http://www.realclearpolitics.com/authors/rss/archive/17517.xmlAuthor Mon, 30 Dec 2013 00:00:00 -0600 Does a movie have to be “important” to be great? Does it have to deal with socially resonant themes, or a great national event, or a disintegrating American family? “American Hustle” is the best movie of the year, but is it important? The plot jumps off from real-world corruption and an F.B.I. investigation—the Abscam affair of beloved memory, when F.B.I. agents, in the late nineteen seventies, employed a Bronx Swindler and also impersonated “Arab sheikhs.” But no one will take “American Hustle” seriously as a representation of that deliriously absurd episode. One of the oddities of the movie is that you don’t realize until the...]]> Wed, 30 Oct 2013 00:00:00 -0500 When Ted Cruz lies, he appears to be praying. His lips narrow, almost disappearing into his face, and his eyebrows shift abruptly, rising like a drawbridge on his forehead into matching acute angles. He attains an appearance of supplication, an earnest desire that men and women need to listen, as God surely listens. Cruz has large ears; a straight nose with a fleshy tip, which shines in camera lights when he talks to reporters; straight black hair slicked back from his forehead like flattened licorice; thin lips; a long jaw with another knob of flesh at the base, also shiny in the lights. If, as Orwell said, everyone has the face he deserves at fifty, Cruz, who is only forty-two, has got...]]> Mon, 02 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0600