It’s the contemporary woman that movies don’t know what to do with, other than bathe her in a bridal glow in romantic comedies where both the romance and the comedy are artificial sweeteners.
I’ve always stayed on the periphery of things. When I used to go to the punk clubs and things like that, I was never up front. I always wanted to be in the back, or on the side, because I wanted to get the whole view, rather than be staring up at someone’s nostrils.
Robert Pattinson is rebel cool incarnated – the James Dean of the undead.
It’s one thing to fight for what you believe in, another thing to fight for what others believe in.
Even the most piddling life is of momentous consequence to its owner.
I understand the people-watching, but I’ve never done it where people have to race to three different shows, from here to there. I mean, the biggest zoo I ever faced was Comic Con, and Comic Con takes place in one big hangar.
At ‘The Village Voice,’ there were all these fevers inside the offices, that would break out into full-scale rumbles between writers.
Broadway purists may deplore the influx of movie-spinoff musicals in recent years, wishing someone would turn off the popcorn machine and let more imaginative brainstorms blow through.
Used to be, conservatives revered the Average American, that Norman Rockwell oil painting of diner food, humble faith, honest toil, and Capraesque virtue.
As we divest ourselves of once familiar physical objects – digitize and dematerialize – we approach a ‘Star Trek’ future in which everything can be accessed from the fourth dimension with a few clicks or terse audibles.
Being raised Catholic in a pressure-cooker household besieged by alcohol and bill collectors enforced and heightened a sense of sentry duty in me, the oldest of five children and the one most responsible for keeping everything from capsizing. Wild indulgence was for other people, the non-worriers.
A new political-entertainment class has moved into the noisy void once occupied by the sage pontiffs of yore, a class just as polarized as our partisan divide: one side holding up a fun-house mirror to folly, the other side reveling in its own warped reflection.
The unhappy irony is that, while ‘Glee’ is hitting the heights, school arts funding is being slashed across the country due to the steep recession and declining tax revenues.
What a turnaround in sentiment ‘Glee’ exemplifies. It was only a few years ago that pursuing the dream of a Broadway career or cabaret stardom relegated some poor yearning dope to a lavender ghetto of losers, self-deluders, and social rejects.
Whenever I catch a chunk of an Adam Sandler comedy on cable, it looks as badly shot and goofily tossed off as a Jerry Lewis gag reel once he hit the late downslide with ‘Hardly Working’ and ‘Cracking Up.’
With ‘Black Swan,’ the ballerina saga flips its tiara and goes on a hallucinatory bender, a scary acid trip where transfiguration and disfiguration meet.
I never accepted why there should be some invisible, wavy cutoff line separating Great Fiction from phosphorescent beauties and dollhouse miniatures, novels that contain a whole world in a snow globe.
What had brought me to New York in the autumn of 1972 was a letter of recommendation written by Norman Mailer, the author of ‘The Naked and the Dead’ and American literature’s leading heavyweight contender, to Dan Wolf, the delphic editor of ‘The Village Voice.’
Slashing its way to the finish line, Black Swan is the first ballet movie for highbrow horror fans for whom ballet itself signifies little to nothing. Those of us who know and love ballet can only look on it with a different kind of horror.
Historically, Hollywood comedy has arrived in skinny envelopes. From fence post Buster Keaton to herky-jerky Jerry Lewis to wiry nerve-bundle Woody Allen to hung-loose Richard Pryor to whippy contortionist Jim Carrey, its comics and clowns have tended to be sliced thin and bendable.