‘Chico And Rita’ And All That Jazz
In the 11 years since the Oscars introduced an award for Best Animated Feature, the category has been dominated by children’s movies, often with computer-animated pandas, penguins and ogres at their center. This year’s a little different. Two of the animated films are subtitled, and one is definitely aimed at adults: the Spanish film Chico [...]
Historian Seeks Artifacts From Lincoln’s Last Days
Historian Noah Andre Trudeau is known for uncovering secrets of the Civil War. His previous books, Bloody Roads South and Gettysburg, have unveiled information about Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman’s march to the sea in 1864, and the legacy of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee. Now, in preparation for a book about a largely unexamined period [...]
Much Ado About Dickens: Why The Bicentennial Hype Matters
If you are a book lover with an unquenchable taste for kitschy Victoriana, good news: this week, the world has finally caught up with your interests. The occasion: the bicentennial of Charles Dickens’s birth on February 7, 2012. In the United Kingdom, the United States, and in countries around the globe, the event is being [...]
Scrappy ‘Girlchild’ Forms A Girl Scout Troop Of One
You’d think that, by now, the news that Americans are spoiling their children would be as attention-getting as the fabled headline, “dog bites man,” but, apparently, we never weary of hearing about how bad we’re doing as parents. Last year, it was the Tiger Mom; this year, a hot new book called Bringing Up Bebe, [...]
Thirty-Eight Cliches In ‘The Vow’ Trailer, Other Than Romantic Amnesia
This weekend marks the release of The Vow, which is not based on a Nicholas Sparks novel, despite having all the gauzy, drowsy look of a Sparks creation. Based on the real-life story of Kim and Krickitt Carpenter, The Vow tells the tale of a woman (Rachel McAdams) who loses part of her memory after [...]
The Incredible Shrinking Liz Lemon: From Woman To Little Girl
The very first time we ever saw 30 Rock’s Liz Lemon, she was standing in line at a hot dog cart when a man walked up, cut in line, and created chaos. Her response: She bought all the hot dogs on the cart and distributed them to the people who had waited in line — [...]
A Mom And A Baby Find Out What’s Really Rural In California
Most moms probably don’t want their babies around pot growers, but San Francisco-based writer-photographer Lisa Hamilton is totally cool with it. In fact, her baby, Ada, is a little over a year old and has probably already seen more of California than most Californians. And that, to Hamilton, is a problem. For her, the basic [...]
Donald Hall: A Poet’s View ‘Out The Window’
Poet Donald Hall spends much of his time in his blue armchair, looking at the landscape out his window. The 83-year-old former poet laureate has lived for years on the same New Hampshire farm that his grandparents used to own, and still writes in the room he slept in as a child. In his recent [...]
Two Rowdy Talk Shows Showcase Vintage Humor
The two DVDs I want to talk about today are hilarious, but they aren’t sitcoms. They’re talk shows — well, one’s a talk show, and one’s a filmed seminar. But they’re both fascinating examples of a specific pop-culture moment frozen in time. And they’re something else as well: Both are highly entertaining real-time examples of [...]
‘Revolution 2.0′: How Social Media Toppled A Dictator
When thousands of Egyptians began to gather in Tahrir Square in preparation for the planned Jan. 25, 2011, uprising, then-President Hosni Mubarak’s beleaguered regime responded with familiar brutality and thuggery. And then, it made a tactical error: it clamped down on Facebook and Twitter. “The regime’s decision to block these two websites,” writes Internet activist [...]
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