It's amazing what a few years in the Rhodesian army will do to a man's reputation.
"If the world was ending, I would head straight for Peter Godwin," said André Bishop, the artistic director at Lincoln Center Theater.
Mr. Bishop recalled an episode during a holiday in Mexico when the car he was in with Mr. Godwin Read More
My Stump Speech (And How It Went Over)
Hello! Great to be here in New York City! [mild applause] I see a few familiar faces down there. Hey, guys. All right. So … New York. Go, Knicks! [light booing] I didn’t come here to talk sports, ladies and gentlemen. I came here to talk about Read More
Michael Apted’s 49 Up continues and possibly concludes the most remarkable chronicle of a slice of humanity in the history of cinema. This is to say that I cannot possibly imagine what more Mr. Apted can glean from people he has known since their childhoods without venturing too deeply into the morbid realms of intimations Read More
Ryan Fleck’s Half Nelson, from a screenplay by Mr. Fleck and Anna Boden, plunges us into an inner-city junior high school in Brooklyn, with all its Marxian-dialectical rhetoric blazing away at the comparatively timid, superintendent-mandated civil-rights curriculum. At least, this is the pedagogical approach of Dan Dunne (Ryan Gosling), the school’s parlor-pink, crack-addicted white instructor. Read More
The March Harper's carries a piece by Celia Farber, who has written about AIDS—and HIV denialists such as Peter Duesberg—for 20 years. Says today's New York Times:Ms. Farber says that neither she nor Harper's endorse Dr. Duesberg's position, but that she is simply reporting on an unpopular view. "People can't distinguish, it seems, between Read More
Sorry to harp on this, but another point on the claim in the Times this morning that the Bloomberg campaign targeted not traditional demographics but "thought-based" groups: Which thought-based group, exactly, was the target of a widely mailed flyer, colored in the green, yellow, and red associated with Africa, that was headed by the Read More
The plight of impoverished Africans is all the rage with film people lately. Again! At The Constant Gardener premiere, Rachel Weisz arrived in a backless teal gown by Narcisco Rodriguez and Cartier earrings. She was followed closely by a handler who let the young journos know that they were to ask only about the movie Read More
The Republican Party no doubt figured it had gotten rid of a nasty problem when its U.S. Senators elected William Frist of Tennessee as majority leader to replace the disgraced Trent Lott. After all, Senator Frist has been declared, by himself and by friends in the media, as nothing less than the Beltway's answer to Read More
People hate reading about budgets. Budgets are often not only depressing, but tedious and difficult to comprehend. If citizens are to pay attention, the budget debate has to be a lot more entertaining. So, from now on-or at least until 2004-think of the federal budget as a caper movie: The Great Treasury Robbery .
In this Read MoreWell, well, well, so it wasn't that gang of marauding, African-American teenagers "wilding" through the white man's part of Central Park who raped and all but murdered a young woman 12 years ago. At the time, the case gave the inhabitants of ZIP code 10021 such a bad case of the shivers that you could Read More
World's Oldest Parking Debacle
Brings Motorists to Blows When is the average New Yorker at greatest risk? Could it be while standing on the packed 72nd Street and Broadway subway platform at rush hour as a train approaches? Hardly. Is it when the F.B.I. announces a "code red" (or is it "code orange"?) terrorist alert? Unlikely. Read MoreEarlier this summer at a media forum in Cambridge,
John Scherlis, a zoologist, rose from the audience to issue a challenge to Hollywood. "All the best data show that the great apes are headed for extinction," he said. "Possibly in just 20 years. Best case, 100-but that will only be isolated pockets of apes who happen Read MoreSometime in the 17th century, there developed the notorious "Triangle Trade": rum and shoddy goods from New England to Africa; slaves from Africa to what would become the Old Confederacy; tobacco, sugar, molasses and cotton from the South to New England.
In the Era of Globalization, there has developed what I think of as the "Sexagonal Read MoreKim Basinger, African Queen
Weaned on Technicolor adventures about the Dark Continent like King Solomon's Mines and Mogambo , I've always had a weakness for movies about the challenges of Africa. Lions and tigers and crocs, oh my! So I am pleased to report that I Dreamed of Africa fulfills my lust for danger and exoticism Read MoreWith the JVC Jazz Festival and the Bell Atlantic Jazz Festival wrapped up, it seems fair to conclude that June in New York has been officially designated as Jazz Burnout Month. (The mind's eye sees Rudy Giuliani making the announcement into a sea of hungry mikes.) Even the festival post-mortems in The New York Times Read More
