Bookworm Room

One of my absolute, all-time, never-get-tired-of-watching favorite movies is Groundhog Day.  Jonah Goldberg gives it the review it deserves: [S]omething important is going on here. What is it about this ostensibly farcical film about a wisecracking weatherman that speaks to so many on such a deep spiritual level? It is a great movie, simultaneously funny, [...]

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Liam Neeson’s flirting with converting to Islam, a religious quest made possible by the fact that the religion has great calls to prayer and everyone does it (at least in Muslim countries) — and, no, I’m not exaggerating when I belittle his expressed motive when he contemplates abandoning the Catholicism of his childhood in exchange [...]

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I’m not surprised that there is a fair amount of rape in today’s military.  The facts on the ground readily explain, although they never excuse, it. To begin within, our troops have grown up and lived in a hypersexualized culture.  Up until a few decades ago, in movies and on TV screens, even married couples [...]

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I watched a dreadful movie last night, really dreadful.  But here’s the interesting thing:  even though it was a terrible movie, with a creepy plot, I didn’t turn it off and walk away.  Instead, I watched it from beginning to end.  Why?  Star power. The movie was a Rock Hudson/Doris Day classic from 1961 called [...]

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Yesterday, I did something I almost never do:  I saw a first run movie.  In this case, the kids and I joined family friends to see Mission Impossible : Ghost Protocol.  I was not sanguine, because I’m not a Tom Cruise fan and because it’s the rare movie lately that doesn’t either bore or offend [...]

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Back in 2004, entirely coincidentally, I ended up at the WWII Memorial in Washington, D.C., on the same morning that veterans of the Battle of the Bulge had gathered for a reunion. Some got there under their own steam. Many, though, were on walkers or in wheelchairs. They were so frail. And so many were [...]

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The great Walt Disney would have been 110 today.  Here’s his and my favorite piece of Disney animation:

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In my younger days, if buxom wasn’t your thing, I had a figure to die for.  Two children and a few years later and . . . well, I’m trim, but it takes a lot of work.  Given the realities of child bearing, age and gravity, there’s nothing more irksome to me than a picture [...]

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I’m not the artsy type who appreciates movies at a level above and beyond mere entertainment.  Given that fact, you’d think that news of director Ken Russell’s death would pass me by, unnoticed.  His films, after all, are bizarre, twisted, dark and perverse — none of which I find particularly interesting.  And yet….  I have [...]

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TiVo captured The Breakfast Club.  My son’s comment after watching it for 20 minutes and then walking out on it:  “That was terrible.  All the kids were really messed up.”

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Jane Fonda is back in the news today, with a British tabloid reporting on Fonda’s one big regret in life:  she didn’t sleep with Che. Actually, the whole thing is a bit more nuanced than that.  The Daily Mail report looks at Fonda’s life in the 1970s.  (A previous story examined Fonda’s bed hopping in [...]

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Don Quixote is reading Ben Shapiro’s Primetime Propaganda: The True Hollywood Story of How the Left Took Over Your TV, which led us into an interesting lunch time conversation about covert versus overt propaganda.  The overt propaganda shows we discussed were All In The Family and Family Ties. In both, week after week, year after [...]

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I was watching You Were Never Lovelier, and my 12 year old son walked in the room just as Rita Hayworth launched into the song below.  “Pretty?” I asked.  “Beautiful,” he replied, in an awed voice.  For a generation raised on Lady Gaga, this is like watching angels:

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You already know that the New York Times and the Washington Post, apparently intent on proving that it is always possible to sink even lower, have asked for their readers to troll through the 24,000 or so emails that Sarah Palin generated while she was governor.  One only wishes that they had showed that kind [...]

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Shapiro’s book, Primetime Propaganda: The True Hollywood Story of How the Left Took Over Your TV, already is one of several I’ve chosen for vacation reading.  He’s now releasing excerpts from his interviews: See more revealing videos here.  (And by revealing, I don’t mean underwear shots, I mean “thought” shots.) I don’t know about you [...]

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Both the SEALS and Charlie Sheen have been in the news lately, the SEALS for an extraordinarily well-planned, brave and effective operation, and Charlie Sheen because he’s a drugged-out piece of human detritus.  Did you know, though, that the two — that is, the SEALS and Sheen — have something in common?  Yup, they do:  [...]

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Last night, after Andrew Breitbart had already left to catch his plane, a few of us hung around to chat and to try to answer one question:  what was the takeaway from Breitbart’s talk?  Eat their eyeballs?  Women’s dominance in the Tea Party means that men are eunuchs?  The fact that the Tea Party needs [...]

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My husband and I recently watched two movies about the military.  Or rather, I should say, he watched one and I watched the other.  The movies’ tones were instructive, especially because I later got corroboration for my sense that Hollywood’s post-Vietnam hostility to the military has real world consequences (that is, it’s not “just” entertainment, [...]

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England’s Bethlem Royal Hospital, founded in the 13th Century as part of a convent, eventually transformed itself into the world’s first facility dedicated to the mentally ill.  By the 16th Century, when it housed only the mentally ill, it was famous for the cruelty with which those patients were treated.  The word “bedlam,” which describes [...]

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Hat tip:  Sadie

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Someone took the time to track the nature of the bad guys in Hollywood action flicks from the 1980s to the present.  It won’t come as a surprise to any of you that she discovered that “the overall winner of the villain tally is American military/government/law enforcement.”  In the 1980s, Russians appeared, but not as often [...]

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I never liked Jean-Luc Godard movies.  I go to movies to be entertained, not bored.  He failed my simple test. Aside from being (in my mind) a boring film maker, it turns out that he is, as well, a deep, blatant, vicious antisemite.  Of course, if you’re a New York Times consumer, you’d never know [...]

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The Chris Coons-Christine O’Donnell debate over the First Amendment has cast into stark relief the fact that the Left believes the First Amendment’s purpose is to keep religious people out of the public square.  I’ve blogged on this point before, so I won’t belabor it.  I’ll only say briefly that the Amendment’s language, the historical [...]

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They seem to have deviated significantly from the book (which simply describes a series of picaresque adventures), and it’s in 3D, which gives me a headache, but it actually still looks like a good movie.  I’ll certainly be at the theater to see it:

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