Word: sin
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...Between (a youngster's confusion about a grownup love affair) and 2004's Closer (in which revenge is a stronger impulse than desire). All these films say we are creatures of our wills; it's what makes us human. Atonement says we can sink into sin and lift ourselves out. That's the message of this wise, beautifully acted parable of vengeance and contrition...
...Noah Baumbach thinks he's funny, though his intermittent gags fizzle painfully. He also thinks - and this is his larger sin - that he is a serious fellow, which he definitely is not. He is merely unhappy in a vague and annoying post-graduate sort of way. He's the kind of filmmaker who thinks that if he sets his star to masturbating on camera, he's making a statement, when all he's actually doing is signifying the true spirit of his movie...
...rather like Americans and that we want to be more so. Dead wrong. No idealism attended the birth of Anglo-Australia. White colonization in America began as a religious venture; the Puritans thought they were, literally, creating God's country. Australia, by contrast, began as the continent of sin, the dump for English criminals. Australians, unlike Americans, have never felt they had a mission or a message for a fallen world. There is no doctrine of Australian exceptionalism. If this deprived us of the heights of American moral expectation, it spared us from the anguish of American disappointment...
...indeed dreamt of a single Latin America where language, Iberian heritage, and a predominant religion would allow for united polity. That is a fine dream, and further integration inspired in by the European model may very well be what the region needs. Chávez’s deadly sin, however, is omission: His rhetoric selectively forgets that an aged Bolívar fell into disgrace by declaring himself dictator by “organic decree” in August, 1828.Through this vicious cycle of shortsighted plans, Latin America remains trapped in arrested development. Politics there have become a tragedy...
...Then my friend made the mistake—a cardinal sin really—of revealing a dispassionate aesthetic appreciation for the game of baseball, complimenting a Colorado Rockies’ hitter with a pretty innocuous observation: “Good eye, there.” Of course, this elicited a cacophony of jeers and a Manichaean, even Bush-like inquisition to determine if he was in fact “with us or against...