Buckley’s Mix

La nouvelle vague

We celebrate this year the fiftieth anniversary of the French New Wave, with the release of Truffaut’s Les quatre cent coups in 1959. That’s how I count things in any event. 1959 was also the year of Resnais’ Hirsohima mon amour, Godard’s A bout de souffle and Chabrol’s Les cousins, but for me it was [...]

Worst Unmade Films

Rendition II. If they don’t make it, the audiences will have won…
The Virtue of Selfishness. Alan Greenspan reads from Atlas Shrugged, leaving out the quite incidental plot.
Siddhartha, with Sean Penn.
The Helen Thomas Story, with Barbra Streisand
Blago: The Movie, starring himself.
It’s only a matter of time…

Best Unmade Films

The Trial of Socrates
The Master of Ballantrae (it’s been done before, but a great story)
The Pre-raphaelite Tragedy: John and Effie take a Scottish holiday with John Millais
R. v. Somerset. Before Wilberforce there was Blackstone and Lord Mansfield. On emancipation, the common lawyers got there first. Dread Scott in England in 1772. “The air of England [...]

Best Conservative Films

NRO is offering up a list of best conservative films. For the most part I didn’t think the films they list very good, nor did I think them especially conservative. Doubtless I am the one who doesn’t understand conservatism, but here is a counterlist of ten other films:
Jules et Jim. “The promised land was in view. [...]

Are creative people necessarily liberal?

Is a queston posed by Roger Simon, who answers yes. Creative people are natural risk-takers, and conservative aren’t risk-takers. Q.E.D. I enjoyed his book, but on this one he’s wrong on so many levels:
1. So risk-taking entrepreneurs are liberals?
2. So the most innovative writers and poets of the last 100 years were liberals? Think Eliot, Faulkner, Pound, Yeats [...]