HBO’s critical hit miniseries John Adams made out big at the Emmy announcement this morning with 23 nominations. Twenty-three! God bless America! Although HBO was also recognized for Entourage and Curb Your Enthusiasm, The Wire, the series that has us wired, was totally snubbed!
AMC’s Mad Men, where ad men still had their Read More
MONDAY
Start fresh! That’s what ABC is begging its viewers to do tonight with Samantha Who? (9:30 p.m.). Its rookie run had been going swimmingly until the writers strike. Starring Christina Applegate and Melissa McCarthy (Sookie from the Gilmore Girls), the show returns in the midst of a heated battle for Monday nights.
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All kinds of people are watching HBO’s seven-part miniseries John Adams, which airs its fifth installment, “Unite or Die,” on Sunday night at 9 p.m. Some are HBO loyalists, who will try anything the network puts on the table at least once (even John From Cincinnati, the network’s most glorious failure). Others are people like Read More
A new genetic study raises the tantalizing possibility that Thomas Jefferson may have had Jewish ancestry.
—Newsweek (3/12/07)
The happiest moments of my life have been the few which I have passed at home in the bosom of my family, one being an occasion that occurred on Monday past. Misfortune had befallen cousin Mendel who, Read More
Paul McGuigan’s Lucky Number Slevin, from a screenplay by Jason Smilovic, masterfully manages to materialize as a fast-talking play on words, plots and fatally mistaken identities, with acknowledged debts to Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959) and the James Bond series, and an unacknowledged debt to the convulsively trick-and-corpse-laden cinema of Quentin Tarantino. The point Read More
Opera, the most multilayered art form, loves war for its multiplicity of passions. Opera also fears war—or at least the direct depiction of it onstage. Most opera composers have sensibly realized that the fury of battle is better conveyed by the sound of clashing instruments than by the spectacle of extras charging at one Read More
John Adams: Party of One, by James Grant. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 544 pages, $30.
Any biography of John Adams that works anxiety, insecurity, worry and dread into its first paragraph is off on the right track. A host of superlatives attach themselves to our first ambassador to Great Britain and second President, Read More
At a little past 9 p.m. on Nov. 20, Dave Chappelle arrived unannounced at the Comedy Cellar in Greenwich Village. The audience, packed into the small red-brick room and just starting in on their two-drink minimum, was delighted.
Mr. Chappelle lit a cigarette. “Fuck the law-I’m a rebel!” he proclaimed after taking the stage. “I Read More
“Location, location, location”-the iron rule of the real-estate racket-has become the mantra of the city’s classical-music institutions. The New York City Opera, fed up with its second-class citizenship at the State Theater at Lincoln Center, wants a place of its own at Ground Zero. The New York Philharmonic plans to move its whole kit-and-caboodle out Read More
In the age of reality TV, can reality opera be far behind? Penny Woolcock, a British filmmaker, has adapted for the screen John Adams’ The Death of Klinghoffer , an opera whose subject-Islamic terrorism-couldn’t be more “reality.” I recently saw the film at the Walter Reade Theater, where it was shown for one night as Read More
