Alice in Wonderland: Feed Your Head

One can almost see the meeting of studio executives that preceded the production of Tim Burton’s new film of Alice in Wonderland. A half dozen cocaine-addled Bard graduates blinking through the aftereffects of yet another night of silicone implanted satyriasis and quietly musing on the possibilities inherent in Lewis Carroll’s century-old fairy tale. “What,” says one, “if instead of being a little girl, Alice is, like, a hot girl-power feminist teenager?” “Cool!” says another, “and what if like, everything that happened in the book happened, like, before.” “Yeah!” says another, “and what if, instead of just wandering around seeing weird things, she has to go Lord of the Ringson, like, something…?” “Awesome!” says a third, “and what if, like, at the end, the Mad Hatter dances like Michael Jackson? That would be so cool.” At this point, someone calls to find out if Johnny Depp is available.

And so it went, one imagines, until the big budget, 3-D, Dolby Sensurround travesty of one of the most beloved pieces of British whimsy literature was completed; leaving the Walt Disney studios a great deal richer and its viewers considerably poorer in every sense of the word.

Continue reading at The New Ledger.

Obama’s Israel Crisis

Now that the rift between the Obama administration and the Netanyahu government has acquired the status of “crisis,” it is worth stepping back from the details of the spat and looking at the big picture. While the Ramat Shlomo announcement and its immediate aftermath were the immediate cause of the Obama administration’s ire, this was a crisis that was waiting to happen and was probably inevitable. The primary reason for this is the fundamental disconnect between Obama and Netanyahu, not only as personalities but, more importantly, in terms of their long term goals for Israel and the Middle East.

To a certain extent, Obama and Netanyahu deserve each other. As I have written before, they are, ironically, remarkably similar in many ways. They are both charismatic, articulate, extremely image conscious politicians whose capacity for visionary rhetoric often far outstrips their competence. Both have been accused of being essentially empty and shallow personalities, which is true in both cases to some extent, but ignores the fact that they are also ideologically driven idealists with very clear visions of the future they are striving toward.

Continue reading at The New Ledger.

Scorsese’s Element

Roughly five minutes into Shutter Island, I knew more or less how it would end. For a film that invests another two hours and fifteen minutes in building to an ostensibly shocking twist ending, this is not a particularly good thing. All the more so when the film in question is the work of someone who many cinephiles (and I count myself one of them) consider to be the world’s greatest living filmmaker. Shutter Island is most certainly not a bad film, but from the likes of Martin Scorsese, it cannot be considered anything other than a disappointment.

One could argue, of course, that we should simply be grateful to see another Scorsese film at all. In an era when most of his contemporaries from the 1970s New Hollywood era have either burned out (William Friedkin, Peter Bogdonavich), died (Robert Altman), or retreated into comfortable mediocrity (Steven Spielberg, George Lucas), the fact that Scorsese is still making films, and still making them with something like the uncompromising intensity of his youth, often seems like reason enough to be indulgent.

Continue reading at The New Ledger.

Biden in Israel

The Israeli press must have been happy to wake up this morning. While the arrival of American Vice President Joe Biden in Israel was an event, no one expected much more from it than the usual exhortations of goodwill and a few gestures toward reviving the peace process. Yesterday’s announcement by the interior ministry that it has approved the building of 1,600 new housing units in Ramat Shlomo, a religious neighborhood in East Jerusalem, however, handed our hapless press corps nothing less than a full-blown diplomatic incident.

The circumstances under which the plans were approved and announced remain unclear, with both Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Interior Minister Eli Yishai claiming that it took place without their knowledge and professing their embarrassment over the timing of the announcement. According to Haaretz, Yishai professed on Israeli radio that “The district committees approve plans weekly without informing me,” and “If I’d have known, I would have postponed the authorization by a week or two since we had no intention of provoking anyone.”

Continue reading at The New Ledger.

The Jews vs. Joe Lieberman

Hating Senator Joseph Lieberman has been a favorite liberal pastime for years now, but it recently reached new heights of invective, as Lieberman emerged both as a strong supporter of the Afghanistan surge and then as a possible obstacle to passage of the health care reform bill in the United States Senate. American liberalism has, since the 1960s, displayed a remarkable capacity for devouring its own, but the spectacle of an entire political movement engaging in a campaign of feverish character assassination against one of its former vice-presidential candidates was truly remarkably to see. More fascinating still was how the cavalcade of abuse seemed to return again and again, as if by some gravitational force, to the issue of Lieberman’s Judaism, which renders this latest round of hatred deserving of broader consideration.

It must be said that most of the corrosive rhetoric employed in this regard was relatively unremarkable—consisting mostly of childish insults and vaguely comprehensible outbursts of liberal antisemitism. Probably the most remarkable was a combination of the two posted at the semi-literate website Wonkette. Under the title “Monsters,” the author described Lieberman as “speaking from a bottomless pit of pain and sorrow, where he lives on the soul-vapors of crushed children.”

Continue reading at The New Ledger.

A People’s History of Howard Zinn

One of the unwritten laws of opinion journalism is to never kick a man when he’s dead, at least, not until an appreciable amount of time has passed. The question is whether this can or should hold true for those who make their living by doing precisely that. The death at the age of 87 of pseudo-historian Howard Zinn raises this issue all over again, since very few academics have made a better living defaming the dead, with everyone from Columbus to Ronald Reagan, and thousands in between, being accused by the jocular old harpy of any number of hideous crimes, not one of whom, needless to say, being alive to answer the charges. It is, of course, the job of the historian to examine the acts of the deceased; and some consider it an equal part of their profession to pass judgement upon them. In the case of Zinn, however, he passed judgment with such slothful ease, and such obvious sadistic pleasure in issuing his condemnations, that one cannot muster up much sympathy at the prospect of the man’s memory dying by his own sword.

Read the rest at The New Ledger.

Andrew Sullivan Crosses the Line

“How we loved you then,” Jean-Paul Sartre wrote of Albert Camus during their acrimonious split in 1952. This simple but deeply sad phrase sprang to mind the other day when I was informed of Andrew Sullivan’s latest descent into unreason. The occasion was, of course, Sarah Palin’s new book; and Sullivan’s missive went, in part, like this:

This is only the second time in its nearly ten-year history that the Dish has gone silent. The reason now is the same as the reason then. When dealing with a delusional fantasist like Sarah Palin, it takes time to absorb and make sense of the various competing narratives that she tells about her life…. She is a deeply disturbed person which makes this work of fiction and fact all the more challenging to read. And the fact that she is now the leader of the Republican party and a potential presidential candidate, makes this process of deconstruction an important civil responsibility.

As many, including myself, expected, this “deconstruction” was in fact driven by what Sullivan called Palin’s “fantastic story of her fifth pregnancy”; that is, Sullivan’s conspiracy theory that Sarah Palin faked her pregnancy and the child known as Trig is actually someone else’s, most likely one of her daughters.

Read the rest at The New Ledger.