year-old director’s new movie, The Tree of Life, an autobiographical memoir of his adolescence in 1950s Waco, Texas, finally fulfills the hopes Hollywood has invested in Malick since his memorable 1973 debut, Badlands, featuring Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek as a thrill-kill couple. Malick is the Red State Coleridge, the philosopher-poet of the Oil Patch.

Read the whole thing there.

A few extra notes on The Tree of Life:

- The idea of Sean Penn playing (in the present) the son of Brad Pitt and and the gorgeous Jessica Chastain (who appear as the parents in the 1950s section of the movie) sounds implausible, but the redheaded starlet has the kind of strong facial features that could, conceivably, be responsible for Sean Penn.

- Malick's own father was variously described as an "Assyrian Christian" or "Chaldean Christian." (Thus, the Garden of Eden reference in the title is all in the family.) There aren't many pictures available of the reclusive Malick, but he looks like a heavier-set version of another half-Arab with fine visual taste, Steve Jobs. [P.S., an Orthodox priest writes in to say that Assyrians don't like to be called "Arabs." He says it's very complicated, but I can see their point: as the Book says in Genesis, they were there first, long before the Arabs arrived.]

- In the movie, Pitt's character describes himself as holder of 27 patents. Online, I can only find ten patents held by Emil A. Malick, but double digits is pretty good, anyway.

- You always hear about the wonders of "Director's Cut," but I'd like to see an "Editor's Cut" of quite a few movies. For example, how much more exciting would a 2-hour version of "King Kong" be than the 3-hour drag Peter Jackson released? You could lose about 45 minutes of "Tree of Life" and the overall movie would be twice as good.

- A director with a similar look to Terrence Malick is Carroll Ballard. Both have only made five movies since the 1970s, and both make gorgeous outdoors films without a lot of dialogue (Here's Spike Jonze's commentary on Ballard's "The Black Stallion.") Ballard paid a lot of dues coming up (he was the second unit director on "Star Wars," which sounds like a pretty good credit to me. I think Ballard's dad was a prominent cameraman in his own day, too.) But Ballard has got typecast as a kids' movie director, not as an art house genius, and has had trouble getting financing, while Malick always has powerful patrons. The link between the two directors is cameraman Caleb Deschanel, who was the DP on Malick's masters thesis short at AFI and then was DP on The Black Stallion. 

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

James Q. Wilson on fall in crime

J.Q. Wilson reviews arguments for explaining the decline in crime in the WSJ. He gives some credence to the lead theory. It would be nice to see the lead theory both more fleshed out and more critiqued. 

What about popular culture? Are there movies today that portray criminals as sympathetic characters? The heist film -- The Town, Fast Five, Oceans 11, or Inception -- remains alive. But the heists in contemporary films are so complicated, require so much planning, training, and teamwork to pull off, that they send the message that you might as well become a second unit movie director. A lot of heist movies these days are actually metaphors about making movies -- Inception, most obviously -- and movies these days are ridiculously complicated to make. 

Moreover, movies promote themselves with "The Making of" documentaries about how complicated they are to make. How many young people have watched The Making of Inception documentary about how many hundreds of experts had to work together to make a movie about expert criminals?

It must be quite daunting for young would-be criminals to be told over and over again by their favorite movies that only by organizing superbly can they become successful criminals.

It's like the flip side of the CIS crime shows on TV that have taught a generation that cops have giant computer monitors that will instantly display the faintest clue that will prove the perp guilty. Heist movies teach the lesson that if you want to outsmart all that CIS technology, you'd better belong to a gang of genius criminals, each of whom is the master of some arcane field of knowhow.

I can imagine that a lot of 13-year-olds would think it cool to join a gang like that, but they don't know any gangs like that. They look around at the gang members they know, like their cousin Jesus, and most of them seem like doomed idiots.

My impression is that popular culture today has gotten rather authoritarian or militaristic. Cops used to be portrayed as big dumb Irishmen, easy to outwit. But now, they're portrayed as practically Seal Team 6, with lots of cool weapons and training. Authority has most of the glamor these days, while criminals seem like losers.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

"Holistic" college admissions

Mickey Kaus writes at the Daily Caller:

But when you think about it, a non-college world in which high school graduates acquired the skills they wanted on the web or in ad hoc classes and proved their worth by performing well in actual jobs might be a preferable form of meritocracy. a) There would be no “signaling” of status for life, the way an Ivy League degree now signals status for life. The elite wouldn’t necessarily be getting Ivy League degrees; b) post-high school life would become a mad scramble for skills in which luck would inevitably play a greater role. That’s a good thing if it prevents people from concluding that richer = better. More than ever, richer might just = luckier; c)  A skill-by-skill scramble would value a multiplicity of discrete talents–are you a good computer programmer? a painter? a musician? writer?–instead of one general talent (“smarts”). You wouldn’t need to be well-rounded to join the elite. You’d just have to be good at something. It’s harder to insinuate that a programmer is better than a musician or writer the way it’s currently possible to  insinuate that a high-SAT Yale grad is better than someone whose scores could only get him into a state school. …

This is an interesting point: that the kind of "holistic" college admissions that the Supreme Court endorsed in its 2003 pro-affirmative action ruling in Grutter claims to evaluate everybody in some overall "holistic" sense that, in effect, says some people are better overall than other people. The purpose of the Supreme Courts' call for holistic admissions was to fuzz up the margin so nobody could be certain than affirmative action was being practiced. But holistic admissions, by their stated goal of analyzing all aspects of the applicants, suggest that people can be ranked holistically (i.e. overall).

In contrast, consider Caltech, which doesn't do much affirmative action and doesn't really care that much about qualifications outside of test scores, grades, and evidence of extreme science or engineering talent / desire. I went to high school with one kid who got into Caltech and my younger son went to school with one kid who got into Caltech. Both of these Caltech-bound kids were extremely Aspergery to the point of autism. The reaction of other kids to these guys getting into Caltech was: "Hey, that's cool! You must have really high test scores! (I'm still glad I'm not you.") 

On the other hand, Harvard trumpets that it has holistic admissions, and most students take away the implied lesson that those who get into Harvard are just overall better than you are. 

Middle-aged Syracuse grad Aaron Sorkin's screenplay for The Social Network was supposed to be about what a flawed individual Harvard's Mark Zuckerberg is, but every high school student I talked to about the movie was of the opinion that they wished they were as awesome as Mark Zuckerberg.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Finally, a fun Woody Allen movie

Here's my Taki's Magazine review of Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris

Satire is a reactionary art form powered by contempt for the present. Although Woody Allen, now 75, has always espoused conventionally liberal views, he’s one of the last figures in American culture unaffected by the 1960s’ faux egalitarianism. 

Having turned 21 in 1956, Woody’s enthusiasms remain those of a cultured mid-century New Yorker. In his famous speech at the end of 1979’s Manhattan on what makes life worth living, Allen references Mozart, Flaubert, Cézanne, Louis Armstrong, Groucho Marx, Marlon Brando, Frank Sinatra, Willie Mays, and Ingmar Bergman—in other words, nobody from the 1960s or 1970s. Like Ralph Lauren, Woody Allen has always been an old-fashioned snob. 

In his delightful new romantic fantasy Midnight in Paris, Allen takes on a challenge similar to Evelyn Waugh in Brideshead Revisited: recreating a vanished golden age. To Woody, it’s the 1920s Paris of the Lost Generation modernists.

Read the whole thing there.

By the way, I've been reviewing Woody Allen movies for a decade so let's see if I came up with anything new to say about him this time. Here are the old reviews:

The Curse of the Jade Scorpion, 2001
Melinda and Melinda, 2004
Match Point, 2005

Reading through them after finishing this new one, I'd say, well, huh, maybe I didn't come up with 800 words of wholly new ideas each time. But they are at least as original as Woody's movies from the last decade!

But, don't let that dissuade you from seeing his latest, Midnight in Paris. It's a joy.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Cornel West peeved Obama takes him less seriously than Wachowskis did

Chris Hedges writes in TruthDig about the cruel disillusionment of Cornel West, Princeton professor of African American Studies and Religion and a star in The Matrix sequels:

The moral philosopher Cornel West, if Barack Obama’s ascent to power was a morality play, would be the voice of conscience. Rahm Emanuel, a cynical product of the Chicago political machine, would be Satan. ... 

No one grasps this tragic descent better than West, who did 65 campaign events for Obama, believed in the potential for change and was encouraged by the populist rhetoric of the Obama campaign. He now nurses, like many others who placed their faith in Obama, the anguish of the deceived, manipulated and betrayed. He bitterly describes Obama as “a black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs and a black puppet of corporate plutocrats. And now he has become head of the American killing machine and is proud of it.”... 

“I have to take some responsibility,” he admits of his support for Obama as we sit in his book-lined office. “I could have been reading into it more than was there. 

“There is the personal level,” he says. “I used to call my dear brother [Obama] every two weeks. I said a prayer on the phone for him, especially before a debate. And I never got a call back. And when I ran into him in the state Capitol in South Carolina when I was down there campaigning for him he was very kind. The first thing he told me was, ‘Brother West, I feel so bad. I haven’t called you back. You been calling me so much. You been giving me so much love, so much support and what have you.’ And I said, ‘I know you’re busy.’ But then a month and half later I would run into other people on the campaign and he’s calling them all the time. I said, wow, this is kind of strange. He doesn’t have time, even two seconds, to say thank you or I’m glad you’re pulling for me and praying for me, but he’s calling these other people. I said, this is very interesting. And then as it turns out with the inauguration I couldn’t get a ticket with my mother and my brother. I said this is very strange. We drive into the hotel and the guy who picks up my bags from the hotel has a ticket to the inauguration. My mom says, ‘That’s something that this dear brother can get a ticket and you can’t get one, honey, all the work you did for him from Iowa.’ Beginning in Iowa to Ohio. We had to watch the thing in the hotel."

Hopefully, the Wests got a good glimpse on their hotel TV of the newly sworn-in President exchanging a celebratory fist bump with their bellhop.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Arnold and Sly and Maria and Brigitte

The story told me by an admirer of Arnold Schwarzenegger is that in the early-to-mid 1980s, Arnold was courting Maria Shriver, daughter of the 1972 Democratic vice-presidential candidate and niece of the late President. 

However, a contractual obligation arising from his starring role in Conan the Barbarian meant he had to go to Spain to make a crummier sword-and-sandal epic for Dino de Laurentis, Red Sonja. One consolation turned out to be the very young, very tall, very enthusiastic Danish model who was playing Red Sonja, Brigitte Nielsen. Arnold and Brigitte immediately began a passionate affair. It was so intense that he began to wonder about his plans for marrying into the Kennedy-Shriver dynasty. Would it be worth it to sacrifice everything he had planned in terms of his ascent in American life just for this extremely hot number? Maybe ...

Finally, Arnold's ambition won out. He resolved to return to Maria. But what if Brigitte pursued him? Could he resist? Then Arnold got a phone call from his agent (or perhaps his lawyer, I forget). He was coming to Spain with another client, Sylvester Stallone, the biggest action movie hero in the world at the time. What about getting together for dinner on Arnold's last night in Spain? Stallone had long badmouthed Schwarzenegger, so there was no love lost between the two, but Arnold agreed.

Arnold came up with a plan. He invited Brigitte to accompany him to the dinner. She was thrilled about publicly being Arnold's date and thrilled about meeting a much bigger star than Arnie. He told her he had some things to do first, so she should get all dolled up and take a cab to the restaurant to meet him, where he'd introduce her to Sly. She went to the restaurant and met Stallone, but Arnold hopped a plane back to Maria. 

Not long afterwards, Sly and Brigitte married. He stuck her in his 1985 movie Cobra. Soon, they divorced, with Sly complaining that she had messed with his head so badly he hadn't been able to concentrate on his career. She went on to four more husbands. I can't remember if she officially married Flavor Flav. She recently starred in a reality show in which she got massive plastic surgery and then was photographed in chain mail lingerie.

Arnold married Maria Shriver, had four (legitimate) children, displaced Sly as the top action star, and was elected governor of California.

Or, at least, that's what I heard.

I know it sounds crazy, but my friend swears that really happened: "In 2003, voters elected this movie muscleman their governor! True f--king story, no s--t."

By the way, as one commenter implied, it's interesting to look at things from Maria Shriver's point of view:

-- 1984ish: The star of sleeper sensation Terminator cheats on me on another continent with 20-year-old Brigitte Nielsen, but then chooses me over her and, to make sure it's permanent, dumps that crazy Nordic Amazon on poor Sylvester Stallone so she won't come after Arnold anymore. Ooh, he really, really loves me ...

-- 2003: The Daily Mail reports just before the gubernatorial election that the candidate had a love child a decade before with that slinky blonde stewardess on his Gulfstream. Hmmmhmmm ... well, it probably wouldn't do to raise a stink now and screw-up the election.

-- 2011: The washed-up ex-gov had a love child in the late 1990s in my own home with my fat Mexican maid?!? What an insult to me! I'm out of here!

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Bridesmaids Revisited

From my movie review in Taki's Magazine:

The biggest laughs in Bridesmaids, the Judd Apatow-produced female buddy comedy starring Kristen Wiig, come from the odd man out among the five bridesmaids—the groom’s sister (Melissa McCarthy), a hefty force-of-nature lesbian who dresses like 1950s golfer Ben Hogan. The metajokes are that, first, lesbians are clueless about what most women like; and second, because nobody else much cares what obviously butch women think, the other bridesmaids never react (either positively or negatively) to her inordinately off-target conceptions of feminine fun.  

For example, when the girls are arguing over a motif for the wedding shower, the lesbian interjects her conception of a crowd-pleasing theme: "Fight Club! We get there early, oil up, then when the bride arrives, we beat the crap out of her!" The ladies listen politely, then immediately go back to debating whether the Parisian theme suggested by Wiig hasn’t already been done to death this season.

Read the whole thing there.

That reminds me of a general point: people only get extremely mad at you when you are at least pretty close to being right. If you suggest an April in Paris theme for a wedding shower, the people who favor, say, a Breakfast at Tiffany's theme might attack you pretty relentlessly because your idea is a plausible enough contender to be a threat to the acceptance of their idea. On the other hand, if you suggest a Fight Club-themed wedding shower, well, it's not really in the running enough for most people to spend too much time worrying about.

Thus, evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa finds himself widely hated today for posting an item on Psychology Today asking "Why are black women rated less physically attractive than other women, but black men are rated better looking than other men?" It caused such a furor (described here) that the magazine deleted it, so only a screenshot survives. Of course, the reason the whole world got so angry with Dr. Kanazawa is because black women are rated less physically attractive than other women on average.

So, you aren't supposed to say that. If he had said "Why are Slavic supermodels rated less physically attractive than other women?" nobody would have much cared.

By the way, speaking of half-black women whom I've always liked, the bride in Bridesmaids is played by Maya Rudolph. I've always enjoyed her performances on Saturday Night Live (especially "Tennis Talk with Time Traveling Scott Joplin"), but I never looked up who her mother was before. You have to be of a certain age to recognize her mother's name, but it was a very sad event when she died of cancer in the 1970s when Maya was a little girl.

Her white father was a good friend of movie producer Bruce Paltrow, so she presumably grew up playing with Gwyneth Paltrow, then went to UC Santa Cruz. Thus, she can do this huge range of characters from black to white, which makes her invaluable in an ensemble show with a limited cast.

Also, she's a funny person who doesn't appear to be crazy, which is rarer than it seems. Jimmy Buffett argued in Changes in Latitudes, Changes in Attitudes: "If we couldn't laugh we would all go insane." But when it comes to making other people laugh, that doesn't seem to hold true all that much.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

"The Beaver"

My new Taki's Magazine column is an overdue tribute to Jodie Foster:

Movie folks think they are better than you or me, and sometimes they are right. Jodie Foster, for example, isn’t the world’s best director, but she may be the bravest. Who else would have the brass to direct her old buddy from 1994’s Maverick and today’s leading object of collective hatred, Mel Gibson, in The Beaver, a good dramedy about hereditary manic depression?

Read the whole thing there. I discuss the oddest of many odd things about Jodie: this calmest, most calculating of stars' enduring relationship with nuts, both onscreen and off. 

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

"The Cave of Forgotten Dreams"

From my movie review in Taki's Magazine:

The Cave of Forgotten Dreams is the latest documentary from artiste / showman Werner Herzog. It's cinema's first look at the world’s oldest known cave paintings (c. 30,000 B.C.), discovered in 1994 at Chauvet Grotto in southeastern France and immediately locked up to protect the stunning drawings of imposing beasts. 

The French government allowed Herzog to make this first documentary about Chauvet because he is a major auteur. His long career depicting energetic lunatics includes 1972’s Aguirre: The Wrath of God, in which a 16th-century conquistador searches in vain for a city of gold amid Brazil’s fever swamps. 

You and I will never be allowed in Chauvet.

Read the whole thing there.

By the way, here's Friedrich von Blowhard's 2003 post on 2Blowhards about the mysteries behind the great Old Stone Age cave paintings. Does anybody really know what they were for?

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

"Atlas Shrugged: Part I"

From my movie review in Taki's Magazine:

Atlas Shrugged: Part I is the most universally despised movie of 2011, but I liked it. Critics hate this adaptation of Ayn Rand’s 1957 cult novel for predictable ideological reasons, while Randites are embarrassed that their exalted capitalist system failed to pony up the munificent financing necessary to give Rand’s doorstop novel the blockbuster treatment they feel it deserves. ... 

To my surprise, I quite enjoyed Atlas Shrugged. Although the story is a hymn to the overdog, this low-budget movie has underdog appeal. I soon started to root for the plucky filmmakers to pull off their high-wire act of making a movie that’s distinctive—not distinguished, but still very 1957 in texture—without having anywhere near enough of the dollars that Rand idolized.

Read the whole thing there.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

"The Conspirator"

From my movie review in Taki's Magazine:

Robert Redford’s courtroom drama The Conspirator castigates the 1865 trial by a military tribunal of Confederate partisan Mary Surratt for her murky role in John Wilkes Booth’s plot to murder Abraham Lincoln. Redford obviously intends his movie as a parable denouncing George W. Bush’s employment of military tribunals instead of jury trials for Guantanamo Bay prisoners. 

... Still, The Conspirator is of considerable interest, both for its cast’s quality and because the 74-year-old Redford seems to have no idea how unfashionable his view of post-Civil War history has become since he arrived on the New York stage in the late 1950s. The Conspirator reflects the anti-Republican prejudice endemic in history textbooks when Redford was in school. To imply that 21st-century Republicans are deluded by Islamophobia, Redford argues that 1865’s Republicans were crazed by Confederophobia. ... 

Everyone says history is written by the victors, but it’s actually written by the historiographers. For the first century after 1865, white Southerners wrote most Civil War histories and almost all the accounts of the subsequent Reconstruction. Their anger over the postwar military occupation was transmitted in two vastly popular movies: 1915’s The Birth of a Nation and 1939’s Gone with the Wind. After FDR’s 1932 victory, white Southerners made up a large fraction of the New Deal coalition. Hence, the liberal Democrats who wrote most mid-century history books pandered to the South’s view of Reconstruction as a grave injustice. 

Only with the rise of blacks in the late 1960s did Reconstruction come under scrutiny. Redford’s movie, set entirely in Washington, DC in 1865, features only one line spoken by an African-American.

Read the whole thing there.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Paul Giamatti in "Win Win"

From my review in Taki's Magazine:

Win Win affords Giamatti the kind of flustered everyman role that has made him an unlikely star. But what’s most interesting about Giamatti is how much high-class breeding it apparently takes these days to portray run-of-the-mill schlubs.

I can’t help comparing the 43-year-old Giamatti with another pudgy Italian-American actor from Connecticut who specialized in playing Average Joes, Ernest Borgnine (now 94). Borgnine and Giamatti epitomize the evolution of social class over the last half century. 

I discovered something hilariously incongruous about the real Giamatti versus the kind of characters he plays. What legendary secret organization did Giamatti join back in the 1980s?

Read the whole thing there.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Jane Austen v. the Bronte Sisters, II

As some commenters have pointed out, in the endless struggle between witty, sensible Jane Austen and the romantic, hysterical Bronte sisters, the high end of the market for fiction and movies has been, for a couple of decades, in Jane Austen's camp. But the mass market in the 21st Century has been going back to the Brontes. For example, Edward Cullen, the vampire love interest of Twilight, is heavily based on Jane Eyre's Mr. Rochester.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

"Jane Eyre"

My review of the new movie adaptation of Jane Eyre is up at Taki's:

What we are left with seems rather like Jane Eyre if Jane Austen had written it. Austen, who died in 1817, was a witty, levelheaded product of the 18th century. She would have gotten along well with Ben Franklin. In contrast, the Brontës were the quintessence of the 19th century’s Romantic mood.

After the neo-Romanticism of the 1960s-70s, tastes have moved away from the Brontës and toward Austen. (The name “Emma,” Austen’s second-most-famous heroine, was merely the 448th most popular girl’s baby name in the 1970s. By 2003, it was the 2nd.) Thus, the new movie features much about the Austen-like topics of class and gender battles. Fassbender’s Mr. Rochester comes across more like a bigger, bolder version of Pride and Prejudice’s Mr. Darcy than like Wuthering Heights’ demonic Heathcliff. Yet Jane Eyre is so expansive and lively a source that this rendition remains authentic and entertaining.

Read the whole thing there.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

What it's like to be swept away by a tsunami

The best movie depiction of how terrifying it is to be swept up in a tidal wave that I've ever seen is the opening of the recent Clint Eastwood movie Hereafter, which will be out on DVD next Tuesday. You can see Clint's depiction of the 2004 Indonesian tsunami on Youtube here. I watched home videos shot by survivors who managed to keep their cameras above the water, and Hereafter's version looks about right about what it would be like if you couldn't.

By the way, it's time to revive the old term "tidal wave" as a complement to the Japanese term "tsunami." During my childhood, most Americans used the term tidal wave, but scientists and science journalists waged a war against it on the simpleminded grounds that tidal waves weren't caused by tides. So, by switching to tsunami, we lost the metaphorically powerful term tidal wave, which does a much better job of hinting at the peculiar horror of this phenomenon compared to normal waves. It's not the height of the front of the tidal wave that is so destructive -- lots of people have surfed waves as tall. It's that, unlike regular beach waves, the water level doesn't go down after the front passes. It's as if the tide has suddenly risen, but with a great velocity to the water rolling in. In cross-section, a tidal wave isn't an inverted V, it's like an inverted L that just keeps going.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer