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 ...
Baseball statistician Bill James's most sobering discovery is that players peak at such a young age (27 on average) that by the time they become nationally beloved stars, their best years are usually past. This is true in the arts as well: By the time you get around to noticing somebody, his prime ...
A cinematic development I hadn"t expected is Oliver Stone evolving into a director who makes movies that are fair, responsible, and forgettable. His sequel Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, with Michael Douglas returning as reptilian financier Gordon Gekko, falls squarely into all three ...
In the Internet Age, an increasing fraction of media "content" is generated by young nobodies, much to the disgust of old pros, such as screenwriter Aaron Sorkin of TV's The West Wing: "I am all for everyone having a voice, I just don’t think everyone has earned the microphone. ...
Davis Guggenheim's much-publicized documentary with the meaningless title of Waiting for "Superman" makes the (by now familiar) liberal centrist case for school reform: the cause of the achievement gap is bad schools, which are the fault of bad teachers, who are protected from termination ...
The Town, set amidst the fading (but increasingly fashionable) Irish-American underclass of Boston's gentrifying Charlestown neighborhood, is a model of crime genre filmmaking, perhaps the best-executed film since July's Inception. Ten minutes into the first bank robbery in this heist movie, it's ...
After the Euro-ennui of The American last week, Robert Rodriguez's Machete sounded pretty entertaining: heroic illegal immigrants driving bouncing lowrider cars slaughter the evil white Americans holed up in a modern Alamo. Well, anything had to be better than waiting around for George Clooney to ...
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 ...
