Portrait of the Enemy: Eastwood's Humanizing Letters

Clint Eastwood’s Letters from Iwo Jima has been made from a screenplay by Japanese-American first-timer Iris Yamashita, which was based on Tsuyoko Yoshida’s Picture Letters from Commander in Chief Tadamichi Kuribayashi, and the story by Ms. Yamashita and Paul Haggis. The “picture letters” in question are shown being dug up at the beginning and end Read More

The Last Gasp of the 1950′s, In Trashy, Sexy Cinemascope

Thanks to the auteur theory, instead of a lot of antiquated factory product and the studio P. and L. of yesteryear, we have the greats-Ford, Hawks, Lubitsch, Sturges, Cukor, Wyler, Lang, Wilder, Fuller, Hitchcock (and this is just a quick Monday-morning skim off the top of one’s head). And then we have near-greats, like Michael Read More

The Best Films of 2002, And a Few Honorable Mentions

As Captain Renault famously exclaims to Rick in Casablanca (1942 or 1943) upon “discovering” that gambling was going on in Rick’s Place, I was “shocked! shocked!” to find myself falsely represented in recent movie ads as having named both Adaptation and Talk to Her as Best Picture of the Year. In my column of Dec. Read More

We’ll Always Have Philadelphia

Everybody complains about the movies these days. They’re awful, they make no sense, there are no characters on the screen anymore that bear even a passing resemblance to actual living, thinking, breathing, adult human beings. Hollywood films are trite, clichéd, insulting, too loud, too long, too vulgar or just plain dumb.

And almost everybody inside Read More

It’s Our Kind of Place: A Swinging Neo-Moroccan

It was after 11 P.M. when we showed up at L’Orange Bleue, a new Moroccan restaurant that recently opened on a dark corner of Crosby and Broome streets. But there was a knot of people hanging around the bar at the front; and the dining room, which has lacquered burnt-orange walls with cobalt blue accents Read More