Monday April 14, 2008

LILEKS AT THE MOVIES. Or in his Sanctum Jaspertorum, anyway, gazing upon some cultural artifact digital technology has delivered. (You can tell because he's not complaining about tubercular sputum.) He saw There Will Be Blood. Hey, I saw that! But I missed the culture-war angle:

It kept my attention, and I enjoyed watching it, even though I felt myself disengaging from it by degrees in the last hour. Let's just not tell ourselves that it's a mark of great artistic insight to have the character get more insular and nasty as he gets richer, shall we? I'm not saying we should have lots of movies like The Biography of Andrew Carnegie...

Oh, how he would long for the days when Hollywood portrayed tycoons as wonderful, ordinary fellows, if such days existed. Imagine Lileks sent back in time to write about Citizen Kane: "Nice of Mackiewicz to let Harold Ickes write the script for him. See Kane, bloated with ambition and dollars! I'm sure Fatty Arbuckle would have something to say about that. And there's some Spanish-American War revisionism thrown in for good measure. No blood for sugar cane, man! While Hearst was protecting our children from marihuana, Welles was turning Shakespeare over to Negroes," etc.

I expect he reads (G)Nat Atlas Shrugged as a bedtime story.