A Guide To An Insanity-Free, ‘Practical Wedding’
When planning a wedding, couples must make scores of important decisions — from whom to invite to how to pay for it. Even the hardiest of partners can feel a little lost. Author Meg Keene’s new book focuses on the meaning of marriage, at least as much as flowers and cake. [Copyright 2012 National Public [...]
Woody Allen: Blending Real Life With Fiction
This interview was originally broadcast on June 15, 2009. For someone who has spent the majority of his career making comedies, Woody Allen sees the world — and his lifelong profession — through a surprisingly dark lens. “Life is a terrible trial and very harsh and very full of suffering … [Film] is a different [...]
Pop Culture Happy Hour: Oscar Nominations And Liking What’s Popular
The Oscar nominations are like a small group of mosquitoes in your bedroom — you may want to ignore them, but you can’t. (We talked about how the Best Picture nominees were determined, but if you want a fuller explanation, here is one.) We talked about how Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close managed to be [...]
HBO’s ‘Luck’: A Winning TV Show, Set At The Track
It isn’t a long shot that David Milch’s newest series for HBO, called Luck, will be on par with his HBO series Deadwood. It’s a sure thing. HBO sent out all nine episodes of the show’s first season for preview, so there’s no guesswork here. The racetrack is at the center of Luck, with every [...]
For ‘Black Nerds Everywhere,’ Two Comedy Heroes
Comics Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele have known each other for years. They were both in the cast of MadTV. Now they’re starting their own sketch-comedy series, due to launch on Comedy Central Jan. 31. You can learn a lot about what makes them tick in a sketch that features Peele impersonating President Obama, while [...]
‘Birmingham’: A Family Tale In The Civil Rights Era
Welcome to the fourth installment of NPR’s Backseat Book Club, where we select a book for young readers — and invite them to read along with us and share their thoughts and questions with the author. Our selection for January — The Watsons Go to Birmingham – 1963 by Christopher Paul Curtis — describes the [...]
February Book Picks: ‘Shooting Kabul’ And ‘The Hundred Dresses’
America is full of families who originally moved to the country from somewhere else, and our next reading adventure for NPR’s Backseat Book Club explores this theme in two books. These books, published more than 60 years apart, both explore what it’s like to try to create a new home while still yearning for the [...]
A ‘Man On A Ledge,’ With No Room For A Stumble
It’s an arresting image, Sam Worthington out on that 40th-story ledge. He’s a fairly tough-looking guy, after all, and we know him best as the tooth-gritting blockbuster hero of Avatar and Clash of the Titans, so it’s head-spinning to see the man’s beefy figure as a speck hovering so precariously close to New York’s infinite [...]
In Broadway’s ‘Wit,’ A Documentary Of Our Demise
In her dressing room at the Friedman Theatre, Sex and the City star Cynthia Nixon has a nightly ritual: She rubs Nivea cream all over her scalp to soothe the razor burns. Being completely bald is just one of the many demands of the character she plays in Wit — a brilliant college professor named [...]
It’s Man Vs. Beast, With Liam Neeson In The Lead
Pity the foolhardy wolf that gets in Liam Neeson’s way. At least, that’s the primary message in the trailer for the latest entry in this most curious period of the Oscar-nominee’s career, which finds him more often than not furrowing his brow in anger and then beating the source of his ire to a bloody [...]
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