A Sound of Sheer Silence

I moved to Columbus, Ohio in 2011 to take a one-year position as a law clerk for a judge on the United States Court of Appeals.  The Court of Appeals is the level below the Supreme Court, and so we would hear appeals from every sort of case that makes its way through the federal trial courts.  We would also review what are called petitions for habeas corpus--supplementary appeals of criminal convictions (usually either life sentences or capital sentences) that occurred in state court.  When I tell people about the cases we saw during my time associated with the court, many people assume that these criminal cases were the most interesting and engaging.  But they were not, at least I didn't think so.  More than anything else, those habeas cases were frustrating. The source of this frustration came in large part from a law called, and I am not making this up, "The Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996," commonly called "AEDPA."  AEDPA was pa...

I saw two reviews this morning for 50 Shades of Grey .   Grantland 's Wesley Morris, who has become my go-to movie reviewer with the passing of Roger Ebert, says that it is conventionally terrible .  In other words, it is bad, but probably not entertainingly  bad in the way I hoped .   So, no reason to see it. Amanda Hess's review in Slate  has a different, and potentially more interesting, take.  She claims that the film is actually very self-aware, in the sense that it knows that many people "hate read" the 50 Shades  books, to use Hess's phrasing.  The film approaches the material in the book, Hess claims, from the point of view of someone who is attempting to read the material from the perspective of ironic distance.  [Ed:  Will Leitch says something similar ]  The story is crap, the characters are crap, the situations are crap, and the movie knows this as it is portraying the same story, characters, and situati...

Over the weekend, I saw a film entitled A Pervert's Guide to Ideology .  Ostensibly it was a documentary, but really it was a 2 1/4 hour lecture by Slovenian philosopher, psychoanalyst, and provocateur Slavoj Zizek on his theories of ideology and how it works.  To make his points, he uses movies, ranging from Triumph of the Will  to Jaws  to The Dark Knight , as illustrations.  Even if you don't agree with everything he says, he is very engaging and thought-provoking, not to mention very weird and funny. In addition to talking about ideology generally, he also goes into specific ideologies--Nazism, Stalinism, Capitalism, Consumerism, etc.  He also has a fascinating discussion of Christianity generally, which I will come back to at some point.  But at the beginning of the film, he talks about the "ideology" of Catholicism. To explain his view of Catholicism, he uses the movie The Sound of Music .  In the beginning of the film, we have the nov...