Few disagree with the line from the old Jimmy Buffett song that “If we couldn’t laugh, we’d all go insane.” Yet in movies, humorless characters are funnier. There’s nothing more painful onscreen than somebody who is supposed to be witty and wise delivering a line that ...
Kathryn Bigelow, director of the Kill Osama thriller Zero Dark Thirty (which goes into national release Friday), has always been the film nerd's dream date: attractive, classy, artistically ambitious, feminine, and fascinated by men who like blowing up stuff. The favorite gal of the Boys Club of ...
Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained is, among much else during its leisurely 165-minute running time, an adolescent male revenge fantasy about an omnipotent mass shooter wreaking carnage upon dozens of victims. I suspect the film would have appealed profoundly to the late Adam Lanza. You might ...
Mass shootings have been a recognized phenomenon in the US since Charles Whitman went up the tower at the U. of Texas with a rifle in 1966 and entered Baby Boomer lore. That's about as far back as I can remember, so I can"t tell you if these kinds of horrible events happened just as ...
As I"ve been pointing out in intermittent columns, much of the received wisdom about the 1960s doesn"t make much sense. One major reason is that human psychology generally doesn"t behave according to the reigning worldview in which the people who complain most about being victims must ...
The great mystery of my lifetime has been the 1960s. It's worth returning to this vast subject periodically as new perspectives unveil themselves. The closest thing to a successful prophecy of that era was made by science-fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein in his 1941 Future History chart, in which ...
Nate Silver is most famous for steadily predicting Barack Obama's reelection (which, as you may have heard, happened). Yet his new bestseller The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail"But Some Don"t is a fine all-around introduction to the science and art of forecasting, with ...
Joe Wright first directed Keira Knightley in a decent remake of Pride and Prejudice in 2005. Two years later, Wright and Knightley almost hit the Academy Award jackpot with the glossy Atonement, an adaptation of Ian McEwan's celebrated bestseller. I argued at the time, though, that Wright and ...
With his unimpeachable performance in Steven Spielberg's Lincoln (which opens nationwide on Friday), Daniel Day-Lewis seems ready to become the first man ever to win three Best Actor Oscars. After his awards for My Left Foot in 1989 and There Will Be Blood in 2007, Day-Lewis is tied for the career ...
I"m writing my weekly column the evening before Election Day for you to read starting an hour after the polls close on the West Coast. As you may have noticed, I"ve strenuously avoided making any election predictions, and I"m definitely not going to start now. So, let's reflect instead ...
