I'm a conservative who's wandered into your site, but what I've read above chimes with a conversation I had last night with friends, father and son, who are plasterers here in rural NSW. Both are excellent and in demand, yet we all agreed that, without the wife's extraordinary ability and patience with paperwork and bureaucratic tangles, their business would not exist. In fact, they would be better off right now as employees of another tradesman, who would himself be better off as an employee etc etc...

Everything, especially the extended and abstract secondary education foisted on canny and energetic young males who want to use their hands, points us toward the Corporate, whether it be government or the Coca Cola Company. It's getting harder and harder to distinguish our vaunted free enterprise culture from old Mother Russia.

I'm a conservative, and a pretty typical one. Obviously, I'm not going to agree with all that's in the article - but it's an article worth the writing and the reading. Well done.

"It wasn't rape rape." The tolerance and even active support for Polanski tell the final story about Hollywood feminists. It was pleasing when Emma Thomson took her name off a Polanski supporters' petition...but why did she need to think twice about it? Aren't these "strong" women equipped with a special "nurturing" instinct, as well as their supposed strength?

Sean Penn would have to be the most over-rated. His mock-intensity constantly distracts the viewer to no end. Be still, Sean!

Curiously, I think Michael Douglas, as highly regarded as may be, is the most under-rated actor. He gives such clear and flavourful performances without affectation; he serves the script and the story with humility, but never misses a chance to inject some fun or some insolent humour. Above all, he is never DEEP.

He does what Robert Donat did. Of course, I'm not comparing Michael Douglas to Robert Donat, who had much greater range. But Hollywood stars don't need range: they only need to know if they don't have it. Do we want to see Cary Grant as Mr. Chips?

Is it possible that all the sensationalism has been necessary to distract us from certain shortcomings? Madonna has enormous talent and energy, but she is essentially the Eddie Fisher of the nineties: a rhythmless cornball.

The Uninvited!

You get real malevolence, a hit song, and a twist ending. No mock-medieval music, no staring, no humping, no mumbling, no blue-and-sepia-against-shadows cinematography. No bloat! (Confound it, movies are so bloated these days. Seems like every director got his start in those mythic, deep-and-meaningless beer commercials.)

Whoopi will assure us that it isn't pedophile pedophilia.

I speak of Jews as a religion-based culture of many bloodlines rather than as a branch of the Semitic race; so I'm hardly implying racial superiority when I reflect on their role in the world's material development.

From Cyrus the Great to the early rulers of Castile, Jewish immigration has been used deliberately as a no-brainer tool of societal improvement by practical policy makers. Jewish persecution, on the other hand, has always been a resort of phobic, desperate and dogma-driven authoritarians.

At present in Australia, the Left has been picketing Max Brenner chocolate shops on behalf of Palestine. Max Brenner! It seems some people won't rest until all of the Middle East is a strife-torn backwater. Israeli democracy and prosperity make a blot on the otherwise harmonious map of contiguous tyrannies. So untidy.

Scandinavia has been wealthy only for a very short period, its version of social democracy may yet expose many flaws. When Norway has to come down from its oil-funded high, let's hope that they look to Israel to see what one can achieve with the only permanent, unlimited resources: clever people and faith.

When television came to Australia in the fifties, I was able to watch the work of great Jewish American comedians like Jack Benny and George Burns. Regardless of the strength of the gag, they had the restraint, the control and the timing to make it all work.

Jon Stewart cackles at his own jokes (in advance), pulls faces (ineptly), and couldn't time a boiled egg. If he were a Goldwater Republican, and I still couldn't watch him.

I'd have to say "Z". Letting the story unfold through the eyes of Trintignant, playing the only-good-conservative, was a masterstroke. Yves Montand, as a dreamboat socialist leader, keeps it plausible. It's talky, but the talk drives the plot. And the simple gag with the door deserves a place among cinematic gems.

I don't much like Costa Gavras, and I really hate commies...but "Z" works for me.

Political movies of the last few decades are just expensive bloat. Philadelphia, There Will Be Blood, and Avatar were particularly risible, but more because they were recent A movies than because of their politics. The supposedly conservative Black Knight, for example, with its mumbled dialogue, enervating plot with multiple climaxes, overdone tech and stylistic excess, was no better than its leftist equivalents.

Shifting values to the right won't help. As a conservative, I enjoy the economy and plotting of recent B movies like Red Eye and Cellular. When B movies don't rely on gore and sex for effect, they fall back on plot, aided, one hopes, by adequate sketching of character. A case of poverty generating new wealth, while established wealth just bloats...and bloats!

Of course, one recent major movie makes the grade as a conservative triumph. But "The Incredibles" is the product of discipline and imagination that belong in the old system of the Goldwyn era. If only Sean Penn was a cartoon character!

Harry, you can't think.