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 ...
In 1965, Gordon Moore of Intel noted that silicon chips had been quickly doubling in transistor density, and forecasted that computers would continue to get twice as powerful every 18 months to infinity and beyond! (Or words to roughly that effect"”Moore's Law” soon entered the ...
The astringent new romance film Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky might be the arthouse equivalent of that often-proposed high concept blockbuster Superman & Batman. Instead of "Who would win in a fight: Batman or Superman?" Dutch director Jan Kounen delivers: "Who would win in an ...
Micmacs is an extravagantly ambitious blend of Charlie Chaplin's silent City Lights and Modern Times, Jacques Tati's clever but impersonal visual comedies, and Steven Soderbergh's Ocean's 11 caper flicks. It is Jean-Pierre Jeunet's first movie since his two hits starring Audrey Tautou: the ...
Starting Thursday, the Boston Celtics and the Los Angeles Lakers meet for the twelfth time in the National Basketball Association finals. The Lakers have traditionally showcased superstars, from George Mikan, the NBA's first big man in the 1940s, through Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Shaquille ...
Hollywood's clean little secret is that many people in the industry are not, at least by natural inclination, the utter shlockmeisters that their output would suggest. They are often cultivated, tasteful, hard-working craftsmen sometimes pained by the trashiness the public demands from them. Over ...
Sir Ridley Scott's Robin Hood turns out not to be the expected proto-superhero summer blockbuster. Instead, it works best as an intricate political allegory about how the recently defeated New Labourites of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown betrayed England through their stratagems of invade the world, ...
A couple of weeks before the release of Iron Man in May 2008, the American public started to realize that casting Robert Downey, Jr. as Tony Stark, a Howard Hughes-like inventor turned superhero, was a great idea. After all, why does Hollywood bother existing if not to make a big American movie ...
Edward O. Wilson's new book, Anthill: A Novel, is, in many ways, a traditional first novel: it's primarily a quasi-autobiographical fictional retelling of the author's childhood and young manhood. Anthill is the tale of Wilson's alter ego, a bug-loving Eagle Scout with the venerable Southern name ...
Due to Polish president Lech KaczyÅski's death in the tragic April 10 plane crash, his identical twin brother JarosÅaw, Poland's brooding former prime minister, announced on April 26 that he is running to replace his twin. This kind of heartwarming/unsettling vibe is common with stories ...
