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R E C E N T L Y

And a little scumbag shall lead them
By James Poniewozik
Did a sex-mad tabloid media hijack the public discourse in 1998? We should be so lucky
(12/22/98)

Cool on global warming
By Susan Lehman
Is it a conflict of interest for a Newsweek editor to rally anti-environmentalists?
(12/17/98)

Mickey Mouse scandal grips nation
By Gary Krist
Darlene voted out of Mousketeers on straight party lines -- charged with doing really, really bad things
(12/16/98)

Brillian mistake
By James Poniewozik
Why Brill's Content is too good for this world
(12/15/98)

The strange liberation of Michael Huffington
By Susan Lehman
Us goes weekly, all the Remnick that's fit to print and other tales of media madness
(12/10/98)

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6) "Chinese Box," directed by Wayne Wang: Dismissed by a culture too glib to get it, writer-director Wang's film came and went last spring with undue haste, though considering how it existed so much on the edge of the present moment, its premature fade-out now seems as inevitable as the built-in obsolescence of the latest computer. The only film of 1998 that couldn't have come out in any other year but 1998, it captured the sense of everything breaking down, with Jeremy Irons' photojournalist dying in lockstep with the 20th century around him, and all our meanings up for grabs. Busy videotaping what he calls the "Pompeii Tapes" as Hong Kong is handed over from Britain to China, Irons records the streets teeming with people clinging desperately to emotional truths that only rarely have to do with economics and ideology but more often with love and sex and possession. At an hour and 45 minutes, the film felt epic, a hole blown in the screen of our times.

7) Steve Wynn's Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas: Come on, you have to love it. For all its European high-art pretensions, it is the most American of enterprises, the purchase of "class" no matter what the price; for all its scope, it is the most ephemeral of spectacles, no more likely to still be there 10 years from now than an iceberg -- unless it's a man-made iceberg for an arctic-themed casino. This is a pure Gatsby-like gesture writ grandiose, in its conviction that identity is the most valuable artifact of all, and that sheer self-invention -- by a person or a city or a nation -- was the real inalienable right the Founding Fathers were getting at all along, before they got carried away with all that life-and-liberty crap. And if you doubt it for a moment, my wife won a $900 jackpot there the first week it opened.

8)"Siren" by Heather Nova: At the end of a decade in which they were clearly the single most creative force in popular music, women finally had somewhere to go other than up, which accounts for the systemic critical backlash against so many of them for having the effrontery to grow beyond the preconceptions of male critics. With all due respect to the equally fine, undervalued work this year by Liz Phair and PJ Harvey, Nova's almost universally ignored album is the one that took over my CD player. After she invited us to "Walk This World With Me" a couple of years back, "Siren" was the homecoming gone wrong, when the lover she thought was patiently waiting could barely withstand the assault of either her unchecked obsessions or unabashed carnality. Along with a mesmerizing sense of atmospheric grandeur, the record was most often characterized by singing so emotionally abandoned one would occasionally mistake her voice for the higher register of a particularly unhinged guitar. Nova is the female Leonard Cohen with hooks, more at home wandering the world than when she's at home, freely vacillating between the depraved and the delirious.

9) "The Culture" by Greil Marcus: A flying dutchman for most of the last 12 months, sailing from print port to print port, the best and most original American critic since the late-'60s/early-'70s glory days of Pauline Kael finally found a national forum in Esquire. Now the only question is whether Esquire -- having been smart enough to hire him in the first place -- is also smart enough to let Marcus be Marcus, navigating his own idiosyncratic course by way of his own intellectual compass and whatever Sargasso Sea or Bermuda Triangle holds allure for him; some of us will follow him off the edge of the earth.

10) Tom Hanks in "Saving Private Ryan": He's been the most overrated actor of the '90s, beloved mostly for his decency; but here he justifies every Oscar given to him. The film itself is uneven, jaw-dropping battle sequences interrupted by the more dramatically contrived scenes that never let you forget it's a movie, and the vague anti-war message is liberal thinking at its most dubious: If there were ever a case where pacifism verged on the immoral, it was World War II. But at the heart of the film is Hanks' interpretation of modern heroism at its deepest and most complex. On the run across occupied Europe with some absurd honor always out of reach and sheer abject terror always nipping at his heels, he's so moving you can only wish director Steven Spielberg left well enough alone -- but then he wouldn't be Spielberg, would he? -- and began the film where it should have begun, with the close-up of Hanks' shaking hand on the beaches of France, and ended where it should have ended, with the close-up of Hanks' face on an anonymous French bridge in a final quiet burst of death.
SALON | Dec. 23, 1998