CHRISTINE BLASEY FORD II: THE SPENCER DIVORCE

by Brett Stevens

With no joy did I read that Richard Spencer will find himself in divorce court soon since his ex-wife has both filed for divorce and, as we might have guessed, the press rushed to the divorce papers to look for nasty stuff to say about the one man who has really threatened their hegemony over the past few years.

FRIDAY, BLOODY FRIDAY: GIBSON'S "PASSION"

"By his stripes we are healed": Jim Caviezel as Jesus Christ in Gibson's gory "Passion" play. 

by Andy Nowicki

Twelve years ago, at the inception of the 2004 Lenten season, Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ was released into theaters worldwide. Passion had already attained notoriety due to a concerted media campaign—led by the Anti-Defamation League’s Abe Foxman as well as other assorted “usual suspects”—to condemn the violent, gory New Testament drama as “anti-Semitic.”

Passion’s overwhelming success at the box office provoked hand-wringing aplenty, as well as some brow-furrowing puzzlement, from the chattering classes. Judging from its content, one never would have thought that the film would hold such mass appeal. Nevertheless, anomalous circumstances predominated, leaving cultural critics scratching their heads, befuddled by what would prove to be the cinematic sensation of the "oughts" decade.

PODCAST 52: COLD PIZZA PLANET OF THE OSCARS

Alternative Right contributor and film director Richard Wolstencroft joins Andy Nowicki and Colin Liddell to discuss the latest Oscars and look back at the classic era of 1970s cinema, including the original "Planet of the Apes" series.

SEEKING A NEW BEGINNING: MEL GIBSON'S "APOCALYPTO"

The following is a film review and analysis I composed for The Last Ditch in 2007. I am reposting it here to set the stage for my upcoming reconsideration of Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, to be published during Holy Week.

Rudy Youngblood as Jaguar Paw in Gibson's "Apocalypto"

by Andy Nowicki

Mel Gibson's latest movie, Apocalypto, is at the end of its run in theaters. Opening in early December, the film achieved a modest success, raking in nothing close to what The Passion of the Christ made, but still earning somewhere close to Braveheart's overall gross.What makes that modest success extraordinary is the fact that Gibson has essentially become a persona non grata in the film industry since his run-in with a Jewish policeman who arrested him for drunken driving in August 2006. If Passion didn't alienate Gibson from Hollywood's largely Jewish movers and shakers, including the distributors — the men who made Gibson rich and famous, and are now eager to unmake him — then his drunken anti-Semitic tirade on the occasion of his arrest, widely broadcast across the nation afterwards, surely did.

SEX AND VIOLENCE TRADITIONALISM

by Andy Nowicki

Flannery O'Connor was an unapologetic, unreconstructed Southerner of staunchly Catholic and profoundly conservative orientation who wrote unsparingly dark, bleak, and violent stories. This disconcerted many readers, who couldn't understand why an author who believed in God and adhered to Christian precepts would so often dwell on such disagreeable subject matter.

Miss O'Connor gave reply in a 1957 essay titled "The Fiction Writer and His Country." It was precisely secular modernity's deadening effect on the individual conscience, she asserted, that necessitated her thematic emphasis on the sordid, the depraved, and the grotesque; people needed to be shocked, shaken up, and reminded of what was important. "To the hard of hearing you shout," she wrote, "and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling pictures."