Day By Day

Wednesday, December 31, 2008

Althouse on Film

Ann Althouse has been going to the movies a lot recently and she has been noticing a disturbing trend. She writes:

I'm seeing all the well-reviewed year-end movies, and there's an awful lot of wrong-age sex. "Doubt" is about a priest accused of molesting children. "Benjamin Button," with its backwards aging character, had scenes of an old man in love with a young girl and an old woman in love with a toddler. "The Reader" had a 36-year-old woman seducing a 15-year-old boy. "Milk" had a man in his 40s pursuing relationships with much younger (and more fragile) men. "Slumdog Millionaire" shows a young teenage girl being sold for sex. I say that Hollywood is delivering pedophiliac titillation with the deniability of artistic pretension.
Read it here.

Yes indeedy, Hollywood has found a cause it can believe in and get behind -- normalizing all varieties of sexual practice even, perhaps especially, the predatory ones.

Unlike Ann, I haven't been going to many movies this year and haven't seen any of the well-reviewed efforts. Maybe that's because I'm not really into Bush Bashing and strange sex and celebrating the drug culture. But then, I'm getting old..., really old.

Time to break into the DVD stack. I think it's time to check out "La Dolce Vita" again. At least Fellini understood the true cost of the choices we make.