Arts Reviews

Last night I posted an incredibly innocuous tweet about Laurence Fox and the outrage it caused was predictably excessive. Now, for those of you not in the know, Laurence Fox is a privileged white British male actor who last week publicly said some of the most toxic and hateful things this country has heard in centuries. On the BBC’s political forum debate show, Question Time, Laurence was asked about his thoughts on the hateful racism Meghan Markle has been regularly subjected to from the British tabloids and his heartless response shocked the nation. I can hardly bear to type this, but he DENIED that any criticisms directed towards her were motivated by racism and called the UK...oh God...this is killing me...he called the UK a ‘lovely and tolerant country’. Jesus.

As per longstanding annual tradition, Hollywood yesterday woke up early to announce the 2020 Academy Awards nominees — and Twitter, as per slightly more recent annual tradition, woke up to be annoyed when the list of Oscar-worthy actors, writers, directors, and other filmmaking professionals was, as always, not particularly diverse. That this year's nominees could still be so overwhelmingly white and male was a particular slap in the face, especially since the Academy made a highly public move in 2019 to avoid exactly this outcome. July of last year saw the introduction of 842 new members, half of them women, into the Academy's voting ranks, with many spectators anticipating a wave of awards-season recognition for female and minority-led films as a result.

If you’re looking for answers as to why Joker, the Todd Phillips-helmed, gritty comic book Scorsese knock-off, garnered 11 Oscar nominations on top of being the highest-grossing R-rated film of all time, then buddy, this isn’t the piece for you. I don’t have an explanation. Joker is not a ruckus Marvel CGI theme ride. It’s an excruciating anxiety-inducing and unforgiving character study, a very good one along the lines of older cult callings like Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer.

As Douglas Murray says, Sir Roger Scruton was as scintillating in conversation as he was on the page. It was typical of Roger’s generosity that in September 2018, a month in which he had no less than three books coming out, he gave up an afternoon to recording a Spectator USA podcast at his home, Sunday Hill Farm in Wiltshire. We originally published it under the headline ‘Knight of the Living Philosophers’. His death at 75 impoverishes us all. Scruton was more than a philosopher. He wrote widely and well on subjects as various as wine and Wagner, fox-hunting and free trade. That month, Scruton the philosopher had published Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition.

I imagine you were all expecting me to write a scathing review of Ricky Gervais’s recent diatribe at the 2020 Golden Globe Awards. Well you would be wrong. Because you see, that is precisely what Ricky is counting on. When he stands there, obnoxiously pimping his own ego in front of the world’s most caring and compassionate people, he is doing it for the attention he so obviously craves. Yes, it was a truly disgusting display (not to mention a staggeringly apt symbol of toxic white male privilege) to see this abhorrently wealthy japesmith spewing his vile alt-right propaganda disguised as ‘jokes’ directly into the faces of the humble and benevolent Hollywood glitterati.

After T.S. Eliot died in 1965, his second wife Valerie became notorious for not releasing his letters or unpublished verse, and for not licensing his published work for vulgar adaptation. This is why ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ was never made into a musical with an opening number in which the protagonist jumps off an operating table as a female chorus come and go, talking of Michelangelo.

Walking into the theater to see Bombshell — which recounts the high-profile sexual harassment cases that led to Roger Ailes’s ouster from Fox News — I felt a bit like a feline about to take in a showing of Cats. I was, after all, about to see a re-creation of the people and spaces that made up my work environment for the better part of two years. I started at Fox Business Network as a producer in October 2013 and stayed until March 2015, when I left to work for Jeb Bush’s presidential campaign (please clap). During my time there, I only met Roger Ailes once, very briefly, and my main takeaway from that interaction was that I was taller than him in heels.

Few things enrage journalists more than when President Trump accuses the media of creating ‘fake news’ or calls them the ‘enemy of the people’.Reporters and pundits understandably take it as a threat — not only to themselves but also to the First Amendment and the bedrock notion that a free press is necessary for a free society. Some have interpreted Trump’s remarks as emerging fascism or even wondered if they could end up in jail for criticizing this administration (though the media curiously didn’t make as much of a stink when President Obama was trampling reporters’ constitutional rights).Yet to date, no journalists have been locked up. No fascist measures have been taken against the press.

No filmmaker knows quite how to push the collective buttons of the American media like Clint Eastwood. He does it purposefully, deliberately and even at almost-90 years of age, artfully. His choice to release a new biopic about Atlanta-bombing-hero-turned-suspect-turned-victim Richard Jewell at this particular moment is a blatant shot across the bow at a corporate media that sees itself as the flawless hero in a tale of them versus Donald Trump in a struggle for the American soul. The media has seemingly played right into the narrative trap Eastwood has set, by casting themselves as the real victim of a vicious smear machine in the story of Richard Jewell.