All the superficiality and pettiness and ineptitude one might expect to see behind the scenes of major pop music operations exists in the Charli XCX mockumentary, The Moment (2026). There is so much of it, though—plus little music—that the flick gets tedious. Charli XCX is mildly vulgar with her attractive body, but also droll in her confusion and exasperation. Alas, we finally witness self-pity from her as well. I believe this film was a mistake.
True Grit (1969 film) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
In 1969, the year of True Grit‘s release, critic Stanley Kauffmann found the movie offputtingly conservative. Mattie, the Kim Darby character, keeps mentioning that her family owns property, you see.
Whatever. It isn’t offputting to me. I enjoyed it for showing us the sweaty, economical drama that every intelligent Western is. It’s an acceptable adaptation of Charles Portis’s novel, neatly directed by Henry Hathaway. And, unlike Kauffman, I thought Darby filled the bill in her role.
It is a campaign-enriching axiom that Eisenhower “got us out of Korea and kept us out of Vietnam.” This is what a movie like Pork Chop Hill (1959), starring Gregory Peck, very much wanted.
Peace talks in the Korean War have gotten underway, but Pork Chop Hill needs to be taken from the Chinese—and everything goes wrong until the end. The film laments the upending of military strategy, the myopia, that turns soldiers into sitting ducks. Is it antiwar? Practically so, but not quite. As John Simon has explained, a movie is not really antiwar unless it shows that both battling sides, not just one, have more or less lost the conflict, and this is not the case with Pork Chop Hill.
Cover of Pork Chop Hill
The late David Lodge‘s 1975 novel Changing Places mildly satirizes college professors, the two in this book being exchange academics, Morris and Philip, from America and Great Britain respectively. They “change places” for a long while, leaving their relatives back home. Both are English professors. Morris never starts his ambitious project of analyzing Jane Austen’s novels, but instead drifts into the attempted seduction of Philip’s wife. There is much erotic misbehavior from the reserved Philip, and, yes, it likewise involves Morris’s wife. In part, the novel has to do with Letting Go—at the university—but where does this leave education or anything else?
CP is fairly short and a bit avant garde. Not as funny or memorable a novel about academic life as Lucky Jim, it is nevertheless buoyant and clever and nicely character-driven. I think it’s almost a patch on Lodge’s novel, Therapy.
I find Sydney Sweeney a delightfully fine actress—un-showy and versatile—in the sensationalistic Euphoria show and The Handmaid. I prefer her to the conventional Zendaya and Alexa Demie, Rue and Maddy respectively on Euphoria. In the future, I want to see her working out of a role and not that of an AI figure. With AI there is nothing to praise. Legislators may need to protect the acting profession (that is, acting per se) from Anthropic, etc. And, after all, successful pro actors generally contribute a lot to the government’s revenue fund.