Watching the misanthropic comedy Bad Teacher, I was reminded of how my late father-in-law, who supplemented his careers as a tuba player and union boss with a day job in the Chicago public schools as the world’s most cynical substitute teacher, liked to tell this old joke: “I can’t get a ...
Ever since Canadian English professor Marshall McLuhan coined the term “the medium is the message” in 1964, it’s been fun (if not particularly taxing) for intellectuals to speculate about how new communication technologies influence content. One of the most perceptive observers of today’s ...
Bill James, the baseball statistics analyst who has been one of the most revolutionary influences upon American sport and thought over the last generation, has now published a non-baseball book, Popular Crime: Reflections on the Celebration of Violence, which grows out of his decades-long ...
X-Men: First Class is the fifth screen adaptation since 2000 of the Marvel Comics series. What’s the appeal of these Homo superior mutants whose superpowers cause them to be oppressed by the bigoted and backward majority, us genetically inferior Homo sapiens? Well, every adolescent sees himself ...
The movie industry cares only about money, not art. Right? Yet Terrence Malick’s four-decade-long career demonstrates how much money and talent film folk will lavish on an occasional prodigy. The exquisite middle section of the 67-year-old director’s new movie, The Tree of Life, an ...
Satire is a reactionary art form powered by contempt for the present. Although Woody Allen, now 75, has always espoused conventionally liberal views, he's one of the last figures in American culture unaffected by the 1960s" faux egalitarianism. Having turned 21 in 1956, Woody's enthusiasms ...
Bridesmaids, the first female buddy comedy from producer Judd Apatow (Knocked Up and countless others over the last half-decade), stars Kristen Wiig, that passive-aggressive skinny blonde on Saturday Night Live. It's been marketed to film critics as the definitive response to Christopher Hitchens's ...
Movie folks think they are better than you or me, and sometimes they are right. Jodie Foster, for example, isn"t the world's best director, but she may be the bravest. Who else would have the brass to direct her old buddy from 1994's Maverick and today's leading object of collective hatred, Mel ...
The Cave of Forgotten Dreams is the latest documentary from artiste/showman Werner Herzog. It features the world's oldest known cave paintings, discovered in 1994 at Chauvet Grotto in southeastern France and immediately locked up to protect the stunning drawings of imposing beasts. The French ...
Atlas Shrugged: Part I is the most universally despised movie of 2011, but I liked it. Critics hate this adaptation of Ayn Rand's 1957 cult novel for predictable ideological reasons, while Randites are embarrassed that their exalted capitalist system failed to pony up the munificent financing ...
