Ron Rosenbaum on Tom Junod in Slate: ...And here it is--he begins with the question: "Does 9/11 still have meaning for most Americans? Does it have more meaning than celebrity? Does it have more meaning than the very specific message of meaninglessness contained in the weekly parable of Angelina Jolie's twisted double life? Or have we reached the point where its meaning is somehow inextricable from the meaning of celebrity, as 9/11 recedes into the past and celebrity gives birth to the future?" I'm not making this up. I'm copying it right out … [Read more...]

East India Trading Company ShrubTwo recent movies are blatantly allegorical, but most reviewers blinked. PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN opens by hanging a ten-year-old boy in a cruel Gitmo scenario that poses a radical question: with brutes like Cheney in charge, wouldn't you want to sing the other guy's song? Based on Disney's global marketing strategy, how many Americans sense the director is playing to the gallery? The movie doesn't follow these metaphors through, but the Cheney figure does get skull-rape by Bill Nighy, and Kiera Knightley makes a … [Read more...]

The Best of the Bad Cops Keeps Walking a Hard Line (NYTimes) By VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN Published: June 6, 2007 [In lieu of writing my own big essay on the Shield's finale, I'm going at it through Heffernan's uneven piece...] ...In its six seasons, "The Shield" has won Emmys and Golden Globes but never squandered the stakes or the suspense of that first episode. At the same time, FX, the channel that once seemed beneath an audition from a jovial ABC star, is now home to a variety of film actors, including Denis Leary ("Rescue Me") and Minnie Driver … [Read more...]

"It was forty years ago today: the release of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. "It's certainly a thrill," the Beatles sang; but listening today, much of the thrill is gone--except for one song. Still, it's easy to remember that day--June 1, 1967--when the first thing we saw was the cover: a collage featuring the Beatles surrounded by cut-out figures of their heroes and other celebrities, including wax figures of themselves two years earlier, when they were the lovable moptops. Rock had never been so smart..." -- Jon Wiener in The … [Read more...]