August 31, 2007

My old movie reviews:

Here are reviews of three 2006 Oscar winners from The American Conservative that have never appeared online before:


- The Lives of Others

- The Last King of Scotland

- The Queen


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

By Steve Sailer on 8/31/2007 Labels:

21 comments:

Anonymous said...

Just re-read your review of The Departed after finally catching it on satellite Saturday. What a great movie. Great script. Worthy Oscars for both. It's nice to see that William Monahan's career is taking off now, judging by the projects he has in the works.

8/31/07, 12:58 AM
Steve Sailer said...

Monahan's Crusader screenplay for "Kingdom of Heaven" didn't make a lot of sense in the theatrical release, but supposedly there's a longer version available now that is better. As you say, his "Departed" screenplay is wonderful. We'll see if he turns out to be a great all-around screenwriter or just a great Boston Irish screenwriter. You ought to be able to have a fine career off just the latter -- there are plenty of Irish-American and/or Boston actors.

8/31/07, 1:06 AM
Anonymous said...

I watched The Last King of Scotland two weeks ago. Whittaker gave a great performance and I enjoyed the movie very much. The DVD featured some extra footage in which Ugandans were queried for their opinions on Amin. Some had family members who were murdered by Amin, but a surprising number of others still seemed to admire the guy as a nationalist and anti-colonialist. That is in spite of persistent claims the British helped Amin in his bid to depose Obote.

8/31/07, 1:24 AM
Anonymous said...

I thought of Sailer's movie reviews the other day when seeing "The Bourne Ultimatium" during the previews. A movie with Kevin Bacon is coming out where a white "gang" murders someone close to Bacon, and he apparently goes for revenge as they will attempt to kill him to silence his testimony.

A "white gang"...............do these really exist? If so, what are they as the aggregate percentage of gangs? One percent?

Maybe thats how the Chav phenomenon got started in England. English whites trying to act tough enough so that foreign thugs would not attack them.............

8/31/07, 6:02 AM
Steve Sailer said...

There are still organized crime gangs of Italians and a few Irish in Boston, but more modern style gangs oriented toward young white people are found mostly in prisons, organized for self-protection.

Of course, there are white immigrant youth gangs, such as Armenian gangs in the LA public schools, who have, for example, been clashing with Mexican gangs at Grant H.S. since the 1970s.

8/31/07, 1:59 PM
Steve Sailer said...

And there are motorcycle gangs like the Mongols, who are white.

In general, white gangs are not cool like the Bloods and the Crips were in the 1990s and MS-13 is today, where local kids in North Carolina start up their own imitation gangs modeled on what they see on TV about gangs in LA.

8/31/07, 2:02 PM
Anonymous said...

"Maybe thats how the Chav phenomenon got started in England. English whites trying to act tough enough so that foreign thugs would not attack them............."

Unlikely. "Chav" is a label that has been recently applied to something that has existed here in some form for some time. Before 2004 they would usually have been referred to with a wider variety of names limited to certain localities.

I think that chav developed from an older term I remember coming across circa 2002/03 which was Charver or Charva. Sadly I can't find the rather funny website the definition was on.

Chavs also exist in areas with a small non-white population.

Anyway I assure you that we Britons can give these foreigners more than a run for their money in the violence stakes if they want some. Don't forget we used to own the places most of them came from!


I'd assume that motorcycle gangs derive a strategic advantage over street gangs because of their organic mobility?

Having done seem reading these lads sound formidable. You best get Mel Gibson to sort them out.

http://www.nagia.org/Gang%20Articles/Motorcycle%20Gangs.htm

8/31/07, 3:09 PM
Anonymous said...

Uh oh...the great Taki is again ridiculing the nation's most powerful "white gang"...this article would be hilarious if there weren't so many lives on the line.

The U.S.-Israeli Draft

8/31/07, 5:55 PM
Anonymous said...

Is Taki the next Christopher Buckley? That is one funny article.

8/31/07, 8:08 PM
Anonymous said...

I propose a new variable for our discussions: the j-factor. The j-factor for this comment thread is 8. It took 8 comments for a thread about Sailer's movie reviews to turn toward a negative comment about Jews.

j=8

8/31/07, 8:13 PM
Anonymous said...

vladimir jabotinsky?

Who's next, Trumpeldor? I love this blog.

8/31/07, 8:19 PM
Anonymous said...

Mongols MC is mostly light-skinned-mestizo. Outlaws, HA, Bandidos and Pagans are all white. Most will accept Mexicans if they are basically white in features and not too dark.

8/31/07, 9:34 PM
Anonymous said...

Interesting Steve.

What I found fascinating was how the failure of the Big Man (Amin) was paralleled (utterly unsurprisingly) by his nation and how gullible Westerners who are taken in by the big man are taken in by it.

And yes. Amin was un-manly. Big Men usually are. Excessive femininity in a man is never attractive.

Interesting too that Blair (as a character, perhaps in real life) is a mid-point between the upright, internal-duty, almost Bogartian "when a Man's Partner is killed, he's expected to do something about it" aspects of the Stasi agent polarity of traditional Western Manhood (non-Big Man) and non-Western Big Man-ism.

Raising an interesting point, is Britain devoid of the old-school model of men, who would do not endlessly feel and engage in things that are quite unattractive (feminine) on the way-post to Amin-land?

You can't do much in a society with Big Men. They end up fighting each other like Lions not well, acting like men.

[I'm surprised no one mentioned the Hell's Angels. The Hell's Angels and some other, local Canadian motorcycle gang fought a war in Montreal over drug distribution as the Mafia there declined. What shocked me was how OLD the Hells Angels and the other gang members were. All white of course, but well ... OLD. Guys in their 40's and fifties, street soldiers in their thirties. Weird. I would have thought that at least street soldiers in a gang warfare would be teens-twenties. Very weird.]

8/31/07, 9:47 PM
Anonymous said...

I found the Last King of Scotland a good film about a charismatic man “living in interesting times” - often of his own making. Forrest dominated it.

Unfortunately, it lost the smooth momentum in the last 1/3rd of the film when character and narrative lost out to a dutiful fleshing out of historical obligations (not very vividly).

On the DVD bonus, it was interesting how everyone, particularly Whitaker, was careful not to pass any judgment on Idi Amin Dada contrary to Hollywood’s moralizing tendencies. At first I though it was fear of some former Amin follower, but then I realized the entire subject had to be soft peddled paean to the Big Man least it highlight some politically inconvenient truths about that part of the world.

- JAN

8/31/07, 11:13 PM
Anonymous said...

Biker gang violence is common in Canada. Earlier this week one Jason Pellicore was slain north of Toronto. He had run afoul of the Hells Angels and was affiliated with the US-based Bandidos biker gang. Last year 8 members of the Canadian branch of the Bandidos were found dead in rural Ontario.

A major rivalry in Quebec between the Hell's Angels and the Rock Machine claimed many lives, especially in the 90s.

All of these gang members appear to be white.

9/1/07, 11:19 AM
Anonymous said...

Jabotinsky said:

a new variable for our discussions: the j-factor. The j-factor [is marked by a] turn toward a negative comment about Jews.[...]The j-factor for this comment thread is 8.

The alleged "negative comment about Jews" in this thread was a post criticizing Israeli policies.

I propose a different j-factor: in any comments thread where Israel or even some aspect of Jewish behavior is criticized, the j-factor is how long before a Jew shows up to ridicule the commenter, smear him or her as an "anti-semite" (explicitly or implicitly), and/or call for censorship.

This thread has a likely j-factor of 10, not 8.

9/1/07, 5:50 PM
Anonymous said...

Steve,

From the looks of his upcoming projects on IMDB, Monahan will be writing and adapting a couple more Mideast-themed scripts ("Tripoli" and "Body of Lies"). He's definitely not limiting himself to the Boston Irish milieu. We'll see how he does, but I'm bullish on him.

BTW, have you ever seen the documentary Overnight? It's about the rise and fall of the writer/director of another Boston Irish mob movie called The Boondock Saints. Like watching a car wreck.

9/1/07, 5:54 PM
Anonymous said...

I've seen "Overnight" and it definitely is compelling.

But the tragically flawed, real-life main character is Irish-American, not Jewish, and I think we should stick to non-anti-semitically criticizing aspects of Jewish behavior, lest we should be seen as knuckling under to the ridicule of overly defensive Jews.

9/2/07, 9:05 AM
Anonymous said...

"But the tragically flawed, real-life main character is Irish-American, not Jewish..."

If it makes you happy, anonymous, some viewers saw Tony Montana and Mark Brian Smith's "Overnight" as a story with two flawed characters, the other one being a Jew, Harvey Weinstein of Miramax. For example, a commenter on IMDB wrote:

"Although this documentary tries to make out Harvey Weinstein as some sort of Hollywood tyrant (which apparently isn't that far from the truth), Duffy was the one who ultimately destroyed his own career..."

And

"It's hard to say as to who the documentary was trying to prove who the bigger tyrant was - Duffy or Harvey Weinstein. After all, Harvey has the comfort and leisure of being that way as he is a self-made man. Duffy on the other hand isn't. "

9/2/07, 8:49 PM
Anonymous said...

BTW, Steve:

As an FYI to your readers who have cable/satellite: Idiocracy is now in rotation on Cinemax. After seeing it on Saturday, I'm not convinced that its controversial subject matter was the reason why the movie got so little play. One point my girlfriend made is that it wasn't that controversial in one sense, because most of the dumb people were white.

Judge had a great concept but ultimately some things were lacking in the execution. Overall, I thought the movie was OK, but some of the throwaway visual details were brilliant and funny (e.g., the "wanted" message for Luke Wilson's character at the Costco, which included, among his offenses "being a dick".) I'm glad I watched the movie on a TV with a DVR, so we could rewind and pause to read stuff like that.

9/3/07, 7:06 PM
Anonymous said...

Fred, (re: your penultimate comment) I was being sarcastic.

9/4/07, 10:49 AM

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