In novels, I love unreliable narrators. I find the precarity of the truth titillating, even thrilling, especially as I slowly discover that what I’m reading isn’t to be trusted. I become a detective, looking for clues to what is really going on. It’s why I love Nabokov’s Lolita and Pale Fire, Peter Cameron’s Andorra, and,…
dvd of the week Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s musical Into the Woods won all of the Tonys in 1988 that Phantom of the Opera did not: book of a musical, and music and lyrics. It’s beloved in a way that few musicals are because it is so often produced by regional and school theaters,…
This Christmas, you have a rather odd choice of movies to see after you’ve opened your presents and gorged on goose (if you’re into goose gorging). Oddly, most of them are about as Christmasy as the Easter Bunny. Unbroken is about a British soldier who endures years of torture as a prisoner of war. Big…
dvd of the week In 2074, mobsters use time machines to send their enemies 30 years back in time to be killed and disposed of by loopers. More and more loopers are “closing the loop,” the phrase for being forced to kill their 30-years-older selves in a violent method of contract fulfillment. But when Joe…
Looper I love the idea of time travel. I fantasize about it a great deal: going back and stopping 9/11; going forward and finding out the right lottery numbers; visiting ancient Greece to see the Parthenon in its original form; or to 1970s San Francisco to visit pre-AIDS Castro. I’m always excited by time travel…
I’m currently getting divorced, so filmed engagements have started to irk me, and as I watched the opening scenes of The Five-Year Engagement, in which Tom (Jason Segel) fumbles through his proposal to Violet (Emily Blunt), I thought, “This is going to end in tears, you nitwits.” Sometimes a movie hits a little too close…
