newcritics

Hear Music, the record label owned by Starbucks has recently announced that Joni Mitchell will release her newly recorded album Shine in September of this year following in the footsteps of Paul McCartney. This has come as a shocking disappointment to some of her fans. Not this one.
Let’s face it. We boomers are [...]

In the past twenty years or so the last of the great twentieth century writers passed away: Samuel Beckett, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Jorge Luis Borges. They haven’t been replaced, and they won’t be replaced.
Now the last of the great masters of cinema is gone. There are still some fine movie makers around, but I don’t [...]

For a generation whose childhood was shaped by Hollywood movies, he opened the door to a new world of film as art. In the years after World War II, Bergman taught us how to think and feel and see in a new way.
He was an artist of images, but ideas were always there. All the [...]

Saw The Simpsons Movie with my son over the weekend, and though we both enjoyed it, this isn’t the best Simpsons effort to date. There are a lot of truly funny and clever bits, inescapable when the likes of George Meyer, John Swartzwelder, Ian Maxtone-Graham, and Jon Vitti are contributing. But as a film, it [...]

D’oh? No. The Shamus has a tip for you: Forget that big-screen version of The Simpsons. A genuine comic marvel hits the DVD shelves on Tuesday: Popeye The Sailor: 1933-1938, Vol. 1.
For anybody remotely interested in animation and film history, this is news of the highest order. For years, fans have traded crappy VHS versions [...]

Yesterday I took a day off work to see Sweet Smell of Success (1957), one of my all-time favorite movies. Starring Burt Lancaster as the virulent newspaper columnist J.J. Hunsecker and Tony Curtis as the lapdog press agent Sidney Falco, the film famously bombed at the box office but is now generally considered a [...]

Well, Sarah Michelle Gellar’s back on TV with Phil Leotardo’s new Lifetime series, Touched By a Zombie. Premiering tonight at 8:00 EDT (with repeats at 9:00, 11:00, 1:00 AM, 3 AM, etc.), Gellar plays hardbitten veteran Philadelphia homicide detective Grace Dumbrowski. Grace, we gather from the opening sequences, is a damned good cop even if [...]

Tonight is the second episode of what has already become something of a touchstone series this summer, AMC’s Mad Men. To be sure, what has drawn viewers and thoughtful critics - like our own M.A. Peel - is the pure style of the thing. Matthew Weiner’s vision comes as an onslaught of slim-cut suits, deep [...]

I like Alan Sepinwall’s take on Saving Grace very much: ”Is the world ready for an R-rated drama about angels? For a gritty crime drama that’s one part NYPD Blue for every part Touched by an Angel? Since the show in question, TNT’s new Saving Grace, stars an acting force of nature, I guess we [...]

I do not usually like movies that feature the life of “real”people as they either contain more fiction than truth or they portray sinners as saints,however I loved La Vie en Rose,the life of the French singer Edith Piaf.
I don’t know how accurate the picture is but it does seem to follow the story that [...]

So I’m reading the Shamus’s perfectly nice recent article in these parts about that perfectly nice artist Stevie Wonder and I had the awful urge to leave a comment, but after for once thinking it over, I desisted. So now I’m writing this instead.
Because I have to admit I fucking hate Stevie Wonder. No, [...]

I have never put much stock in the Emmy Awards, mostly because they never reflect actual talent on television. Two and a Half Men? Really? Boston Legal? These are shining examples of tv at its best? And it’s not like the people choosing haven’t seen shows like Battlestar Galactica, because [...]

The holy trinity of modern music, according to Mrs. Shamus, is Johnny Cash, Al Green and Stevie Wonder. But the Mrs. and I have always disagreed on which Stevie Wonder. I prefer the ’60s singles and the “Innervisions” album. She is a hardcore “Songs In The Key of Life” fan. I’ve always [...]

I can’t remember the first time I saw Hairspray. I thought the first time I saw it was in 1981 when I was living in Boston. It was a terribly hot day in the middle of August and my friend Audrey and I (Audrey is a total blast from the past who I [...]

Ian McEwan is a brilliant writer. I have enjoyed so many of his books. Funny enough, I never got through Atonement but after reading On Chesil Beach, I feel inclined to try again.
On Chesil Beach is a small novel. A five part book that follows the lives of 2 characters who marry [...]

My friend recommended I read the book Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. So, I bought it and read it. I am in the reading groove right now. This book is sticking with me.
The book is a year long self discovery of Gilbert’s. She finds herself at 31 living the [...]

In the beginning, there were men. Actual men, in a litany that includes N.W. Ayer, J. Walter Thompson, David Ogilvy, Leo Burnett, John Orr Young & Raymond Rubicam, Mac Dane, Ned Doyle, & William Bernbach. As individuals they created an industry that is the epicenter of the American economy: advertising. Many of the [...]

© George Zimbel - UN Plaza taxi in the rain, 1955
In the 1950s, we began to see the world differently. A new generation of photographers was transforming frozen posed pictures into available-light images of people and places as they really were.
Those golden days of black-and-white photography are recalled in a new web site by one [...]

Ryan Adams is perilously close to becoming the Lindsay Lohan of rock: a precocious talent, a prolific (but spotty) resume, a public burnout.
It doesn’t help that Adams, and once and future manager John Silva, are hyping Easy Tiger–Ryan’s nineth and newest album–as the North Carolina native’s “clean and sober” record complete with the artist reminiscing [...]

Shrunken Heads
Ian Hunter
May 2007
If you still believe that George Bush and his buddies are on the right track and you have the entire Journey catalog on your iPod, you’ll hate this record. If, however, for the last 5 years your emotional state has been on a wheel that rolls from outrage to disbelief to [...]

Here’s something that has lifted my spirits — “The Ronnie Horror Show” from the December 12, 1980 edition of Fridays, the old ABC late night comedy show that remains one of my favorites. I haven’t seen this since it originally aired, and it only aired once, due to the protests of The Rocky Horror Picture [...]

Yeah my baby called me up said I done made her mad
she’s takin’ me off for everything that I had
ran out of town and now she’s come back
got Van Halen wailin’ on the stereo eight track
watch out baby that’s what I said
there’s a red light, road block, bridge out ahead
- Georgia Satellites - Red Light
My [...]

Today, July 16, marks the 100th anniversary of Barbara Stanwyck’s birth. There was a time when the former Ruby Stevens of Brooklyn was familiar mostly as a white-haired matriarch on television series like The Big Valley, The Colbys or The Thorn Birds. Thank god those days seem to be fading, and now Stanwyck’s movie career [...]

The Mint Theatre is committed to unearthing neglected and forgotten plays and reclaiming them for current times. It has found a real treasure in The Return of the Prodigal, a play written in 1905 by the English playwright St. John Hankin. [As all Anglophiles know this is pronounced Sinjun Hankin!!]
In the play, the prodigal son [...]

When I got there, the Bronx had already burned. In the mid-80s, I was a reporter for The Riverdale Press covering Bronx politics. The borough was still reeling from the abandonment of the previous decade, and a covey of politicians had its hands out for Federal rebuilding dollars. The Bronx was open for business, but [...]

Cameron Crowe turns 50 today. I think he’s generally underrated as an American filmmaker. He makes old-fashioned Hollywood movies with new-generation Hollywood stars, full of witty lines and endearing characters. Some complain about the dream-like quality of his women, but I see it as a gentle man’s nod to an earlier era. Some see the [...]

Ladies and gentlemen, Johnny Thunders & the Heartbreakers. Just because it’s great, because it’s Wednesday, because Johnny’s still dead, because Max’s is a faint memory, and because there’s a lightning storm sweeping across Manhattan. And it’s not the Grateful Dead. Comment away.

The key line in The Candidate is supposed to be the final one in which Bill McKay (Robert Redford), having just beaten the incumbent to become the new Senator from California, turns to his manager, the wily Lucas (Peter Boyle) and says, “What do we do now?” But for me, the key line comes a [...]

The essay simply entitled “July 8, 1822″ in Christopher Morley’s The Powder of Sympathy caught my eye because I would be returning from vacation on July 8, 2007. When I realized it was about Italy, I was more intrigued, since that was my destination.
And so I read:
“It is to-day a hundred years since that sultry [...]

While Michael Moore’s latest documentary, Sicko may not receive nearly the attention that his last film, Fahrenheit 9/11 did, I think that Moore’s scathing critique of the health-care industry deserves wider attention, if only because it challenges the way that our current health-care system, with its incessant ads for drug companies and minimal hospital stays, [...]

The surprising new Wilco album, Sky Blue Sky, came out a couple of months ago. The band uses new media to brilliantly create buzz and sell tickets, in this case it had been streaming the album for windows of time on its website. I say “surprising,” because the relaxed album, at the surface [...]

We need to talk about Flight of the Conchords. Why? Because it’s a gazillion little bits of hilarious goodness stitched together with golden strands of awesomeness, all wrapped up in a big bow of brilliance and topped with a cherry of jocose absurdity. I mean, if that’s not worth talking about, what [...]

Sebastian Faulks has made a name for himself in the UK as a best-selling writer of historical sagas (Birdsong, Charlotte Gray). But his reputation is mixed: He doesn’t have the cachet of an Ian McEwen, Julian Barnes, or Martin Amis, and some critics sniff that his work verges toward sentimentality, or worse: his Charlotte Gray [...]

Gas (1940) oil, 66.7 x 102.2 cm
The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Mrs. Simon Guggenheim Fund.
Widely seen to display a sort of inherent “American character,” the work of Edward Hopper seems damn close (perhaps damningly close) to earning him a title along the lines of America’s Painter. He’s popular enough now to give Norman [...]

Cluck ‘Til October by Devilshampoo.
Cymbals hit with ball peen hammers mesh with a bullet-riddled saxophone and a trio of dented fuzz guitars to create an unsettling wave of sound that can send chimps into murderous rages. Lead singer Lamont Means brings some texture to the mix, when he isn’t trying to swallow the mike or [...]