Sam Mendes’ Jarhead, from a screenplay by William Broyles Jr., based on the book by Anthony Swofford, begins with a U.S. Marine Corps basic-training sequence reminiscent of Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987), though without a character as profanely hilarious as Gunnery Sergeant Hartman (played by former real-life drill instructor R. Lee Ermey), with his Read More
“What does tonight mean to me? Terror! A lot of fear!” said David Benioff, the screenwriter of Troy, on the red carpet of the film’s premiere. “But I had a couple of drinks before I got here, so I’m feeling a little bit better.” On May 10, he joined the film’s stars, Brad Pitt, Eric Read More
Turning Homer’s Iliad into an action-epic summer-movie blockbuster that is literate and commercial has got to be a job for either a genius or a fool, but Wolfgang Petersen-the director who has guided everything from Clint Eastwood to a German submarine to box-office glory-answers to both labels. Despite the fact that the self-anointed Greek gods Read More
It happens in the best of families: Someone gets mad and,
before you know it, heads are blown off and body parts are landing in the tea
cups. With the recent disaster at the royal palace in Nepal, the mysterious
East has gotten a little less mysterious, suddenly more like Weehawken, Boise
or Scarsdale. According Read More
I saw a performance of Troilus and Cressida the other evening, a Shakespeare play I had never seen before. In it, the army of Greeks camped outside the walls of Troy is fraying at the edges with envy, boredom, power struggles (think Israeli politics). Achilles, lying in his tent, has temporarily recused himself from battle. Read More
