movies

Close.

Albert Nobbs is Ms. Butler

Albert Nobbs, a lumbering saga about the pitfalls of a woman posing as a man to hold down employment as a butler in 19th-century Dublin, opened for one week in December to qualify for Oscar nominations. It is now expanding to commercial marquees for public scrutiny. Thanks to a quirky performance by Glenn Close featuring enough prosthetics, wrinkles, painfully binding corsets and pinched diction to generate critical acclaim and give Meryl Streep a run for her money, attention must be paid. But not too much. As a period piece, Albert Nobbs is slower than Proust, and nothing of any consequence ever happens to write home about. In her bowler hat and high starched collars, Glenn Close looks like Conan O’Brien playing Oscar Wilde.

Awkwardly directed by Rodrigo Garcia (son of acclaimed novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez) from a novella by George Moore that was turned into a play Ms. Close performed off-Broadway 30 years ago, it’s a dull little fugue in a minor key Read More

Drink

A day when the drinks were on Mr. Joyce's tab.

Free Guinness on Bloomsday? Yes I Said Yes I Will Yes!

Fans of James Joyce — and fans of open bars — flocked to Ulysses Folk House yesterday to celebrate Bloomsday with traditional Irish food, pints of Guinness, plenty of Jameson,  Irish dancing, readings from Ulysses and piles of oyster shooters served, for some reason, through an ice luge with a Guinness logo.

Bloomsday has always Read More

Wall Street

Morning Roundup: No Luck for Ireland

  • Moody’s downgraded Ireland’s credit rating five notches and said more downgrades could come if the country didn’t figure out how to deal with all its debt. [WSJ]
  • If Ron Paul proceeds to hector the pants off Ben Bernanke in his new role as congressional Federal Reserve overseer, he’ll be following a long-established Read More

Wall Street

Morning Roundup: Return of the Golden Parachute

  • According to one powerful shareholder group, Wall Street firms still tie executive pay too closely with the pursuit of short-term profit and fail to penalize executives for thoroughly gumming up their companies. In fact, this situation has only gotten worse since 2007, which wasn’t exactly a banner year for corporate responsibility. [WSJ]
  • Read More

Wall Street

Morning Roundup: Probes for the Holidays

  • The Feds are wrapping up a three-year project aimed at cracking down on insider trading. Some of the biggest names in finance (Goldman Sachs, SAC, Janus) are being bandied about, as are the following phrases: Criminal and civil; three-year investigation; bankers; hedge funds; analysts. This should be a lot of fun to watch. Read More

Wall Street

Morning Roundup: Rattner the Attacker

  • As he fielded two lawsuits from New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo and settled his beef with the SEC yesterday, former car czar Steven Rattner also went on the offensive, suing his former buddies at private equity shop Quadrangle Group. [NYT]
  • Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke is still mad at China for Read More

Wall Street

Morning Roundup: SEC Takes a Poke at Citi

  • The Securities and Exchange Commission has subpoenaed some former Citigroup brokers as part of an investigation into the mega-sized, bailed-out bank’s handling of leveraged debt funds concentrated in municipal bonds and mortgage debt. [WSJ]
  • You know what’s still a big problem? European sovereign debt. Ireland is looking precarious, but let’s not forget Read More

Morning Roundup: Introducing the Lincoln Intercontinental

  • Ford CEO Alan Mulally said he thinks Lincoln cars should be sold worldwide. But first, the automaker will spend four or five years convincing Americans that the struggling luxury brand is still relevant. [WSJ]
  • Ireland is spending up to 40 billion euros to bail out two banks. The Irish government is seizing control Read More

sadDow Diary

Dow Diary: Down in the Dumps On Dreary Data

Dear Diary,

Well that was unpleasant.

I lost 76 points today, my worst performance in a while. Only four of my stocks went up.  And I was down pretty much all day. Lower at the open, tried to fight back to breakeven, then a late-afternoon nosedive to finish the session. Total bummer.

It didn’t help Read More