Posted by Ed
Back when I was an undergraduate at Swarthmore College, I once had a conversation with a fellow quizbowl team member about how to create the perfect TV show. My suggestion: take any hackneyed and poorly written family sitcom and substitute Mao Zedong for the father figure. The result would be comedy gold!
I was recently reminded of this conversation as I read the latest collection of essays by one of my favorite writers, Clive James. James begins one essay--a review of a Bertrand Russell biography--with the following sentence: "Two twentieth-century philosophers whose names are inseparable, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Bertrand Russell, were such a great double act that there simply has to be a buddy movie sooner or later." That line got me thinking...
Maybe I'm just eccentric, but I think that Clive James and I are on to something here. I can see several possibilities--either James's system (a straightforward combination of a buddy movie and biopic) or my system (take a mediocre movie and substitute one of the pairs below for the two central characters--Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins do Rush Hour!). Either way, I'm convinced that we need some intellectual buddy movies, and here are some possibilities:
Important note: Yes, I'm aware that Sun Yat-sen (and not Mao Zedong) was "the father of the revolution" in China. But coming up with titles for blog entries is harder than you'd think!
Important note 2: If my GT posts are a little frivolous for your tastes, don't worry: more substantive fare is on the way.
Posted by Ed at February 3, 2004 12:17 PM