With James Cameron's Avatar shouldering aside George Lucas's original Star Wars and Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight for second place on the all time movie box office rankings (behind only Cameron's own Titanic), it's a good time to note one of the odder twists in the evolution of popular film ...
You might think that James Cameron, the man who wrote and directed the two biggest global box office blockbusters in history, Titanic and technologically groundbreaking Avatar, hardly needs defending. Yet, amidst all the denunciations of Avatar by neoconservative such as John Podhoretz and David ...
Until the Underpants Bomber tried to blow up Flight 253 over Detroit, the frontrunner for the Best Picture Oscar was widely assumed to be Up in the Air. Indeed, before the Christmas Day incident reminded everybody of how much they hate business travel, the dramedy"in which George Clooney plays ...
After The Dark Knight failed to earn a Best Picture Oscar nomination, the Academy expanded the number of nominees for its top honor from five to ten. With luck, these improved odds will prod popcorn movies to aim a little higher and license Oscar-bait films to let themselves be a little more ...
The sharply contrasting careers of two Slavic-American artists who both died in 1987, the droll commercial illustrator Andy Warhol and the titanic sculptor Stanislaw Szukalski, illustrate much about how culture has changed over the last century. For over 40 years, Warhol (1928-1987) has been ...
Last Sunday evening, while I was watching the final minutes of the now famous Indianapolis Colts - New England Patriots football game, I experienced a moment of middle-aged serenity. I realized that I didn"t actually need to have an opinion on perhaps the leading topic of office water cooler ...
Can I milk another column out of Mad Men? Why not? Matthew Weiner's show about Madison Avenue in the early 1960s is so meticulously detailed that it's worth using it as a spur to consider what has and hasn"t changed in the Zeitgeist over the last half century. "¢ The overall impression ...
Mad Men, the upscale drama about an early 1960s Madison Avenue advertising agency, is a sort of Brideshead Revisited for heterosexual American grown-ups. For Baby Boomers, it's hard to watch Mad Men without enviously exclaiming: Our parents had it better! Like the eleven-hour 1981 British ...
The cable period drama Mad Men attempts to answer the question: What would have Cary Grant's stylish advertising executive in Hitchcock's 1959 barnburner North by Northwest gotten up to if"instead of getting chased by spies all the way to Abraham Lincoln's nose on Mt. Rushmore"he and his ...
Everybody complains about how dumbed-down movies have gotten. Here, for example, are representative quotes from A.O. Scott of the New York Times in "Spoon-Fed Cinema" bemoaning the state of movies c. 2009: "infantile," "male immaturity," and "a program of mass ...
