Theo one more time

I have blogged on here many more times than once about the depressing silence from Hollywood about the murder of Theo Van Gogh. That death and the earlier murder of Pim Fortuyn awakened me to the seriousness of the change in the Europe I grew up with and loved. These murders seem to have had no affect on my former colleagues in the film community, if indeed they have ever heard of them. It’s been two years now since the Dutch director Van Gogh was cut down in the streets of Amsterdam by a psychotic Islamist, as Pieter Dorsman notes on Pajamas. But it seems like yesterday and a hundred years ago simultaneously. The situation in Europe continues to worsen. I was reminded of how bad things have gotten in the Old Country when Sheryl and I had the pleasure of entertaining Paul Belien of Brussels Journal and his wife Dr. Alexandra Colen for dinner at our house. The food and conversation were great, only the substance of that talk was bleak in the extreme. When I asked Alexandra whether there was hope that Europe could still turn around, she hesitated only slightly before shaking her head and saying simply “It is too late.”

UPDATE: Related story form Europe by Nidra Poller on Pajamas. (Bragging rights here: I don’t think anyone anywhere is doing better work in English on la situation francaise than Nidra.)