By Ted Gushue 1/22/12 2:54pm

Sundance Film Festival

Bing Presents Comedy With Aziz Ansari And A Drake Performance At The Bing Bar - 2012 Park City

Turf Wars, Lil Jon And The Josh Hartnett Sundance Stink Eye

Day 2 of the Sundance Film Festival found The Observer snowbound in the extreme. We’re talking enough snow to give Mayor Bloomberg and the New York City transit system nightmares. Astronomic surcharges became the norm as Park City’s anemic livery force struggled to even make the most ludicrous time frames: ”Yeah I can have a guy up there in like 3 and a half hours?” deadpanned one audacious taxi dispatcher, who seemed to take pleasure in seeing so many city slickers squeal. Read More

By Ron Rosenbaum 8/30/04 12:00am

Age of Damaged Info Provides Bush-Hating Complicity Theory

1) The Post-Millennial Grassy Knoll

The four things that have made me laugh the most this summer were parodies of conspiracy theories and conspiracy theorists. Just a coincidence? I don’t think so. I think it indicates two things. First, conspiracy theory-apparently embedded in the collective unconscious of the culture like a smoldering information virus-has flared Read More

By Nicholas von Hoffman 7/12/04 12:00am

It’s a Dog’s Life For America’s Foes

The political psychotics were infused with new energy from the sparks given off at the 9/11 commission hearings. The stories about how George W. Bush was behind the destruction of the World Trade Center were themselves recirculated by the ardent nut cases who take nothing at face value. But then, these days you can mouth Read More

By Richard Brookhiser 7/01/02 12:00am

As Face of War Changes, Our Tactics Change, Too

What a difference a war makes. My only dealings with the Army War College in Carlisle, Pa. (the Army’s equivalent of a postgraduate institution), occurred three years ago, when I sat in on the taping of a seminar there, for a documentary that is finally being aired July 4. The colonels and lieutenant-colonels were discussing Read More

By Andrew Sarris 1/07/02 12:00am

Where Does Hollywood Go From Here?

I have been contributing in print to a yearly film canon since 1958, and my research extends back to 1915, leading me to the conclusion that bad movies outnumber good movies by a ridiculously wide and constant margin, which is the way of all the arts.

Fortunately, we tend to forget all the bad movies Read More

By Bruce Feirstein 12/10/01 12:00am

Diary of A Post-9/11 Script Doctor

I am writing this diary at 2:30 in the morning, on a film set somewhere north of Jacksonville, Fla. It’s a calm, clear, beautiful December night. And I’m standing with 200 members of the cast and crew, in the darkest corner of an abandoned U.S. military training camp that has been magically transformed into a Read More

By Richard Brookhiser 10/01/01 12:00am

A Deadly Struggle Whose Outcome Is Certain

As the flatbeds carry the wreckage up the West Side Highway, away to disposal, so a few already-wrecked ideas of the last two weeks require attention.

The pacifists are a beleaguered minority now, and rightly so. But their case has a history and a certain consistency, and when the next bloodlettings occur they may rise Read More

By Terry Golway 6/11/01 12:00am

A Lost Victory in the Pacific

This newspaper appears on newsstands on June 6; like Dec. 7,

it is a date that some of us assume every fresh-faced school child associates

with the war from which there is no escape. Even if the schools believe that

this kind of knowledge is not helpful in the self-esteem-building process, the

kids could hardly Read More

By Andrew Sarris 6/11/01 12:00am

Shrek and Dreck? Well, Not Quite

I spent Memorial Day weekend catching up on Shrek (directed by Andrew Adamson and

Vicky Jenson, from a screenplay by Ted Elliott, Terry Russio, Joe Stillman and

Roger S. H. Schulman, based on the book by William Steig), and Pearl Harbor (directed by Michael Bay,

from a screenplay by Randall Wallace). Shrek

has had nothing Read More