To the editors:
“Progressive” political movie crit, as widely practiced, spurts from the same well of American pietism as various youth purity movements, the Anti-Saloon League, school-library book-banning groups, the Moral Majority, and the radical antipornography squads. As an emergent minority orthodoxy, the Left is new to the tradition but does it proud, nevertheless.
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I can’t say that I objected to Rosenbaum’s review half so much as the omniscient, attitudinizing preamble. By the time he gets to the stuff about the “intensity of horror” he feels when contemplating the careers of North, Reagan, and “even Hitler,” I had become inured to the rhetoric. As I read I tapped my foot, impatiently waiting for the movie to get a full measure of attention. It never did, exactly, but as an otherwise skilled reviewer, Rosenbaum gave me some sense of Walker. He liked it and I didn’t, but we did see the same movie.
Disclaimer: For whatever reason, people are inclined to consider the source. I’m against paying for the murder of Nicaraguan peasants with my tax dollars, as I support the right of the sovereign government of Nicaragua to maintain itself as a crypto-Leninist regime, without outside interference. I object to bad movies, and movie criticism that would dictate and not examine movie morals and politics.
Jonathan Rosenbaum replies:
