Kids these days have short attention spans. Or so I"ve often been informed. For example, Baroness Greenfield, an Oxford professor of "synaptic pharmacology," recently warned the House of Lords that social-networking websites "are devoid of cohesive narrative and long-term ...
The exuberant 127 Hours, Director Danny Boyle's first movie since winning the Best Picture Oscar for Slumdog Millionaire, is surprisingly comparable to The Social Network. While 127 Hours is shorter, slighter, and more upbeat, both films are deftly made reconstructions of famous 2003 events within ...
In WWII and the Cold War, we faced enemies the caliber of Wernher von Braun and Andrei Sakharov. In the War on Terror, however, a strikingly large fraction of Muslim would-be terrorists, such as the recent Underpants Bomber and the Times Square Fizzler, are screwups. Criminal masterminds turn out ...
Typical documentaries, such as Waiting for "Superman" and Freakonomics, are made by people who know more about lenses and lighting than about their subjects. In contrast, Inside Job, a competent condemnation of Wall Street's role in the recent economic unpleasantness, is the work of Charles ...
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 ...
