newcritics

Men talk more than women, eh?
Not in this house.
Your experience may vary.
Usual caveats about articles like this. They’re feature stories not science reporting. The writers aren’t interested in the studies and methodologies under discussion, only in the conclusions if they are controversial enough. The point is to stir up trouble, get people…talking, [...]

The heat is on. Tonight’s Project Runway promises to have the toughest challenge yet in all four seasons. Egos get ruffled, aesthetics are trampled and thrown out the window, polite veneers come off.
Join Claire and me as we track the exciting momentum and find the much sought after answers to the questions that have been [...]

There are so many marvelous things about Todd Haynes’ “I’m Not There.” How does it feel? The Shamus is still soaking it in. Thinking about it. Dreaming about it. Marveling anew at what Bob Dylan has given us over the years. It’s time for another Shamus List:
20 REASONS TO BE STUCK INSIDE A MULTIPLEX WITH [...]

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This weekend, a fine actor named Frank Langella is being seen in a new film, Starting Out in the Evening, which is getting good reviews in the New York Times, Rolling Stone and points between.
In it, Langella plays a writer and was directed by Andrew Wagner, a college classmate of one of my sons. Thirty [...]

Todd Haynes wheeling, kaleidoscopic Bob Dylan biopic, I’m Not There, is so dazzlingly fresh and original that it makes me wonder what went wrong with movies over the past thirty years.
How did cinema turn from an enterprise entered into by the bravest creative minds–people like Welles, Fellini, Buñuel, Goddard or even Warhol, people willing to [...]

A lengthy and elegant mess of a film, Todd Haynes’ not-so-experimental I’m Not There is nonetheless a beauty of a wreck, a “non-biopic” about Bob Dylan that mainly ignores that facet of Dylan that always hides in plain site when analysts look for meaning in the minstrel poet’s own life - his music.
Oh, there are [...]

Is it some kind of heresy, or blasphemy, or out-and-out idiocy to admit that sometimes I miss the dark ages before instant gratification became an expectation, an entitlement in the long shadow of VHS, DVD, Blu-ray and whatever configuration is next up on the horizon to make whatever format you’re backing obsolete? Remember those headless [...]

“To some, The Big Lebowski is just a movie. To others it is the movie. When we decided to get some friends together at a tiny bowling alley in Kentucky to drink White Russians and celebrate our favorite movie, Lebowski fest was born. We discovered we were not alone, and fellow fans from around the [...]

”If Southland’s smugness doesn’t get to you, then its barriers of built-in self-protection should. The film is designed so that any of the obvious critical grenades one can lob at it can be deflected with the force of a fly swatter: try “scattershot,” “messy,” “inelegant,” “politically confused” and its defenders will follow the Richard Kelly [...]

This new season of Project Runway has snuck up on me and I haven’t yet availed myself of the copious information Bravo has on each of the contestants - including the models. I usually don’t start remembering contestants names until at least five or six have been axed, so excuse me if I refer [...]

I suppose that Ben Lee’s bubblegum pop is something that I should leave for my teenage girls, but honestly I love him as much as they do. We’ve been digging his records in our home since his 1995 record, Grandpaw Would. That record has one of the great odes to making music on it, the [...]

Last summer, another occasional blogger on this site gave me a sterling backstage view of Parliament, a thoroughly enjoyable excursion through wood-lined passages and old stone arches, into robing rooms and vaults and the like. So I was thinking of that very tour as The Deal unfolded on my screen recently - a tight, well-acted [...]

He wanted to write The Great American Novel but changed the face of journalism instead. He died today at 84, leaving behind a torrent of words and an outsized public persona.
Norman Mailer was the opposite of shy. At a cocktail party, drink in hand, in front of a TV camera and, above all, on the [...]

Wolcott is right. He was something like a planet, massive, unavoidable, wandering all over the sky, sometimes more visible than at others, but always exerting his own gravitational field, drawing lesser objects into his orbit, whether they wanted to be there or not, warping the independent orbits of others.
So you’d think I’d have as [...]

I’m still laughing. Or perhaps cackling, chortling or guffawing. Engaged in mirth. And thanks to co-organizers M.A. Peel and Jason Chervokas, newcritics’ first-ever blogathon went off spectacularly last week. I’ve been under the weather, so this note is a bit late - but how great was that blogathon? Great, great posts from some many [...]

Alright people! Here we go. It’s Season 4. Just remember… Don’t bore Nina!!!
9:01 Alright, a designer who can make an outfit out of salad ingredients! Snag? Did you hear that?
9:04 We already seem to have a lot of pros in this season… not too many Wendy Peppers who are designing out of their basements.
9:05 Accidental [...]

It’s been over a year since we’ve last heard Tim Gunn utter the immortal words, “Make it work!” It’s been over a year since we’ve last heard Heidi Klum say, “You’re in!” or “You’re out!” Tonight… after a long, long, long wait for Project Runway junkies, Bravo will be airing season 4 and we here [...]

Hello newcritics readers! This is Jennifer of Saying yes… the newest newcritic. This evening Claire and I will be joining forces to live-blog the 4th season of Project Runway! Tonight I will be at the helm, while Claire will be serving cocktails and snark down in the comments.
Stop by! Live-blogging starts promptly at 10/9c.

The other night, I had the privilege of going to a screening, “Rosita”, at NYU’s law school. This film depicts a violation of human rights, where to uphold the doctrine of the Catholic Church became more valuable than an existing life. The filmmakers Barbara Attie, and Janet Goldwater document the story of Rosa, a eight [...]

I read a few reviews about the book Before I Die by Jenny Downham and it called out to me. The story is told by Tessa a 17 year Brit dying of leukemia. She decides to make a list of the 10 things she must do before she dies. She lives with [...]

I had a dream last night that The Gotham Gal and Josh and I were at a Neil Young show, right up front, and during an acoustic version of Powderfinger, Neil invited The Gotham Gal to join him on acoustic guitar. She was great by the way.
That dream ended in the Boston Garden in 1979 [...]

Writers of sketch comedy were the focus of two events at The Paley Center for Media this week, which by happenstance became the week television writers went on strike. Irony strikes again. Luckily talking about what they do crossed no picket lines.
The first event featured the the huge talents of Upright Citizens Brigade, Matt Besser, [...]

One of the reasons that the movies of today aren’t as much fun as those made in the first two decades of Talkies is because they jettisoned their great army of supporting players. At one time when people reminisced about movies, they were more likely to be talking about Eve Arden than Doris Day or [...]

When it arrived on NBC three years ago, The Office seemed certan to be a soft and slender knock-off of its British ancestor, the riotous and brilliantly cruel Ricky Gervais combination of mockumentary and sitcom set in the non-careerist backwater of Slough, an exurb of London. The UK Office denizens sliced and diced the various [...]

Tonight I was at Barnes and Noble, having a dad’s night out, and not enjoying myself as much as I would have even five years ago—browsing through the new fiction I kept coming across author biographies that began, “So and so was born in 1980…”
While I’m in the cafe drinking my coffee, a barely [...]

Zion, oh mighty Zion, your bison now are dust
As your cornflakes rise ‘gainst the rust-red skies,
then our blood requires we go…
Marching, marching to Shibboleth
On a recent car trip with my high-school-age son, just for fun, I popped into the CD player, Firesign Theatre’s Don’t Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me The Pliers.
“What is [...]

The funniest comic film/TV moment I can think of is, ironically, in a blatantly commercial and successful movie from the 80’s, Naked Gun starring Leslie Nielsen. I’m talking about the Umpire Moondance scene, of course, and the reason this is the funniest comic moment I can think of is that it best exemplifies two notions [...]

You want to see his real, unwrapped face?
Why ever for?
That’s the 11 year old’s homework assignment.  His sixth grade class has been studying Ancient Egypt for the past few weeks and so the news that King Tut’s head is going on exhibit along with the other relics from his tomb that have been traveling around [...]

Why is life worth living? It’s a very good question. Um, well, there are certain things I guess that make it worthwhile. Uh, like what…OK, um for me, I would say laughter. Um…comedy. Pure, funny moments. Groucho Marx singing “I’m Against It,” for one thing. Uh, um, Cary Grant screaming, “No, no, leave the rooster [...]

Years before regaling us with stories about his affair with a married woman at the age of fourteen, and his redemption courtesy of an English monk named Father Joe, Tony Hendra wrote Going Too Far, which may be the definitive book dedicated to Baby Boomer humor (if not the only book dedicated to Boomer Humor), [...]

What set New York’s Funniest Stand-Up contest winner Wil Sylvince apart from the rest of the field during Monday night’s finals at Caroline’s was the Haitian material.
The material was funny–particularly the bit about Haitians making lousy pimps because of their elfish, pipping speech and squeaky falsetto voices.
But what made the material fly was the way [...]

I loved the comedy of Mitch Hedberg. He was sort of like a hip version of Steven Wright. His jokes were often obtuse and esoteric. Or they were stupid, depending on your perspective. At times his delivery was unprofessional – he’d stumble on a line or laugh as if he were [...]

To summarise: wartime Britain kept its spirits up by listening to entertaining and uplifting radio from the BBC. After the war the morale raising Home Service was joined by the Light Programme. Together they pioneered a brand of light-hearted and often highly innovative radio entertainment. Shows like Round the Horne, Hancock’s Half Hour and The [...]

The thing about writing about comedy is that writing about comedy is usually not funny. Let’s face it, comedy itself is usually not funny, so it stands to reason that talking about comedy is even more likely not to be funny.
So I won’t bore you with a shot-by-shot exegesis of some of my favorite [...]