Pitch Perfect Why college campuses, especially on the East Coast, are overpopulated with a cappella groups is a mystery to me. Virtually no one who isn’t on a college campus pays to see a cappella groups. No one buys their albums, and I don’t know anyone who can name an a cappella group that isn’t…
The Master While a great deal of the press about The Master is focused on how it is supposedly a fictional retelling of the birth of Scientology, I think this does a disservice to both the film and to Scientology. A comparison: The Social Network was a fictional retelling of the birth of Facebook: The…
dvd of the week What a great idea: Remake Snow White, but throw out everything that made the Disney film work and replace it with everything that made The Lord of the Rings work. And it is, actually, a great idea. In this film, the huntsman who is charged with capturing Snow White has a…
I think that few things are duller than a plagiarism scandal. I’ve worked as an editor, a literary agent, a journalist, and I currently teach writing, so I take plagiarism very seriously – no one should ever put their name on the words written by someone else. It’s lazy and dishonest. But as moral crimes…
BREAKING The U.S. embassy in Yemen has been attacked since this story was first filed. It is believed anger about The Innocence of Muslims’ portrayal of the Prophet Muhammad sparked the attack. Shots have been fired, according to reports from the scene. MSNBC is reporting initial indications that there are injuries on each side. President…
In controversial remarks, that have inadvertently offended some in the LGBT community, writer-director Nick Cassavetes has placed incest alongside gay marriage. In an interview with TheWrap at the launch of his new movie Yellow at the Toronto Film Festival, Cassavetes started to defend the main character’s incestuous love affair with her own brother. Cassavetes whose…
The Campaign In case you haven’t noticed, we’re smack dab in the middle of the silly season. This is the period during a political campaign when the promises, claims, attacks and revelations get so desperate and weird and implausible that “silly” is the only word that really describes it all. A few weeks ago, not…
He’s a jock; he’s pretty hot (at least for a partially computer-generated character in a 3D stop-motion animated film); and although he’s not the star of ParaNorman (in fact, his is a fairly small role), Mitch, who is voiced by Casey Afleck, has a pretty gay response to a female charcter who asks him out…
Thinking we probably already saw them when we were younger, we seniors (and soon-to-be seniors) seldom rent movies from our youth. Big mistake. We were so young and innocent in those days (at least I was), that we missed the subtle, yet very much present sexual relationships and motives that often were vital to the…
Cosmopolis A few years ago, I was reading Don DeLillo’s Libra, a speculative novel about the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and I remarked to a literary critic that none of DeLillo’s characters spoke like recognizable people, and they all spoke alike in their staccato pretentiousness. But there was one exception: Oswald’s wife, Marina, had…
