Wednesday, September 7
Reever Madness
They’re making another Superman flick with some British gent—don’t they know that for screen magnetism as well as real-life heroism, the buck stopped with Christopher Reeve? The beloved screen icon, who became an advocate for the paralyzed after a horseback-riding accident, is remembered at the Christopher & Dana Reeve Read More
Snark: It’s Mean,
It’s Personal, and
It’s Ruining Our Conversation
By David Denby
Simon & Schuster, 128 pages, $15.95
If David Denby—New Yorker movie critic, occasional cultural commentator, erstwhile online pornography addict—hoped to inoculate himself against snark by parsing it for over 100 pages, well … oh, boy.
This isn’t intended meanly or personally Read More
Critics are falling all over themselves to laud Gus Van Sant’s Milk. Some seem to love one scene in particular:
A.O. Scott, The New York Times:
One of the first scenes in ‘Milk’ is of a pick-up in a New York subway station. It’s 1970, and an insurance executive in a suit Read More
On the eve of Thanksgiving, The New York Times‘ Glenn Collins sat down with Gael Greene, New York Magazine’s dismissed "Insatiable Critic."
Mr. Collins called Ms. Greene, "The priestess of radicchio, beurre blanc and arugula," but also noted that the critic had "become an attenuating natural resource at New York since giving up Read More
Add another trend piece to the ever-growing ‘Internet Porn Addiction Ruins Relationships’ canon. This month, Details‘ Em & Lo offer Jerking Off Is the New Infidelity (subhed: "Is your secret habit causing your marriage to slip through your fingers?"), in which we learn that, "While some guys store everyday images and encounters to fuel Read More
Introducing an occasional scorecard for New York’s most dynamic gossip columnist.
Today’s Post gives Cindy Adams a much-deserved page-one teaser: “WTC: Why I hate this lousy movie.”
Inside, on page 14, Cindy–self-nominated as “New York’s watchdog” (motion seconded! And carried!)–touches all the critical bases:
* Filmgoing experience? “Slow-moving and formulaic.”
* Commercial prospects? Read More
“The slender Irish actor Jonathan Rhys Meyers (from “Bend It Like Beckham”) has widely spaced blue eyes, slightly flaring nostrils, and a flattened upper lip—he can look pensive or brutally calculating at will.
[...]
“Scarlett Johansson wears her blond hair up, which brings out the oval shape of her face and the soft beauty of Read More
Read all about it! New York’s comfortably employed, middle-aged writers start trend of publishing queasy, painful-to-read, subtextually hostile ” way too much information” scenes from their own lives. Younger writers who read this prose are reported to spend subsequent days in blue funk, fearing that their own lives will turn out the same way.
Katha Read More
DENBY: ‘IT’S DISASTROUS’
Surreal Season of Discontent As Highbrows Take Hit
This winter has been even gloomier than usual for the city’s intellectual class. Let’s start with the travails of the rising generation: the almost comically grim saga of the 27 Lingua Franca freelancers who are being sued for money they were paid Read More
American Sucker , by David Denby. Little, Brown, 337 pages, $24.95.
Now that the shell shock has worn off and we’re unhappily accustomed to the nonstop barrage of first-person testimony-autobiography these days being the default mode for anybody who feels the itch to write-the appearance of yet another disappointing memoir only triggers a Read More
