Begging to Differ
I generally like Frank Rich's columns, which is why I have a link to them on my sidebar, but I need to nitpick his latest one.
He talks about the Cessna plane in Washington, D.C. "prompting panicky evacuation scenes out of the 50's horror classic 'The Day the Earth Stood Still.', apparently he forgets that in this particular movie - one of my all-time favorites, which I pretty much watch every time I notice it's on TV - although people went around talking and acting paranoid much of the time (hey, it was the '50s!), there weren't any "panicky evacuation scenes" at all, particularly when all the electrical devices (not to mention independently-activated internal combustion engines!) stopped working for half an hour, which prompted people to... pretty much stand around doing nothing with worried looks on their faces. Even the scenes which show crowds gathered around the spaceships have them looking rather lethargically curious. It's a slow-paced film, far more intellectual than thrilling. (But damn, I wanted Michael Rennie to invite Pat Neal and her kid to come with him. Instead she married Roald Dahl, which I suppose wasn't a bad trade-off.)
Also, Rich says that "Tom Ridge, now retired as homeland security czar, recently went on 'The Daily Show' and joined in the yuks about the color-coded alerts." Which he most certainly did not; as I blogged a couple weeks ago, he was perfectly serious in his support for the color-coded alerts and insisted repeatedly that they were never politicized, an insistence that he blatantly contradicted the very next day.
Like I said, I know these are nitpicks, but Rich is formerly a culture critic, and should therefore be a bit better informed about things like movies and TV shows.
I generally like Frank Rich's columns, which is why I have a link to them on my sidebar, but I need to nitpick his latest one.
He talks about the Cessna plane in Washington, D.C. "prompting panicky evacuation scenes out of the 50's horror classic 'The Day the Earth Stood Still.', apparently he forgets that in this particular movie - one of my all-time favorites, which I pretty much watch every time I notice it's on TV - although people went around talking and acting paranoid much of the time (hey, it was the '50s!), there weren't any "panicky evacuation scenes" at all, particularly when all the electrical devices (not to mention independently-activated internal combustion engines!) stopped working for half an hour, which prompted people to... pretty much stand around doing nothing with worried looks on their faces. Even the scenes which show crowds gathered around the spaceships have them looking rather lethargically curious. It's a slow-paced film, far more intellectual than thrilling. (But damn, I wanted Michael Rennie to invite Pat Neal and her kid to come with him. Instead she married Roald Dahl, which I suppose wasn't a bad trade-off.)
Also, Rich says that "Tom Ridge, now retired as homeland security czar, recently went on 'The Daily Show' and joined in the yuks about the color-coded alerts." Which he most certainly did not; as I blogged a couple weeks ago, he was perfectly serious in his support for the color-coded alerts and insisted repeatedly that they were never politicized, an insistence that he blatantly contradicted the very next day.
Like I said, I know these are nitpicks, but Rich is formerly a culture critic, and should therefore be a bit better informed about things like movies and TV shows.
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