Based closely on the outstanding 1999 novel that won J.M. Coetzee the Nobel Prize in Literature, the new art house film Disgrace follows August's District 9 in portraying the ever-growing Afrikaner diaspora's dire view of black-ruled South Africa. ...
Watching Steven Soderbergh's comedy The Informant! (with Matt Damon as that guy back in the 1990s who squealed to the feds about how he fixed the price of lysine for Archer Daniels Midland) reminded me of Econ 101, where you learn about the glories ...
Having listened to country music on and (mostly) off since Johnny Cash's "A Boy Named Sue" four decades ago, I checked in on Billboard's Top 30 Country chart to see if anything was new. A possible advantage about not knowing much about what ...
Extract is the third live-action film written and directed by Mike Judge, creator of the hit animated TV series Beavis and Butt-head and King of the Hill (which will broadcast its final episode this coming Sunday after 13 seasons). Judge's first was ...
Are men to blame for the economic crash? That's become a popular theme in the press. For example, the BBC's business editor Robert Peston recently stated in "Why men are to blame for the crunch:" "I routinely characterise the credit ...
While watching Inglourious Basterds, I had time on my hands to ponder once again whether Quentin Tarantino's variegated gifts and inclinations would have made him even more suited for other careers. Reviewing Kill Bill: Vol. 2 back in 2004, I wrote, ...
Peter Jackson and Neill Blomkamp’s Malthusian fable of post-Apartheid Johannesburg. District 9, a violent science fiction movie set in a Johannesburg slum inhabited by 1.8 million feckless refugee space aliens, is the critical and commercial ...
The publicity machine is now gearing up for documentarian Ken Burns's twelve-hour extravaganza, The National Parks: America's Best Idea, which will run for six straight nights on PBS starting September 27. This being a Ken Burns series, the ...
I was trying to watch with my wife the DVD of He's Just Not That Into You, which is to romantic comedies what Watchmen is to superhero flicks: a confusing bundle of plotlines about the upscale romantic entanglements of what used to be called ...
Barack Obama, Henry Louis Gates Jr., and the African-American Master Class Countless pundits have debated whether the Henry Louis Gates Jr. brouhaha is about race or class. In truth, Barack Obama's maladroit but heartfelt interjection of his own ...
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince earned a record $394 million worldwide in its opening week, an extraordinary amount for a film based on the sixth (and penultimate) installment in J.K. Rowling's series of fantasy novels. The striking title ...
Every so often, an action hit comes out of nowhere"Mad Max, Terminator, Ricci v. DeStefano. Inevitably, we start hoping that the big budget follow-up can keep the same excitement going, just with huger explosions. A few times"Road Warrior, ...
