Real Journalism written by people
Let’s talk about some recent movies! I’ll start: Confess, Fletch. It’s pretty fun, a decades-in-the-making reboot of Chevy Chase’s 1980s comedy-mystery franchise based on Gregory McDonald’s series of novels, with Jon Hamm in the role as investigative reporter-turned-amateur-gumshoe I.M. Fletcher. It’s a solid effort from director and co-writer Greg Mottola, albeit a bit too shaggy and padded out to meet […]
When was the last time you thought about Elvis Presley? When did you last think about breathing? Elvis is everywhere and nowhere — in music and marriage, camp and cliché, a singular entity who inspired countless imitators and reshaped nearly every facet of American life. Forty-five years after his death, his endurance is something of a paradox — more complicated […]
John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, which turned 60 this year, is undeniably a classic. Pairing John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart for the first time, it’s the Western that introduced Duke’s “Pilgrim” into the Hollywood firmament and gave the world the irresistible line, spoken by a newspaper editor, “When the legend becomes a fact, print the legend.” And, […]
The opening credit sequence is now a kind of lost cinematic art. But there was a time when this overture, designed to ease viewers into a film’s world and tone, was ubiquitous. And even then, the first minutes of Alexander Mackendrick’s 1957 masterpiece Sweet Smell of Success pulsed with a rare energy and artistry. An overhead shot of Times Square […]
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one with the fewest Spider-Men, And that has made all the difference. Robert Frost wrote “The Road Not Taken” in 1915 as a reflection on self-determination, or maybe a goof on his walking buddy. But, c’mon, he’s clearly got the multiverse on his mind. Two roads, two choices, two […]
Is it too early to say there won’t be a 2022 Major League Baseball season? Because it sure feels like there won’t be one. If the current lockout, which has already claimed some of Spring Training, begins eating regular season games, which seems likely, who knows where things end — or how the shrinking fan base will react. But maybe […]
A strange Vice headline recently crossed my feeds: “Cult Classic ‘Fight Club’ Gets a Very Different Ending in China.” Thanks to Tencent Video, Fight Club, director David Fincher’s searing adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk’s novel, finally made it to China! Only took 22 years. Thing is, it also came with a new finale. If it’s been a while, a quick refresher: […]
In spring 1999, the world stared down a new century. It prepped for a Y2K computer meltdown, grappled with millennial paranoia, witnessed widening class and wealth gaps, and wrestled with culture rapidly moving online. Into this din came the Wachowskis’ The Matrix, its sexy leather-clad cyberpunk heroes kung-fu fighting and bullet dodging the Men in Black avatars of an evil […]
Art that endures is art that evolves, that speaks to us across time and experience, that fully reveals itself only when we mature into its sensibilities. As Anthony Lane wrote in 2012, “The Portrait of a Lady that I read in my late teens bears the scantest relation to The Portrait of a Lady that I read today.” A book […]
There’s a small group of filmmakers whose latest work gets me into a theater no questions asked. Wes Anderson is near the top of that list. Beginning with Rushmore (1998) straight through to Isle of Dogs (2018), even as the films went further and further into a meticulously curated twee formalism (parts of The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), for instance, […]
American journalism is on the ropes. The nation has lost one in four newspapers — 2,100 publications — since 2019. (That number has surely grown during the pandemic.) Half of what’s left is owned by vulture capitalists, private equity firms and hedge funds that have perverted local media ownership into cynical resource extraction. Newsrooms are gutted, and what’s left is […]
All of it was inconceivable — the scale, the carnage, the optics. To watch the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in real time, especially on television, was to thrash desperately for order as everything fell away. For many of us, that tenuous toehold was Hollywood. “This is like something out of a movie” was a natural first reaction. With more […]
Peter Nicks’ exceptional documentary Homeroom, which debuts on Hulu August 12, is the third film in a trilogy focused on the residents of Oakland, California, and their fraught relationship with public institutions. The first, The Waiting Room (2012), centered on health care, specifically Highland Hospital; The Force (2017) was concerned with policing. Homeroom tackles education — Nicks admits to being […]
