Fresh Air Weekend: David Alan Grier, Sacha Baron Cohen
Fresh Air Weekend highlights some of the best interviews and reviews from past weeks, and new program elements specially paced for weekends. Our weekend show emphasizes interviews with writers, filmmakers, actors, and musicians, and often includes excerpts from live in-studio concerts. This week: David Alan Grier’s ‘Sporting Life’ On Broadway: The stand-up comedian and star [...]
Folk Singer Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy Plays Not My Job
Will Oldham is among the most celebrated singer-songwriters in the country, but chances are you haven’t heard of him. That’s because he doesn’t record under his own name, but under a series of pseudonyms — his latest, and most well known, is Bonnie “Prince” Billy. Oldham sings mostly sad songs, with a truly tragic song [...]
‘Route 66′: A Country-Crisscrossing Series Comes To Home Video
When you’ve seen a lot of movies where Toronto plays the part of New York, you come to appreciate location shooting. And on today’s All Things Considered, you’ll hear from the star of one of television’s more ambitious series when it comes to location shooting: Route 66, which followed two guys around the country in [...]
Cannes Diary: Ticket Tactics, Plus A Surprise Great Performance
A strong competition lineup has kept audiences eager inside the halls of the Palais de Festival du Cinema, but if you want to see true movie love in action, look at the crowds just outside Cannes theater entrances. This is where impeccably dressed young people hold up handmade signs for hours on end, asking or [...]
The End Is Near, And It’s No Walk ‘On The Beach’
Myla Goldberg’s books include The False Friend and Bee Season. Growing up, I had pretty much the same interests as any other early 80′s kid: I loved the Muppets and Schoolhouse Rock and I was obsessed with mutually assured nuclear destruction. In those Cold War days, apocalypse was in the air, from Sting crooning that [...]
‘February House’: When Musicals Whisper Rather Than Shout
I’ll always love big musicals. Shows like Hairspray and Anything Goes just want to make me happy, and if they don’t change my life, then so what? There are worse things than smiling for two hours while 35 hotties nail a synchronized tap number on the prow of a boat. But sometimes, I love a [...]
Teenage Tales: Sneaking Looks In Sexy Books
Emily Danforth is the author of The Miseducation of Cameron Post. I was at a garage sale with my grandmother when I found a paperback copy of Rita Mae Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle. I was, without much enthusiasm, rummaging through a pile of books. And then I turned over a small paperback. There, on the back, [...]
A Wes Anderson ‘Kingdom’ Full Of Beautiful Imagery
Many people are rapturous over the work of Wes Anderson, and for them, I expect, Moonrise Kingdom will be nirvana. The frames are quasi-symmetrical: a strong center, often human, with misaligned objects on each side suggesting a universe that’s slightly out of balance, like a series of discombobulated dollhouses. The movie is a Platonic romance [...]
Let’s Rush To Judgment: Baz Luhrmann’s ‘The Great Gatsby’ In 3-D
This week, we got our first look at the trailer for The Great Gatsby, the Baz Luhrmann 3-D extravaganza starring Tobey Maguire as Nick, Carey Mulligan as Daisy, and Leonardo DiCaprio as … well, you know. It will come out at Christmas, so that gives us more than six months to make semi-informed predictions about [...]
Pop Culture Happy Hour: On Endings And Road Trips
On this week’s show, we start with endings — because we’re ironic that way. Various shows have ended this spring, and we thought it was a good time to talk about how you wrap up a TV show, a book series, or whatever needs closure. The “visceral need for narrative closure”? We’re on it. Whether [...]
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