Copyright 2008 The New York Sun Fri, 19 Sep 2008 03:41:48 -0400 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Andrew Stuttaford :: Stories from The New York Sun http://www.nysun.com/authors/Andrew+Stuttaford istoll@nysun.com (Ira Stoll) webmaster@nysun.com en-us ANDREW STUTTAFORD http://www.nysun.com/arts/fight-for-your-right-to-fight-battle-in-seattle/86180/ Fri, 19 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST One doesn't have to agree politically with a movie to appreciate the skill with which it was made or, for that matter, to enjoy it. To combine a bad film, however, with worse politics is to add insult to injury, which brings us to the topic of "Battle in Seattle," a ham-fisted, sanctimonious blend of leftist agitprop, by-the-numbers melodrama, and excruciating self-righteousness that arrives in theaters Friday. If you are currently taking orders from Rage Against the Machine, Michael Moore, or... ANDREW STUTTAFORD http://www.nysun.com/arts/the-good-the-bad-and-the-beautiful-the-duchess/86173/ Fri, 19 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST Barely more than a decade after that tragic dash through Paris and the unhinged, hysterical carnival of lamentation that followed, it is no great surprise that Princess Diana continues to cast a shadow over popular culture, particularly in the country where she once seemed destined to be queen. It is, nonetheless, disappointing to detect that elements of her tawdry, strip-mined melodrama have been slipped into Saul Dibb's new film "The Duchess," which arrives in theaters Friday. The British... ANDREW STUTTAFORD http://www.nysun.com/arts/dragging-kennedy-into-a-new-fight/85870/ Tue, 16 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST At its best, counterfactual or "virtual" history (to use Harvard historian Niall Ferguson's term), the exploration of what might have happened if history had not taken a certain turn, can be a fascinating intellectual exercise, a "what if" that illuminates what did happen. Unfortunately, "Virtual JFK: Vietnam if Kennedy Had Lived," which begins a two-week run at Film Forum tomorrow, is neither fascinating nor illuminating. Helmed by first-time director Koji Masutani, and featuring Brown... ANDREW STUTTAFORD http://www.nysun.com/arts/space-chimps-on-a-wild-ride-through-outer-space/82133/ Fri, 18 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST When Alan Shepard returned safely to Earth late in the Gagarin spring of 1961, a relieved, ecstatic nation treated him to ticker tape, meet-the-president, and, subsequently, a trip to the moon. The previous astronaut sent by NASA into space hadn't fared quite so well. Emerging snarling and indignant from an edge-of-disaster suborbital shambles that was a comedy of human error and simian savoir faire, Ham had to make do with an apple, a pat on the head, and a speedy return to the desert... ANDREW STUTTAFORD http://www.nysun.com/arts/imitation-jules/81650/ Fri, 11 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST On March 9, 1886, poor, deranged Gaston Verne shot his uncle Jules, the French writer often credited with the invention of science fiction. The great man survived, but if he'd known what filmmakers would do with his books in the centuries to follow, he probably would have reached for that revolver himself. The latest movie to spring from Verne's pages, "Journey to the Center of the Earth," may turn out far better than what has come before, but the precedents are not encouraging. Previous... ANDREW STUTTAFORD http://www.nysun.com/arts/wanted-the-man-who-would-be-kingpin/80790/ Fri, 27 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EST Whatever else you might want to say about it, Mark Millar's graphic novel "Wanted" was one of the most effective evocations of nerd-boy rage since the days of Bobby Fischer. Obscene, misogynistic, scatological, and saturated with a nasty geek nihilism, it's a clever, unsettling, and unpleasant bloodbath only occasionally softened by signs that it was intended as some sort of parody. Reports that "Wanted" was to be turned into a major Hollywood vehicle made for a bad day. The news that it was... ANDREW STUTTAFORD http://www.nysun.com/arts/the-man-who-would-be-khan/79435/ Fri, 6 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EST On vacation some years ago in a post-communist Mongolia now free to venerate its most famous son, I asked one of the locals if he thought Genghis Khan, the founder and posthumously declared emperor of what became the largest contiguous empire in history, had been, well, just a touch brutal. "Oh, yes," came the reply, "but he was provoked." That's pretty much the spirit in which the Russian director Sergei Bodrov has made "Mongol," a lavish, highly praised (it was nominated for a Best Foreign... ANDREW STUTTAFORD http://www.nysun.com/arts/cabinet-of-soviet-curiosities/76797/ Wed, 21 May 2008 00:00:00 EST Sometimes the smallest of things can illuminate the largest. A fossil tells the story of massive planetary change, a line or two of poetry does more to explain trench warfare than a dozen history books, and the miniatures of Nicholas Hilliard bring Gloriana's long vanished England back to iridescent, dangerous life. In writing "Lenin's Brain" (Hoover Institution Press, 163 pages, $15), Houston University professor Paul R. Gregory has mined the Hoover Institution's extraordinary collection of... ANDREW STUTTAFORD http://www.nysun.com/arts/making-the-modern-iron-man/75324/ Fri, 25 Apr 2008 01:37:50 EST With its dusty Humvees, violent Afghan battlefields, and worries about the munitions business, the upcoming "Iron Man" is a film set firmly in 2008. That'll do, I suppose, but what was wrong with 1963? If there's any tale that deserves the chance to return to the sheen, swank, and soul of its Rat Pack, space-age, pay-any-price-bear-any-burden origins, it's Iron Man's. Conceived by comic maestro Stan Lee and launched by Marvel Comics in the final year of the Kennedy administration, "Iron Man"... ANDREW STUTTAFORD http://www.nysun.com/arts/cops-gone-wild/74568/ Fri, 11 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EST "People sleep peaceably in their beds at night," George Orwell once wrote, "only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf." That society sanctions the use of force to protect itself is neither surprising nor controversial. What we debate instead is how rough those men can be and how, exactly, they can be controlled. We live, so the story goes, in a nation of laws, but we also seem to accept, if quietly, that some laws will occasionally have to be broken if others — the laws... ANDREW STUTTAFORD http://www.nysun.com/arts/holding-up-a-shattered-mirror/72944/ Fri, 14 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EST When it comes to movie do-overs, the recklessly sexy Naomi Watts just cannot keep herself out of trouble. In remakes of "Ringu" ("The Ring") and "King Kong," she found herself stalked by, respectively, a monstrous spirit and a rampaging ape. If, as has been reported, she stars in an upcoming reworking of Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds," she will soon be facing an enraged avian army. But none of these ordeals, past or future, are enough to deter the much menaced Ms. Watts from appearing in yet... ANDREW STUTTAFORD http://www.nysun.com/arts/children-of-the-revolution/72362/ Wed, 5 Mar 2008 01:07:32 EST It is fair to assume that any volume with space for a discussion of the "crisis" in mid-20th-century Soviet children's theater is aimed at a specialist audience. That said, if the subject of "Children's World" (Yale University Press, 736 pages, $45), Oxford professor Catriona Kelly's immense, imaginative, and thoroughly researched new book — a history of child-rearing in Russia between the twilight of the tsars and the fall of Gorbachev — is somewhat academic, her prose style is not. She writes... ANDREW STUTTAFORD http://www.nysun.com/arts/spies-like-us/69642/ Wed, 16 Jan 2008 00:00:00 EST Mark Ruttenberg, the hero of "An Ordinary Spy" (Bloomsbury, 288 pages, $23.95), Joseph Weisberg's deft, sour, and clever new novel of espionage, bureaucracy, and disenchantment, is — it is true — a spy. But he's no James Bond. Just read what happens, or doesn't, when he shows up for a celebration at the Russian embassy in the country to which, as a novice CIA agent, he has recently been posted. The poor fellow fails to make any real progress with the general who is the most important target in... ANDREW STUTTAFORD http://www.nysun.com/arts/fighting-for-a-lonely-planet/67989/ Thu, 13 Dec 2007 00:00:00 EST Hell may not, whatever Jean-Paul Sartre once wrote, be "other people," but other people, or what's left of them, certainly conspire to mess up the second half of "I Am Legend," a movie that was, until then, developing into one of the finest science fiction movies of recent years. In his retelling of Richard Matheson's harsh, hallucinatory novel from 1954, director Francis Lawrence is brilliantly successful in re-creating the book's postapocalyptic vision of a survivor hanging on to life, and... ANDREW STUTTAFORD http://www.nysun.com/arts/dont-worry-you-can-take-the-family/67718/ Fri, 7 Dec 2007 00:00:00 EST It is a measure of the genius of the British novelist Philip Pullman that when, less than 30 pages into his book "The Golden Compass," 12-year-old Lyra Belacqua angrily objects to the refusal of her (supposed) uncle Asriel to take her to the frozen, fabled northlands, most readers will understand and agree with her. "I want," protests Lyra, "to see the Northern Lights and bears and icebergs and everything." And so, you just know, do you. Disappointingly, despite some excellent special effects... ANDREW STUTTAFORD http://www.nysun.com/arts/saturday-morning-classic-literature/66619/ Fri, 16 Nov 2007 00:00:00 EST Mighty Beowulf fought for glory, honor, and immortal renown. If, however, the hero of that ancient Anglo-Saxon epic had been unlucky enough to see three recent movies inspired by his exploits, he would, I reckon, have opted instead for obscurity. The first, Graham Baker's "Beowulf" (1999), was an incoherent fiasco starring Christopher "Highlander" Lambert, and set in a dank, dismal techno-medieval future. Next came Sturla Gunnarsson's "Beowulf & Grendel" (2005), a movie of such numbing... ANDREW STUTTAFORD http://www.nysun.com/arts/we-happy-two/65840/ Mon, 5 Nov 2007 00:00:00 EST One of the more poignant features of the current competition among Republican presidential hopefuls, fiercely fighting for a chance to lose to Senator Clinton in 2008, has been a series of missions to Maggie. Mitt Romney saw Margaret Thatcher, the former British prime minister, late last year in Washington, D.C., while Fred Thompson and Rudy Giuliani were at pains to include meetings with the Iron Lady in the course of their recent trips to London. The political consequences of such encounters... ANDREW STUTTAFORD http://www.nysun.com/arts/false-dawn/65649/ Thu, 1 Nov 2007 00:00:00 EST The disparate, jostling artistic movements grouped together and loosely labeled as "modernist" may have been gathering pace before 1914, but it was the moral, spiritual, and physical devastation left by four years of war that allowed them to play such a prominent role within the cultural avant-garde of what remained of Europe. "Graphic Modernism From the Baltic to the Balkans, 1910–1935" is a fascinating, striking, and intellectually ambitious exhibition now showing at the New York Public... ANDREW STUTTAFORD http://www.nysun.com/arts/godfather-part-i-stalin-as-a-boy/65156/ Wed, 24 Oct 2007 00:00:00 EST When Josef Stalin finally succumbed to the stroke he so richly deserved, a distraught Pablo Neruda mourned the death of this "giant. ... the noon, the maturity of man and the peoples." Such attitudes are, mercifully, now rare. Once known genially as "Uncle Joe," Stalin is now regularly reviled as a monster and a despot to be ranked with history's worst. Despite this, it continues to be the case that, in the popular imagination, the name Stalin fails to deliver anything like the sense of horror... ANDREW STUTTAFORD http://www.nysun.com/arts/in-search-of-the-inner-shaman/64452/ Fri, 12 Oct 2007 00:00:00 EST There once was a glorious, splendid, self-confident epoch, back in the reign of the blessed Eisenhower, when a director from the West could shoot a film about remote, mysterious Mongolia with minimal authenticity, fearless inaccuracy, and cultural crassness so epic that it could feature John Wayne as the young Genghis, Susan Hayward as Bortai, a haughty Tatar princess, and the irradiated Utah desert as the land of the khans. "The Conqueror" (produced, appropriately enough, by remote, mysterious... ANDREW STUTTAFORD http://www.nysun.com/arts/hearts-of-darkness-2007-09-19/62930/ Wed, 19 Sep 2007 00:00:00 EST In the course of humanity's long, violent history, there was one brief, happy interlude, a decade or so on either side of 1900, when those fortunate enough to live in the more advanced parts of the planet were able to persuade themselves that barbarism had been banished from their culture, never to return. To those luckiest of men, the last true optimists, the barriers — psychological, political, and technological — that separated them from the savagery of the past were as reassuringly robust... ANDREW STUTTAFORD http://www.nysun.com/arts/in-the-land-of-mammon/60539/ Wed, 15 Aug 2007 00:00:00 EST Despite unprecedented social, political, economic, and cultural upheaval, there is, still, just a part of this country's vision of itself that is forever Bedford Falls. That was an idea of nation as extended community, diverse, but not too diverse, a land of opportunity, certainly, but one where no one was left too far behind, or ended up too far ahead. There was Potter, but he was an outsider, the moneyed exception that proved the modest rule, the rule that was also an ideal, of an America... ANDREW STUTTAFORD http://www.nysun.com/arts/fathers-sons-and-bogeymen/59137/ Wed, 25 Jul 2007 00:00:00 EST Don't be put off by agitprop, achingly self-conscious blue-collar grit, and accents that may mystify some on this side of the Atlantic: "This Is England," the latest offering from the up-and-coming British director Shane Meadows, is a sometimes exhilarating, sometimes wrenching and, at its best, profoundly moving coming-of-age tale that also manages to find room to ponder questions of friendship, fatherhood, group loyalty, masculinity, and national identity. That's not bad for 98 minutes... ANDREW STUTTAFORD http://www.nysun.com/arts/room-with-a-bloody-view/57128/ Fri, 22 Jun 2007 00:00:00 EST I like hotels: the soothing anonymity, the agreeable sensation of watching people pick up after you, the questionable pleasures of pay-per-view. Needless to say, Stephen King, a writer at his best when conjuring up evil from the everyday, disagrees. In the prelude to his short story, "1408," he explains why hotel rooms are "naturally creepy": "How many people have slept in that bed before you? How many of them were sick? How many were losing their minds? How many were perhaps thinking about... ANDREW STUTTAFORD http://www.nysun.com/arts/magical-mystery-tour/56097/ Thu, 7 Jun 2007 00:00:00 EST At one time or another, most of us have gone through that gray-faced morning routine: the shameful stumble through the shambles of a living room reduced to a wasteland of empty bottles, dirty glasses, and elusive memories, you know how it goes. The night before had been fun, you think, you hope, but what was it, exactly, that had happened? And so it was with that starburst we call "the '60s." For a few brief, blinding moments, there was illumination, chaos, and destruction, sometimes creative... ANDREW STUTTAFORD http://www.nysun.com/arts/something-there-is-that-doesnt-love-a-wall/55504/ Wed, 30 May 2007 00:00:00 EST To cross over into East Berlin in the 1970s, as I did on a couple of occasions, was to take a trip that, even then, seemed like a voyage back into a lost, almost unimaginable era. The rampaging ideologies, cruel and convinced, that had done so much to wreck Europe were in retreat across the western part of the continent, their fervor dimmed by exhaustion, bitter experience, sweet, if uneven, prosperity, and, credit where credit's due, careful American supervision. In East Berlin, by contrast... ANDREW STUTTAFORD http://www.nysun.com/arts/nation-safe-for-autocracy/54178/ Thu, 10 May 2007 00:00:00 EST Much as blood and soil may help, it takes more to make a nation than a happy coincidence of genes and real estate. Today's nation-states are, whatever they may claim, purpose-built, as artificial as they are organic. Many may now have developed a genuine sense of self, but that identity is often rooted in myth as much as history, in fantasy as much as fact, and in forgetfulness as much as memory. Nowhere is that more the case than in those states where the past is as awkward as geography is... ANDREW STUTTAFORD http://www.nysun.com/arts/englands-arcadia/53621/ Wed, 2 May 2007 00:00:00 EST Of all the legends with which humanity deludes itself there are few more persistent, enchanting, and tormenting than that of a lost golden age. The Jews of the Old Testament pined for Eden, and the ancient Greeks dreamed of Arcadia. In the fantasies of many modern Britons, that vanished, magical idyll may have taken place on the island they call home, and not that many years ago, but that has only sharpened the sense of loss and tightened its grip on the English imagination. This particular... ANDREW STUTTAFORD http://www.nysun.com/arts/victory-at-all-costs/52240/ Wed, 11 Apr 2007 00:00:00 EST If there is one thing, and one thing only, to be grasped about Britain's failure to head off Hitler in time, it's that it was almost certainly inevitable. Unfortunately, this is something that readers of "Troublesome Young Men" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 448 pages, $27.50), a new book that explains how Winston Churchill rose to power and appeasement fell, will have to discover from another, more balanced source. What's more, to describe "Troublesome Young Men" as a "new" book in anything other... ANDREW STUTTAFORD http://www.nysun.com/arts/turning-myth-into-cartoon/50134/ Fri, 9 Mar 2007 00:00:00 EST Hades, the ancients warned us, is dreary, morose, and subdued, its only pleasure a certain resigned tranquility. However, once news of Zack Snyder's "300," an account of the battle of Thermopylae, reaches the shades of the Spartan dead, even that sad calm will be gone. There will be shouts of rage, muttered, if laconic, threats and most ominous of all, the sound of swords being unsheathed as the finest fighting men of all time set off to hunt down Mr. Snyder, this son-of-a-Helot who should have... ANDREW STUTTAFORD http://www.nysun.com/arts/english-saint-gets-the-story-he-deserves/49152/ Fri, 23 Feb 2007 00:00:00 EST "The Lives of Others," the compelling new movie about East Germany currently in contention for an Oscar, is the story of two flawed individuals' quest for moral redemption, but Michael Apted's "Amazing Grace" raises the bar far higher. It tells the tale of William Wilberforce, an unquestionably good man who set out to redeem the honor of an empire and, in so doing, saved millions of lives. Born in England in the middle of the 18th century to a wealthy merchant family, Wilberforce (ably played... ANDREW STUTTAFORD http://www.nysun.com/arts/taking-lives-in-stasiland/48373/ Fri, 9 Feb 2007 00:00:00 EST If there is nothing else to East Germany's credit (and, frankly, there isn't), that grim, gray dictatorship did succeed in provoking two of the finest films to come out of a reunited fatherland in recent years. The first, Wolfgang Becker's sweet, enchanting "Good Bye Lenin!" (2003) used one family's crisis to examine both the year that Erich Honecker's then largely unlamented republic simply faded away and the way that layers of self-deception, "internal emigration," and illusion had helped its... ANDREW STUTTAFORD http://www.nysun.com/arts/wicked-west/47948/ Fri, 2 Feb 2007 00:00:00 EST The dust of those doomed towers had barely begun to settle before some Americans began asking themselves who, beyond Al Qaeda, was really responsible. Suspects included the Jews (as usual), the sinister Bush White House, the complacent Clinton White House and, in the view of Jerry Falwell, God. It's a tribute to the power of his imagination that, despite this strong competition, in "The Enemy At Home" (Doubleday, 333 pages, $26.95), Dinesh D'Souza has managed to come up with a startlingly... ANDREW STUTTAFORD http://www.nysun.com/arts/battered-kingdom/46020/ Wed, 3 Jan 2007 00:00:00 EST If, in 1932, nearly 15 years after the catastrophe of the "war to end all wars" had finally drawn to a close, any Britons were still foolish, complacent, or naïve enough to cling to their island nation's traditional sense of inviolability, Stanley Baldwin, the country's once-and-future prime minister, wanted to smash that illusion beyond repair. Speaking to the House of Commons in November of that year, he warned that the "man in the street [had] to realize that there is no power on earth that... ANDREW STUTTAFORD http://www.nysun.com/arts/defying-death-to-save-a-life/43933/ Wed, 22 Nov 2006 00:00:00 EST Darren Aronofsky's "Pi" was, for all its indie buzz and critical approval, muddled, pretentious, and, at roughly 80 minutes in length, roughly 80 minutes too long. His no less pretentious second effort, the morbid "Requiem for a Dream," won even more awards (and, to be fair, a deserved Oscar nomination for Ellen Burstyn) but combined dazzling direction with leaden storytelling, preachiness that would embarrass the Drug Enforcement Administration, and, most unforgivably, ghastly treatment of... ANDREW STUTTAFORD http://www.nysun.com/arts/character-sketch-gone-crazy/43266/ Fri, 10 Nov 2006 00:00:00 EST There are some desserts, just a few, that are perfection itself. There are plenty more, glutinous, sticky, cloying, annoying, that tip over into a sickly sweetness and simply disgust. Then, trickiest of all, there are those that teeter uncertainly along the edge, promising delight on one side, threatening nausea on the other. They generally end up delivering both. In this respect they resemble nothing so much as Marc Forster's sharp, saccharine, original, clichéd "Stranger Than Fiction," a film... ANDREW STUTTAFORD http://www.nysun.com/arts/eat-drink-and-wait-for-the-revolution/41955/ Fri, 20 Oct 2006 00:00:00 EST There's a strangely wise conversation in 1971's "Harold and Maude," when ancient, youthful Maude explains her radical past to youthful, ancient Harold: "Big issues. Liberty. Rights. Justice. Kings died, kingdoms fell. I don't regret the kingdoms, but I miss the kings." Sofia Coppola, I suspect, feels much the same way. Her bewitching, delirious, pastels-and-candy "Marie Antoinette" combines a sardonic critique of the Versailles system with a wry, understanding portrait of those kings, queens... ANDREW STUTTAFORD http://www.nysun.com/arts/reign-storm/40638/ Fri, 29 Sep 2006 00:00:00 EST Within a few weeks, American moviegoers will be given the chance to wallow in the glitz, glamour, and guillotines of Sofia Coppola's "Marie Antoinette." For now they will have to make do with a dowdier, more discreet queen, the one who has been reigning in England for more than half a century now, a monarch who shows every sign of hanging on to her crown and, thankfully, the head on which it sits. In all the decades of Elizabeth II's painstakingly (and sometimes painfully) dutiful... ANDREW STUTTAFORD http://www.nysun.com/arts/look-but-dont-touch/39165/ Wed, 6 Sep 2006 00:00:00 EST Right at the beginning of this mad, maddening, provocative, and sometimes beautifully written book, "Nicole Kidman" (Alfred A. Knopf, 304 pages, $24.95), David Thomson admits that he "loves" Nicole Kidman, a confession that is both essential and superfluous. Skeptical as we all should be about long-distance psychoanalysis, Mr. Thomson's book is more love letter than biography, both a meditation on obsession and a monument to it. He writes: There she is in profile, her right shoulder raised, her... ANDREW STUTTAFORD http://www.nysun.com/arts/mann-overboard/36908/ Fri, 28 Jul 2006 00:00:00 EST It would be nice to believe that someone, somewhere, someday is going to do a good job translating a much-missed, much-loved television series of my youth onto the big screen, but it's proving a long, long wait. "Bewitched" failed to enchant, "Charlie's Angels" was the work of the devil, "Lost in Space" was adrift in self-importance, "Starsky and Hutch" turned a decent drama into a bad farce, and "The Dukes of Hazzard" transformed a likable hayseed comedy into, well, words fail me. Despite this... ANDREW STUTTAFORD http://www.nysun.com/arts/blinded-by-the-light/35644/ Fri, 7 Jul 2006 00:00:00 EST Philip K. Dick (1928-82), the reliably legendary, always eccentric, and occasionally brilliant science fiction writer whose "A Scanner Darkly" is the basis of Richard Linklater's dreadful new movie,is often described as a philosopher, a shaman, and a seer. But that's being kind, the man was bonkers, a nut-case, a lunatic, crazier than a street-corner shouter or attic-roosting aunt. Unfair? Maybe,but then unlike Dick I have never been fortunate enough to be "seized" by a light beam that lifted... ANDREW STUTTAFORD http://www.nysun.com/arts/superhero-to-cheer-about/35012/ Mon, 26 Jun 2006 00:00:00 EST To explain the ultimate source, and the lasting popularity, of Superman would take Carl Jung, "The Golden Bough," and, quite possibly, Zane Grey. What we do know is that, since the Man of Steel's initial appearance in June 1938's "Action Comics," he, like all the gods, devils, and myths of mankind's collective unconsciousness, has changed along with the times in which he finds himself imagined. With "Superman Returns," directed by Bryan Singer, he is still evolving. If we start, as we should... ANDREW STUTTAFORD http://www.nysun.com/arts/bottoms-up-on-the-poseidon/32610/ Fri, 12 May 2006 00:00:00 EST I can't imagine it's much fun being a passenger stuck on a cruise liner that has just flipped upside down, but, according to Wolfgang Petersen, the director of "Poseidon," the sense of confinement makes it even worse. "This is not something a person can run away from. Trapped within a closed environment where there is no escape, no help, and very little time, they are forced to deal with it by themselves." Trust me, Wolfgang, any audience unfortunate or unwise enough to be trapped in a cinema... ANDREW STUTTAFORD http://www.nysun.com/arts/myth-but-not-the-pathos/30972/ Fri, 14 Apr 2006 00:00:00 EST Whoever said moral decadence, perversion, and cultural decline couldn't be fun? There was a time - a serious, earnest time - when the women of Hollywood's biopics were history's greats: They were queens, empresses, Marie Curie. And now? Well, let's just say England's Bess has been joined by Tennessee's Bettie. She's a queen, yes, but of the pinups, a bondage icon and retro cheesecake, and now she's the subject of Mary Harron's delightful, witty, and touching new movie, "The Notorious Bettie... ANDREW STUTTAFORD http://www.nysun.com/arts/film-sabotaged-by-itself/29211/ Thu, 16 Mar 2006 00:00:00 EST With the dangerous and complex struggle against Islamic extremism stretching relentlessly, terrifyingly, and, seemingly, endlessly ahead, there's plenty of room for an intelligent movie that shows how fear, disaster, and fury could lead us all into totalitarian temptation. "V for Vendetta" is not that movie. To be sure, as should be expected of a film produced by the maestros behind "The Matrix" and based on the ideas and imagery of a pioneering graphic novel, "V for Vendetta" is visually... ANDREW STUTTAFORD http://www.nysun.com/arts/mutilating-mr-bean/28884/ Fri, 10 Mar 2006 00:00:00 EST To understand the origins of the mutant mayhem that is Alexandre Aja's new version of "The Hills Have Eyes," it helps to begin with a detour into the old, nasty Scottish legend, the legend of Sawney Bean. Like the finest old, nasty Scottish legends, it's certainly old, probably bogus, and undoubtedly nasty. Sawney, it's said, was a brigand who lived in a cave with a large, feral, and incestuous brood that only emerged from their lair to rob, murder, and, well, eat, innocent passers-by, unseemly... ANDREW STUTTAFORD http://www.nysun.com/arts/humorous-performance/26565/ Fri, 27 Jan 2006 00:00:00 EST There were some who thought Michael Winterbottom's last movie, "9 Songs" (2004) - a dreary, pointless exercise involving a British glaciologist, an American student, and very explicit (and very real) sex scenes - should not be made. They were right. There were others who thought his latest effort, "Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story," could not be made. They were wrong. Mr. Winterbottom's new film is based, sort of, on "The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy" (1759-67), nine bewildering... ANDREW STUTTAFORD http://www.nysun.com/arts/up-from-the-badlands/26185/ Fri, 20 Jan 2006 00:00:00 EST Legends that appear only rarely need to make sure that when they do so, it's special.Halley's comet pulls this off. Barbra Streisand does not. The brilliant but reclusive filmmaker Terrence Malick falls somewhere in between. Since first attracting attention with his debut feature, the spare and unsettling "Badlands" (1973), the enigmatic Mr. Malick has developed a reputation as a director of genius that, remarkably, rests on just four films, each of which divided critics and, assuming (as seems... ANDREW STUTTAFORD http://www.nysun.com/arts/wonkette-jumps-the-snark/25419/ Fri, 6 Jan 2006 00:00:00 EST If you need any confirmation that the glum little town that passes for this nation's capital is hopelessly obsessed with itself, take a look at "Dog Days" (Riverhead Books, 288 pages, $23.95), the Washington frolic and first novel by Ana Marie Cox, the below-the-Beltway blogger better known as Wonkette. To get the most out of this book, you need to know beforehand what Ms. Cox has been up to on her blog. Sleazy, sarcastic, funny, and salacious ("Politics for People With Dirty Minds"), Wonkette... ANDREW STUTTAFORD http://www.nysun.com/arts/legendary-lover-brought-down-to-size/24898/ Fri, 23 Dec 2005 00:00:00 EST Even his name, Giacomo Casanova, with its lovely rhythms and hint of a sigh, sounds like seduction. Try saying it without smiling as you savor the memory or, more precisely, the legend of this trickster Romeo, bogus aristocrat, and genuine original, a man (perhaps character is a more appropriate word) about whom nothing was ever quite as it seemed, but who deserves better than the lame, preachy mess that is Lasse Hallstrom's dreadful new movie. To start with, Mr. Hallstrom's "Casanova" fails...