"Eastern Promises" with Viggo Mortensen

Here's an excerpt from my review of the new film in the October 8, 2007 issue of The American Conservative:

"Eastern Promises," David Cronenberg's latest crime family thriller collaboration with Viggo Mortensen (the King in "The Return of the King"), is a sizable improvement over their last outing, 2005's "A History of Violence." It might be almost as preposterous as that critical favorite, but its less familiar setting amidst Russians in London makes it easier to enjoy than Cronenberg's clankingly inept vision of middle America.

"Eastern Promises" raises politically incorrect questions about why we would want so many newcomers that new ethnic mafias have become inevitable. Cronenberg explained to the New York Times his opposition to immigrants failing to assimilate:

"At its worst, it’s you come and you live there, but you live in a little ghetto of your own culture that you brought with you. I suppose that’s happening in the States with the Spanish language. Can multiculturalism really work?"

"Eastern Promises" asks whether the West needs, in particular, quite so many foreign pimps to lure blonde adolescents here from Eastern Europe with promises of singing jobs, only to rape them, hook them on heroin, and enslave them in brothels?

The October 8th issue, now available to electronic subscribers, also includes John Derbyshire's review of Steven Pinker's new book The Stuff of Thought, and lots of other good stuff from Andrew Bacevich, James Howard Kunstler, Fred Reed, Tom Piatak, Michael Brendan Dougherty, Daniel Larison, Philip Weiss, Pat Buchanan, Philip Giraldi, Daniel McCarthy, and more. Subscribe here.

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