Past sell-by date
“Most of the depressing trends in contemporary Hollywood — the sequels, the reboots, the inferior remakes of foreign-language films, the gradual (if likely temporary) 3D-ification of genre after genre — are easily explained by greed, lack of imagination, or some combination thereof. But a reliably disappointing subcategory that lacks any obvious rationale is the reimagining of good, if perhaps not quite classic, films associated with the latter 1960s and early 1970s.
“’Planet of the Apes,’ ’Alfie,’ ’The Stepford Wives,’ ’The Heartbreak Kid,’ ’The Taking of Pelham 123’ — all were movies very much of their times and, in their various ways, they reflected the sexual and political anxieties of the era. Over the last decade, all have been remade in forms utterly deracinated from their original context, resulting in films that have no evident idea what they are trying to say or why they are trying to say it.
“To this unhappy fellowship may now be added ’Just Go With It,’ a remake of the 1969 Gene Saks film ’Cactus Flower.’”
— Christopher Orr, writing on “’Just Go With It’: A Sad Union of the Saccharine and Scatological,” on Feb. 11 at Atlantic
Muslim learning
“Welcome to one of Britain’s most influential Islamic faith schools, one of at least 2,000 such schools in Britain … the Darul Uloom Islamic High School in Birmingham, an oversubscribed independent secondary school. …
“The Channel 4 current affairs program Dispatches filmed secretly inside it — and instead discovered that Muslim children are being taught religious apartheid and social segregation. We recorded a number of speakers giving deeply disturbing talks about Jews, Christians and atheists. We found children as young as 11 learning that Hindus have ’no intellect.’ …
“And we came across pupils being told that the ’disbelievers’ are ’the worst creatures’ and that Muslims who adopt supposedly non-Muslim ways, such as shaving, dancing, listening to music and — in the case of women — removing their headscarves, would be tortured with a forked iron rod in the afterlife.
“In 2009 this school was praised by Government-approved inspection teams for its interfaith teachings. The report said that ’pupils learn about the beliefs and practices of other faiths and are taught to show respect to other world religions.’”
— Tazeen Ahmad, writing on “Shame of Britain’s Muslim schools” on Feb. 13 at the Mail on Sunday
’Get me rewrite’
“The media wants to give Obama credit for taking The Dangerous Tyrant Mubarak out. …
“It seems when it comes to even soft power, Obama’s against it — he’s not only willing to do business with dictators, he’s positively giddy at the prospect. And Verum Serum has dug up this clip of Obama, praising Mubarak as a ’stalwart ally’ and ’force for good in the region’ and refusing the interviewer’s terming of Mubarak as an ’autocrat.’ As Verum Serum says: ’Not exactly a “tear down this wall” moment.’
“The MFM wants to credit Obama with this because they need to credit him with something; for such a transformative figure in politics, Obama has almost no actual objective successes. (Subjective successes in the form of liberal political deliverables, yes, but those are easy; what about unambiguously good deliverables?) So they’re desperate to throw a few scraps of fabric on The Naked Emperor.
— pseudonymous blogger “Ace,” writing on “Thank God Obama Gave That Cairo Speech, Eh?” on Feb. 14 at his eponymous blog Ace of Spades
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