Andrew Cuomo’s schedule has probably felt like a three-ring circus lately, with major bills on rent regulation, property tax caps, university tuition, and, of course, same-sex marriage hitting the floor of the Senate and Assembly this week. But now the circus metaphor is getting … literal. Read More
Somebody should show The Best and the Brightest on a double bill with The Perfect Host just to see how many gullible people are smart enough to demand their money back in the least amount of time. Read More
This week, I saw one good movie and two unspeakable piles of garbage. From where I sit, that’s a pretty fair average for the summer. And I didn’t even see the one about Jim Carrey and the penguins.
The one to catch is A Better Life, an intelligent, heartfelt study of the Olympian daily struggles of an honest, hard-working single father who also happens to be an illegal immigrant, toiling as a Mexican gardener in Los Angeles, while doing everything he can to keep his head above water and protect his 14-year-old son from the toxic environment of the ghettos in East L.A. Read More
Since early June, we’ve been forced to resign ourselves to the inconvenient truth that New York is now, basically, the Midwest as far as the weather is concerned. Long days of oppressive, unrelenting heat (the kind that would wilt corn crops, but somehow does nothing to subdue the brunch crowds at Sarabeth’s) followed by sheets Read More
The Best and the Brightest should be called The Worst and the Dumbest. Written on the lid of a toilet seat and directed in a coma by a first-time hack named Josh Shelov, this is the kind of crap that proves the movie world is overpopulated with amateurs who call themselves producers, always ready with a fast buck to squeeze their names into the opening credits of gibberish in order to establish an entry on the Internet Movie Data Base. Read More
We thought we had seen the last leg of the Sarah Palin Not-Ready-For-Prime-Time Tour when she took off across the Eastern seaboard by bus last month, but it gets worse. On Friday the state of Alaska finally released (only three short years after being asked) tens of thousands of the former governor’s emails. While disappointingly Read More
As summer garbage goes, The Green Lantern can’t go fast enough. Even in the brainless world of cinematic comic books gone bad, it’s as bad as it gets—a dumb, pointless, ugly, moronic and incomprehensible jumble of botched effects, technical blunders, and cluttered chaos. Oh yes. It is also—did I forget to mention?—boring.
In the sudden current rush of coming-of-age movies, there is nothing especially inventive or original about The Art of Getting By, but thanks to talented first-time writer-director Gavin Wiesen, it has more charm and wit than most of its J.D. Salinger-inspired cousins in the same genre, and is undeniably engaging. Read More
So, Monday was fun. Not only did we learn that embattled amateur underwear model and unwavering mayoral aspirant Anthony Weiner really did tweet that infamous crotch shot to Gennette Cordova, in addition to numerous other indiscretions conducted over social media (we couldn’t resist imagining how a certain member of–well, Mr. Weiner’s person–may have felt about the whole affair), but we also learned that Andrew Breitbart has no qualms about creating new photo ops for himself. Read More
According to the New Testament, wars, famine, pestilence and lawlessness are all signs of impending apocalypse. Other warnings of Armageddon include fire and brimstone, the mark of the beast and Ben Affleck in a NASA suit. But Brooklyn blogger Allison Pennell noticed an even more troubling sign when she looked at the 2010 census results: Read More
