Watching Steven Soderbergh's comedy The Informant! (with Matt Damon as that guy back in the 1990s who squealed to the feds about how he fixed the price of lysine for Archer Daniels Midland) reminded me of Econ 101, where you learn about the glories of competitive markets. Traditionally, economists ...
Having listened to country music on and (mostly) off since Johnny Cash's "A Boy Named Sue" four decades ago, I checked in on Billboard's Top 30 Country chart to see if anything was new. A possible advantage about not knowing much about what I"m talking about when it comes to music is a ...
Extract is the third live-action film written and directed by Mike Judge, creator of the hit animated TV series Beavis and Butt-head and King of the Hill (which will broadcast its final episode this coming Sunday after 13 seasons). Judge's first was 1999's Office Space and the second was the ...
Are men to blame for the economic crash? That's become a popular theme in the press. For example, the BBC's business editor Robert Peston recently stated in "Why men are to blame for the crunch:" "I routinely characterise the credit crunch as "men behaving badly""because ...
While watching Inglourious Basterds, I had time on my hands to ponder once again whether Quentin Tarantino's variegated gifts and inclinations would have made him even more suited for other careers. Reviewing Kill Bill: Vol. 2 back in 2004, I wrote, "His talents, while broad, don’t mesh ...
Peter Jackson and Neill Blomkamp’s Malthusian fable of post-Apartheid Johannesburg. District 9, a violent science fiction movie set in a Johannesburg slum inhabited by 1.8 million feckless refugee space aliens, is the critical and commercial ($37 million opening weekend) hit of the moment. ...
The publicity machine is now gearing up for documentarian Ken Burns's twelve-hour extravaganza, The National Parks: America's Best Idea, which will run for six straight nights on PBS starting September 27. This being a Ken Burns series, the predominant theme of The National Parks will be ...
I was trying to watch with my wife the DVD of He's Just Not That Into You, which is to romantic comedies what Watchmen is to superhero flicks: a confusing bundle of plotlines about the upscale romantic entanglements of what used to be called yuppies. To pass the time while a heartbroken Ben Affleck ...
Barack Obama, Henry Louis Gates Jr., and the African-American Master Class Countless pundits have debated whether the Henry Louis Gates Jr. brouhaha is about race or class. In truth, Barack Obama's maladroit but heartfelt interjection of his own prejudices into the controversy stemmed from a ...
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince earned a record $394 million worldwide in its opening week, an extraordinary amount for a film based on the sixth (and penultimate) installment in J.K. Rowling's series of fantasy novels. The striking title certainly didn"t hurt. The term "Half-Blood ...
