BOOKS & THE ARTS
Friday, June 26, 2009
'Transformers': As If The Plot And Acting Weren’t Bad Enough, They Had To Throw In A Pair Of Jive-Talking Minstrel-Show Robots
by Christopher Orr
The new Transformers movie is two-and-a-half hours long. I'm going to write that sentence again, if I may, because it is a reality I find only slightly less confounding than I would the arrival on this planet of actual alien robots inclined to disguise themselves as backhoes and eighteen-wheelers: The new Transformers movie is two...
Thursday, June 25, 2009
Were Postwar American Jews Really 'Silent' About The Holocaust?
by Adam Kirsch
In her new book, We Remember With Reverence and Love: American Jews and the Myth of Silence after the Holocaust, 1945-1962, Hasia Diner sets out to drive a stake, once and for all, through the heart of a historical falsehood that has proved remarkably durable. This is the notion that, as Diner’s subtitle has it, American Jews were initially “...
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
The End Of Doctors: Should Patients Be Put In Charge Of Their Own Medical Treatment?
by Sherwin B. Nuland
Patient, Heal Thyself: How the "New Medicine" Puts the Patient in Charge
Washington Diarist: A Personal Footnote To The Remarkable Story Of Bruno Schulz
by Leon Wieseltier
In The New Yorker the other week, David Grossman reported on his discovery in Beersheba of an old man named Ze'ev Fleischer, who on November 19, 1942, came to the corner of Czacki Street and Mickiewicz Street, at the entrance to the ghetto in the town of Drohobycz, in Poland, right after Bruno Schulz was murdered there. He found a piece of bread in...
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
Umberto Saba's Poems Are Ironic, Detached, And Quotidian--That's What Makes Them So Grand
by Rosanna Warren
Songbook: The Selected Poems Of Umberto Saba -- Translated by George Hochfield and Leonard Nathan
Monday, June 22, 2009
'50 Years Of Kauffmann' TNRtv Special: Why Review Films That No One Can See?
by Stanley Kauffmann
Stanley TNRTV
Saturday, June 20, 2009
'Seraphine' Reminds Us, Marvelously, Just How Eerie The Disposition Of Talent Can Be
by Stanley Kauffmann
Seraphine--Music Box Films
24 City--Cinema Guild
Friday, June 19, 2009
The Binding of Isaac
by Adam Kirsch
'Zetland: By a Character Witness" may not be the best fifteen pages that Saul Bellow wrote, but it is surely the most concentratedly, turbulently Bellovian. "Yes, I knew the guy," the story begins. "We were boys in Chicago. He was wonderful." Instantly the reader is plunged into an accelerated tour of all of Bellow's great themes and tropes: Chicago...
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
After Watching 'Away We Go,' You’ll Have To Take A Shower To Wash The Smug Off
by Christopher Orr
"No one’s in love like us, right? It’s so weird," Verona (Maya Rudolph) tells Burt (John Krasinski) early in Sam Mendes’s Away We Go. The two are an unmarried but deeply committed couple crisscrossing the United States in search of the perfect place to raise the baby Verona is expecting. The proximate cause of her amorous observation is an encounter...
Saturday, June 13, 2009
Michelle Cottle Vs. Jason Zengerle: Did Letterman Cross The Line With His Palin Jokes?

Letterman has said that he wasn't joking about Palin's 14-year-old daughter, Willow, but her 18-year-old daughter, Bristol; and, frankly, I believe him. Why? Because the jokes make no sense if they're not about Bristol. First, Bristol is far and away the most famous of the Palin children; late night comics generally don't tell jokes about people who...
Friday, June 12, 2009
'Pelham 1 2 3': Another Exercise In Emotional Manipulation And Cinematic Tourettism From Tony Scott
by Christopher Orr
The career of director Tony Scott can, I think, be divided into three major phases: first, as a competent purveyor of Hollywood schlock (e.g., Top Gun, Beverly Hills Cop II, Days of Thunder); next, as a genre talent whose output ranged from the above-average (Crimson Tide, Enemy of the State) to the very good (True Romance); and, most recently, as ...
Thursday, June 11, 2009
Looking Back At Elia Kazan, A Master Of Direction And Of Deviousness
by David Thomson
Kazan on Directing--Edited and with commentary by Robert Cornfield
Wednesday, June 10, 2009
KGB In The USA: How The Soviets Were Able To Recruit Hiss, Stone, And So Many Other Americans
by Anne Applebaum
Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America--By John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr, and Alexander Vassiliev
Tuesday, June 09, 2009
How The Irreverent Greek Poet C.P. Cafavy Became A Genius. (And How Scholars Got The Story Wrong.)
by Peter Green
Translated, with introduction and commentary, by Daniel Mendelsohn
Saturday, June 06, 2009
The Art Of Elision: 'Summer Hours' Is Best For What It Manages To Leave Out
by Stanley Kauffmann
Summer Hours -- IFC Films
Burma VJ: Reporting From a Closed Country -- Oscilloscope
Friday, June 05, 2009
The Competition Is Tough, But Francis Bacon May Have Been The Worst Painter Of The 20th Century
by Jed Perl
Francis Bacon: A Centenary Retrospective -- Metropolitan Museum of Art
When Porn Stars AREN'T The Answer: Steven Soderbergh's Newest Film--'The Girlfriend Experience'--Is All Stunt, No Soul
by Christopher Orr
It's not often that an actress can boast of having her name above the title on her very first mainstream film, but then Sasha Grey is not just any actress. At age 18, she received the prize for “Best Three Way Sex Scene” and “Best Group Scene” at the Adult Video News Awards; at 19, she was a Penthouse Pet of the Month and also became the youngest starlet...
Disney's First Black Princess Is One Of The Most Soulfully Accurate Renditions Of A Black American In Animation History
by John McWhorter
So Disney's animated movie is already occasioning offense: although it will feature Disney's first black princess, her swain will be a light-skinned fellow not intended as black. The setting is 1920's New Orleans and he is of some sort of non-black extraction.
Wednesday, June 03, 2009
Music In The Meltdown: What Should Pop Music Sound Like When The Country's Going To Hell?
by David Hajdu
When all this is over, the economic crisis will take lasting form in the American consciousness as a video montage. The images are already familiar: traders gaping in horror at the Stock Exchange ... Paulsen testifying before Congress ... A foreclosure notice tacked onto a front-porch door ... Obama selling the bailout ... The Chrysler headquarters...
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