When I was a little kid, my friends and I used to dig holes in the backyard, imagining, and half believing, that if we went down far enough, we would come out in China.  Well, that’s not right exactly, but it is true that if you go down far enough when you’re making a movie, you reach a place where it’s almost entertaining.

Young Girls Are Naked In This Movie.

Or so it was in 1972, apparently, when talented director Michael Ritchie (The Bad News Bears) and talented screenwriter Robert Dillon (Ruby Cairo) teamed up with the great Lee Marvin and the likewise great Gene Hackman to make this piece of unbelievably exploitative trash–which is sort of fun to watch.

Here’s the plot.  It’s Sissy Spacek’s first film so she’s, like, 22-years-old and fabulously beautiful.  She’s naked in it.  She says things like, “I never been with no man before…”  Then people shoot each other.

Now, if you stopped reading and went out and bought a copy of the DVD between reading the word “naked” and the word “in,” this is the picture for you.  Other than that, the idea is that good guy Chicago gangster Marvin goes after bad guy Kansas gangster Hackman–who drugs young girls and sells and rents them at cattle-style shows, where they lie around penned up and did I mention naked in a bunch of hay.  I’m not making this up.  Anyway, the idea is that heartland America is just as corrupt and violent as urban America–though who says so and why the Chicago gangsters are such nice guys are never explained.  It’s all absurd and smarmy really beyond telling…  but, as with the proverbial car wreck, it’s pretty hard to look away.

On a side note…  allow me to speak with that searing honesty that has made me a byword for searing honesty among the searingly honest.  I love a good nude scene as much as the next guy.  I re-ran the slave girl portions of Spartacus:  Blood and Sand until the scenes wore down to pixels–and scientifically, that can’t even happen.  But the older and more decrepit I get, the more I painfully and reluctantly come to the conclusion that there is virtually no such thing as a necessary nude scene or sex scene on screen.  Almost every single one of them is extraneous, dishonest and exploitative.  I know, I know what you’re thinking:  Shut up, Klavan!  Why spoil a good thing?  But really, it is kind of awful that, if you’re a young girl with talent, you have to take your shirt off to make a living…

I’m just saying.  I’ll still probably be first in line to buy a ticket but…  I’m just saying.

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Hey, Little People!  You know how at the end of movies, they sometimes show what are called “outtakes”–mistakes and accidents that occurred during filming?  These delightful laugh-fests remind you that even your superiors in Hollywood occasionally make an error or two, almost as if their species bore some genetic relationship to that of you troglodytes clinging to your religion and guns in the savage wastes outside LA!

Well, kiss my grits, this week, we present some of the goofs, foul-ups, blunders and flubs that occur even here at PJTV’s Klavan on the Culture…  where we actually are better than the rest of you.

Justin Folk created the backgrounds, including the stunning illusion that I’m sitting in front of a green screen.

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Super Mario Galaxy 2

July 28, 2010

This was lots and lots of fun – then wasn’t.  Super Mario in all his various incarnations is still the closest thing we have to a perfect video game character.  He’s lovable, courageous, courtly, talented–and if your toilet backs up, who ya gonna call?

As with Super Mario Galaxy 1, this game takes you around various [...]

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Me in City Journal on the Media

July 27, 2010

The truly estimable City Journal has posted my reaction to–well, to several things:  Journolist, Breitbart and the cancellation of my novel Empire of Lies in France for “political and religious” reasons:
The book’s French cancellation is, I realize, a rather small cultural event. Yet it gives specific color to the recent revelations on the [...]

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Notes on the Culture

July 26, 2010

INCEPTION
Well, it works, which, given the concept, is a small miracle in and of itself.  Plus, about two of its two and a half hours are really involving and entertaining and, in this summer of mostly crummy movies, that makes it feel like some sort of masterpiece.  But what Inception really is is a good [...]

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DVD: Brooklyn’s Finest

July 23, 2010

I’m a mega-sucker for cop films.  Love to watch guys in ties standing over a homicide victim.  Whether it’s great stuff like Heat, good but over-rated stuff like The Departed or despised stuff like Pride & Glory, I’m there and can pretty much watch it with pleasure end to end.  I’m sorry TV has sort [...]

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DVD: The White Ribbon

July 22, 2010

This German film is so beautiful to look at that you can just sit and watch the menu screen on the DVD with the scenes changing in the background. As for the movie itself, it’s long but quite involving.  It tells of a small northern German village just before World War I where strange [...]

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Funny Video of the Week

July 21, 2010

Okay, there’s no Klavan on the Culture this week, so we’ll have to give the award to Onion TV again.  I mean, this could be a one sentence joke, but they play it out brilliantly:
Girl Raised From Birth By Wolf Blitzer Taken Into Protective Custody

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Featured Me

July 20, 2010

I am pleased and proud to be the current “Featured Personality” on PJTV’s Facebook Page.  The page has an interview with me about how I make my Klavan on the Culture videos (they’re actually carved out of the living rock).  Here’s a sample exchange:
PJTV: What inspires your Klavan on the Culture episodes?
AK: Oh, [...]

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Columbia VS The Murdoch Effect

July 19, 2010

Columbia University is the place where leftists give leftist journalists Pulitzer Prizes and then tell each other how prestigious leftist journalism is because—wow!—look at all the Pulitzers they’ve won.
This week, the president of Columbia, Lee Bollinger, wrote a specious opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal, crying that American journalism, dying in the free market, [...]

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