Not Recommended. All right. I have decided to announce the Triumvirate of Mediocrity: Martin Scorsese, Oliver Stone and Quentin Tarantino. These three guys are somehow worshipped as “auteurs” of artistic films. But what they really are is masters of mediocrity; overlong boring mediocrity, I might add. All of them think their movies are worth two and a half or three hours of our lives, and thus become thieves for stealing this precious time from us. While this movie has an interesting depiction of Hughs’ descent into his madness, it is all rather unfocused and boring drama. Scorsese thinks that “mental illness” Hollywood glamour and movie stars makes for interesting movies, but he is wrong. It’s what these external things reveal about our internal spirituality that is interesting. I did not care one whit for Hughs. He is no hero. And is therefore unworthy of such status in a film. He is an unsympathetic selfish self-obessessed idiot. And he was interested in sexy movie stars like Hepburn and Gardner, who were also unsympathetic selfish self-obessessed idiots. And the whole thing about how he sought to make fast planes and fought to share the airs in competition with Pan Am – who cares? I did not care one moment for this story because it was not made interesting. The Right Stuff made manned flight to the moon and the history of flight with Jaeger and everything very interesting. This made the history of flight boring. Well, it wasn’t horrendously boring like Alexander , made by Oliver the Mediocre, it was only mildly boring. But that’s enough to just say No. And you know, it shows Hughs’ descent into neurosis, but it makes no sense of it. It is just arbitrary. Where did it come from? Why did it happen? Maybe in real life it was a mystery. But this is the movies, not real life. Since they show nothing of his inner character, or his true quest for meaning, it reduces to a shallow examination of the external degeneracy of neurosis. Yeah, but how is this a reflection of his INNER SELF? Everything is external in this movie, and thus boooooring because it seeks the external sufferings of life without the true INNER HUMAN DRAMA. Pretty movie stars with pathetic juvenile temperaments are not interesting if we learn nothing about where this lack of character comes from. Hughs’ external malady should have been a metaphor for the internal flaw of everyone in this film but nothing like this is ever attempted. Thus it fails even as a tragedy because this Hero is a victim, not of his own flaws, but of some external arbitrary malady. I guess this is the essence of humanist tragedy. Life is arbitrary suffering in a chance universe. And that is why true humanist epics are unsatisfying and lack the transcendence that makes for a great movie.

Not Recommended. This movie is terribly dishonest and morally criminal. It is the cliché accusation that Christian morality suppresses natural desires which cause dysfunction in society (embodied in Kinsey’s cliché “sexually repressed” religious father, who is himself an obsessed masturbator). First of all, the fact that Kinsey is a hero is itself a sign of moral bankruptcy. If it was a tragedy, like Amadeus, I could buy it, but alas, it is not. This is supposedly the story of Alfred Kinsey, who wrote the infamous pseudo-scientific studies on male and female sexuality beginning in the 1930s. The scandal of it all is that he explored and frankly communicated details of sexuality in a culture that had suppressed talking about such things. He tried to legitimize pornography and perversion by wrapping it in an academic veneer of analysis. True, 70 years ago, society had some pretty unscientific beliefs about sexuality, like masturbation causing blindness, oral sex reduces pregnancy and the like. And it can be true that “strongly prohibited desires become an obsession.” But the fundamental philosophical and moral failure of this film is its assertion of the naturalistic fallacy. This is the belief that the way nature acts is the way nature ought to be. And it is the fundamental philosophical conceit of all pseudo-scientific endeavor that reality is purely physical and we must not apply morality to scientific pursuit. This is, of course, the dominant scientific philosophy of today. As Kinsey says, “the only way to study sex is to strip away everything but physiology.” “Human beings are just larger, slightly more complicated gall wasps.” “Every living thing is different from every other living thing,” and “diversity becomes life’s one irreducible fact.” Of course, what the filmmaker does not seem to realize is that these statements are themselves as absurd as the unscientific beliefs of the 30s that he mocks. Reductionism of reality down to mere physiology has proven over and over again, to not only be self-contradictory, but a failure in yielding accurate scientific results. Interestingly, it is still growing strong in the sociobiological movement of today that says immaterial notions like spirit, mind, love, good and evil are reducible to chemical and physical laws in our bodies. Okay, so if mind and reason are not abstract external immaterial notions of reality, but merely chemistry in our brains, then the sociobiological theory is itself not “true”, but merely the result of chemicals in the brains of naturalists, who are, I might add, a statistical minority, which makes them a natural abnormality by their own theories. The universal problem of reductionism is that it reduces itself to absurdity. And you know, diversity CANNOT be the absolute diviner of reality. Diversity simply cannot explain the UNITY that is also seen in the world. One’s metaphysic MUST explain both unity and diversity, or suffer under the weight of absurdity. If diversity (particulars) is the “one irreducible fact,” then one could NOT say there are such things as men, women, children, adults, gall wasps, and any other universal category that groups common things through similarity. Even to talk about sex itself is to categorize the idea through unity, not diversity. Yes, there is a diversity of sexuality, but sex itself is the unity under which those diverse sexualities are unified. What this really is is not science, but relativism disguised as fact. (Ironic that Kinsey was the one, in the film, who accused moralists of disguising “morality as fact.”). The obvious agenda of saying that “everything is different from everything else,” and that no sexual proclivities should fall into “biological abnormality” because there is no such thing as abnormality – the real agenda is obviously the normalization of abberant sexuality. It is interesting to note that atheistic evolutionists are now starting to admit that within their evolutionary myth, rape IS normal. IDEAS DO HAVE CONSEQUENCES. Kinsey tries to justify his pornography addiction by claiming it is “Simply the depiction of man in his natural state.” Okay, in a sense, I agree. That is, man is NATURALLY EVIL, so it does not surprise me that our natural tendencies will be toward evil, which include pornography. The fact that most of us men struggle with pornography may make it normal, but it does not make it morally right. We cannot look at nature to define good and evil. In this sense, normal and abnormal simply mean statistical averages, not moral “normality” or “abnormality” as in right and wrong. So the film is also guilty of this equivocation of bouncing back and forth between defining normal as statistical average and then as morally acceptable. A common trick of moral relativism. One of the most revealing aspects of the film is its unwitting deconstruction of its own ethic. To be fair, the filmmaker does put in some counter arguments to Kinsey in the mouths of his fellow laborers, but they are not carried out to a conclusion. Kinsey encourages his “researchers” to violate their marriage covenants and have sex with each other in the name of research and make their own pornography from it. Well, obviously this starts to screw up their marriages and families and one of the kids says, “Stop using science to justify what you’ve done.” But the kid stays with him. And then he says later, “What are we, lab rats? F—ing is no more than mere friction, mere fun?” But the kid stays with him. The point is that this set up is never paid off with the tragedy that it should have. Kinsey continues on in his stoic “Scientific” pursuit like a hero who weathers minor difficulties. Condon does not seem to realize that these mere arguments at moments of frustration to the hero’s goal are actually the moral truth revealing the actual absurdity and actual evil of Kinsey’s criminal activity. Perhaps the most telling scene of the whole movie is when Kinsey and a fellow researcher meet with a man so perverse in his sexual behavior that he has had sex with thousands of people, dozens of species of animals, and molested hundreds of pre-adolescents, all the while keeping detailed journal entries on it all. The young researcher actually has his limits and leaves, but not Kinsey. No, he says the kid just gets a little judgmental sometimes. BUT the scene is never carried out to its moral conclusion. It remains in the movie as a mere extreme of the hero’s obsession, rather than the actual refutation of Kinsey’s entire ethic that it is. What the filmmaker does not go on to tell us is that the real person this character was based on actually continued in correspondence with Kinsey who used his journal entries for his research. So KINSEY WAS A CRIMINAL and the filmmaker considers him a hero for it. An accomplice to pedophilia and crime. “Everyone should do what they want” the criminal says and Kinsey replies, “I’ve never said that. Nobody should hurt anyone.” But he did say it – when he said in the film that if everyone is having all this socially unacceptable sex, then “everybody’s sin is nobody’s sin. Everybody’s crime is nobody’s crime.” HE DID IN FACT SAY IT. The problem is that people do not want to face the logical conclusion of their own moral premises that all sexuality is acceptable. Even they believe that some sexual behavior is not acceptable. But who says so? By whose moral standard? If you deny the external objective moral absolutes of God’s Law, then you are left with nothing but the will to power, my friend. You have no moral authority to condemn ANY sexual behavior, including incest, polygamy and pedophilia. The logical conclusion of the “Kinsey ethic” of sexual relativism is precisely the moral acceptance of pedophilia. This is exactly the ultimate goal. When Kinsey says to the pedophile he shouldn’t hurt anyone, he is denying all he has ever said about making judgments and imposing morality and he DARES to be judgmental and impose HIS morality on others? You cannot strip away morality from sexual behavior without facing the logical conclusion of your belief. IDEAS HAVE CONSEQUENCES. If you say there is no morally unacceptable sexual behavior, then you must accept the pedophile because that is simply their “natural state.” And you are trying to suppress their desires just like the religious moralists try to suppress the desires of those they disagree with. The second a person places a limit on certain kinds of sexuality (pedophilia) as morally unacceptable, he is doing the very thing he accuses Christians of doing: imposing his morality on others. This, dear friends, is hypocrisy at its worst. If we are supposed to “strip away everything from sex but physiology,” then who is anyone to condemn the physiology of a pedophile or polygamist or any sexual predator? And who says we can’t hurt anyone? That is a moral judgment that Kinsey and other moral relativists say we are not allowed to make. It is arbitrary to claim you cannot hurt anyone if you have no absolute standard in your sexual ethic. After all, there are many people (as Kinsey no doubt observed) who actually like being hurt. So who are you to define “hurt” and impose it on everyone else? Condon ends with showing shots of all those “big bad laws against sexual perversion” being overthrown. But who says those laws were bad? What right does Condon and other moral relativists have in saying any law is “bad” or “wrong?” What right do they have to impose their morality on anyone through law, since all morality is relative and there is no abnormality? To strike down those sexual perversion laws is to tell moralists what they cannot do sexually, namely, maintain their own sexual views. More hypocrisy. We see in the end that this moral relativism is really just a cover for a fascistic oppression of the majority by the minority. Moral tyranny of the minority. Condon tries to justify Kinsey’s research with a tear-jerker scene of a lesbian thanking him for his books because they helped her come out of the closet and find a lesbian partner. “You saved my life, sir,” she says. And this is the obvious agenda. Kinsey’s work helped gays to be less ashamed and more acceptable in society, so what he did was good. In other words, the ends justify the means. Since Kinsey reinforced MY beliefs, the filmmaker says, it’s okay that he lied in his research, its okay that he lied about using an excessive amount of prison inmates to create the now-discredited statistic of 10% homosexuality in the population. It’s okay that he was a criminal in aiding and abetting a pedophile and using his journal as “research.” It’s okay that in the name of “science” he engaged in crime, adultery, orgies, pornography and pedophilia. THIS IS SCIENCE to these people? Of course, none of these facts are in the movie because then that would make it the moral tragedy that it should have been. Judith Reisman put it best, this movie is criminal because it lionizes Kinsey, “Leader of the most barbarous international pedophile sex ring of the twentieth century.” For the true story of Kinsey go here: < http://www.drjudithreisman.org/articles.htm>