Reviews > Movies
Mission Impossible
Norman Mailer’s The Castle in the Forest was a novel about Hitler narrated by a demon, who writes: “Most well-educated people are ready to bridle at the notion of such an entity as the Devil…There need be no surprise, then, that the world has an impoverished understanding of Adolf Hitler’s personality.” I was… READ MORE >
Reviews > Movies
The Ugly Truth
When Caden Cotard wakes up, the first thing he does is look in a mirror. He sees a pudgy, middle-aged, balding, sad-sack of a human being. The rest of the movie will be like that: a merciless self-examination. Neil Gaiman, sci-fi and fantasy author, described most current literary fiction as “miserable people having small epiphanies of misery.”… READ MORE >
Reviews > Books
Burgeoning Beats
A legendary manuscript co-written by Beat Masters, Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs, has finally come to light as And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks. Written when both were unknown and unpublished, leading hardscrabble lives in wartime New York, the real-life story centers on the doomed relationship between Lucien Carr and… READ MORE >
Reviews > Movies
Blood Lust
Twilight begs the question, why do girls always go for vampires? Is it the Byronic good looks? Or perhaps because they’re given to lines like, “You don’t know how long I’ve waited for you,” and “You’re my own personal brand of heroin.” Bella, a junior in high school recently relocated from Arizona… READ MORE >
Reviews > Music
Mercy Knows My Name
There’s a pseudo-myth in rock music that drug-abusing artists lose their edge when they clean up their act. Their music, once forged in the crucible of angst and addiction, is softened and sanitized by sobriety. It’s a popular theory, especially among would-be rock stars without a label contract but with a dealer contact. To paraphrase… READ MORE >
Reviews > Movies
Guy Movie
Who or what is a RocknRolla? Someone born to be in a Guy Ritchie flick, that’s who. An amoral member of the criminal class doing bad things in stylish threads and an expensive pair of shades, spouting tough-lout talk like a Cockney at a Tarantino casting call. Ritchie’s first and best movies were Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels… READ MORE >
Reviews > Books
A Hipster’s Homily
Chuck Klosterman acquits himself well with his first novel, Downtown Owl. He’s better known as a wiseass essayist on movies, video games, heavy-metal music and pop culture miscellany for publications like Esquire, Spin, and The Guardian. An ominous news clipping prefaces Downtown Owl, reporting on a vicious blizzard that claimed the… READ MORE >
Reviews > Music
Man of Sorrow and Strife
If, in his early days, middle-class Minnesotan Bob Zimmerman playacted the persona of hobo troubador Bob Dylan, he has since evolved into the genuine article, an authentic Elder Statesman of American music. Dylan’s late-career flowering, which began with 1997’s death-haunted, Time Out of Mind (though 1989’s Oh Mercy had its… READ MORE >
Reviews > Movies
Don’t Call Me Junior
No one could accuse Oliver Stone of ducking controversy. But I don’t think anyone expected his new movie about the George Bush presidency, W., to be predictable and toothless, if intermittently amusing. In the era of the internet and insider confessionals, most of what appears on screen has already been widely circulated. What, Bush… READ MORE >
Reviews > Movies
Conservulous
A movie mocking Hollywood liberals is overdue, but a movie mocking Michael Moore is outdated. David Zucker, director of zany comedies like Airplane and Naked Gun, sets his satirical sights on a ripe target: the self-satisfaction of bleeding-heart Hollywood liberals (the kind who decry world poverty while collecting multi-million dollar paychecks).… READ MORE >
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