This week's New Yorker has Anthony Lane's brutal review of Watchmen--and let me start by saying that I won't be linking to it here. It's clueless, sure, and reveals that its author utterly fails to understand what the source material (let alone, one assumes, the movie) is trying to do. But worse than that, Lane quite offhandedly spoils several ( Read more... )

Sir Salman Rushdie has criticized Slumdog Millionaire [Oscar-winner!] for "piling impossibility on impossibility." This, from the author of that excursion into magical realism, Midnight's Children.

Wow. The review in the Times today is beyond harsh. Don't believe it; the show has problems but I don't think it's that bad.

-The New Group's Mourning Becomes Elektra: A play (or, really, a trilogy of plays) legendary in its day as the great epic of American theater, consisting of an intensely Freudian reimagining of Aeschylus' Oresteia transplanted from ancient Mycenae to post-Civil War New Hampshire. It's a rarely revived, six hour (though pared here to four and change ( Read more... )

Is this the new face of the Republican Party? Really?

A couple of weeks before the Alaska legislature began this year's session, a bipartisan group of state senators on a retreat a few hours from here invited Gov. Sarah Palin to join them. Accompanied by a retinue of advisers, she took a seat at one end of a conference table and listened passively ( Read more... )

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Here's a few brief excerpts from the astounding 2006 Broadway production of Brian Friel's Faith Healer, about a itinerant, self-destructive faith healer who, although he knows he's a fraud, is on the rare occasion able to actually cure the lame. The show takes the form of a series of long monologues; Fiennes, and his co-stars Cherry Jones and Ian ( Read more... )

Remember how Larry King used to write a newspaper column consisting of dropped names and weirdly banal observations?

Seems like Fidel Castro is getting in on the act. This may be the (unintentionally?) funniest thing I've read by a world leader.

Sometimes it's infuriating to be a Democrat. There's the identity politics (thankfully now, I think, fading away somewhat), the spineless creatures who pass for party leaders and who seem to crave compromise even in resounding victory, and, of course, the disorganization among the rank and file ( Read more... )

When Michael Steele was elected head of the RNC about a little over a week ago, I was actually concerned. "Here's a guy," I thought to myself, "who isn't prima facie insane, who did better than expected in a 2006 Senate race in true blue Maryland, and who's black. Maybe he'll actually change the look and the approach of the Republican party ( Read more... )

Blossom Dearie, a brilliant and inimitable jazz singer died yesterday.

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