Archive for 2016

KYLE SMITH HAS SOME 25TH ANNIVERSARY THOUGHTS: As a feminist film, ‘Thelma & Louise’ fails miserably.

Even on its own terms, as a bluntly obvious feminist parable, the movie is a self-contradictory failure. Its regrettably schematic screenplay (which writer Callie Khouri won an Oscar for) shouts its points in the manner of a freshperson term paper from an only intermittently coherent Womyn’s Studies major.

You may recall the movie as a date-rape revenge saga wrapped up in a freewheeling outlaw adventure, but really it’s a story of two idiotic hysterics who make a series of daft decisions that are nobody’s fault but their own. Stupidity and hot tempers, not entrenched sexism, are the causes of their problems. . . . It’s as if Khouri is trying to paint feminists as given to hysterical overreaction. Teachable moments get garbled — just days after learning that being alone with a strange man is not a great idea, Thelma picks up a hitchhiker, who turns out to be a criminal, simply because he’s Brad Pitt, suggesting the lesson for women is “Be careful of men you don’t know, except the cute ones.”

The movie works better if you just think of it as a misogynist tale about unbelievably ditzy women who lose what remains of their reason under pressure and suffer the ultimate punishment.

As a colleague said at the time, what really happens in the movie is that two women get out from under male supervision, immediately do a lot of stupid things, then commit suicide. And the only voice of sanity is the older white male cop (Harvey Keitel), whom they ignore.

LIFE IN THE 21ST CENTURY: Twins married to twins resort to plastic surgery in order to tell each other apart.

A set of identical twin brothers and their wives, a set of identical twin sisters, are resorting to plastic surgery in order to tell each other apart.

The two couples, from the Shanxi province in China, often find it difficult to tell which twin is their spouse and which is their in-law, leading to frustration and confusion.

After several mix-ups, the couples are resorting to plastic surgery in order to differentiate their appearances.

They must be unusually identical. I’ve known several sets of twins and it was usually possible to tell the difference after a while.

HILLARY’S CAMPAIGN SLOGAN ENCOUNTERS A HITCH.

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ANALYSIS: TRUE. Bill de Blasio Hates Freedom: “This week, New York mayor Bill de Blasio signed a ban on using snuff or chewing tobacco at Yankee Stadium and Citi Field. It sounds trivial, but this is actually a damned big deal.”

DARKNESS ON THE EDGE OF THE LADIES ROOM: Tim Blair on Bruce Springsteen and the PC Street Band.

Related: “How did we get to this absurd place? You won’t go wrong if you point your finger at the [Obama] administration,” Clarice Feldman writes at the American Thinker in an article titled “The War On Women Moves to Restrooms.” As Feldman writes, “To accommodate the perceived wishes of a very small number of people, the federal government and many states are placing women and girls at risk of rape and assault in restrooms.”

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Do you live in a bubble? Take the quiz, based on Charles Murray’s Coming Apart.

For what it’s worth, I got 44 out of 100, which is indicative of “A first-generation middle-class person with working-class parents and average television and movie going habits,” which sounds close enough, I guess. Although post-WWII, my entrepreneurial parents worked very hard to fit in with the upper middle-class in our small South Jersey suburb, and other than the Big Bang Theory, I watch very little network TV these days.

IS THERE NOTHING IT CAN’T DO? Global Warming Will Kill Our Sex Drives!

But from the point of view of the warmists, isn’t that a good thing? In the 1970s, reports of “global cooling” were often accompanied by articles demanding “zero population growth,” ala Paul Ehrlich’s fever-swamp 1968 book, the Population Bomb. And as a San Francisco Chronicle claimed with a straight face in 2008, in that famously prim and reserved city, “There is nothing more bacchanalian than a kid’s birthday party.” They’re ever so environmentally incorrect, don’t you know?

Related: A (Not Quite) Complete List Of Things Supposedly Caused By Global Warming.