New movies you say?

Just so you don't get your hopes up, I'll list the flix first, so you can decide whether you really want to keep reading:

UHF
Dodgeball
Madagascar II
The Penguins of Madagascar

And last weekend we got

I am Legend
Minority Report and
Shenandoah

Did I say "new"? I meant new to me. I'll try to give each one at least three sentences:

UHF: I'd seen it on cable back when we had it. I didn't expect much from it; I figured it'd be dumb, but I laughed out loud quite a lot. Weird Al isn't much of a dramatic actor but he writes some funny stuff. The whole is better than the separate clips available on YouTube. I bought it because my daughter had been watching those.

It came double packed with

Dodgeball: I figured, "What the hell! People talked about it quite a bit, and it's cheap. Why not?" The old geezer coach (Rip Torn! Of all people!) cracked me up. And if that's not Ben Stiller's natural personality (God, I hope not!), he's one of the best actors of our generation.

The chick's hot, too.

You'll notice that I got Madagascar II and Penguins together as well (you can't be bourgeois if you're not cheap). I'm going to cheat and review them together as well. Hilarious, the lot of 'em. I don't know who Danny Jacobs is, other than the voice of King Julien, but there's another guy (along with Stiller) who's not afraid to make a complete jackass of himself for the sake of art.

The wife gave me I am Legend and Minority Report for Valentine's Day. [I love you too, Hunny Bunny!] Both of them deserve more than three sentences, but I'm lazy, so:

I am Legend: I suppose everybody knows by now that this is a repriese of the same story The Omega Man is based on. This one's a touch better, though I think Charlton Heston did a heckuva job on the older move. Will Smith is a mere five years younger than I am, (plus one month and eleven days, ignoring the two leap days)... He's 40, man! Close enough to my age, all right!?

Unfortunately, since the kids were watching it with me, I had to downplay the scary parts.

Minority Report: good action/adventure. Interesting special effects. Up there with Cruise's Mission Impossible.

Does that count as three sentences? Three fragments? It deserves better, but...well, you know.

Is it saving the best for last to put Shenandoah here? It's probably the deepest story, though there was a fair amount of schlock in it. Anderson is a very sympathetic character to me, but...didn't Sheridan burn that whole valley to the ground in 1864? They went a little easy on the Yanks, if you ask me.

But I enjoyed the speech.

Well, I didn't do anything this weekend

I slept all day Saturday (after I took down the Christmas tree and hauled it out to the curb). Today I went to church, then I watched the Arizona Cardinals beat the Philadelphia Eagles and the Pittsburg Steelers beat the Baltimore Ravens. During the commercials I watched my new DVD Nietzsche and the Nazis.

Kelley Ross has written a review of it, Nietzsche and the Nazis, with some strong arguments against Dr. Stephen Hicks' "personal view," which inspired me to get the DVD and view it for myself.

Here's Ross' conclusion:

Hicks is confused enough about morality that he agrees with Nietzsche on the "slave revolt," and this serves to vindicate the influence, which he mentions himself, that Nietzsche had on Ayn Rand. This merely serves to illuminate the failings and oversights of Randite ethics. Nietzsche and the Nazis would be much better if Hicks were not carrying water for the peculiarities of Ayn Rand's own defense of liberalism and capitalism. By apparently agreeing with Nietzsche's denigration of Jewish and Christian compassion and charity, Hicks in truth burdens his case for freedom, democracy, liberalism, and capitalism with a weakness that the enemies of all these, today principally on the Left (but also in Islamic Fascism), have never hesitated to exploit. Politically, leftist rhetoric is still, even in America, much more pervasive and effective than any defense of the free market or private property.

Nevertheless, despite these tendentious weaknesses, and the peculiarity of its structure, Nietzsche and the Nazis is a valuable and, on the whole, impressive work. That Nietzsche was not an individualist and that the Nazis were socialists are points that seriously need arguing against other admirers of Nietzsche, on the former point, and against those who, on the latter point, promote the leftist interpretation of fascism as a form of capitalism. Hicks does this all effectively, even as he performs the valuable historical service of preserving and expounding what the ideology of the Nazi regime actually was, and the reasons why a great many Germans really supported it. We should not forget that the eugenics movement in the United States was not completely discredited until it was obvious what the Nazis had done, faithfully, with such ideas. At the same time, the attraction of Nietzsche for Stephen Hicks himself is evidence for the thesis that intellectually serious people, whether Nazis or not, can believe this stuff.

Emphases and links are in the original.

I must say, I didn't find the Randian touches particularly disagreeable, but, then, I've been tempering my Objectivism with Ross's insights for a number of years now. I won't feel very qualified to argue against Dr. Ross until I finally get around to finishing one of Kant's books - or, rather, several. The impression I got of Kant from my college course on him (called Romanticism and Alienation, and it wasn't exclusively about Kant, we also surveyed Fichte, Hegel, Schilling and some other German Idealists - my paper was, more or less, "Fichte and the Nazis"; I think I got a B- on it)...

Oops! Digression!

Anyway, my impression of Kant from that class was that he deserved both barrels of what Ayn Rand fired at him. It is Ross who got me to reconsider. The trouble is, I'd rather read Ross than Kant or Schopenhauer.

I know that the points Ross goes on about in his review, even with his forewarning, aren't ones in which I feel much of a personal stake, so I found it difficult to get as worked up over them as he did when I watched the movie (the first time, without the football games). I've read four books on Hitler, including Mein Kampf and The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, and thirty or fourty on World War II, visited Dachau, stayed for two and a half weeks with a former SS soldier and been otherwise inundated with information about that epoch... You'd think I'd be tough to impress on that subject... But I was impressed with Hicks' presentation of the similarities and differences between Naziism and Nietzsheanism.

And, of course, I am interested in the comparison of Hicks' achievement with my own.

Update: Aha! Now I see a bit more clearly.

V for Vendetta: preliminary notes for a review

Wikipedia article. Actually belies, somewhat, the notion that the Norsefire regime is intended as a direct outgrowth from the Thatcher government.

I prefer Spooner and the early Herbert Spencer to Bakunin. Hell, I prefer Nietzsche and Stirner to Bakunin.

I like what Moore says about the movie, "[The movie] has been "turned into a Bush-era parable by people too timid to set a political satire in their own country.... It's a thwarted and frustrated and largely impotent American liberal fantasy of someone with American liberal values standing up against a state run by neoconservatives—which is not what the comic V for Vendetta was about. It was about fascism, it was about anarchy, it was about England."

I haven't read the graphic novel. I think I will.

Update Mon. 5/21/07: Got it Saturday, read it by 5:00 Sunday - it is illuminating. Moore is right. It seems hard to believe that the movie is actually a milk-toast (must I use a "que"?) version of the story, but, yeah, it does cut out the harder edges of the fascism and anarchism in the movie. And in doing so in the case of the latter, eliminates the need for V's important distinction of the difference between anarchy and chaos.

As I say, I'm not sanguine with the Bakuninist idea that the current society must be destroyed before we can rebuild a better world, but in the case of a totally fascist world, as presented in V, I can see it.

One of the funny ironies is that they show the decapitation of a fascist state. Where have we seen that before? If you're going to be wishy-washy about it, you wind up in Iraq.

The flaw in the Bush invasions, is that the rebuilding has been undertaken using collectivist, centralized control methods. I'd like to think that they were trying not to make the mistakes in privatizing that were made in the former Soviet Union, but simply retaining centralized control of Iraq's resources hasn't proven too efficient either. Any more than it did for the Soviet Union.