Your humble blogger is fully aware that everyone and their mother has been blogging and writing about the big Obama speech from yesterday. Why, you might ask, have I been silent? [I might, I might indeed!--ed.]
It's a combination of four things:
- Like Mark Lynch, I want to wait and see what the longer-term effects are -- if any. By longer term, we're talking past the six-hour window that bloggers would consider as long-term.
- There are plenty of FP bloggers who can write about this to any ideological flavor. So I'm free-riding off of them rather than write about a subject on which writing persuades no one and brings nothing but loopiness to the comments section.
- [He's waaaay behind on some other writing assignments!!--ed.] You weren't supposed to say that out loud.
- Superficial cultural gadfly that I am, the thing that caught my attention this AM was not the reax to the Obama speech, but A.O. Scott's devastating evisceration of Sam Mendes' new movie Away We Go (though I do grant that the trailer looks amusing). In this paragraph, Scott articulates for me the response I always have to Mendes' work:
To observe that they inhabit no recognizable American social reality is only to say that this is a film by Sam Mendes, a literary tourist from Britain who has missed the point every time he has crossed the ocean. The vague, secondhand ideas about the blight of the suburbs that sloshed around American Beauty and Revolutionary Road are now complemented by an equally incoherent set of notions about the open road, the pioneer spirit, the idealism of youth.
Clearly, Sam Mendes is not the film equivalent of de Tocqueville. This, of course, leads to a vital film question: who is the cinematic equivalent of Alexis de Tocqueville?
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