2001: A Space Odyssey
(1968)
Murray N. Rothbard (a.k.a. Mr. First Nighter)
(”2001: A Space Odyssey” is briefly mentioned in this.)
Star Wars, dir. by George Lucas. With Alec Guinness and Carrie Fisher.
First came the hype. That Star Wars is going to be the biggest popular film success since Jaws means very little. So every season is going to have its oversold smash hit, so what? But the difference, the new.hype, with Star Wars was its overwhelming acclaim among the critics. Usually the masses whoop it up for a Jaws while the critics go ape over Bertolucii or Fassbinder. Yet here they were in joint huzzahs, with the critic from Time flipping his wig to such an extent as to call it the best movie of the year and making Star Wars the feature of that week’s issue.
But the oddest, the most peculiar part of it was what my fellow-critics were saying: “Hurrah, a fun movie-movie”; “good escape entertainment”; “a return to good guys vs. a happy ending again”; “movie fare for the entire family”; “like Flash Gordon” etc. Here were men and women who have spent the greater, part of their lives deriding these very virtues…
Read the rest via The Complete Libertarian Forum (1969-1984) Vol. 10.6, June 1977
2018-12-12
(Review Source)
First came the hype. That Star Wars is going to be the biggest popular film success since Jaws means very little. So every season is going to have its oversold smash hit, so what? But the difference, the new.hype, with Star Wars was its overwhelming acclaim among the critics. Usually the masses whoop it up for a Jaws while the critics go ape over Bertolucii or Fassbinder. Yet here they were in joint huzzahs, with the critic from Time flipping his wig to such an extent as to call it the best movie of the year and making Star Wars the feature of that week’s issue.
But the oddest, the most peculiar part of it was what my fellow-critics were saying: “Hurrah, a fun movie-movie”; “good escape entertainment”; “a return to good guys vs. a happy ending again”; “movie fare for the entire family”; “like Flash Gordon” etc. Here were men and women who have spent the greater, part of their lives deriding these very virtues…
Read the rest via The Complete Libertarian Forum (1969-1984) Vol. 10.6, June 1977
Murray N. Rothbard (a.k.a. Mr. First Nighter)
(”2001: A Space Odyssey” is briefly mentioned in this.)
First came the hype. That Star Wars is going to be the biggest popular film success since Jaws means very little. So every season is going to have its oversold smash hit, so what? But the difference, the new hype, with Star Wars was its overwhelming acclaim among the critics. Usually the masses whoop it up for a Jaws while the critics go ape over Bertolucii or Fassbinder. Yet here they were in joint huzzahs, with the critic from Time flipping his wig to such an extent as to call it the best movie of the year and making Star Wars the feature of that week’s issue.
But the oddest, the most peculiar part of it was what my fellow-critics were saying: “Hurrah, a fun movie-movie”; “good escape entertainment”; “a return to good guys vs. a happy ending again”; “movie fare for the entire family”; “like Flash Gordon” etc. Here were men and women who...
2018-05-18
(Review Source)
A Clockwork Orange
(1971)
Murray N. Rothbard (a.k.a. Mr. First Nighter)
(”A Clockwork Orange” is briefly mentioned in this.)
This is the time of year for movie critics to roll out their awards and their ten-best lists, and I am forced to take a long, hard look at the cinema from the fact that I cannot come up with a “ten best” list at all. For in the cinema we must wage the same struggle that we should have been fighting in the rest of the culture since the turn of the twentieth century: on behalf of the old, bourgeois values and against the morbidity and unreason of the avant-garde. Unfortunately, the avant-garde has now become “the garde”, and so it becomes more important than ever, in the movies as well as in literature, art, and music, to raise the standard of the arriere-garde — a rear-guard struggle against a diseased culture. The carriers of the disease are of the course the intelligentsia…..
Read the rest via The Complete Libertarian Forum (1969-1984) Vol. 4.11, January 1973
2018-12-12
(Review Source)
Read the rest via The Complete Libertarian Forum (1969-1984) Vol. 4.11, January 1973
A Few Good Men
(1992)
Murray N. Rothbard (a.k.a. Mr. First Nighter)
For once, the Academy Awards were tolerable-not the ceremony which was longer, more boring, and more Politically Correct than ever-but the awards themselves. The Unforgiven was neither my favorite picture of the year, nor a particularly good movie or Western, but it was not too bad, and certainly infinitely better than the repellent Crying Game, which it just beat out by a nose. The great Clint Eastwood deserves an Oscar, and so this can be considered a "lifetime award." But he was only able to receive it for a genre hated by left-liberals because he made deep obeisances throughout the movie about the evils of violence, or of revenge, about the torments of "killing a man" and all the rest of the liberal swill. In other words...
Read the rest via The Irrepressible Rothbard pg. 426
2018-04-13
(Review Source)
Read the rest via The Irrepressible Rothbard pg. 426
A League of Their Own
(1992)
Murray N. Rothbard (a.k.a. Mr. First Nighter)
The Old Culture returns in a warm, affectionate story about the American Girls' Professional Baseball League that was established by some baseball owners during World WarII and lasted until the early 1950s. The movie catches the spirit of the 1940s, and its feminist points are therefore never abrasive. Fortunately, the 1990s sensibility is kept out of the film. Geena Davis is excellent as the star baseball player, and director Penny Marshall forges good team performances out of all the players, including even the notorious Madonna, who is kept subdued and amiable in a minor role as "All the Way, Mae," the strumpet of the team.
Read the rest via The Irrepressible Rothbard pg. 425
2018-04-13
(Review Source)
Read the rest via The Irrepressible Rothbard pg. 425
A New Leaf
(1971)
Murray N. Rothbard (a.k.a. Mr. First Nighter)
(”A New Leaf” is briefly mentioned in this.)
The Heartbreak Kid. dir. by Elaine May. With Charles Grodin, Cybill Shepherd, Jeannie Berlin, and Eddie Albert. If, in the old adage, “it takes one to know one,” we can perhaps understand some of the brilliance with which the team of Nichols and May hilariously and acidulously satirized the typical conversation and thought-processes of New York-liberal-Jewish intellectuals in their great records of the 1950s and early 60s. Since then, Mike Nichols has gone on to ape the pretentiousness of the people he once satirized, leaving Elaine May to mine the comic vein alone. Her first movie, A New Leaf, was simply and happily hilarious, starring the great comedic talent of Walter Matthau, but lacked the old social bite of former days. In The Heartbreak Kid, Miss May returns to her old genre, and with the notable exception of Philip Roth, no one is as adept in exploring the cultural differences and conflicts between the Jewish and the goyishe worlds. Heartbreak Kid is a brilliantly crafted…
Read the rest via The Complete Libertarian Forum (1969-1984) Vol. 5.7, July 1973
2018-12-12
(Review Source)
Read the rest via The Complete Libertarian Forum (1969-1984) Vol. 5.7, July 1973
A Night at the Opera
(1935)
Murray N. Rothbard (a.k.a. Mr. First Nighter)
(”A Night at the Opera” is briefly mentioned in this.)
The appearance of what is unquestionably the funniest movie of the last several years (Blazing Saddles, dir. by and with Mel Brooks, and with Gene Wilder, Cleavon Little and Madeline Kahn), offers a welcome occasion for an appreciation of a man of prodigious and exhilarating comedic talent. Beginning—as did so many other leading humorists—as a writer for Sid Caesar’s “Your Show of Shows” in the 1950’s, Brooks burst on the entertainment scene with his justly famous hit record which he wrote and narrated, “The Two Thousand Year Old Man”. In that record, Brooks presented the trivial side of world history (In Yiddish accent, as nearly as I can remember: “Napoleon? Sure I remember him. Short fella, bad stomach.”)
Since then, Brooks has made all too few movies, but they have been outstanding. One, The Producers, made in 1968, still stands as the funniest movie of the last two decades. In that picture, the fabulous Zero Mostel, playing a sleazy, down-on-his luck New York Jewish theatrical producer...
Read the rest via The Complete Libertarian Forum (1969-1984) Vol. 6.2, February 1974
2018-12-12
(Review Source)
Since then, Brooks has made all too few movies, but they have been outstanding. One, The Producers, made in 1968, still stands as the funniest movie of the last two decades. In that picture, the fabulous Zero Mostel, playing a sleazy, down-on-his luck New York Jewish theatrical producer...
Read the rest via The Complete Libertarian Forum (1969-1984) Vol. 6.2, February 1974
A River Runs Through It
(1992)
Murray N. Rothbard (a.k.a. Mr. First Nighter)
A picture about fly-fishing in Montana? For an urban New York type like myself who wouldn't know a fly-fisherman from a surfer, who thinks that fish should be caught in giant nets, and who believes that once you've seen one mountain or tree, you've seen them all? And from someone who had never heard of Norman Maclean, from whose autobiographical sketch this movie was made? And yet, I found this a wonderful, enchanting movie. I was enthralled by the entire story of an early twentieth-century family in Montana, by the spare, haunting, marvelous narration culled from that book, and by the motion picture which Redford has obviously made totally in the spirit of the story; with no Hollywoodization, and no beating the audience over the head with every point.
Read the rest via The Irrepressible Rothbard pg. 425
2018-05-11
(Review Source)
Read the rest via The Irrepressible Rothbard pg. 425
A Star Is Born
(1937)
Stefan Molyneux
2018-10-13
(Review Source)
A Street Cat Named Bob
(2016)
Libertarian Agnostic
Shameless plug: If you’re interested in proof that hobos spend their money on drugs, then watch my ghetto DIY documentary on YouTube. I went undercover with hidden camera spy glasses and lived on the streets/in the shelters and proved the point … Continue reading →
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A Touch of Class
(1973)
Murray N. Rothbard (a.k.a. Mr. First Nighter)
A Touch of Class. dir. by Melvin Frank, with George Segal and Glenda Jackson. One of the great movie genres was the sophisticated comedy of the 1930s, usually starring Cary Grant. Katherine Hepburn, or Carole Lombard. The scintillating wit, the high style, the sophisticated intelligence of both hero and heroine were a joy to behold. In these days, when intelligence and wit have been virtually expunged from the cinema, the “Cary Grant-type” comedies of the 1930’s seem as remote as a Golden Age of long, long ago. Not since such isolated and wondrous bursts of late glory as the HepburnTracy movies of the 1950’s (“Pat and Mike”, “Adam’s Rib”) have we seen anything to compare with the classics of the thirties.
A Touch of Class is an interesting attempt…
Read the rest via The Complete Libertarian Forum (1969-1984) Vol. 5.11, November 1973
2018-12-12
(Review Source)
A Touch of Class is an interesting attempt…
Read the rest via The Complete Libertarian Forum (1969-1984) Vol. 5.11, November 1973
Murray N. Rothbard (a.k.a. Mr. First Nighter)
(”A Touch of Class” is briefly mentioned in this.)
The Oscars. Most of the comment on the Oscars has been devoted to the always boring, bumbling, but somehow lovable Academy Awards dinner that ran an hour over on nationwide television. Far more important, however, was the content of the awards themselves, and in particular the titanic struggle that was waged between The Sting and The Exorcist for Academy honors.
The Sting, directed by George Roy Hill, was a charming, brilliantly directed, suspenseful, richly textured comedy about two lovable con-men and the con they pulled during the 1930’s on a leading gangster. It embodied the best of Old Culture film-making. The Exorcist, on the other hand, was the embodiment of all that is sick and degenerate in modern culture…
Read the rest via The Complete Libertarian Forum (1969-1984) Vol. 6.4, April 1974
2018-12-12
(Review Source)
The Sting, directed by George Roy Hill, was a charming, brilliantly directed, suspenseful, richly textured comedy about two lovable con-men and the con they pulled during the 1930’s on a leading gangster. It embodied the best of Old Culture film-making. The Exorcist, on the other hand, was the embodiment of all that is sick and degenerate in modern culture…
Read the rest via The Complete Libertarian Forum (1969-1984) Vol. 6.4, April 1974