Stories by John Podhoretz
If Looks Could Gill
Best Picture nominee is a bizarre but lovely mer-myth.
4:00 AM, Feb 09, 2018
Who didn’t love Ron Howard’s Splash back in 1984? Tom Hanks falls in the ocean and nearly drowns but is rescued by the beautiful mermaid Daryl Hannah. She follows him to New York, and they have a romantic idyll until she’s captured by the authorities. “Nobody said love’s perfect,” says Tom’s brother, played by John Candy. Tom has a hard time with the interspecies-mating issue—“I don’t it expect to be perfect, but for God’s sake, it’s usually human!”—but eventually he saves Daryl and returns Read more
'Post'-Truth
Steven Spielberg's new movie idealizes journalists by distorting the historical record
4:25 AM, Jan 26, 2018
The Post is about a little-known and relatively minor incident in the annals of newspapering—how the Washington Post made itself a player in the Pentagon Papers story, the biggest scoop of 1971, after it was beaten to the punch by the New York Times . And it merges that account with a female empowerment tale featuring the 55-year-old Katharine Graham as a shy and retiring victim of mansplaining back in 1971 who found her voice and her leadership skills standing up not only to Richard Nixon b Read more
Word-of-Mouth Movies
Audiences talked Jumanji and The Greatest Showman into box-office hits.
4:25 AM, Jan 19, 2018
Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle is a “reboot,” whatever that means, of a 1995 Robin Williams movie about kids magically transported inside the world of a board game. Sony Studios knew that the new Jumanji was likely to be a hit from the reaction of preview audiences, but no one expected it would make about as much in its third and fourth weekends as it made in its first ( $36 million ). That almost never happens. And nobody thought it would make $350 million at the domestic box office—a milest Read more
She's a Stand-Up Gal
The nostalgic marvels of Amazon's 'Mrs. Maisel.'
4:00 AM, Jan 12, 2018
The most potent form of nostalgia is for a time you never knew in a place you do and imagine was at its peak before you came along. For me, that would be the 1950s in New York City, set to the cool, light strain of the Dave Brubeck Quartet playing Paul Desmond’s “Take Five.” I can never get enough of the cultural examples of the day—made-on-location potboiler movies about career girls, dated bestselling novels about the advertising business that once occupied paperback racks next to the giant ph Read more
'The Last Jedi': The Bore is Strong with This One
The latest Star Wars flick and the state of movie criticism.
4:00 AM, Dec 22, 2017
Enough with the whiny movie critics complaining about the new Star Wars movie. Like them, I was fully prepared to hate the thing when I arrived at the screening, but that prejudice was overcome by the movie’s wondrous look and by its fascinating, multilayered plot. Yes! I hear you fans saying. Yes! He gets it! But a few of you (whichever ones of you follow me on Twitter ) may be confused: Wait, wasn’t Podhoretz ragging on The Last Jedi all weekend? Yes, I was. The fact is I didn’t wr Read more
'The Last Jedi': The Bore is Strong with This One
The latest Star Wars flick and the state of movie criticism.
3:41 PM, Dec 20, 2017
Enough with the whiny movie critics complaining about the new Star Wars movie. Like them, I was fully prepared to hate the thing when I arrived at the screening, but that prejudice was overcome by the movie’s wondrous look and by its fascinating, multilayered plot. Yes! I hear you fans saying. Yes! He gets it! But a few of you (whichever ones of you follow me on Twitter ) may be confused: Wait, wasn’t Podhoretz ragging on The Last Jedi all weekend? Yes, I was. The fact is I didn’t wr Read more
Hour of Kneed
Tonya Harding, the ice maiden of the '90s skating scandal.
4:00 AM, Dec 15, 2017
The propulsively entertaining but problematic new movie I, Tonya reminds us that it’s been nearly a quarter-century since the figure skater Nancy Kerrigan was whacked on the back of the knee by a baton-wielding goon. The attack was the outcome of an insane white-trash conspiracy to give Kerrigan’s rival, fellow American Tonya Harding, a leg up at the 1994 Winter Olympics. The movie is a black comedy, the bleakest Preston Sturges slapstick tale you never saw. It’s The Miracle of Morgan’s Cree Read more
The Oldman Churchill
A metaphor for Britain's stiffening spine.
4:00 AM, Dec 08, 2017
Darkest Hour is a movie about the first three weeks of Winston Churchill’s premiership in May 1940, and it is balderdash. In a razor-sharp National Review critique , Kyle Smith takes out after the movie for shrinking Churchill “down to a more manageable size” by portraying him as undergoing an emotional crisis due to the political maneuverings against him and the enormousness of the challenge he faced as the Nazis bore down on Britain’s army in France. Smith is right. Nothing in the historic Read more
Evil on the Rails
In the new 'Murder on the Orient Express,' it's the details that make the detective.
4:00 AM, Nov 24, 2017
Last summer, to prepare for the upcoming movie version, I reread Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express . Christie was the bestselling writer of the 20th century and Murder on the Orient Express is one of her most famous works. But I found it almost agonizingly tedious. It reads more like the schematic of a great mystery novel than a mystery novel itself. Though it centers on the aftermath of the kidnapping and murder of a child, the book itself comes across as self-satisfied, tetchy, Read more
Signs of Grief
In the dark comedy 'Three Billboards,' a mother turns to vigilante justice.
3:00 AM, Nov 17, 2017
If I tell you that Martin McDonagh is one of the most imaginative writers of our time, I expect you will immediately think he writes science fiction or fantasy—because the word “imaginative” has now devolved into a subset of the fantastic, the surreal, the unearthly. That is not the case with McDonagh. Nothing he writes is remotely surreal, not even when he sets his work in an unnamed totalitarian state. But he lets his imagination loose on the real world in a way that puts self-conscious fantas Read more
Taking Wing
'Lady Bird' is a coming-of-age tale that's clear-eyed yet charming.
4:00 AM, Nov 10, 2017
We are living through the golden age of the cinema of Sacramento. Oh, you didn’t know there was such a thing? There is. It’s new. Very new. In 2015, the Sacramento radio station NOW 100.5 could find only eight movies filmed in part in Sacramento over the previous 30 years, and in all of them it was used as a stand-in for somewhere else. But the California capital has served as a key location in two of the best movies of 2017. The city is the home of Ben Stiller’s Brad, the protagonist of the t Read more
We're All Bad Guys
Hollywood's dreary, despairing, dumb antihumanism.
3:30 AM, Oct 20, 2017
Half a century ago, fashionable young moviemakers looking for new ways to separate themselves from old Hollywood fuddy-duddies—and to épater la bourgeoisie even though it was that very bourgeoisie they needed to become rich and powerful—sank their teeth into the notions that America and capitalism were pretty awful and played as aggressively with those notions as a pit bull with its jaws clamped on a rubber bone. To be sure, there was a frisson of countercultural excitement to be had from th Read more
Replicants' Return
Why 'Blade Runner' lasted—and its sequel won't.
4:00 AM, Oct 06, 2017
Can there be such a thing as a great movie that is also unsatisfying? It would seem like a contradiction in terms. After all, how can something work when it doesn’t work? And yet it does happen. The early Marx Brothers and Woody Allen pictures are disastrous pieces of storytelling, but who cares when you’re exploding into laughter every two minutes? It’s far more rare for a drama to pull this off, since a drama is almost nothing but a story told. Still, the unsatisfying aspects of a piece of pop Read more
Chauvinist Racket
The not-so-historic clash of Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs.
3:30 AM, Sep 29, 2017
The 1973 tennis match between the 29-year-old female champ Billie Jean King and the 55-year-old former champ Bobby Riggs was many things. It was one of the great “pseudo-events” of all time, fitting perfectly Daniel Boorstin’s definition in his 1962 book The Image as “dramatic performances in which ‘men in the news’ simply act out more or less well their prepared script.” The script, in this case, was the Male Chauvinist Pig vs. the Women’s Libber. The match was a ludicrous and colorful di Read more
Measuring Up
Ben Stiller tackles the everyday tragedy of status anxiety.
3:15 AM, Sep 22, 2017
In Brad’s Status , a 47-year-old man takes his 17-year-old son on a tour of Boston’s colleges. A onetime journalist whose award-winning website went bust during the financial meltdown, Brad Sloan runs a nonprofit in Sacramento that seeks to match donors with other worthy nonprofits. His wife works for the California state government. They have a good, solid life. His wife is contented with her lot; on weekends, they have dinner parties and discuss Terry Gross and NPR with their friends. Meanwhi Read more
'It' Takes All Kinds
Stephen King's creepy clown Pennywise is pound wise, too.
4:00 AM, Sep 15, 2017
Stephen King’s It was the bestselling book of 1986 and the source material for an enormously successful two-part miniseries on ABC in 1990 that has been shown regularly on cable TV ever since. The ridiculously overlong novel reads like King is parodying himself; the miniseries is obvious and indifferently acted in the manner of most of the television of the time. But the central conceit of It —a grim-faced clown named Pennywise who turns out to be an ancient extraterrestrial demon literal Read more
Going Theronuclear
Does the camera like Charlize too much?
2:20 AM, Aug 11, 2017
Charlize Theron first appears onscreen in her mostly terrific new action thriller, Atomic Blonde , trying to heal her wounded body in an ice bath. She has bruises all over her back. Her face is swollen, one of her eyes blackened. She pulls herself out of the tub, dresses laboriously, and limps into the headquarters of MI6 in London for an interrogation that will, in part, address the question: How did she, a superspy, get herself beaten to a pulp? The answer is contained within this jigsaw pu Read more
Undone Dunkirk
The stories and civilizational stakes that don't make it onto the screen.
3:00 AM, Jul 28, 2017
There are few events in the history of war comparable to the evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force from the French beach at Dunkirk in the late spring of 1940. It is an episode that repays close attention to its every aspect—the terrifying Nazi triumphs in combat that led to it, the halting and contradictory behavior of both the Allies and the Nazis during the week when 400,000 British and French soldiers had retreated to the sands by the English Channel, and the awe-inspiring improvisat Read more
The Little Sick
It's fine—but the Sundance darling doesn't deliver as promised.
2:00 AM, Jul 21, 2017
The Big Sick is a movie about a struggling comedian from a Pakistani family and his graduate-student waif of a girlfriend. They break up. She gets a mysterious infection and is put in a medically induced coma. He must deal with her parents, who are angry with him for the way he treated her, and his own parents, who are angry that he won’t accept a Pakistani girl of their choosing. The Big Sick is nice. There are some good lines. The scenes with the Pakistani family are charming. Ray Romano Read more
Spider-Man...Again
With great deal-making comes great profitability.
7:30 AM, Jul 14, 2017
In the past 15 years, no fewer than seven movies have featured the character of Peter Parker, the Queens teenager who obtains powers from a radioactive spider bite. Tobey Maguire starred in three of them from 2002 to 2007; Andrew Garfield starred in two from 2012 to 2014; and after appearing in a couple of dazzling scenes in last year’s Captain America: Civil War , Tom Holland now takes center stage in Spider-Man: Homecoming. If the superhero genre is the dominant Hollywood trend of this cent Read more
Meek but Mighty
Soft heroes and softer villains deliver a fun ride.
3:00 AM, Jul 07, 2017
Automobiles, pop songs, and movies form a golden braid as eternal as the one that binds Gödel, Escher, and Bach. In 1980, the writer-director Paul Schrader released American Gigolo , whose first three minutes mostly feature shots of Richard Gere driving a black Mercedes convertible along the Pacific Coast Highway while Blondie’s “Call Me” plays on the soundtrack. There is something ineffably galvanizing about Gere’s whipping hair, the calm Pacific Ocean, the pulsating music, and the quick cuts Read more
The Other Tom
The world's oldest 35-year-old remains in action.
2:00 AM, Jun 16, 2017
So, The Mummy. The question that bedevils me as I begin this review is how I can get to the end of it. Like Lucy in Peanuts , I am now counting words to see how quickly I can get to 700, which fills my slot here at The Weekly Standard. That was 53 words. I'm 8 percent of the way there. Can I make it? If this were Twitter, I'd put up a poll. On the one hand, there's the fact that I have nothing to say about this movie except that it's dreadful, so maybe I should just give up. On the other ha Read more
Comic Critics
Ideologues drain all the wonder from a popcorn flick.
2:15 AM, Jun 09, 2017
Wonder Woman is a superhero movie about a very attractive person who was fashioned out of clay. She resides on an island on which only women live. It is in the Mediterranean Sea but hidden behind a gigantic magical cloud. She leaves it and emerges into World War I-era Europe so that she can get into a big climactic fight with Ares, the Greek god of war. In bygone days, such a plot would not be the cause of extended analysis and study, and the movie that contains it would be treated as it dese Read more
Market Rules
IP is the key to success, except when it isn't.
3:15 AM, Jun 02, 2017
The Arthurian legends are among the most enduring stories in history. But when a $175 million film version casting Arthur as the lowlife foster son of a prostitute battling dragons and a campy Jude Law bombed at the box office, the reason for the movie's failure, in Hollywood's eyes, was simple: King Arthur was "very old IP." See, it wasn't fresh IP, like the upcoming Emoji Movie , which is about those little yellow graphics that began flooding your text messages in 2010. It wasn't IP from 30 y Read more
Uncompromised
An artist's vision for 'Twin Peaks: The Return.'
2:30 AM, May 26, 2017
David Lynch has not made a movie or a television show in a decade. But his overwhelming talent—a talent all but unmatched in cinematic history—for transferring to the screen the jarring and unforgettable images (and sounds) that haunt his unconscious has not been dimmed by his absence. The first 4 hours of the 18-hour series he has just cowritten and directed for Showtime— Twin Peaks: The Return —make that clear. There are scenes here, moments here, flashes here, alternately shocking and dazzlin Read more
Go With It
The willing suspension of disbelief is mandatory here.
2:00 AM, May 12, 2017
This discussion of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 will feature spoilers, so I don't want to hear any whining from any of you nerds. Read on, or don't; I get paid either way. Anyway, if you do complain, you're being silly because (a) this movie isn't a mystery, and (b) there aren't really any big "reveals" that will "change everything you've believed" about the Guardians of the Galaxy movies. First of all, the new GotG is only the second one, and let us recall that the original GotG was Read more
Fix the Fixer
How odd of Hollywood not to choose the Jews.
3:00 AM, Apr 28, 2017
I was recently reading The Whole Truth and Nothing But , a 1963 memoir by the legendary gossip columnist Hedda Hopper, and I came across an interesting passage in which the producer Samuel Goldwyn (né Szmuel Gelbfisz) tells Hopper flatly, "You can't have a Jew playing a Jew. It wouldn't work on the screen." She then goes on to report, using once-famous names you will need to Google to track down, that "in Hollywood only Christians are allowed to portray Jews. Gertrude Berg was thrown out of Read more
Monster Mash
The footsteps heard 'round the world.
2:30 AM, Apr 21, 2017
It’s nearly 24 hours since I saw the new movie Colossal , and I'm not sure what I think of it. I've never seen anything like it, and trust me, neither have you—so for that reason alone Colossal might be worth your time. The question I can't seem to answer yet is whether its originality makes Colossal legitimately good or just surpassingly weird. So Gloria (Anne Hathaway) is a hot mess of a New York party girl. In a beautifully written scene—the screenplay is by the film's Spanish director Read more
Money for Nothing
Disney's $160 million might have been better spent.
3:00 AM, Mar 31, 2017
Until its final scene, there isn’t a moment in the new live-action version of Beauty and the Beast that wasn't done better in the 1991 animated film from which it derives. The songs are sung worse: Emma Watson works hard to trill on-key as the real live Belle, but in the original, Belle's lush and confident voice in the opening number (voiced by Paige O'Hara) is what tells you she is a formidable person to be reckoned with. The characterizations are worse. Ewan McGregor's transformed CGI v Read more
Gorilla Theater
Sometimes, but not always, the remake is better than the original.
3:00 AM, Mar 24, 2017
I was, and I remain, one of the few people on this earth willing to state for the record that I thought the 2005 Peter Jackson version of King Kong was terrific. Indeed, I’ve long been of the opinion that most people who have condemned that picture didn't actually see it. It's long and self-indulgent, yes; but it's staggering as a piece of cinematic craft—with an absolutely gorgeous recreation of Depression-era New York City. The middle section, on the South Seas island where natives and prehi Read more