Month: April 2007

  • Man Versus Beast

    Fifty years ago I was a young bride planning to rent an old Iowa farmhouse. My rural mother-in-law shared her successful bedbug remedy [“A Bedtime Preyer,” April]. She said: “Wash and air-dry all bedclothes. Center the bed in the middle of the room. Put each leg (bed leg) in a pail of turpentine. Don’t smoke.…

  • A Fatal Lack of Judgment

    There are two things I’ve learned from reading and talking about the decline of modern newspapers: The average consumer doesn’t give a damn, and a key survival strategy of those who remain in mainstream newspapers is denying the self-inflicted wounds of compromised news judgment. To the first, there isn’t much I or any other ex-newspaper…

  • Echoes of the Empire

    I shall spend a lot of this summer reading Polybius. The rise and fall of empires is in the air, and Polybius is the most coherent historian of the rise of Rome—not least because he was a Greek and smart. When Polybius describes how the Roman general Titus Flaminius accomplished his mission in the Second…

  • Yippee: A Journey to Jewish Joy

    “When you wake up in the morning, don’t kvetch! Say ‘Yippee’!” So suggests the wisdom of this happy collective of Hasidic Jews in this delightful, if somewhat workmanlike, documentary from Paul Mazursky. Mazursky, once a presence in Hollywood (he created the outstanding Enemies: A Love Story before flushing his career down the toilet with some…

  • The Valet

    François Pignon (the Moroccan-born Jewish actor Gad Elmaleh) has it pretty rough. He’s a good-natured but horse-faced valet who can’t convince the love of his life to marry him. Out moping one afternoon, he is caught on film while standing on a street corner, by chance next to a supermodel who’s out on a romantic…

  • It Came From Another World!

    In this purposefully ridiculous sequel to his popular The Monster of Phantom Lake, Christopher R. Mihm offers yet another send-up of ’50s B-movies. This Ed Wood-like quality is achieved with grainy black-and-white images, a hambone cast, and special effects that look as though created from random objects found in the garage—which, in fact, is often…