This is a good Monday. I'm sitting at my computer listening to the new Norah Jones album I downloaded, I got my appointment letter for teaching at NYU's Stern School next semester, and I got a timely response from the Lincoln Center Theater giving me a refund on two...
Dan Glickman | Posted November 23, 2009 | Entertainment
Movies often are about escape and adventure. We root for the underdogs and cheer their success. Sometimes heroes beat the odds with dazzling superpowers. But many of the great cinematic stories come from a uniquely American well, where real life trumps even the best fiction and inspires us to strive...
Thane Rosenbaum | Posted November 23, 2009 | New York
Tevye the Milkman, the working stiff Jewish Everyman from the shtetls of Russia, may not be one of Broadway's sexiest characters, but he certainly has been one of its most enduring. And one actor more than any other has embodied the role of the tradition-bound, world-weary, rich-man obsessed song and...
Katherine Spillar | Posted November 23, 2009 | Entertainment
By Katherine Spillar and Carmen D. Siering
Sure, the film New Moon is breaking box office records, and both tween girls and their moms are swooning over pale-faced vampire Edward and hunky werewolf Jacob, who both vie for the attention of our ostensible hero, Bella. Isn't it romantic?
Well.... with...
Greg Archer | Posted November 23, 2009 | Entertainment
The Twilight Saga: New Moon took a healthy bite into the box office over the weekend -- no surprise there -- raking in a monstrous $140.7 million. The figure is above what most industry execs expected. Final numbers arrived Monday but it looks like the second film of the...
Esther Iverem | Posted November 23, 2009 | Entertainment
In the films of Lee Daniels, horror is expressed through a claustrophobic Black pain that Hollywood finds absolutely compelling. In Precious, the fifth film that Daniels has either produced or directed, he returns to the formula that won him acclaim and won Halle Berry an Oscar for her role in...
Michael Sigman | Posted November 23, 2009 | Entertainment
Ever since British New Wavers Ian Dury and the Blockheads scored with their 1979 single Reasons To Be Cheerful (Part 3) -- which celebrated people like Elvis and the Marx Brothers and pleasures like Ploughman's sandwiches (cheddar cheese and a pickle) and "coming out of chokey" (solitary confinement)...
Joyce McFadden | Posted November 23, 2009 | Entertainment
I can't think of another figure on television who's done more to encourage us as a culture to rise to the highest common denominator.
MacNeil and Lehrer come to mind, but they began as a team and their purview was and is limited to news, whereas Winfrey's platform is broader...
Fern Siegel | Posted November 23, 2009 | New York
Give it up for Ragtime, a sweeping, ambitious revival that, with the election of Barack Obama, carries added resonance. The musical, an adaptation of E.L. Doctorow's novel about early 20th-century America, is moving, stirring and not to be missed. Real historic figures, like anarchist Emma Goldman, Harry Houdini, Evelyn Nesbit...
Dan Persons | Posted November 23, 2009 | Entertainment
Podcast: Download (10.4MB)
So you go into this room at New York's Museum of Modern Art's Tim Burton exhibit, and it's like striking gold: the Jack Skellington...
Eric Lurio | Posted November 23, 2009 | Entertainment
A few days ago, I was at DigitalWire's conference on the "Future of Television" and what I heard chilled me to the bone. The right to privacy is going to be totally abolished and they're going to sugar coat it with the name "TV Everywhere."
For decades, there were...
Joe Favorito | Posted November 23, 2009 | Sports
The lessons learned in high school often shape the base of how we deal with life's issues, whether those lessons were forged through athletics, academics, the arts, or any combination thereof. That life experience can be invaluable as we deal with day to day challenges, and can often be used...
Melissa Silverstein | Posted November 23, 2009 | Entertainment
On Friday morning Hollywood woke up to the realization that fangirls can be as rabid as fanboys. By Saturday morning they realized that two BIG records had been broken, including the highest midnight screening opening and the best opening date in history. On Sunday morning, they woke up realizing that...
Jonathan Leigh Solomon | Posted November 23, 2009 | Comedy
Who is Sarah Ball and why is she saying awful things about Emo Phillips? And, why is she not saying awful things about Robin Williams? I.E., if she is going to bash those twelve, she ought to also be brave enough, and have the critical eye required, to take...
Marshall Fine | Posted November 23, 2009 | Entertainment
Richard Linklater's Me and Orson Welles is pure delight, a backstage story set in a romantic period built around a magically charismatic character.
It's also the movie that proves that Zac Efron is a real actor, not just a teen star with a solid singing voice and a dazzling smile....
Michael Kaiser | Posted November 23, 2009 | Entertainment
The current economic downturn has indeed created a crisis for virtually every sector of the economy, especially those of us in the not-for-profit arena. Yet during this Thanksgiving week, I believe we in the arts have a great deal to be thankful for even in this troubled time.
First, we...
Alex Remington | Posted November 23, 2009 | Entertainment
Bong Joon-ho's recent monster movie The Host was greeted with plaudits normally reserved for a master of the French New Wave, with an average Metacritic score of 85. It had a budget of $11,000,000, quite high for a non-American film, and special effects from Weta Digital, the New Zealand...
Mike Ragogna | Posted November 24, 2009 | Entertainment
Beyoncé - I Am...Yours
"You had me at hello," sings Beyoncé Knowles as the soul-pop diva embraces scores of outreached hands while working her way to the stage through a crowd of 1500 at the Wynn Hotel's Encore Theater in Las Vegas. Thus begins...
Scott Mendelson | Posted November 23, 2009 | Entertainment
If you're a Batman fan or a general guy-centric geek, you're probably thinking "That was close... too close". If you're a Twi-fanatic, you're thinking something along...
Alex Remington | Posted November 23, 2009 | Entertainment
I've already written that I think P.M. Dawn is one of the great, underappreciated groups of the 1990's. They're nearly 20 years removed from their only #1 hit, "Set Adrift On Memory Bliss," which sampled "True" by Spandau Ballet and rode in from left field with new age...
Charles Warner | Posted November 23, 2009 | Entertainment