Iqra’i

Because if Helen gets to link to anthropology blogs, I get to link to movie reviews.

I’m sure I’ve gotten more of a kick reading merciless reviews of The Happening than I possibly could have by watching the movie itself, and Chris Orr’s non-review review obviously takes the cake. But Anthony Lane, taking advantage of the mini-time-warps of print media (the review is published weeks after the movie comes out? Bizarre!), engages in a meta-review of both movie and reception, and in the process manages to turn M. Night Shyamalan into something like an Old Testament prophet:

he is trying to reinsert the fear of death into a moviegoing culture that would prefer to think of it as laughable, dismissible, or gross. People around me in the cinema were cackling…the same audiences who go tense and quiet on the rare occasions when, as Shyamalan did in “The Sixth Sense,” he makes sombre and controlled use of the same anxieties.

It’s an interesting read on his career: a cautionary tale against trying to be Buckley’s “man who stands athwart history yelling ‘Stop!’” by means of shock therapy. Because shock is just another peculiarly modern thrill.

Meanwhile, Sudes’ review of Wanted (which is thoroughly great) wins for the image of the week:

my dog-eared copy of Summer Action Movies: Theory and Practice (eds. Joel Silver & Jerry Bruckheimer).

Not least because the second edition of said book would totally include my as-yet-unwritten essay on why Iron Man is the first truly postmodern action movie.