Reviewed by Emily Karrs
‘It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in search of more brains.” So opens the novel Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, a much-hyped mashup arranged by Seth Graeme-Smith between (a) what some literary critics view as the greatest novel of all time and (b) hordes of reanimated corpses eager to devour the brains of every last man, woman, and child in the British Isles.Since the announcement of its title, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies has generated an online buzz comparable only, perhaps, to that surrounding the movie Snakes on a Plane. Milking the novelty as heavily as possible, the publisher chose April Fools’ Day as its release date. (In fact, some people who thought the book couldn’t really be getting published said the release date proved it was an elaborate online prank.) Yet the novel is no hoax — it debuted third on the New York Times bestseller list.It has already ignited Hollywood’s fancy, with bidding for a film adaptation in progress. Angling to please the newly discovered Austen/horror market, a film called Pride and Predator will soon be in production, setting loose the title character of the Predator film series to attack the Bennett family — under the guidance of none other than Sir Elton John’s production company.
Read “Dawn of the Zom Rom Com” — Reviewed by Emily Karrs |
Reviewed by
How much enjoyment you can milk out of the 155 minutes required to sit through Baz Luhrmann’s sprawling, teeming, and extremely silly epic Australia will depend on what you think about its most important character. Here I do not mean Nicole Kidman or Hugh Jackman, who technically headline the film — Kidman as the English noblewoman who inherits a cattle ranch in the late-1930s Outback, Jackman as the rugged Aussie known only as “the Drover” who becomes her business partner and then, inevitably, her lover. Nor do I mean the Land Down Under itself, whose picturesque topography is captured with swooping, soaring, God’s-eye camerawork throughout. (The Australian tourism industry has a $26 million ad campaign riding on the hope that the film becomes a hit.) No, the character I have in mind is Nullah (Brandon Walters), the half-caste part-Aborigine boy who becomes a surrogate son to Kidman’s Lady Ashley, and whose uneasy racial status provides the jumping-off point for the movie’s political ambitions.
Such ambitions are new to Luhrmann, whose past successes — his Shakespeare-as-teen-soap Romeo+Juliet and the garish pop musical Moulin Rouge — lacked any high purpose save a fierce zeal to entertain. After a seven-year hiatus, though (spent staging La Bohème and failing to stage an Alexander the Great epic when Oliver Stone’s got off the ground first), he has more serious things in mind. The result is an epic that seeks to marry Old Hollywood grandeur to New Hollywood revisionism: Imagine Gone with the Wind refashioned as anti-slavery polemic, and you have roughly the idea of what Luhrmann’s going for.
His hot-button subject is Australia’s historic treatment of its Aboriginal minority, and specifically the policy — whose actual scope is the subject of considerable debate, though you wouldn’t know it from this movie — of tearing half-caste children from their homes and raising them in orphanages, the better to turn them into proper Westerners. The quest to keep young Nullah from this fate, amid cattle drives and Japanese bombing raids alike, provides the movie with what’s meant to be its most potent through-line: The bronze-skinned, beaming boy is simultaneously a potential martyr to Australia’s racist past and a harbinger of its multiracial future.
And God, how I hated him. Not the actor, who brings a kilowatt smile and an androgynous charisma to a role he’s not responsible for crafting, but the character, who occupies the peculiar zone where political correctness shades into precisely the sort of racial stereotyping it’s supposed to counteract. Nullah grins and gambols; he chatters in a cloying patois (“we gots to drive-um them cheeky bulls, Mrs. Boss”); and he comes equipped with a mysterious medicine-man uncle (David Gulpilil) who’s a pure Noble Savage cartoon, bearded and bare-bottomed and rich with hocus-pocus. The overall effect is Little Black Sambo by way of Dances with Wolves: The condescension is intended to be favorable, but it’s condescension all the same.
pic_douthat.gifAustralia’s Lady Ashley (Nicole Kidman)20th Century Fox
But maybe you’ll feel differently — and if you do, the non-Nullah aspects of the film have enough going for them to make Australia at least an intermittently successful guilty pleasure. Luhrmann’s métier is melodrama, and at its best the movie offers the mix of sincerity, shamelessness, and spectacle that made his Moulin Rouge such a gaudy treat. The plot is a pastiche of war movies and westerns; the hero and heroine are imitations of archetypes from Hollywood’s Golden Age (Jackman is basically playing Clark Gable playing the Drover); there are not one but two hissable villains (Bryan Brown as the cruel cattle king Carney, and David Wenham as his sinister right-hand man); and whenever the narrative starts to flag, Luhrmann throws in a tavern brawl or a cattle stampede to keep things interesting. The stars are game, the scenery is stunning, and if you can suspend your critical faculties (and ignore the often dodgy special effects), there’s enough sweep here to get swept up in.
And if the hackneyed script and endless third act begin to grate — if your mind turns too often to Michael Bay’s Pearl Harbor, another big-budget love story featuring a Japanese surprise attack — it’s probably because there isn’t enough singing. The implausibility inherent in the melodramatic style is ideally suited to a musical or opera: Moulin Rouge worked so well, in part, because it demanded that the audience suspend its disbelief, by peppering the plot with realism-busting bursts of song. We know, from that film, that Kidman has pipes enough to warble through a musical, and Jackman has headlined on Broadway in the past. If they’d sung their love, instead of speaking it — if Australia had been titled Australia! — I think there would have been more in Luhrmann’s latest film to love, and less to roll one’s eyes over.
But he wanted to be serious instead. He wanted to be political, to take on racism and imperialism and the sins of Australia’s colonial fathers, and to make something more than a frothy entertainment. The result, perhaps inevitably, is a film that’s something less. Australia showcases Luhrmann’s gifts as a crowdpleaser, but not nearly often enough. You might say they’ve been Nullah-fied.
Read “Film: Under Done” — Reviewed by |
Reviewed by Thomas Sowell
Those who put a high value on words may recoil at the title of Jonah Goldberg’s new book, Liberal Fascism. As a result, they may refuse to read it, which will be their loss — and a major loss.Those who value substance over words, however, will find in this book a wealth of challenging insights, backed up by thorough research and brilliant analysis.This is the sort of book that challenges the fundamental assumptions of its time — and which, for that reason, is likely to be shunned rather than criticized.
Read “Who Is “Fascist”?” — Reviewed by Thomas Sowell |
An Interview with the Author
Are you a single female reflecting on the year past and the year ahead and feeling in a limbo? Wanting to get on with life already — husband, kids, that American dream? Love and marriage are great things, the Heritage Foundation’s Jennifer Marshall writes in her book, Now and Not Yet: Making Sense of Single Life in the Twenty-First Century, but don’t put off living in the meantime, she advises.
Read “Love the Life You’re In” — An Interview with the Author |
Reviewed by Kathryn Jean Lopez
R.L.: “…[E]ven Sprite leaves a legacy.” M.L.: “I have thought about writing a book about him, but nobody will care.”R.L.: “Sprite no doubt taught you much — about the way he lived his life with the cards he was dealt and your family’s genuine compassion to love him and help him.”M.L.: Well nobody would want to read about my dog.R.L.: Sure they would . . . and your family’s life with him. It would touch millions of hearts. Mark Levin took his friend Rush Limbaugh’s advice and became the author of a book called Rescuing Sprite, which began as a letter to his family. This weekend, Rescuing Sprite: A Dog Lover's Story of Joy and Anguish is in its ninth week on the New York Times best-seller list.
Read “Rescuing Us” — Reviewed by Kathryn Jean Lopez |
An Interview with the Author
If you’re looking for a little wisdom around this time of year, Mark DeMoss, president of the p.r. firm, the DeMoss Group, based in Atlanta, Georgia, may have just the reflection for you. DeMoss (son of the late Arthur S. DeMoss), is author of The Little Red Book of Wisdom, a collection of fundamentals he primarily wrote down for his children to have. The book serves as an ode to faith and family life, an efficient business-management guide, and a little red reminder for anyone who is prone to working too hard.In a pre-Christmas interview with National Review Online, DeMoss talked about the book, politics, and other important things.
Read “The Little Red Book that Should Start a Cultural Revolution” — An Interview with the Author |
An Interview with the Author
Radio talk-show host, former Cabinet secretary, and future vice president William J. Bennett is author of a two-volume history of the United States — America, the Last Best Hope — just recently boxed up and packaged with a Ronald Reagan tribute CD. Just in time for Christmas, as they say. Bennett offers his pitch for the books, as well as thoughts on reading in America, 2008, and Pat Buchanan, in an NRO interview.Kathryn Jean Lopez: I’ve bought a number of Bill Bennett books over the years. Big ones even. What’s so special about this boxed set? William J. Bennett: Thank you! What’s special here is the range and depth, in one box, for a good price. You get pretty much all of American history, from Christopher Columbus to the fall of the Berlin Wall and, more importantly, you get it in an exciting and fair way: Not boring, not one sided — those were my twin goals.
Read “Boxed In” — An Interview with the Author |
Reviewed by Jay Nordlinger
Publisher’s Note: National Review has brought out Here, There & Everywhere: Collected Writings of Jay Nordlinger. You may order the book here. It has eight chapters — and we are making one piece per chapter available on NRO. We are doing this every Tuesday — hence, “Tuesdays with Jay”! The chapters are Society, Politics, People, The World, Cuba and China, Golf, Music, and Personal. For the pieces drawn from the first four chapters, go here, here, here, and here. And this week’s piece is from the chapter on Cuba and China. It was originally published in the National Review of April 24, 2006.Charles Lee has a story to tell, and I have come to hear it, in a New York conference room. Dr. Lee has recently been released from a Chinese prison, after three years’ confinement. He is an American — a U.S. citizen since 2002 — and he talks like one: His conversation is peppered with “like,” as in, “If you tried to move, they would, like, hit you.” Dr. Lee is a remarkably composed and assured man. But he has been through a ghastly ordeal, which is no surprise, given the People’s Republic and its ways.
Read “TUESDAYS WITH JAY: Prisoner of the PRC” — Reviewed by Jay Nordlinger |
An Interview with the Author
“They were ying and yang, Tweedledum and Tweedledee, identical but opposite.” Opposites attract, even in politics. Nicholas Wapshott is the author of the new book, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher: A Political Marriage. He recently took questions about the historic partnership from National Review Online editor Kathryn Lopez. Kathryn Jean Lopez: Why did you pick “marriage” as the description of the Ronald Reagan — Margaret Thatcher relationship? Nicholas Wapshott: Because their friendship and working partnership was far closer than any other, even more intimate even than that of Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, where Roosevelt never let Churchill forget that he was a supplicant. Not only were Reagan and Thatcher completely in concert with their political beliefs, their unshakeable personal alliance echoed those harmonious arrangements in which men and women combine perfectly at work and take office husbands and wives.
Read “Cold War Couple” — An Interview with the Author |
An Interview with the Author
A Democratic victory in 2008 is not inevitable, Mark Stricherz argues. In his new book, Why the Democrats are Blue: Secular Liberalism and the Decline of the People’s Party, Stricherz maps the recent history of a party that has lost the allegiance of the working class and Catholic voters that once constituted its base. Stricherz talks to National Review Online Editor Kathryn Lopez about what went wrong and how they can fix it. Kathryn Jean Lopez: What’s “shortsighted” about democratic inevitability predictions for 2008? Mark Stricherz: In almost every general election since 1972, the Democratic party’s association with abortion and homosexuality has damaged its nominee politically. George McGovern was tagged, famously, as the candidate of the three A’s — acid, amnesty, and abortion. Jimmy Carter in 1980 and Walter Mondale in 1984 were seen as captives of the feminists. Michael Dukakis in 1988 got killed on the abortion issue, according to a little-noticed ABC poll at the time. Bill Clinton acknowledged that the party’s cultural liberalism hurt him in many states.
Read “The Once and Future Democratic Party” — An Interview with the Author |
An Interview with the Author
Few books are more authoritative that the volumes in the Oxford History of the United States—a series that includes masterpieces such as The Glorious Cause by Robert Middlekauff (on the American Revolution) and Battle Cry of Freedom by James M. McPherson (on the Civil War).
Read “The Howe of History” — An Interview with the Author |
Reviewed by Eve Tushnet
Some say there’s a fine line between genius and madness. The Book of Jane is a chick-lit rewriting of the Book of Job.This is the third book in which the authors, Anne Dayton and May Vanderbilt, have explored the spiritual dilemmas of good-natured, privileged American women. With this one, Dayton and Vanderbilt have intuited, I think, that something is seriously lacking in the sunshiney, Tide-commercial Christianity of this country. In a prosperity-Gospel culture where even the Catholics think Vatican II said that being Christian wouldn’t hurt anymore, a chick-lit Job is a terrific idea — a sort of Jesus jujitsu, using the weight of an inherently fluffy and this-worldly genre to drag the protagonist to the foot of the Cross.
Read “Job Wears Prada” — Reviewed by Eve Tushnet |
|
|
|
|
