{"id":64416,"date":"2026-01-31T08:13:13","date_gmt":"2026-01-31T14:13:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.wlbott.com\/?p=64416"},"modified":"2026-01-31T08:13:13","modified_gmt":"2026-01-31T14:13:13","slug":"review-of-a-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wlbott.com\/?p=64416","title":{"rendered":"Review of a Review"},"content":{"rendered":"
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I love The Guardian<\/strong>. The Guardian<\/strong> is like that one coworker that makes a horrible job tolerable. That lone coworker who brought you flowers when your dog died. That one coworker who can impersonate the boss so well you shot coffee out your nose. The one coworker who can ask “who farted?” in French, Spanish, Mandarin, russian, Italian (with the appropriate hand gestures), and twelve other languages. That one coworker who is simpatico<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That one coworker who always tells you the truth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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So let’s review of a review from The Guardian<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n

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With the illustrative talents of Elder G<\/strong>, and hopefully the forgiveness of The Guardian<\/strong>, let’s explore Xan Brooks<\/strong>‘ review of the new Melania<\/em> movie.<\/p>\n<\/div>

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[ed. note: captions are from The Guardian<\/a> review]<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n

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“This mood of cosy conviviality extends all the way through the opening credits; at which point the chill descends and the novocaine kicks in, as the film\u2019s star and executive producer proceeds to guide us \u2013 with agonising glacial slowness.”<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n
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She glides from the fashion fitting to the table setting, and from the \u201ccandlelit dinner\u201d to the \u201cstarlight ball\u201d, with a face like a fist and a voice of sheet metal.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n
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It\u2019s one of those rare, unicorn films that doesn\u2019t have a single redeeming quality. I\u2019m not even sure it qualifies as a documentary, exactly, so much as an elaborate piece of designer taxidermy, horribly overpriced and ice-cold to the touch and proffered like a medieval tribute to placate the greedy king on his throne.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n
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\u201cCandlelight and black tie and my creative vision,\u201d she says, as though listing the ingredients in a cauldron. \u201cAs first lady, children will always remain my priority,\u201d she coos, and you can almost picture her coaxing them into her little gingerbread house.<\/p>\nThe Guardian<\/a><\/span><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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What drama there is chiefly hinges on her concern that her white blouse is too loose at the neck and needs to be cut and then tightened, much to the consternation of the fitters.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Xan Brooks<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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Xan Brooks<\/strong> is an award-winning British journalist, film critic, and novelist known for his 15-year tenure as an associate editor at The Guardian<\/strong> and as a founding member of The Big Issue<\/em> magazine. He hosts the Guardian Film Show<\/em> and has written fiction, including The Clocks in This House All Tell Different Times.<\/em><\/p>\nGemini<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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Reference: The Zone of Interest<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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The 2023 movie The Zone of Interest<\/strong> (which Xan Brooks references in the title of his review) is a deeply disturbing movie, not because it shows graphic violence, but because it shows the banality of even the greatest evils.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Zone of Interest<\/strong> is a 2023 historical drama film written and directed by Jonathan Glazer. Loosely based on the 2014 novel by Martin Amis, the film focuses on the life of German Auschwitz commandant Rudolf H\u00f6ss and his wife Hedwig, who live with their family in a home in the “Zone of Interest” next to the Auschwitz concentration camp. Christian Friedel stars as Rudolf H\u00f6ss alongside Sandra H\u00fcller as Hedwig H\u00f6ss.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Glazer wished to make a film that demystifies the perpetrators of the Holocaust, which he noted are often portrayed as “almost mythologically evil”. He sought to tell the story of the Holocaust not “as something safely in the past”, but “a story of the here and now”. He compared his approach to the writing of philosopher Gillian Rose, who envisioned a film “that could make us feel ‘unsafe’, by showing how we’re emotionally and politically closer to the perpetrator culture than we’d like to think” and a film seen through the “dry eyes of grief” that is unsentimental and “forensic”.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The website’s [Rotten Tomatoes] critics consensus states, “Dispassionately examining the ordinary existence of people complicit in horrific crimes, The Zone of Interest forces us to take a cold look at the mundanity behind an unforgivable brutality.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Andreas Klib stated […] “At Cannes, where The Zone of Interest<\/strong> won the Grand Jury Prize, some critics criticized the film for its lack of storytelling. But that’s exactly the point of Glazer’s film: it doesn’t paint a story, but a world.”<\/p>\nWikipedia<\/a><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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The Memes<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

We had to show great restraint, because many of the interweb memes are >= PG13<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I love The Guardian. The Guardian is like that one coworker that makes a horrible job tolerable. That lone coworker who brought you flowers when your dog died. That one coworker who can impersonate the boss so well you shot coffee out your nose. The one coworker who can ask “who farted?” in French, Spanish, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[113,130,25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-64416","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-collapse-of-democracy-civilization-etc","category-gravediggers-of-american-democracy","category-sticking-it-to-the-man"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wlbott.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64416","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wlbott.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wlbott.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wlbott.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wlbott.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=64416"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.wlbott.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64416\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":64446,"href":"https:\/\/www.wlbott.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64416\/revisions\/64446"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wlbott.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=64416"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wlbott.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=64416"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wlbott.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=64416"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}