Why has The American, in which superstar George Clooney plays an international hitman hiding out from Swedish assassins in Italy, been released in early September, the Idiocracy season of the Hollywood calendar? Directed by Dutch photographer Anton Corbijn, it has received mostly positive reviews ...
The Tillman Story is a documentary about Pat Tillman, the NFL player who, following 9/11, turned down a $3.6 million Arizona Cardinals offer to enlist as a private in the U.S. Army, then died in Afghanistan in 2004. The film has elicited critical praise but not much media hype. Why not? As ...
Four decades into the feminist era, the number one movie at the box office is Sylvester Stallone's The Expendables, in which Eighties action heroes blow stuff up. Right behind is Julia Roberts" Eat, Pray, Love, in which a divorcée expensively feels sorry for herself in Italy, India, and ...
Despite both a forgettable title and the fifteen years in which Will Ferrell and writer-director Adam McKay have been beating their brand of comedy into the ground since they first teamed up at Saturday Night Live, The Other Guys is an implausibly funny movie. McKay's approach hasn"t much ...
Get Low, a dramedy starring venerable elders Robert Duvall, Bill Murray, and Cissy Spacek, is promisingly based on a prime slab of Old, Weird Americana: the true 1938 story of an elderly hillbilly (played by Duvall) who hired an undertaker (Murray) to throw him a huge funeral before he died. The ...
We won the Cold War two decades ago. Do we yet know why? As T.S. Eliot noted in Gerontion, “History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors…” In 1945, Winston Churchill banned all mention of the immense Ultra project that had broken the Nazi Enigma code. Ultra's 1974 ...
In April, I noted that television ratings indicate that sports audiences skew Republican and entertainment audiences Democratic. "Which is more useful to control for propagandizing for your Party: the games or the stories?" I asked portentously. An astute reader pointed to Italy, however, ...
The limited-release comedy The Kids Are All Right has driven critics into paroxysms of praise. For instance, the normally low-key A.O. Scott enthused in the New York Times as follows: "superlative," "outrageously funny," "heartbreaking," "canny," "agile," ...
Believe it or not, it's worth comparing a current box office smash—The Twilight Saga: Eclipse, a Mormon teen vampire romance—to a dud—Knight and Day, an expensive Cameron Diaz-Tom Cruise thriller parody. Knight and Day is expertly made and consistently entertaining, while the ...
Is the grindingly low scoring in the World Cup soccer tournament a bug or"as I"m finally starting to suspect"a feature? Could it be that the World Cup's global popularity is not so much despite all the nil-nil draws as because of the grimness of the scores? The three-match mini-season ...
