Film/TV
675 results
Page 59
Fareed Zakaria's "Post-American World'
Good riddance to American Exceptionalism
America is no longer the world's “shining city on the hill”— not because we've declined, but because the rest of the world is catching up. Fareed Zakaria's book, like his life, suggests a positive solution for Americans: Instead of fretting about losing, let's rejoin the human race.
Articles
4 minute read
"Phillies': The ultimate coffee-table book
Another miracle from the Phillies
Marcel Proust bit into a Madeleine to unleash a flood of childhood memories. Phillies offers old posters, baseball cards and ticket stubs that you can touch and caress. Top that, Kindle!
Articles
3 minute read
"True Grit' gets a remake
Tweaked Grit
The arch, awkward, faux-Victorian language almost worked in the original True Grit. But if you were born in 1995 and watching the Coen brothers' sendup of the 1969 sendup, you'd have to ask: What country, what planet spawned these people?
Articles
3 minute read
"At the Fights': Writers on boxing
Raconteurs of the ring
At the Fights is more than a collection of great boxing prose, from Jack London to David Remnick; it also offers, perhaps inadvertently, a study in the evolution of the prose of American sports journalism.
Articles
9 minute read
"For Colored Girls' goes Hollywood
When a few good words are worth a thousand pictures
Listening to the poems of Ntozake Shange 35 years ago was a revelation. Seeing her words visualized on screen was a letdown.
Mark Garvey's "Stylized': Admiration or adoration?
An obsessed writer is not a pretty sight
How many grammarians can dance on the head of a pin? The number pales beside the admirers and detractors of The Elements of Style, Strunk and White's classic guide to basic writing principles. And don't get me started about the proper usage of hopefully.
Articles
4 minute read
Tony Goldwyn's "Conviction' and the death penalty
Who shall live and who shall die? America's death penalty lottery
Tony Goldwyn's Conviction tells one of the 254 stories of DNA exoneration through Barry Scheck's Innocence Project, most of them grim parables of judicial incompetence, bias, or worse. The film's subject spent 18 years in prison for a murder he didn't commit— luckily for him, in Massachusetts, a state with no death penalty.
Conviction. A film directed by Tony Goldwyn. www.innocenceproject.org/know/conviction.
Articles
6 minute read
Outsider heroes: Lisbeth Salander and Jack Reacher
The girl who kicked her computer, or: Who needs Facebook? Who needs friends?
Why do the action novels of Stieg Larsson and Lee Child sell millions of copies worldwide? Maybe because their fantasy heroes are individuals in the age of modern technology— unlike most of the rest of us, who've been enslaved by it.
Articles
5 minute read
Herbert Gans imagines America in 2033
An academic envisions a future he won't see
As its title suggests, my old colleague Herbert Gans's latest book is a hopeful and engaging imagined “history” of the first third of the 21st Century. It begins like a novel and ends as a series of clearly stated position papers on the issues that made George W. Bush's presidency such a tragic American aberration.
Articles
5 minute read
Clint Eastwood's 'Hereafter'
In the realm of the absurd: Clint Eastwood confronts eternity
Clint Eastwood's Hereafter speculates about what may— or may not— lie in the Great Beyond. A brilliant opening sequence is worth the price of admission, but Eastwood, himself a professed skeptic, loads his dice too easily, and brings his plot lines together too patly at the end.
Articles
6 minute read