newcritics

If they had walked into a bar, Kevin, Dermot, and Joe would have been no more than a trio in the long tradition of Irish jokes.
But instead, they are part of the memorable fictional world of Conor McPherson’s 2002 play Port Authority, now at the Atlantic Theater Company until June 22.
In this ferry dock waiting [...]

If you need it in brief: The Sex and The City Movie is fabulous. Go. Now.
If you need it longer, then perhaps you are more like Samantha.
I’m not; but beyond all of the “which SATC girl are you” (the quizzes where the gay boys wind up choosing between Carrie’s Stanford and Charlotte’s Anthony), is where [...]

If it had only been the whistle, Earle Hagen would have qualified for major send-off from TV Land. That’s his own windy pursed lips at the beginning of The Andy Griffith Show as Andy and Opie head to the fishing hole, and it’s his tune as well. But Hagen, who died this week at 88, [...]

I’m not kidding.
Watch.

A rock band can be a wonderfully simple machine. Like cogs and gears, simple parts played by bass, guitar and drums performed with well-engineered timing can deliver a lot of horsepower and a magnificent grind. It doesn’t take virtuosity, genius, or even that much ingenuity, just well conceived parts working together–melodic choruses, guitar hooks, bass [...]

Years ago, writing a review of The Firm, I wrote “Sydney Pollack directs great dinner parties”; I meant it in the best way possible: the sheen, elegance and taste Pollack brought to filmmaking made for polished, easy to take films. Including The Firm, which in retrospect may well be the best adaptation of Grisham ever, [...]

Cross-posted from The Chutry Experiment
Starting with its premiere last night on HBO, I’ve been watching bits and pieces of Recount (IMDB), the cable channel’s dramatization of the month-long battle between Democrats and Republicans in the aftermath of the 2000 election. I did ultimately watch the whole thing, but it’s a hard movie to take [...]

In celebration of this Memorial Day weekend, I attended two defining American art forms: the Broadway musical and the Hollywood blockbuster.
I saw Curtains on Broadway and Indiana Jones & the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull 12 hours apart. Even for a professional, it was pop culture overload, as each is a mad frenzy [...]

Since no one sems to have claimed it yet, I think it only fair that the gay guy gets to cover the run-up to The Sex And The City Movie.

The likelihood - even as it goes up Memorial Day weekend against The Movie That Exhumes Harrison Ford - is that SATC will be [...]

I say this sort of thing sometimes.
College is a waste of time for a lot of people.
They just shouldn’t go.
College isn’t for everybody, and everybody isn’t for college.
When I say that, I’m usually talking about students who aren’t emotionally ready for college, either because they’re not yet mature enough or they are too restless at [...]

Back in the summer of 1990, 18 years ago, I had nothing better to do, so I went to see Days of Thunder, a Don Simpson-Jerry Bruckheimer vanity production in service to the vanity of its producers, its director (Tony Scott) and its star, Tom Cruise. It was the reunion of Scott and Cruise with [...]

The Fox Movie Channel showed “Gentleman’s Agreement” the other night, a preachy drama about anti-Semitism that won the Academy Award 60 years ago, and it brought into focus the realization that I may live to see a black man inaugurated as President of the United States.
What Barack Obama faces from now until November would be [...]

Bing Crosby’s birthday is May 2, or 3. He was born in 1903, although his tombstone says 1904 because of a mix-up. This confusion about the simplest of a man’s details is the least of the problems with his legacy.
Like the Olympian gods, he is largely forgotten and unloved today. Gary Giddins made [...]

(unedited - subtitle: Solemnity Does Not A Truth Make)
“Modern art is what you can get away with,” Andy Warhol told us, suggesting ‘artistic’ works get approved not just by the few acting out of sometimes perplexing conviction, but by all those who mindlessly tag along. And in this way the limit of the credible often [...]

Over at my place we’ve had several lively discussions of the Production Code Administration, so the Siren was eager to read Hollywood’s Censor, Thomas Doherty’s biography of PCA honcho Joseph I. Breen. Doherty is a good writer and the book is intelligent and amusing. He obviously developed a real affection for his subject, and if [...]

Hello, yeah, it’s been a while…
Since I’ve been distracted by politics over at my place, and because I didn’t want to inflict a simple review of Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay on you (now, a comprehensive analysis of the Stoner Comedy, maybe… but I haven’t had the time), I’ve been a little out [...]