Month: July 2003

  • Casablanca (Special Edition)

    Do we really need to try to convince you on this one? If you’re building a DVD library and don’t plan on including Casablanca, there’s just plain something wrong with you. This double-disc edition includes 10 minutes of newly discovered deleted scenes, plus a couple of choice bits of nearly forgotten Casablanciana—a radiodrama adaptation, the…

  • More Equal Than Others

    “Equal justice under law.” These words, emblazoned over the entrance to the United States Supreme Court in Washington, really represent the “bottom line” of our court system. No matter who you are—Joe Blow or Joe Biernat—if you do the crime, you should get the same time. In unguarded moments, however, lawyers will tell you what…

  • The Last Action Heroes

    Watching Arnold Schwarzenegger lumber his way through Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, I was struck by a nagging, persistent quibble. Why on Earth would anybody build a 55-year-old android killing machine? That’s like building a sex robot modeled after Bea Arthur. Granted, at no point in T3 does the Austrian oak actually pull out…

  • from Norway: Wheel Envy

    The sight of 10 road-weary but cheerful unicyclists whizzing down the road would make people take pause in almost any city. For the onlookers in these small northern Norwegian villages, it’s a bizarre and thrilling event. So why are these determined folks riding over, around, and through Norway’s mountains and fjords, nearly 600 miles to…

  • All That Jazz, Cabaret, Chicago, Moulin Rouge

    If it’s possible to credit the last three years’ resurgence of the movie musical to one person, it has to be the late Bob Fosse. His highly physical, breathlessly sexualized choreography has influenced nearly all the genre’s post-millennial successes—most obviously last year’s Oscar-winning Chicago. Fosse also directed two of the last great musicals before the…

  • By Any Other Name

    A joke that starts off “a duck walks into a bar,” has good odds of being funny. Ducks are funny. A joke beginning “a water buffalo walks into a bar” just doesn’t have the same ring. But “a can of Spam walks into a bar”—now that’s hilarious. Spam’s one of the funniest things about Minnesota,…