Welcome to the 21st century. That was virtually the first thought I had after the Sept. 11 attacks had a few minutes to sink in, and if it sounds callous, I apologize. But there was no small amazement in the fact that this new form of warfare arrived in the first year of the new […]
Godfrey Cheshire
Posted inArt
Reality Wars
In the ways that humanity’s conflicts have been organized and transformed by technology, we can now identify four main phases. One: For several thousand years, armies of men fought each other face to face, hand to hand, with horses, swords and guns. Two: From 1914, as war was mechanized, men, horses, swords and guns were […]
Posted inArt
Children of Abraham
The purpose of this article is to invite you to consider the meaning of a phrase that’s all but unknown to our media: “Abrahamic ecumene.” But let’s begin with a word that has been in the news during the past month. President Bush used the term “crusade” in emotively responding to the attacks of Sept. […]
Posted inArt
Fearful Symmetries
Used to be, when I would walk to the corner of my Greenwich Village street and Sixth Avenue, I had an icon at each shoulder. To the left, northwards, the Empire State Building commanded the skyline; to the south, the crystalline upthrust of the World Trade Center dwarfed everything around it. I never became so […]
Posted inFilm & Television
Judgment Call
“It was just like a movie.” The remark was too obvious and banal, but who didn’t think it? On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001–a date now etched in black on the national memory–I was at home in my apartment in Greenwich Village. United Flight 175 flew low over the neighborhood on its way to […]
Posted inFilm & Television
Losing it at the Movies
Funny how fate deals the cards. In a slow week for movies, the annual dead zone following Labor Day, I proposed to my editor that I devote a column to the critic Andrew Sarris and Citizen Sarris, American Film Critic (Scarecrow Press), a new book of essays examining and celebrating his influence. Then, just as […]
Posted inFilm & Television
Bits and Bytes
In trying to handicap the Labor Day-till-Christmas movie season, there’s always a useful bit of perspective to be found in perusing the results of the year to date. This year, there have been no seismic shifts in the filmic environment, but a couple of rather subtle developments deserve note, and they cluster around the two […]
Posted inFilm & Television
Apocalypse Again
In retrospect, the dozen years between the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963 and the fall of Saigon in 1975 look like America’s very own season in hell. Compared to the relative placidity of the Eisenhower years in the preceding decade and of the Reagan era that followed it, this period of riots, war, […]
Posted inFilm & Television
B-ball Bard
We’re in a tony prep school in the Palmetto State. Not surprisingly, many of the kids here are dreaming of scholastic realms one state to the north. A few of the brainier types have Duke pennants on their dorm walls. And some basketball players have their sights set on Chapel Hill. As a dramatic milieu, […]
Posted inFilm & Television
Hypnotic
Woody Allen has averaged making a movie a year since his first film as director, Take the Money and Run, in 1969. That’s quite a record, one that no other major American filmmaker even approaches. At this point, the highs and lows of his work quality-wise are less noticeable than his overall consistency. Certainly, he’s […]