The Coen Brothers" devotion to odd vernaculars has contributed to their haphazard box-office track record. Audiences immediately cottoned to Fargo's "You betcha" Minnesota accents and almost as quickly to George Clooney's grandiloquent Southern pettifoggery in O Brother, Where Art Thou? ...
Casino Jack is a consistently amusing biopic starring Kevin Spacey as the manic, bull-necked Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff, who recently spent three and a half years in prison for, as far as I can tell, running a little more amok than is considered seemly among Washington insiders. As ...
On Friday, I was shocked like the rest of America to learn that Richard Nixon had been taped in the Oval Office subscribing to a stereotype: "The Irish can"t drink....Virtually every Irish I"ve known gets mean when he drinks. Particularly the real Irish." On Saturday, I went to see ...
What's the most demanding sport? A 1975 Journal of Sports Medicine study by James Nicholas, an NFL, NBA, and NHL team doctor, ranked 61 sports on 18 different measures of physical pounding endured and athleticism required. American football came in third and bullfighting second. Yet the most ...
In outline, The King's Speech sounds like a Wayans Brothers spoof of a Weinstein Brothers prestige film: an Oscar-bound movie where the King of England, a victim of society's prejudice against stutterers, is empowered by an impudent immigrant therapist to overcome his stiff upper lip just in time ...
Kids these days have short attention spans. Or so I"ve often been informed. For example, Baroness Greenfield, an Oxford professor of "synaptic pharmacology," recently warned the House of Lords that social-networking websites "are devoid of cohesive narrative and long-term ...
The exuberant 127 Hours, Director Danny Boyle's first movie since winning the Best Picture Oscar for Slumdog Millionaire, is surprisingly comparable to The Social Network. While 127 Hours is shorter, slighter, and more upbeat, both films are deftly made reconstructions of famous 2003 events within ...
In WWII and the Cold War, we faced enemies the caliber of Wernher von Braun and Andrei Sakharov. In the War on Terror, however, a strikingly large fraction of Muslim would-be terrorists, such as the recent Underpants Bomber and the Times Square Fizzler, are screwups. Criminal masterminds turn out ...
Typical documentaries, such as Waiting for "Superman" and Freakonomics, are made by people who know more about lenses and lighting than about their subjects. In contrast, Inside Job, a competent condemnation of Wall Street's role in the recent economic unpleasantness, is the work of Charles ...
The new documentary Freakonomics harkens back to the good old days of 2005. Remember when economists, having permanently perfected the economy, graciously allowed their attention to wander to crime fighting, sumo wrestling, baby naming, and other fields not traditionally enlightened by their ...
