Interests and irritations to a guy on a red horse.
Quotes
"Fascism and communism both promise "social welfare," "social justice," and "fairness" to justify authoritarian means and extensive arbitrary and discretionary governmental powers." - F. A. Hayek"
"Life is a Bungling process and in no way educational." in James M. Cain
Jean Giraudoux who first said, “Only the mediocre are always at their best.”
If you have ten thousand regulations, you destroy all respect for the law. Sir Winston Churchill
"summum ius summa iniuria" ("More laws, more injustice.") Cicero
As Christopher Hitchens once put it, “The essence of tyranny is not iron law; it is capricious law.”
"Government’s view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it." Ronald Reagan
"Law is where you buy it." Raymond Chandler
"Why did God make so many damn fools and Democrats?" Clarence Day
"If I feel like feeding squirrels to the nuts, this is the place for it." - Cluny Brown
"Oh, pshaw! When yu' can't have what you choose, yu' just choose what you have." Owen Wister "The Virginian"
Oscar Wilde said about the death scene in Little Nell, you would have to have a heart of stone not to laugh.
Thomas More's definition of government as "a conspiracy of rich men procuring their own commodities under the name and title of a commonwealth.” ~ Winston S. Churchill, A History of the English Speaking Peoples
“Laws are like cobwebs, which may catch small flies, but let wasps and hornets break through.” ~ Jonathon Swift
The accelerating nuttiness
of CNN this past week put me in the mood for a film about the fine line
between on-air personality and psychopath - and this is one of my
favorites. The cameras turn, the flashlights pop, and Suzanne Stone is
in heaven, Not literally, of course: she's actually at the funeral of
her late husband. who is in heaven, having been prematurely
dispatched there by Suzanne. But fame is fame, and, when you've been
pining for it all your life. why quibble about the details? In 1995, ten
minutes after the OJ trial, the world of the "media circus" was almost
beyond satire, but To Die For shrinks it to its most pitiful, localized basics and skewers it brilliantly.
The roots of this splendid Nicole Kidman turn lie, unofficially, in
the Pamela Smart story, the case of a media coordinator at Winnacunnet
High School in New Hampshire who ran the drug-awareness program "Project
Self-Esteem". So far all the details sound like rather too obvious a
parody: "media coordinator", "drug-awareness program", "Project
Self-Esteem"... But it gets better: Mrs Smart managed to persuade her
15-year-old schoolboy lover and his pals to kill her husband by
impressing the lads with her knowledge of heavy metal. In 1990 the case
riveted a state otherwise rather lacking in memorable murder cases.
Long ago Joyce Maynard was one of those impressionable young female fans of Catcher in the Rye
who caught J D Salinger's eye and was invited to move in to his pad in
Cornish, New Hampshire. So she knows the state, and kept the setting.
But her novel rewrote Pamela Smart's story into that of Suzanne Stone,
an ambitious weather girl at an unwatched local TV station, and made the
tale a black comedy on tabloid culture. That too is something Miss
Maynard can give at least a couple of pointers on: at the time she lived
a couple of hours south of me and the last time she'd been in the paper
was an essay she wrote about her silicone implants ("My journey into
the land of large breasts"). I saw her in the local bookstore round
about the time To Die For came out and they certainly made
brushing past her in a narrow aisle something of a challenge. Anyway,
like the implants, Buck Henry's screenplay firmed up and enlarged on
Miss Maynard's raw material, transforming Suzanne's ascent to
micro-stardom into a droll amorality tale on the vapidity of celebrity.
Gus Van Sant originally wanted Meg Ryan in the role, which would, I
think, have been disastrous. When Miss Ryan bailed, Nicole Kidman fought
hard for the part, and made it a breakthrough.
No comments:
Post a Comment