Film/TV
682 results
Page 61
"Saturday Night Fever,' revisited
Should you be dancin'? Saturday Night Fever, revisited
Saturday Night Fever evokes a brief moment in pop culture history: the sexual freedom between the dawn of the Pill and the advent of AIDS. To those of us born to that particular slice of the Baby Boom, this gritty 1977 movie and its buoyant songs often strike a contradictory note.
Articles
8 minute read
Julia Roberts and "Eat, Pray, Love'
Julia Roberts confronts mature womanhood
Eat Pray Love is a forgettable work of escapist fantasy. But its star, Julia Roberts, is evolving in the opposite direction: from bimbo to mature woman with real brains and real-life problems.
Articles
4 minute read
Dennis Tafoya's "Wolves of Fairmount Park'
Crime and redemption, Philadelphia-style
Philadelphian Dennis Tafoya's second crime novel is a twisting journey into the gray, gritty urban demimonde of dope.
Articles
4 minute read
"Matterhorn,' a Vietnam novel by Karl Marlantes
A not-so-distant mirror
For those of us who lived through the Vietnam War, this powerful and compelling novel triggers haunting memories.
Articles
1 minute read
Electronic books vs. ink on paper
New adventures in reading: My first e-book experiment
Can a plastic rectangle produce the same habit-forming bliss as several hundred pages bound between two hard covers? My first experiment with e-books suggests that what really matters is The Word, not how it's conveyed.
Articles
5 minute read
Michael Douglas as the 'Solitary Man'
The comedown kid
Sometimes it takes a bad film to draw out an extraordinary performance. So it is when Michael Douglas plays Ben Kalmen in Solitary Man, another in his gallery of self-destructive heroes. Kirk should be proud of Michael's work here.
Articles
5 minute read
Stieg Larsson's not-so-radical thrillers (2nd comment)
The girl who captured 35 million readers: Stieg Larsson's debt to Tarzan
The novelist Stieg Larsson may have been a radical journalist, but his view of Swedish society doesn't look that radical to a reader familiar with the thriller genre.
Articles
5 minute read
John Waters and his "Role Models'
Beyond Pink Flamingoes
The renegade filmmaker John Waters's latest book is a paean to reading as a revolutionary act. His recent appearance at the Free Library was tame by comparison.
Articles
5 minute read
"Sex and the City 2'
No sex, no city: Why young mothers love this film
This movie-going mom thinks critics should stop whining about Sex and the City 2. I got my mojo boost from seeing four of modern America's sexiest women falling into the patterns of matrimony and parenthood— my patterns.
Articles
4 minute read
Ben Yagoda's "Memoir: A History'
Everybody's doing it: On remembering your pasts
From George W. Bush to Facebook to Twitter, these days everyone is writing a memoir of some sort. Ben Yagoda catalogues the phenomenon from ancient times to the rest. But he left me wondering: Do we understand each other any better as a consequence?
Articles
4 minute read