Ross Douthat writes an excellent, wise blog called The American Scene, a right-leaning take on politics and culture.Ross reminds us that education is not everything; it certainly is not the cure-all for our economic anxieties people like to make it out to be. As Ross notes, its a sexy line:...
I SHOULD note at the outset that despite being a literary-minded Catholic convert, I regard Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited with something less than uncritical affection. I tend to share Waugh's own judgment, handed down in the late 1950s when he made revisions on the book, that it "is infused with...
Given the Republican party's many problems, the solution requires a mix of ingredients blended together in a manner that would do Julia Child proud. In Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream, Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam have concocted a recipe that...
FOR the world's dwindling band of M. Night Shyamalan admirers--a group in which I still count myself, though increasingly reluctantly--the best-case scenario for his latest film, The Happening, was that it would represent a return to form after his disastrous previous effort, Lady in the Water. The...
ALMOST nobody remembers now, so completely has it been buried by the cultural weight of the television adaptation, but the original Sex and the City--the columns Candace Bushnell penned for the mid-1990s New York Observer, and then the book she made of them--was a radically darker piece...
THE first time I tried to read The Chronicles of Narnia from start to finish, I gave up somewhere in the middle third of Prince Caspian--after the long flashback to the prince's childhood in his usurping uncle's court, but before the Pevensie children finished wandering (and wandering, and wandering) in...
THE script for Iron Man, this summer's first successful popcorn flick, belongs atop the syllabus for a class that some enterprising film school ought to offer: How to Write Action Movies in a Polarized Climate. Ever since 9/11, and especially since the invasion of Iraq, Hollywood has veered between action...
CAN infertility be funny? This is the first and most pressing question raised by Baby Mama, a cheerful little film premised on the theory that the "inhospitable" uterus of a late-30s professional woman can be mined for the same sort of laughs (and box-office dollars) delivered by last year's spate...
THERE'S only one reason to see Forgetting Sarah Marshall, and his name is Aldous Snow. Or maybe I should say Russell Brand, since the line between the actor (Brand, that is) and the character he plays is not exactly clear. Snow, the lead singer of a band called Infant Sorrow,...
Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream By Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam Doubleday, 256 pp. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] During the week I spent reading Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam's Grand New Party, I had...
STOP-LOSS isn't an anti-war movie for the latte-sipping, NPR-listening liberal pacifist pantywaist crowd. No sir. This is an anti-war movie for red-blooded Red State Americans. It's a love letter to the guys and gals who love their country and their country music. It's The Best Years of Our Lives for...
T. S. ELIOT picked April, but as far as moviegoers are concerned, March is the cruelest month. The weeks immediately after the New Year are the traditional dumping ground for the worst of Hollywood's dross, but unless you're a critic or a true obsessive, you probably won't have kept up...
THE writers' strike is settled, the picketing scribes have dispersed to their keyboards, and if the stars feel any pangs of social conscience while strolling the red carpet they'll have only their fuel-guzzling, globe-warming private jets to blame. The Oscars, in other words, will go on as...
ONE of the more interesting recent exchanges between a filmmaker and a fan took place on the movie-geek website Ain't It Cool News, just before the release of Rambo, the sixtysomething Sylvester Stallone's second consecutive revival of a character he made famous a quarter century back. (The first was 2006's...
IF the name "Cloverfield" meant nothing in particular to you as of the first of this year--if it sounded like a shampoo, perhaps, or a new brand of imitation butter--then you are obviously not an American (okay, a male American) between the ages of 12 and 34 and in possession...
YOU won't find a film more self-consciously ambitious than Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood in cinemas this winter. Hailed, near-universally, as the masterpiece that Anderson's admirers have long expected him to produce, the movie certainly looks the part. At 2 hours and 38 minutes, it has the necessary...
MIDWAY through The Golden Compass, Chris Weitz's adaptation of the first volume of His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman's famously theophobic fantasy saga, the plucky, flame-haired heroine, Lyra Belacqua, falls in with an armored polar bear named Iorek Byrnison. An exile from his Arctic kingdom, Byrnison seems to have a weakness...
SHOULD we take the Coen brothers seriously? This may seem a strange question to ask of two brothers whose joined-at-the-hip filmmaking has been sending cinephiles into raptures for more than 20 years, ever since Blood Simple, their shoestring-budget Texan noir, first put them on the highbrow map....
MIDWAY through one of the three narratives that twine through Lions for Lambs, Robert Redford's hilariously awful drama about the War on Terror, Jasper Irving, an up-and-coming Republican senator played by Tom Cruise, steps out of his office to take a phone call. The journalist who's been...
NOBODY can whack the Mafia movie, but Tony Soprano did his best. After six riveting, exhaustive seasons with New Jersey's leading crime family, a memo seems to have gone out to every filmmaker contemplating a gangster flick: No more Italians for a while, capisce? So Martin Scorsese,...
Articles 2007-11-19
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