I am not eloquent, but I am irritated. There is a very liberal site:

http://www.fairandunbalanced.com/

The people who post there are liberal, except for one republican conservative, who is also liberal.

I found the site because of posts about Christianity. They are Christians.

The last two posts were very annoying socialist commentaries.

Can someone who is eloquent and knowledgeable please respond to these people? I would do it, but I am not a debater.

I will say this, they are VERY unbalanced and there is nothing fair about it.

Film is unfortunately all too one sided in its presentation. So while it can present thoughtful presentations of contemporary life–what with the yuppie or bobo quandary of living authentically that makes a good story of contemporary life–film ultimately makes a one-sided choice in its demonstration. Film has a hard time being ambiguous and polysemic compared to a Shakespeare play. Film is ultimately a visual medium, and it can’t compare to Shakespeare.

This is why it is better to read Shakespeare than to see it live. I’ve seen straight Shakespeare productions which were nonetheless one-sided (a Gertrude of Hamlet performed like she was drunk), let alone the Sandinista King Lear or 1920s Cole Porter/Great Gatsby version of Two Gentlemen of Verona. They were fun, but at the end of the day I could figure out these one-sided presentations from the plays themselves without something so obviously ideological.

This is what I meant by saying that Peter has good taste. Film in it’s slavery to the photographic image doesn’t have the immensity of meaning that a Shakespeare can give to his written play. Nonetheless, peter is a good viewer of films. He takes them as they come, and he speaks something true to the idiosyncratic nature of film images–but he does it in a way that is relevant to others.

In this review of Please Give it doesn’t seem that there is a preference for suburban trees over urban taxi cab exhaust. This is Peter talking–and talking well. Nonetheless, it discusses what the movie shows. Yes, it is true that in real life the city has museums and smart people, and the country has fat tea party people. So what? The film in its story raised good questions in Peter’s mind–btw, questions that should be raised.

A good film can show the real struggles that us modern denizens of the half-assed regime of progress have left us. It still leaves you open to something other than what is shown in the NYTimes let alone is the reality of day to day life. If you’re half-way intelligent you can see this.

Nonetheless, film as a medium has it’s shortcomings. Let me suggest Brian De Palma as the only filmmaker I know of late–and this includes your Scorcese, Coppola, Kubrick, Tarantino, Jarmusch, Nolan, Soderberg, Anderson, etc.–who raises the self-conscious question of the insufficiency of film as a medium to represent the human problem in both its political and divine elements. His whole filmic career has been made in terms of the vocabulary of making movies and how that is limited in saying something straightforwardly true. So, for instance, he always has a movie within a movie–if not an expositional interlude of how to make a movie itself (see Hi, Mom! or Blow Out, but all of his movies address this theme).

De Palma–in his bad movies (which many say comprises the entirety of his body of work)–may veer toward the all too secular in his presentation, but at least he is cognizant of the problem of filmic art. The rest of the filmmakers take their ability to make images it for granted–and they take it to hundreds of millions of dollars to prove it. No wonder many critics think De Palma a mere “stylist” while they take those other directors as realists and hence artists.

De Palma has READ Shakespeare’s As You Like It, it seems to me, while many others have merely watched it in a production (no doubt with good Green themes added).

Friggin’ rubbish. I grew up in the suburbs, and the city (at least in a decent neighborhood) is far more communal, social, and less soul-destroying than the suburbs. My kids have lived in both, and they beg us NEVER to leave the city.