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 ...
American culture has become so globally dominant that even the lamest U.S. customs, such as our soporific presidential debates, infect countries blessed with superior traditions. For example, as part of the run-up to the May 6th General Election, the Brits are holding their first ever prime ...
In professional wrestling, the designated hero in a match is known as the "face" (short for "babyface") and the villain is the "heel." At the other end of the socioeconomic spectrum, pro golf suffered a sudden face shortage when Tiger Woods turned “heel.” The ...
What does it take to be a genius? Europeans of the Romantic Era tended to ascribe the accomplishments of the great to an inborn spark. In contrast, in this age in which voracious competitiveness must rationalize itself in politically correct terms, American self-help books, such as Malcolm ...
In South-Central Los Angeles in 1940, a Mexican immigrant gave her son a 51-cent tennis racket for his 12th birthday. After wandering over to the park and watching how the sport was played, young Pancho Gonzales ventured off on a titanic career that"despite never taking a lesson and wasting a ...
