Most eighties comedies don't snare us like they used to. We can flip past Ferris Bueller's Day Off or Stand by Me and not lose our whole afternoon. But there are certain movies that still grab hold, every time, like Tootsie (HDNetM, Saturday, 2:15 p.m.).
Tootsie is one of the great actors' showcases. Everybody in Read More
Because of the asinine way holiday movies are programmed, tomorrow night's probably your only chance to watch White Christmas (Lifetime, 9 p.m.). For anyone keeping count: that's forty-eight hours after Thanksgiving dinner, about sixteen days until a weather report predicts white snow or unseasonal warmth on Christmas morning, and twenty-six days before meteorologists are proven Read More
Jimmy Stewart never struck us as all that nice. There were, sure, the poems he'd read about pints of milk or his dog named Beau on Johnny Carson. (Sample verse: "He bit lots of folks from day to day,/ The delivery boy was his favorite prey.") But that was when he was so old Read More
The Miracle of Morgan's Creek (TCM, Sunday, 10:15 am) was the Juno of 1944. The full plot summary would require thousands of confusing words so let's try long story short: Small town Trudy loves soldiers, which is why, the morning after a Read More
Everybody learns to write by ripping off their heroes. I learned to write reviews by ripping off John Leonard, who died last night. I still carry his books around and study them on long subway rides, like Orthodox Jews with their miniature copies of the Torah. I got pretty good at aping his funny, involuted Read More
Mark Halperin on The Page: THE NETWORKS WON’T TELL YOU BUT THE PAGE WILL: BARACK OBAMA WILL BE THE 44TH PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES.
Nate Silver, on Fivethirtyeight.com: "!"
Andrew Sullivan: This is Obama's achievement; but it is also Karl Rove's.
Josh Marshall, on Talking Points Read More
But should you have a spare second Read More
If Obama pulls it out tonight, progressive bloggers will get as shriek-y as teen girls at a Beatles concert. We predict posts that devolve into exhilarated, random hitting of keys: “He’s Black Reagan! Bi-Racial Roosevelt! SAHFGOhasjnaaw**%!!!!E#R$!”
But The Most Breathless Post In the History of the Liberal Blogosphere may already been written. That would be Boyd Read More
Every holiday movie we want to watch always arrives annoyingly early, like a punctual party guest. We’re still picking at Thanksgiving leftovers during the annual broadcast of A Charlie Brown Christmas. Halloween is on AMC this morning at 9:30, when no one’s actually home alone to be scared. And cable channels like TNT and USA, once host to gloriously Read More
Save your pennies, skip Film Forum and watch our classic pick on TV!
In our humble-ish opinion, the three funniest movies ever made are Leo McCarey's The Awful Truth, Billy Wilder's The Apartment and, yeah, Ghostbusters, which, for a stretch at age 16, we watched pretty much every night, in the hopes that a close study Read More
It took something like 48 hours to seal over Pompeii and all those Pompeians with pumice and lava and ash; and fewer than 48 seconds to flatten and fry Nagasaki, to begin cancers, to burn kimono patterns into Read More
This Sunday, TCM's showing 24 hours of Paul Newman, and movie nerds, like football fans, probably have their tailgating all planned out. Slurp up spaghetti and Newman's Own Sockarooni sauce while Hud drinks and disappoints (6 p.m.). Microwave a bag of Newman's Own Light Butter Popcorn as Cool Hand Luke chokes down 50 hardboiled eggs Read More
Do yourself a favor: watch The Awful Truth on TCM, Friday morning, at 9:15. Don't even TiVo it. Call in sick. Stay home. All about an unfaithful couple who divorces and then finally falls in love, it's the real marvel of the ‘30s screwballs, more human and less ridiculous than Bringing Up Baby, as brawling Read More
HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWSBy J.K. RowlingArthur A. Levine Books, 759 pages, $34.99
Nowadays, the story of the boy and his author is as familiar as the Nativity. Harry Potter, the unloved orphan with the weird-ass scar, turns out to be not just a wizard but—for reasons he can barely recall—one of the most famous Read More
Haruki Murakami works wonders with daytime. In the Japanese novelist’s very best books—Dance Dance Dance (1988) and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1994)—un- or semi-employed protagonists discover that, when the rest of us are stuck at work, the everyday world turns out to be as startling Read More
