“It’s not the size of the dog in the fight - it’s the size of the fight in the dog”SPRING 2014nuchronicle.com

Ben Shapiro on name-calling, racism, and ‘check your privilege’

By Anthony Settipani

Ben Shapiro, conser-vative commentator and radio host, explained this quarter his view that ratio-nal argument in political debate has been overtaken by attacks on the character or morality of the opposite side. “We live in an era, unfor-tunately, in which partisan politics have completely overcome and destroyed any semblance of basic, decent conversation,” he said. “Everything now comes down to an argument about character.” “Once that begins,” he said in his talk, “there can be no evidence-based policy debate. The response to ‘you’re a racist’ is not ‘you know what? That’s a good point, let’s have a discussion about that.’ If somebody says ‘you’re a racist,’ the proper response is ‘well, you’re a jackass.’” On stage, Shapiro’s words are rapid and forceful. One audience member criticized him for interrupting so many times over the course of asking him a question. In person, the phrases tumble out as quickly and smart-ly as a toy soldier assembly line,  and the answer to any given question covers a lot of extra territory, often wrapping around neatly to where the idea first began.

The Chronicle met with Shapiro before his talk for a short interview.

Tell me about the talk. Sure. The left’s entire moral justification for their position is moral superiority, es-sentially. They believe that they are morally superior to people on the right. They are bet-ter people than people on the right because right-wingers are by necessity racist, sexist, bigot homophobes. And that enables leftists to not actually do anything to help folks, but just moan about how nasty their opponents are. And this is a very effective tactic because many Americans are in search of a boost in self-esteem, and the easiest way to gain self-esteem is by putting down somebody else. (continued on pg. 3)

Chronicle photo/Anthony Settipani

By Ryan Milowicki

As the preeminent farce comedian and satirist in America today, Seth MacFarlane has expanded his realm off of the television screen and into mov-ie theaters. With the surprising amount of success that Ted had in the summer of 2012, it makes sense that MacFarlane tries his hand on the big screen again this year with a parody of the western genre. After all, Mel Brooks (the premier satirist of Hollywood’s pre-vious generations) use this as a template for Blazing Saddles, perhaps his most beloved work. Unfortunately for MacFarlane, A Million Ways To Die In The West lacks consistent humor, and often

(continued on pg. 8)

Film review: ‘A Million Ways to Die in the West’

President and professor clash on John Evans investigation

By Charles Rollet

President Shapiro disparaged sociology professor Gary Fine for claiming that Northwestern’s leadership was not doing enough to publicize university found-er John Evans’ role in the Sand Creek Massacre at a faculty senate meeting last week. Fine opened his three-minute talk by calling North-western “an institution built on blood money” due to Evans’ position as governor of Colorado during the massacre of over a hundred Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians, mostly women and children, in 1864. A visibly upset Shapiro said this characterization

(continued on pg. 4)

Editor-in-ChiefAnthony Settipani

Arts and EntertainmentJanice Janeczko

NewsMegan Spengler

FeaturesCharles Rollet

OpinionAlex Entz

SportsSage Schroeder

Staff writersRyan Milowicki,Varun Kumar, Margaret Flynn, Abigail Jen-kins, DJ Oh, Maria Beltran,Samuel Kahn, Tim Reilly,

Annalise Frank, Jordan Minor,Dane Stier

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2013-2014 Staff Full steam ahead!By Anthony SettipaniEditor in Chief

This spring, I took the helm of The Chronicle. Upon hearing this, most people I know have asked me one of two questions. Many want to know why I would take charge of a paper they view as failing and ridiculous. The rest ask me, “What’s The Chronicle?” I have a few answers, the first being simple senti-ment. It was The Chron, after all, that gave me my first chance to put my words out in the world, and helped me find confidence to scratch out my first notes and stories outside the classroom. Those first stories still stick out to me as some of the most real experiences I’ve had. The most important reason, though, is that The Chronicle offers a look into the stories here at Northwestern that consistently fail to be told.  We are a community of bubbles. Agreements, dis-agreements, love, and sometimes even hate percolate though our home here, and so many are burst before they ever get a chance to alter the melange of campus life. I believe that those ideas deserve their chance to speak, even if they’re unpopular. Perhaps especially if they’re unpopular. The purpose of college is to chal-lenge our beliefs, to gather those bubbles up until they hold a form of their own, whatever that may be. And that creation represents the selves that we become when we leave Northwestern, the sum of all the ideas, arguments, classes and conversations that stuck with us and became a part of who we are. We can pull together the most popular ideas, of course. Scour our studies and our social lives for the “perfect college experience,” and surround our identi-ties with a palace of confirmation and support. It’s not hard to find those columns in North by Northwestern or The Daily that cheer us on. They’re wonderful. In The Chronicle, however, I look for those rare gems of thought that go against the grain, that challenge the common notion. I don’t always agree with them, but that’s the whole point. No matter how big your cheer squad is, you’ll never know how strong your team is until you face off with the other side. At the Chronicle, we’re not afraid to tell people that they’re wrong. We’re not afraid to make people angry, because anger is nat-ural. It’s okay. And none of us will ever grow without

first encountering conflict. I have a lot of plans for The Chron. I intend to see us continue to produce deeply-researched news and investigative journalism. I mean for us to continue to cover the groups and stories on campus that others won’t pursue. I want to give Northwestern students a place to go for serious news about their school, and honest opinion from perspectives they’ve never even considered. We have a long way to go, but we’re well on our way. And we’re always looking for volunteers.

Agenda 2SPRING 2014 NUCHRONICLE.COM @NUCHRONICLE

Remember that time the Chron painted the Rock? Yeah, neither do we.

News 3 So that’s essentially what the left on campus does. They do it all over the Unit-ed States, these bully tactics in which they suggest that you are a bad human being. Not that your policies are bad, but that you are a bad human being for even having merited a belief in these policies.

So you’ve seen this on many different campuses? Oh yeah, it’t true on campuses across the United States. And it’s true on a vari-ety of topics. It’s true on everything from economics to social policy. If you are not a Keynesian, then it’s because you hate poor people. It’s not because you believe that Keynesianism is ineffective, and in essence philosophically selfish. It’s not because of that, it’s because you hate poor peo-ple. If you believe in school vouchers, it’s not because you believe the public school system has failed and you want to offer people more educational opportunities, it’s because you are a vicious racist who hates black folks. If you are an advocate for tradi-tional marriage it’s not because you believe a child needs a mother and a father and that society has an interest in the produc-tion and raising of children. It’s because you hate gays. Everything comes down to ‘you hate x.’ And therefore you have to be silenced. Because this is a way of silencing people. You don’t have discussions with people who are racists and brutes and big-ots and haters. You silence them.

Can you think of any examples that would illustrate that position? Ayaan Hirsi Ali getting banned from Brandeis recently, that’s a perfect example. She holds a position--indecipherable, by the way, from Bill Maher’s position on Is-

lam--but she is politically conservative to a certain extent, and that means that she has to not be allowed on campus. The left only has three lines of attack as a general matter. Corrupt, mean and stu-pid. And those are the lines of attack that they pursue against conservatives on a reg-ular basis. And on campus they tend to fo-cus mostly on mean. Because campuses are places of feelings, warmth and diversity. And so we have to respect everybody’s right to self-esteem. Even though nobody really has a right to self-esteem. That comes from you.

The focus of your talk, as I under-stand it, is mostly geared toward college students? I’m going to talk a little bit about how it is on college campuses, but I’m also going to talk about how the right can fight back against these tactics, because these are tactics that are designed to end debate. The latest example is this ‘check your privilege’ campaign, the implication being that if you hold views different from them it’s because you’re a bad, privileged person who doesn’t recognize their own privilege. How are you supposed to fight back against that? Because if you say ‘wait a second, I’m not privileged, I worked my way up,’ well no, you’re demonstrating your white privilege again, because you don’t understand that you’re actually privileged. It’s a character assault.

Can you describe the moment when you first started to realize this tactic, and start to act against it? It’s something that I’ve always instinc-tively understood, but the first time that I really started to pick up on this was proba-

bly during the Obama election cycle. Be-cause then it turned into ‘If you don’t vote for Obama, it’s because you’re a racist and a bigot.’ As opposed to I just don’t like his policies because his policies are exactly the same as Hillary Clinton’s. And I don’t like Hillary Clinton’s policies either. And I don’t hate her because she’s a woman. Everything turned into ‘if you don’t vote for Obama it’s because you hate black folks’ or ‘if you don’t vote for Hillary Clinton it’s because you hate women.’ And it’s getting more and more egregious over the course of my lifetime. I grew up in an era, and so did you, I mean everybody who’s of a certain age grew up in an era in which we basically don’t understand racism. It doesn’t make any sense to us. The concept that someone is inferior because of their skin color is asi-nine and makes no sense, and is ridiculous and doesn’t even compute. And yet we’re still being called racists if we disagree with particular policies. At that point, I looked around and said ‘wait a minute. I’ve nev-er mistreated a black person in my entire life. I would try and hunt down people who mistreat black people. I don’t understand why I’m being called a racist because I dis-agree with you on school vouchers or voter ID.’ And that’s when it started to dawn on me that, well, this is dishonest. It’s a tactic.

* Interview has been shortened and condensed for publication

Name-calling, racism and privilege (continued)

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News 4SPRING 2014 NUCHRONICLE.COM @NUCHRONICLE

President and professor clash on John Evans investigation (continued)(Continued from front)

was contradicted by the John Evans Study Committee’s final report, which was released last week. “I don’t know whether Pro-fessor Fine actually took the time to read [the report] or not,” said Shapiro. “If you actu-ally read this thing you’ll read a very different, really nuanced view.” Fine mainly criticized Sha-piro and the university’s lead-ership for not making more of a concerted public effort to address Evans’ oppression of Native Americans. Fine wants Northwestern to commit to a public dialogue about the issue similar to what Brown president Ruth Simmons did for Brown’s involvement in the slave trade. “The question [is] will the president lead a campus-wide discussion, and we have an answer: it’s no,” Fine said. Shapiro shot back: “Maybe if you were president, Gary, you would do something different, but you’re not,” countering that he would only follow the advice of a second committee designed to offer recommendations based on the report. Shapiro praised the creation of the committee, saying he had “never seen in my life a faculty committee augmented by oth-

ers to do such a serious job, [and] we’re gonna have a serious answer for it.” “It’s not gonna be based on de-cisions made before anybody read the stinkin’ report like you want it to,” Shapiro said. Despite Shapiro’s strong reac-tion, Fine “absolutely” stood by his words in an interview with THE CHRONICLE. Fine said that despite personally liking Shapiro, he was “stunned” by Shapiro’s attitude. Fine also said that he had read the Study Com-mittee’s report, contrary to Shap-iro’s implication, and pointed to a specific passage he said justified his use of the term “blood money.” On page 93, the report reads: “Although quantifying the portion of John Evans’s substantial con-tributions to Northwestern that resulted from his policies toward

Native peoples is difficult, such a con-nection existed.” The report, released on May 29, con-cluded that while Evans was not directly involved in the Sand Creek massacre, Evans’ anti-Indian policies led to a cli-mate in which such a situation was made possible. Three months before the massacre, Evans issued a proclamation ordering all Colorado citizens to “kill and destroy… wherever they may be found” all “hostile Indians.” Evans was forced to resign as gover-nor after a Congressional investigation, but he remained an influential leader in the West, going on to serve as the Presi-dent of Northwestern’s board of trustees. “What we are asking is that North-western hold [John Evans] to the same standard that the Republican Congress in 1865 held him,” Fine said. The university’s investigation into John Evans, which was spurred by activ-

ism from the Native American and Indigenous Student Alli-ance (NAISA) and Fine himself, has sparked controversy before. An open meeting to discuss the status of the Study Commit-tee last October was a “fiasco,” said Fine. As recounted by NBN, academics yelled at Na-tive Americans in attendance to “sit down” after they got “emo-tional.” The tensions were clear at the Faculty Senate meeting as well. Faculty seemed split on whether to support Fine or Shapiro. Engineering professor Neal Blair told THE CHRONICLE he felt “Morty was right on target.” “It seems premature to jump ahead of the committee,” Blair said. For Fine, though, the uni-versity remains reluctant to confront the issue in a public way like Ruth Simmons did for Brown, overly relying on closed-door committees. In his only comment on the comparison, Shapiro said Simmons “might have had a different approach” than Northwestern. With the massacre’s 150th anniversary coming up this November, Fine is worried the reckoning won’t come soon enough. “A year and a half after this investigation started, I am still the John Evans professor of Sociology,” he said.

John Evans (left) was governor of Colorado during 1862’s Sand Creek massacre (right), which was carried out by his friend Col. John Chivington. Photos: Colorado State archives.

Opinion 5SPRING 2014 NUCHRONICLE.COM @NUCHRONICLE

Op-ed: The politics of raceBy Joe BakaVice President, Northwestern Uni-versity College Republicans

The Democratic Party positions itself as the party of racial pro-gressivism. They argue that their policies are in the best interest of America’s disadvantaged minori-ties, and that by opposing these policies, Republican voters and lawmakers are racist. The Demo-crats’ ideology is not the best for the long-term good of America’s minority communities, yet they have successfully swayed public opinion to support these policies and have garnered long-term sup-port from minority voters. On April 22, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi tweeted in response to the House Republi-cans’ latest budget proposal, which cuts $5 trillion from planned spending over the next decade, largely through cuts to Medicaid, food stamps, and other entitle-ments. She said that “Over 50% of food stamp recipients are people of color. The #GOPbudget takes food out of their mouths” and “Under the #GOPbudget, millionaires get a $200k tax cut and communities of color are stuck with the bill.” These assertions, however, have little substance and are merely an attempt to spark an emotion-al reaction from individuals on food stamps or other government assistance. The policies espoused by the Republicans in the proposed budget will lead to increased

prosperity for all Americans—minorities included—in the long run. Tax cuts, for instance, reduce unemployment by leaving more money in the hands of corpora-tions and small businessmen, the economy’s primary employers. A 2002 study by Bernhard Heitger of the Keil Institute for World Economics reinforces the view-point that higher taxation leads to increased unemployment, by examining unemployment and tax rates in countries measured by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)—which include the Unit-ed States and most of the Europe-an Union—over a 12 year period from 1983–1994. He concluded that “the relationship between taxation and long-term unem-ployment is a mutually reinforcing one: a rising total tax rate leads to a higher long-term unemployment rate (and government expendi-tures) which in turn leads to a higher tax rate.” In simpler terms, raising taxes results in higher long-term unemployment, which later results in even higher taxes to cover the costs of unemploy-ment. One could easily envision this turning into an adverse cycle. Reducing taxes has the opposite effect. Doing so will result in both increased prosperity for working class minorities, and long-term economic growth and an increased quality of life for all Americans. Another area in which the Democrats fail to act in the in-terest of racial minorities is affir-

mative action. Affirmative action is marketed as an equalizer, and opposi-tion to it is implicitly considered racist. In April 2014, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in the dis-sent to the Court’s ruling in Schuette v. Bamn, which upheld a voter-ap-proved amendment to the Michigan state constitution banning affirmative action in public university admissions, “A majority of the Michigan electorate changed the basic rules of the political process in that State in a manner that uniquely disadvantaged racial minori-ties.” However, there is little evidence to suggest that affirmative action ben-efits minorities. Rather, we must strive to guarantee everyone’s right to equali-ty and ensure that everyone has access to quality, accessible education—a goal not necessarily promoted by affirma-tive action. For example, according to a 2012 study from the National Bureau of Economic Research, after California residents voted to ban affirmative action in 1996, graduation rates for minority students at public universities increased by 4.4 percent. Many stu-dents who, due in no small part to the failure of public secondary education, would have struggled at presti-gious universities are now grad-uating from universities at which they are competitive. Research has shown that affirmative action actu-ally hurts people of racial minori-ties. The Democrats only support it because doing so is an easy way to convince minority voters that they have their interests at heart. These are just two of many examples that demonstrate not

only that the Democratic Party’s leadership lacks genuine con-cern for the wellbeing of racial minorities, but also insinuates that they lack recognition of minority voters’ intelligence and capabilities. By attempting to coax racial minorities into vot-ing for them through pandering entitlement programs such as food stamps, they are implying both that they do not believe minorities can succeed without their assistance and that they believe minority votes can be bought. The Democrats’ support of affirmative action implies that they do not believe people of racial minorities can succeed on their own merit and thus require institutional assistance to compete. Of course no pol-itician would admit to holding these beliefs, but Democratic policies concerning entitlements and affirmative action perpetu-ate them in the interest of little more than acquiring votes.

Images, clockwise from top: “Lunch Hour,” by Morris Top-chevsky; “Danse Macabre” by Mabel Dwight,; “I Make Steel,” by Elizabeth Oldz.

Features 6SPRING 2014 NUCHRONICLE.COM @NUCHRONICLE

By Charles Rollet

In the early 1920s, the Russian fu-turist poet Vladimir Mayakovsky was so awestruck at the sight of Brook-lyn Bridge that he wrote a 4-page poem about the experience. “Give, Coolidge, a shout of joy!” he ex-horted, praising the bridge’s “austere disposition of bolts and steel.” Even though he was an ardent Communist, Mayakovsky venerated the products of America’s unre-strained capitalism. It’s often forgot-ten that Marx was a fond admirer of capitalism’s productive forces – they were the tools, after all, with which Communist superabundance would supposedly be achieved. On the Left, mechanization spurred art that glori-fied industry as a savior of mankind. Mayakovsky’s Brooklyn Bridge was more than a mere structure – it was sacred, and he entered its hallowed frame “as a crazed believer enters a church.” Little of that soaring exuberance is present at the Block Museum’s exhi-bition on Leftist American art during the Great Depression. “Left Front: Radical Art in the Red Decade” focuses neither on Communism’s glorious future nor the raw power of industry, but on the unprecedented suffering caused by capitalism (at least five separate works are titled “Unemployment”). Most of the art-ists in the exhibition belonged to the John Reed Club, an organization for Communist intellectuals in the USA named after the radical American journalist who now lies buried under the Kremlin. One of those artists, the Ger-

man-born Carl Hoeckner, drew hyper-realistic lithographs de-picting allegories of capitalism so dark they almost seem to foreshadow the Holocaust. In his pieces, scores of wrinkled old men (the ‘discarded’) march to their doom in a factory furnace; mor-bidly obese bosses feast as starv-ing workers stare; sullen troops march to a mechanised doom. Hoeckner’s social mysticism and dark religious imagery stand in stark contrast to the benign tractors-and-workers school then dominating the Soviet Union. Similar to Hoeckner’s hellish scenes is Elizabeth Olds’ 1937 lithograph, I Make Steel, in which a worker’s uncertainty about his fate is compellingly summarized by his depressed facial expression. Yet his pose shows him somehow retaining his dignity. The Polish-born Morris Top-chevsky conveys similar feelings of despair through his paintings, which, despite their use of color, are totally bereft of any hope. Amidst all this misery, Henry Simon is one of the relatively few artists to celebrate “working class” men instead of mourning them. In an untitled drawing, Simon depicts a triumphant worker con-templating the fruits of his labour: a hectic jumble of Manhattan’s skinny skyscrapers and Vladimir Tatlin’s beautifully insane Monu-ment to the Third International. Simon’s message is clear: Com-munism is around the corner, and workers from New York to Lenin-grad (where Tatlin’s tower was to

be built) will soon unite. But the art’s explicit political purpose can be problematic. As art fan and Bi-enen junior Erin Cameron put it, some of the pieces feel constrained by ideology. “I guess it presents an intellectual di-lemma of art being useful in its own right versus being propaganda,” she said. “I feel like some of [the pieces] blur the line.” Indeed, some of the works, such as Mabel Dwight’s Danse Macabre, feel more like state-sponsored political car-toons than “art” as we consider it today. The history of the John Reed Club itself underlies this tension between author-itarianism and free expression; Stalin forcibly dissolved the organization in 1935, but it wasn’t until the Nazi-Soviet pact in 1939 that American intellectuals stopped turning a blind eye to Stalin’s oppressive rule. It’s a little perturbing to read in the Left Front’s brochures about tenured art professors fully endorsing Leftist revolu-tionary art without a modicum of

historical distance (which an exhibi-tion on no-less-interesting Fascist art would likely have strenuously em-phasized.) Alas, academia has never owned up to its support of Stalin’s brutal regime in the thirties, and it can’t be expected to do so now. The artists on display had more of an excuse. Even if they ignored Stalinist cruelty, their beliefs existed in a historical context in which fas-cism was a very real threat. In the age of Damien Hirst and the free market, the conviction through which these radical artists attempted to bring art to the masses leaves some nostalgic. “[Progressive art] is just not as common. That’s too bad, but I don’t find it dispiriting,” said Bill Dolnick, a social worker at the exhibition. “You can still hope. And it’s great art.”

The Depression through red-colored glasses

Sports 7

By Alex Entz

It’s October 17, 2004. Red Sox utilityman Dave Roberts takes off for second base. Millions of Ameri-cans watch with baited breath as he slides into second base right as the throw from Jorge Posada arrives. The umpire signals safe. The crowd goes crazy. Then, with the replay splashing onto the screen, we head to a com-mercial break while the umpires schlep to the dugout to review the play. Three minutes later, after we are reminded of Coke and Wal-Mart and KFC, they come back out to a quiet stadium, and signal that he was, indeed, safe. Seem a little anticlimactic? Major League Baseball has gone to great lengths to expand instant replay this year. Managers now have up to two challenges (that’s right, just like football), and nearly every play is reviewable, including “tag plays.” Baseball has always had a human element to it. In trying to emulate the commercial success of football and basketball, baseball is losing the humanity that makes it unique. Unique, okay. But if an umpire blows a call, shouldn’t we want them to get it right? There are a couple of reasons I think that “correctness” should be secondary to “human element,” and the first is, quite simply, that the game has always been this way. Baseball is nothing if not a historic sport. It’s not just about Derek Jeter,

Mike Trout, and Starlin Castro—it’s also about Lou Gehrig, Shoeless Joe, Cy Young. It’s about their stories, their momentous gains and failures, their legacies. We have to remember our roots. The best way to do that is to play the game that they played.Second, missed calls in baseball are rare—indeed, umpires make 99.5% of calls correctly. Over the course of a game, umpires make judgment calls on everything from balls and strikes to fair and foul, and they get the vast majority of them right. Much of the beauty of baseball comes in those bang-bang mo-

ments, when the runner and the ball arrive at first at the same time. Slow-ing the game further and adding a mechanical element robs the game of the romance of argumentation. The game is perfect in that it is not. It’s also important for baseball to be fallible because, in many ways, it reflects us. Unlike more aggres-sive, high-intensity games like foot-ball and basketball, baseball’s slower pace builds to moments of extreme intensity and suspense—much like our own lives. Life is not a grind-it-out, constant-action epic. It has an active but decidedly calculated pace.

We make mistakes. Baseball makes mistakes. Mistakes add to the furor and intensity of fandom; they allow for arbitrary, absurd moments that we’ll remember forever. Remember Steve Bartman in the 2003 NLCS? Jeffrey Maier in the 1996 World Series? Don Den-kinger in the 1985 World Series? All reviewable calls. But if there’s a certain right answer, what is there to argue about? What is there to be passionate about?In a game where players regularly flip from Red Sox to Yankees, where there’s no loyalty to anything but money, where even Wrigley Field is being scrubbed clean of its charm to bring in huge scoreboards and video graphics, I find it comfort-ing that my friends and I can still yell at each other about perceived wrongs. That’s part of what makes the game special: it’s the same thing that our grandparents did before us, the same bond that has united fans across generations. The game is not mechanized, and it was never meant to be. Baseball is not football. In 2004, the umpires got the call right, as they do 995 times out of 1000. Even if they hadn’t, baseball would have survived: arguing about blown calls and throwing the dice with the umpiring gods has always been part of the game. What is not clear is whether or not baseball, in its truest form, will survive if concessions are repeatedly made to modernity.

Baseball in a time of replaySPRING 2014 NUCHRONICLE.COM @NUCHRONICLE

Arts & Entertainment 8 SPRING 2014 NUCHRONICLE.COM @NUCHRONICLE

(Continued from front)

devolves into long stretches of vulgarity and scatological gags. Combine that with a nearly 2-hour runtime, and you have a medio-cre-paced comedy with fewer laughs than expected. The star-studded cast and host of cameos are not enough to mop up the disappointing end product. Set in Arizona in the 1880s, the meek sheep farmer Stark (Mac-Farlane) deals with the heartbreak of being dumped by his girlfriend (Amanda Seyfried) while trying to survive what he calls “the worst time and place in history.” A gor-geous gunslinger (Charlize Theron) changes Stark and tries to grant him the courage and strength to square off against her estranged husband (Liam Neeson), the most ruthless gunfighter in the West. With the exception of the un-apologetic anachronisms (“Oh no I didn’t” one character quips), the plot unfolds like a pretty traditional western. The purpose of a satirical comedy and the key to effectively parodying a popular genre is to

point out, exploit, and ultimately subvert the expectations such films usually provide. However, A Million Ways, while it does show some signs of self-aware humor, it more often than not finds itself adhering to the plot conventions of westerns more than transcending them. The result leads to several unpleasant stretches where the plot tries to hard to move forward, with ostensible attempts at any kind of humor. What makes this awkward is Seth MacFarlane’s acting. Without a doubt, he is one of the most accom-plished voice actors of our time, and has a great knack for timing and for writing jokes. That’s why Ted worked so well, as it played out like one of his Family Guy characters romping around in the real world. But once the animation fades away, we’re left to realize that MacFarlane just doesn’t have the acting chops to carry the more serious stretch-es of the film. It isn’t for lack of effort, phoning in a performance, or anything like that; it’s just that sometimes MacFarlane doesn’t re-ally know what to do with his face.

This is understandable for some-one most comfortable in the recording studio, but it makes his extended screen time a little more awkward. He doesn’t yet have the acting talent just yet to merit starring in his own movies (à la Woody Allen), so it would behoove him to find someone else to star in his next big-screen comedy. This acting discrepancy is ex-acerbated by the talent surround-ing MacFarlane on the screen. Theron and Neeson lead the way, and they have visible amounts of fun shining in roles with much more vulgarity than their tradi-

tional roles generally afford them. Both show a good deal of comedic prowess, all the while reminding us why they’ve endured as some of our favorite actors. Also giving their all is Neil Patrick Harris, who returns to the big screen for his first non-Harold and Kumar appear-ance in a while. As the dimwitted but well-mustachioed new beau of Seyfried, his character provides some witty bouts of buffoonish dia-logue with the much more deadpan MacFarlane. Giovanni Ribisi and Sarah Silverman also enter the fray as a hyper-sexualized model of a dysfunctional Old West couple, as the town prude and town prostitute respectively. All of these fine actors do their best to take some of the self-inflicted burden off of MacFar-lane’s shoulders, but their efforts fall consistently just a little short. There are plenty of laughs to be had throughout the film, but the comedic output is hit and miss nonetheless. I will shamefully admit to laughing heartily during a minutes-too-long sequence of Neil

Patrick Harris vacating his bowels into a bystander’s hat, but scatolog-ical humor is not the way to go to get anything more than a few cheap chuckles. I expected to hear some scathing self-aware zingers on the condition of westerns, but instead it just felt like a 2-hour episode of Family Guy, with a myriad of non sequiturs being shoehorned into a plot that consistently felt the need to be pushed forward. The jokes that landed were very well-earned (including probably the best last-frame joke of the year so far), but the stretches of screentime without a hearty laugh left me feeling akin to the tumbleweeds rolling through a deserted main drag. And so, although it’s well-enough made and features some good work for a slew of bigtime actors, A Million Ways To Die In The West certainly lives up to its title, but not with the wall-to-wall humor audiences have come to expect from MacFarlane. Hopefully he will learn from this endeavor and reaffirm that his strengths lie in the comedic writing and not in acting or drama, then use this to make Ted 2 and whatever future projects he has planned much more gratifying. A Million Ways was not a whole-heartedly unpleasant experience, and there were plenty of moments to chuckle warmly, but a pervad-ing sense of disappointment and a lack of investment in MacFarlane’s protagonist hampered my ability to fully enjoy myself. I highly suggest a viewing of Blazing Saddles right af-ter seeing A Million Ways to remind yourself what effective satire really looks like.

Review: A Million Ways to Die (continued)