•Cirque du Soleil, originally from Quebec, may be trying too hard to seem New Yorky with their new show based here: flappers, jazz dance, Vaudeville, urban motifs — and it’s called
Banana Shpeel.
•George Lucas just had to go and “improve” his original Star Wars trilogy with various digital enhancements and lame prequels — but, despite his [...]
For some reason, my instinctive reaction to this headline from an e-mailed advertisement was alarm, though I’m not sure if I was reacting primarily to garishness, anorexia, or overacting — definitely some instinct telling me that I don’t want to be close to all three of these people at the same time:
Baz Luhrmann & Claire [...]
So James Cameron, judging by the stories told about his ego, must be at least a little peeved that his ex-wife got the Oscar for Best Picture after all the money he spent on special effects and 3D. By contrast, the director of the 1953 horror blockbuster House of Wax, which helped launch the [...]
A colleague points out this unusually slick and funny anti-government song parody from last year, Tim Hawkins’ “The Government Can,” based on “The Candy Man.” Given how much mileage the left gets out of priding itself on having the edge in hipness and irony, we need more of this. A half-century ago, they thought they [...]
One of my favorite things is hearing people complain about something you barely understand but complaining in sufficient detail that you almost come to share their passion about the obscure problem, like the time a video editor complained to me at length about his dongle being taken without permission, or the letter to the editor [...]
Yikes: Shia LaBeouf is surprisingly, perhaps admirably, frank about revealing what a deep emotional crisis his co-star Michael Douglas from next month’s Wall Street sequel, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, is going through. Douglas won an Oscar in 1987 for playing ruthless trader Gordon Gekko and now returns to the role — with Oliver Stone [...]
On the eve of the Oscars, I contemplate three odd films 2010 brings that likely will not be nominees in next year’s Best Picture category:
•an ill-advised-sounding thriller called Frozen about three men stuck throughout the film on a ski lift chair after dark (claustrophobic terror done wrong, sounds like)
•a trippy film called Enter the Void [...]
Afraid things will be crowded tonight at, say, the Broadway and 68th IMAX theatre if you try to see Tim Burton’s visually delightful and adventure-film-intense version of Alice in Wonderland? Then why not join me a few blocks away at 2 West 64th St., where the Ethical Culture Society will be taking a trip [...]
Surveying the panoply of classic films easily available to the modern cinephile in advance of the Oscars, I finally watched the DVD of the ensemble rap drama/comedy Krush Groove from 1985 that I picked up at a convenience store recently. It was pretty awesome.
I admit that for me, no hiphop fan, the big thrill is [...]
Tonight’s our big Debate at Lolita Bar on the question “Is Christianity for Wimps?” — and one question sure to arise is whether wimps are, in fact, bad. Take our level of tolerance for violence as an example.
Surely, violence manifests itself in all sorts of horrible ways (else we would have no police and [...]
I saw Alice in Wonderland, about which I am sworn to secrecy for now, but I will just say that from the posters alone you can glean that Helena Bonham-Carter’s character has a sinister grin and a giant forehead, if you’re into that (and if you are, that’s one more weird side topic we can [...]
It’s disappointing that a movie of Atlas Shrugged with Angelina Jolie didn’t quite happen — and that we’ll never see the ad campaign that likely would have resulted, with Jolie accompanied by the question “WHO IS JOHN GALT?” In what may be just an odd coincidence, Jolie is now being seen in ads for her [...]
Ayn Rand’s novel about a collapsing, overregulated economy, Atlas Shrugged, sold over a half-million copies in 2009 alone — and that was over twice the previous one-year record, set in 2008, according to the Ayn Rand Institute. This suggests that the narrative of our economic woes being caused by unregulated capitalist greed has not fully [...]
Our recent (Feb. 3) Debate at Lolita Bar pitted two former members of the Misfits, Bobby Steele and Michale Graves, against each other on the question “Is the Music Business Bad for Music as an Art Form?” Remember the event with us now, with photos by Monty Leman (showing, from left to right, me, Graves, [...]
With my Italian libertarian economist friend, I rewatched the very libertarian Italian movie We the Living, adapted in 1942 without Rand’s authorization (but with her retroactive approval decades later) from her early novel about a young woman in Rand’s native Soviet Union dreaming of escape and torn between two lovers, one anti-communist but driven to [...]