Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

Honeymoon in Vegas opened this week on Broadway. This is a live musical based on the Nicolas Cage movie of the same title from 1992. If you click on that link you'll get to the imdb page for the movie. I enjoyed the movie, but the on-line reviews were lukewarm (5.8 out of a possible 10 stars). Here's the plot summary, in case you're click-ophobic: On her deathbed, a mother makes her son promise never to get married, which scars him with psychological blocks to a commitment with his girlfriend. They finally decide to tie the knot in Vegas, but a wealthy gambler arranges for the man to lose $65K in a poker game and offers to clear the debt for a weekend with his fiancée. Suddenly the man is insanely jealous, and pursues his fiancée and her rich companion, but finds pitfalls in his path as the gambler tries to delay his interference. Anyway, I wish the Broadway production the best of luck.

Here's a quote from film critic David Denby, writing recently in The New Yorker about the movie Zero Dark Thirty: "The raid begins with beautiful shots of Black Hawk helicopters taking off at night, silhouetted against a few brilliant lights. The journey across the mountains from the base in Afghanistan to western Pakistan is conducted in darkness and quiet, like a sacred ritual. The SEALs are older and beefier than you expect -- bigmen in their late thirties who nonetheless move smoothly, as if their legs were on finely calibrated springs." Aestheticizing violence -- especially mechanized, contemporary, violence in this way makes me quite uncomfortable. I suppose Hollywood might next do a movie about the 'Batman' movie-theater kills and we might be told how the gunman silhouetted against the light from the screen in front of the room made for a striking visual. A bit later, Denby is calling the movie "an example of radical realism [with] its myster...