Among this season’s intelligent movies about smart people doing complex jobs, the Wall Street film Margin Call ranks ahead of Contagion and The Ides of March and behind only Moneyball. Unlike Moneyball, which is so engagingly written that it had my wife asking me insightful questions the next ...
The two big books of the moment are Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (which I reviewed in the November issue of The American Conservative) and Pat Buchanan’s Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025? (which I reviewed in VDARE). ...
George Clooney likes to make serious, important movies such as Up in the Air, Michael Clayton, and The American, in which he plays broken men beaten down by The System. Fortunately, it seems to have finally dawned on Clooney that he exudes too much Clooneyosity to be plausible as a small-time ...
On August 31st, I extolled Clybourne Park (now playing at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre), Bruce Norris’s 2011 Pulitzer Prize-winning drama about white flight in 1959 and white gentrification in 2009. That same day, in an example of life imitating arts criticism, liberal gentrifiers sent ...
When my son was ten, his baseball coach—inspired by Michael Lewis’s bestseller Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game—came up with a statistically brilliant team strategy: Don’t swing. Ever. Because few ten-year-olds can throw more strikes than balls, his team won the pennant ...
Whatever happened to the femme fatale? From Mary Astor in The Maltese Falcon and Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity to Kathleen Turner in Body Heat and Linda Fiorentino in The Last Seduction, the silky seductress who lures some poor sap into her web of betrayal was the central element of the noir ...
Ever since Oscar-winner Gwyneth Paltrow started her website Goop.com to let people know about all the expensive stuff she owns, many have wanted to see her portray, say, a corpse who gets the top of her skull sawed off by coroners trying to figure out what brain-rotting disease killed her. And ...
Bruce Norris’s Clybourne Park, winner of this year’s Pulitzer Prize in New York and Olivier Award in London, is the play I’ve been waiting for since the 1980s. Although Norris previously wrote six dramas for Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre Company, Steppenwolf will finally stage his ...
Why are there always rumors about male stars being gay? Maybe they’re true. Screenwriter Joe Eszterhas (Basic Instinct) claimed in his amusing 2006 book The Devil’s Guide to Hollywood, “With the exception of Russell Crowe and Mel Gibson, there are few stars able to play supermacho parts ...
It’s not uncommon for me to get into discussions about celebrities that go something like this: Him: Hey, you’ve heard of Mr. Big Name [a world-famous icon of masculinity], right? Me: Sure. Who hasn’t? Him: Well, he’s gay. Me: Really? That’s interesting. Him: Yeah, my buddy Al, who was a ...
