Wednesday December 31, 2003

CAN I PLAY TOO? Richard Brookhiser, having tantalized his fellow Cornerites by pronouncing Visconti's "The Leopard" "one of the two best conservative movies," finally breaks the spell by pronouncing Satyajit Ray's "The Music Room" the other.

I've never seen "The Leopard," but I love "The Music Room," which is about a declining Indian rentier who persists in giving a lavish fete in his crumbling music room, even though he knows the expense will bankrupt him.

It is always hard to know what is going on in the minds of Cornerites (loud explosions and snatches of Wagner, one imagines), but perhaps Brookhiser has here displayed an intuition of the current, very conservative Administration's financial management style.

Another contributor nominates "Mrs. Miniver," perhaps because it's the sort of thing old folks like to watch. Jonah Goldberg, of all people, has some intriguing suggestions.

I've seen a few sessions of this parlor game, and I don't know why no one ever brings up "River's Edge." It's about a bunch of nihilistic teenagers, one of whom kills a girl just because he's wasted and, apparently, doesn't know what else to do with his unchannelled energies. The only meaningful authority figure is a boomer-era teacher who congratulates his own generation because "we stopped a war, man!" The teacher's airheaded idealism is sometimes countered by a values-obsessed nerd (the Ben Shapiro role), whom everyone tells to shut up. If this doesn't fit your typical talkative conservative's world-view, I don't know what would.

I like that movie, and I like Whit Stillman's "The Last Days of Disco," which seems to me a cultural conservative's wet dream.

Well, that was kind of fun, but I think I'll go back to my usual standard, y'know, quality: how well a work of art puts over whatever ideas it happens to have.