Sin City: I was a bit punchy with hay fever when I saw this, so it may have added to the oppressive feeling of Basin City (which reminded me more than anything of St. Louis, the most terrifying city I have been to). At any rate, unlike Josh Chafetz I didn't find the recurrent violence particularly disturbing, but I also confess that I don't see what's so bad about being physiologically inured to cartoon violence and gore. Surely it is important that we not be morally inured to the stuff, but a great many civilized people are capable of recognizing that practices that are not disgusting are nevertheless wrong. (The devil hath the power and all that jazz). Meanwhile I also disagree with Matthew Yglesias who suggests that being inured to violence has anything to do with supporting aggressive action in Iraq. As we have seen before, sometimes aggressive violence is the best way to reduce the amount of violence in the world (even if we disagree about which times those are). Contrariwise, one can very easily think it's bad to attack real people and still think that simulated fights make good literature. (Aristotle: The imitation of a thing inspires different feelings than the thing itself, &c.).

Finally, Amber Taylor makes the case for Sin City as feminist film. She is very right when she dismantles the accusations that Sin City is actively "misogynist" but I am less convinced that it is an actually "feminist" film, perhaps because I don't entirely understand what that would be.

On the whole, a very good movie, although I think the violence would have been a little more shocking if used a little more judiciously (I am thinking of an old favorite, Payback, here), as Anthony Rickey suggests. I don't know what he has against dear Alexis Bledel's blue eyes, though.

Closer: Chris Orr described this movie as being about "wounding one another in all the ways of which human beings are capable. Scratch that: The wounding is all pretty much of a single variety, specifically, being unfaithful to your (presumed) loved one and then describing the infidelity to him or her in excruciating detail." This is true enough, but Orr is completely off-base both when he thinks this is "ludicrous" and also when he thinks that the message of Closer is that honesty is equal to cruelty. It's the reverse.

At any rate, Orr also has a hard time believing that a too-shy easily smitten wit can turn into a predatory womanizer. Indeed, he thinks that this character (Jude Law's) adheres to "no recognizable set of human principles". My own circle of friends so flatly defies this that I hardly know what to say. But there is little point in quarrelling with somebody who finds a set of characters unbelievable; we believe in different fictional people because we have known (and lost) different ones in real life. Phoebe Maltz is much more on the mark, especially about Natalie Portman's haircut.

Ross Douthat agrees with Orr on almost all counts and is therefore wrong. Douthat also thinks that Closer is bad because those in it (wrongly) "believes that they're getting to the heart of modern romance, or modern sex, or something -- when all they're doing is making an empty, glossy, potty-mouthed piece of junk."

This is wrong on both facts and theory. The quality of a movie has just about nothing to do with the subjective motivations of those who are in it. Bad movies are bad because they are bad, not because some people wrongly think they are good. And Closer isn't bad. It may be glossy and potty-mouthed but it's also smart and tricksy-- not The Real Thing, but not a bad stab at criticizing the common obsession with infidelity. Douthat doesn't seem to find this particularly interesting, which is fine, but any attempt to take his criticism farther than saying "not really my cup of tea" falls apart for lack of evidence. I'll leave his accusation of "moral ... vacuousness" for another day. (In a nutshell, though, Douthat is wrong twiceover-- the characters have non-empty moral codes, but there's nothing wrong with a movie where they don't.)

Normally I use this format for short movie reviews. I seem to have gotten carried away.

Angus Dwyer responds to my post on the estate tax, pointing out that public opposition to the estate tax is not based on any sort of rational self interest (since almost nobody pays it) or economic analysis, but rather on an intuitive fear of death. True enough.

However, my proposal to eliminate the step-up in basis at death could probably sail through independent of that perception chiefly because I suspect very few people even know that it exists. Invisible subsidies are the easiest ones to repeal.

Amber Taylor is debating what to rename her blog when she finishes her 19+ years of schooling. Carina votes for "Prettier than Napoleon". I concur.