These are standard posts with no special features.
It’s probably unfair to say that the public had fallen out of love with Bogart and Bacall by the time 1947’s Dark Passage rolled around. (They certainly hadn’t fallen out of love with one another, despite the 25-year difference in their ages.) But they’d gone from The Big Sleep, one …
Humans are the only animals that can make metaphors or moral judgments. Unfortunately, we make far too few of the former and far too many of the latter. The appealing thing about placing social problems in a moral context is that it allows you to start ignoring the problem; if …
I want to like Stephen King. I really, really do. He’s undeniably an important writer, at least insofar as he’s written a ton of books that have sold enormously well, and become virtually synonymous with “contemporary American novelist”. He’s managed to remain successful even in a terrible downtime for fiction, …
“I never met anybody,” Richard Pryor once pointed out, “who said when they were a kid: I wanna grow up and be a critic.” Did he ever meet anyone who said ‘I wanna grow up and watch movies and listen to music and read books all day’? That will remain …
It was in summer of the first year of his second term that the President decided that he didn’t want to go anywhere anymore. It was announced rather precipitately to the public although it was certainly known to his inner circle for quite some time, because when you’re the President …
When I was thirty-two and still living alone in the rented house near the river, I found myself in conflict with the radio announcer. Nowadays I need quiet to write; I cannot abide even the softest music, or the flicker of the television with the sound off. But then I …
First of all, how about that title, eh? The movie could be a heap of shit and it would still win points for the title, which sounds like some lost French new wave picture. Éclat de Silence, avec Alain Delon. But no, it’s an American film noir, albeit a pretty …
After a half-century of perceived American cultural hegemony, Europeans feel the need to get back at us in any way that they can. You really can’t blame them; after endless decades of ruling the world, here we come with our fat loudmouthed tourists and our Big Macs, ruining everything, and …
I’ve always taken a special displeasure in the ‘things were better before’ approach to culture. While it’s undeniable that taste is taste, it strikes me as a particularly lazy way to come at the world around you to simply let your tastes calcify without protest. Sure, it’s hard to keep …
MANHATTAN. “Okay this one is easy. It’s what you call a basic, a basic cocktail. You take a whiskey, a rye whiskey, and vermouth, and a cherry. And there you ugh! Sorry, there you go! It’s easy! It was named after the Manhattan cocktail. I mean, the Manhattan Hotel. In …
Judging a movie by its potential is probably skirting the edge of fairness, but the creepy 1947 carnival-noir Nightmare Alley tempts pretty strongly in that direction. The feeling it finally leaves you with is an unsatisfying one, both in the way it frequently opens up possibilities it doesn’t quite live …
Along with all the other exciting and annoying content to hit this site in 2011, I am getting ready to kick off a special feature called The Sandwich Century. Over the course of the year, I will prepare, consume, and document a hundred different sandwiches, and you will follow it …
The other day, which by my reckoning could have been anywhere between last Thursday and Thanksgiving of 2004, I was talking with a good friend about the Daily Beast’s annual ranking of the smartest cities in America. Although my stomping grounds of San Antonio ranked 54th out of 55, that …
1. A popular band makes it a point while on tour to stick with performing material familiar to their fans, reckoning that this is what they most want to hear. Detractors cite this as a reason the band is unadventurous, predictable, and dull. 2. One night, the bandleader, deciding to …
From “Peter9827″‘s review of Blues Brothers 2000: Alright Here is my review of Blues Brothers 2000 the sequel to the 1980 Classic the Blues Brothers Which was one of my favorites this also one of my favorites too.But Before I begin this review this movie has nothing to do with …
