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Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong
The famed right-wing critic Terry Teachout once thundered, “Politics makes artists stupid,” from his perch at the Wall Street Journal, on panning the pro-Palestinian play My Name is Rachel Corrie....
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Zero would be more like it: Notes on Nine and Broken Embraces
What makes Rob Marshall’s Nine so peculiarly bad is its sheer self-congratulation. We’re incessantly told how important, how fascinating the director Guido Contini must be, and we as viewers are...
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Films of the decade: The Ballad of Jack and Rose
Several of the decade’s most beguiling cinematic risk-takers flew well under the radar. Joanna Hogg’s Unrelated, warmly received in its native Britain, has yet to cross the Atlantic, although the...
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Noted briefly: Oscar noms
Given that our nation’s critics (almost all of whom are center-right in their reacting) failed to champion Ang Lee’s Taking Woodstock, Woody Allen’s Whatever Works, and Terry Gilliam’s The Imaginarium...
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Redacted from Salon‘s Oscar coverage
My ultra-brief tenure at Salon.com came to a screeching halt with the non-publication of this, my third and final short piece for the play-it-safe-unless-it’s-vulgar online rag. I didn’t bother to...
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Cinco de Mayo at the Robischon Gallery
Yours truly attended Wednesday’s opening reception at the Robischon on Wazee for DAM Contemporaries’ Summer Salon series. The galleries were overflowing with revelers, the wines were exquisite, and...
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Not an introduction.
“Your writing elicits for me a much appreciated sense of flux, a view in a state of change, as well as a much more luminous sense of being, the joys of expression, of living itself, like a wonderfully...
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Savaging two Colin Firth movies for the price of . . .
Why I've avoided The King's Speech. Until now. More than a year after seeing it, I remain so thoroughly appalled by the memory of Tom Ford’s gay victimhood hatchet job on the Isherwood novella A Single...
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Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives
Overall, Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s new film Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives doesn’t surpass his previous work, the near-masterpiece Syndromes and a Century. The problems that cropped up...
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Our media culture learned nothing from Aurora
In the small hours of the morning that the Jonah Lehrer scandal broke, I had devoted a little time in crafting a letter to the editor of The New Yorker magazine. My letter went unpublished. Possibly,...
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Irrational Man
When Woody Allen outstretches his hand in the direction of irony, his filmmaking goes fatally, abysmally wrong. In the dreadful You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, a failed novelist played by Josh...
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Here’s that Rainy Day: a near-masterpiece
Under the weather: Elle Fanning and Jude Law in A Rainy Day in New York I already knew Elle Fanning was a good actress long before I finally settled in to watch – over Valentine’s Day weekend, no less...
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Irrational Man
When Woody Allen outstretches his hand in the direction of irony, his filmmaking goes fatally, abysmally wrong. In the dreadful You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, a failed novelist played by Josh...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Here’s that Rainy Day: a near-masterpiece
Under the weather: Elle Fanning and Jude Law in A Rainy Day in New York I already knew Elle Fanning was a good actress long before I finally settled in to watch – over Valentine’s Day weekend, no less...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Irrational Man
When Woody Allen outstretches his hand in the direction of irony, his filmmaking goes fatally, abysmally wrong. In the dreadful You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, a failed novelist played by Josh...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Here’s that Rainy Day: a near-masterpiece
Under the weather: Elle Fanning and Jude Law in A Rainy Day in New York I already knew Elle Fanning was a good actress long before I finally settled in to watch – over Valentine’s Day weekend, no less...
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