Bookworm Room

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 [...]

16 Comments »

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 [...]

13 Comments »

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 [...]

7 Comments »

I already mentioned how impressed I was by Ronald Reagan’s 1964 speech, which I posted here, and listed to in its entirety while folding laundry.  Listening to Reagan made that task go much faster.  It’s a fabulous speech, with each idea — most of which are as relevant today re government spending, individual freedom, and [...]

7 Comments »

I’ve never been able to last more than a couple of minutes watching Family Guy.  It is, quite simply, way too crude for my tastes.  It takes vulgar, and puts it into hyperdrive.  I’m also out of sync with its liberal sensibilities, but that goes for 99% of what’s on TV nowadays, so that fact [...]

4 Comments »

Well, I finally got around to seeing The Blind Side.  For those unfamiliar with the movie, it retells the true story of Michael Oher, a profoundly disadvantaged black boy who ended up as a scholarship student at a Christian academy in Memphis.  Sean and Leigh Anne Tuohy, parents at the school, stumbled across him, and [...]

20 Comments »

What do you get when you cross a Bratz doll with a Smurf?  A Na’vi. Yup, folks, I finally caught up with my pop culture and went to see Avatar last night.  Seeing it made me realize why I so seldom bother to catch up with pop culture.  The movie was a snoozer.  The first [...]

27 Comments »

You’ve got to see this one.  It’s so right — and it really resonates with me because I work so hard educating and inoculating my children against the omnipresent Leftist pop culture.  I think the video also works for me because, as a history major who has always rejected Marxist and deconstructionist approaches to history, [...]

3 Comments »

There’s yet another movie coming out about the way in which the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq destroy lives and turn young men into pathetic losers: There is a grim timeliness to the release of “Brothers,” Jim Sheridan’s movie about the effects of war on the family of a Marine serving in Afghanistan. Whatever the [...]

2 Comments »

The big buzz is about James Cameron’s Avatar, which is supposed to be to modern movies what The Jazz Singer was to the silent film:  It will remake movies. I don’t know about that, but having seen the preview a few days ago when I took some boys to the movies, I can tell  you [...]

63 Comments »

Back in 2006, I wrote an optimistic article for American Thinker in which I saw some hope in Hollywood’s approach to manliness.  I’m going to quote here at some length from my earlier article, because I want to make the point that I was lauding an enormously successful movie because it celebrated traditional male virtues: [...]

9 Comments »

Hollywood and the media establishment as a whole are inescapable parts of American and, indeed, world culture.  It’s fascinating, therefore, to think about the type of patriotism our American media now espouses and that which it embraced in the past.   Depending on how one defines patriotism, whether as love of country or love of a [...]

17 Comments »

I went to NBC’s site looking for something else entirely, and got waylaid by a link to Hollywood brainiacs.  I found it somewhat interesting, at least initially.  Before I begin, though, let me say that I’m absolutely certain a lot of the actors and actresses profiled are indeed really, really smart.  Having said that, there [...]

12 Comments »

As you all know, over the years I’ve been fascinated by male and female roles in America.  As the mother of a very manly little 10 year old, I take male role models in this culture very seriously.  I’ve therefore noticed (and commented upon) the way in which our society consigns boys to perpetual adolescence.  [...]

34 Comments »

In my Friday Open Thread, I promised that I’d blog about Zac Efron.  First off, let me clear the air here and explain that I haven’t developed some pathetic “middle-aged woman/teenage boy” obsession with him (although he does bear an uncanny resemblance, girlish hair and all, to the teen idols of my youth).  What makes [...]

3 Comments »

Check out Ed Morrissey’s suggested list of worst political movies and see what you think.  I agree with him.  Indeed, I was savvy enough even in my pre-neocon days to recognize how awful some of them were, especially Oliver Stone’s JFK, which I thought was one of the stupidist, most paranoid, ill-informed movies I’d ever [...]

8 Comments »

Sadly, Hollywood isn’t only a mirror of culture but it’s also a cultural leader. During WWII, it took the lead in promoting American values and urging American victory. In the past decades, and with increasing energy in the current decade, Hollywood has taken the lead in hostility to American values and, in the war between [...]

11 Comments »

I’m buried up to my whatsis in work this morning, so can’t blog.  Before I turn this post into an open-thread, though, I wanted to suggest that you read William Katz’s article, which looks at the way in which the movies that showcased the wonderful Van Johnson (who died the other day at age 92) [...]

29 Comments »

As this Reason.tv video explains, while Hitler is appropriately reviled, something that occurs because he is wrongly associated with the Right, despite the fact that his politics were to the Left, Hollywood and pop culture just love Leftist mass murderers: This video reminds me why I was so horrified when I saw a sweet little [...]

6 Comments »

The other day I was speaking with a man who commented that the proliferation of Obama bumperstickers on luxury cars (not to mention the fact that the very rich in blue communities had flocked to the Obama banner) comforted him that Obama would not destroy the US economy by trying to nationalize it.  After all, [...]

15 Comments »

WWII was a dreadful time, with about 400,000 American military deaths suffered during those four years.  Just for perspective, we’ve been in Iraq for almost six years and, thank God, have sustained only 4,200 deaths. Nevertheless, there’s a tendency to look back with nostalgia on America’s time during WWII, and that’s in part because the [...]

No Comments »

I hadn’t missed the fact that Paul Newman died of cancer this weekend.  I always admired him, not for his screen presence, but for his off-screen decency:  a fifty year marriage to the same woman and a twenty year commitment to children’s charities.  As for his on-screen presence, I too admired his unusual good looks, [...]

8 Comments »

Many years ago, courtesy of Turner Classic Movies (my favorite TV station), I watched The Farmer’s Daughter, a 1947 film starring Loretta Young and Joseph Cotten.  Over the years, I’ve carried a strong memory of liking the movie a great deal, and no memory at all of the plot.  So, when I saw that The [...]

18 Comments »

Even thought I didn’t and couldn’t post yesterday, it didn’t mean I wasn’t paying attention.  I have a whole bunch of links I want to share with you.  I won’t take too much time on any one link, because I have only a short time before the Mom stuff starts again (summer, you know), but [...]

1 Comment »

It was Aristotle who first stated that man is a social animal.  He was right.  Humans define themselves by their allegiance to their family, their community and their country.  The ancient desert rule condemning a thief to lose his hand (an idea that Mohammed co-opted), was not intended simply to cause physical pain and suffering.  [...]

77 Comments »