Positive Liberty

Are your investments insufficiently risky?

How about placing a bet in a derivatives market for motion pictures.

Since making a bet on a movie so is about the closest any of us will ever get to being actual show business producers, here’s possibly the funniest four minutes in the history of motion pictures (the next five minutes are pretty good, too):

Later today I will be taking my younger son to see the Tim Burton / Johnny Depp version of Alice in Wonderland. It may be a good movie or a bad movie or an in-between movie, but I won’t subsequently criticize it for not being true to the source material. Doing so would be criticizing a dog for being an unsatisfactory cat. Besides, one does not hire Johnny Depp for what would then be little more than a cameo role.

Carroll’s masterpieces are surely the most celebrated works of children’s literature among the philosophically inclined, for their author (nee Charles Dodgson) was both a mathematician with an interest in logic and, more importantly, a man with a gift for elegant and eloquent absurdities. It is, I suspect, the combination of the two that made Carroll such a rara avis. Continue Reading »

In commemoration of today’s opening of the film, Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief, I’d like to take a moment to note for those who haven’t been paying attention to this particular market niche that we seem to be in a golden age of children’s literature. I use the term “children’s” loosely, to refer to literature that’s not primarily directed at adults, and there’s a lot of it out there these days. The reason, I think, is because the market for kids books is so strong–particularly with the money to be made from film adaptations–that good authors can become fabulously wealthy. Continue Reading »

The Hughes Brothers’ The Book of Eli is one part The Road, one part A Canticle for Lebowitz, one part Kung Fu and one part Waterworld without the water. Filmed in some gawdforsaken desert except for the few decayed urban scenes probably filmed in Detroit, the movie requires more suspension of disbelief from its viewers than a remake of Braveheart staring Pee Wee Herman. But if the viewer is able to imagine, for example, GM made vehicles still operating thirty years after a nuclear holocaust, it’s a vastly more entertaining movie than most of the rest of the current offerings.

Denzel Washington gives one of the best, most nuanced performances of his career as the eponymous protagonist, a devout and peaceful yet preternaturally formidable martial artist who is carrying what is supposedly the very last extant copy of a precious tome (mini-spoiler: some consider the tome in question “inerrant,” whatever the hell that means). Eli is taking his precious property to a western destination he, himself, does not know but pursues as a matter of faith. Along the way, well, complications ensue, as he encounters his vaguely Al Swearengen-like antagonist, a small town boss named Carnegie (Gary Oldman). Carnegie is building a library (get it?) the sole purpose of which is to get his hands on a copy of the book in question so he can pull a Pat Robertson and expand his Earthly empire.

Jennifer Beals and Mila Kunis play a mother and daughter, respectively, and the only significant female roles to be had; but there’s no romance and only fleeting, brutal sex in the movie. For that matter, while there are definitely violent scenes, it’s neither gratuitously violent nor particularly gory, such bloodshed as there is being minimized by the film’s washed out, nearly colorless pallet. Though R-rated, it’s far closer to a PG-13 movie in terms of sex and violence.

As other reviewers have noted, the film’s conclusion ratchets up the story’s fundamental incredibility even further, but The Book of Eli is not a movie to be thought about. It is, at bottom, nothing more than another of the currently popular genre of post-apocalyptic road movies in which the viewer is invited along for the ride. Taken as such, Constant Viewer heartily recommends it. On the other hand, CV would not be at all surprised if the movie finds an unusually large Christian audience and serves as grist for many a church adult education discussion forum. If that should happen, however, CV also suspects such discussions will tend more toward eisegesis than exegesis. Then again, when isn’t that the case?