What does it mean that Amazon.com paired the Dixie Chicks’ new album with Al Franken’s new book for a special discount deal? It means some people can’t let go of the past. So the Chicks shocked some fans a few years back by making clear their opposition to the invasion of Iraq; they’ve had a … Read more
Blame the gentrification of bluegrass nation on O Brother, Where Art Thou?, NPR, or handsome young bands like Nickel Creek, whose ability to cross over to an open-minded rock audience must chafe home-pickin’ traditionalists to the calloused bottoms of their clogging toes. Of course, bluegrass has been through this all before, when college folkies discovered … Read more
French director Jean-Pierre Jeunet fashioned the now-classic Delicatessen as a black-humored farce that is a cautionary tale buried within an expansively freaky fairy tale. At a popular French eatery, a series of handymen become the special of the day, until a former clown takes the doomed job and woos the butcher’s daughter. She rallies a … Read more
In this Scottish film, sacked shipbuilder Frank Redmond pulls out of his doldrums when he decides to swim the English Channel. Training, planning, and sneaking around his wife in order to do so give him a new lease on life. As with many a classic British buddy movie, he’s supported by a posse of slouchy … Read more
Next time you have the opportunity to make a bargain with a genie, just say no. And yet, you’ll probably say yes, no matter how many fairy tales you’ve read, because those spell ladies are just so darn persuasive. In this stylized Chinese romance, a poor orphan girl negotiates with a sorceress to become a … Read more
Seven years in the making, Water has finally landed on our shores, and it was worth the wait. Shelved after its sets were destroyed by fundamentalist Hindis and the director Deepa Mehta’s life threatened, the production resumed years later in Sri Lanka with a new cast. Water is the story of Chuyia, a precocious eight-year-old … Read more
Sean Penn and Madonna did it; so did J-Lo and Ben Affleck. For some couples, love and ego swell together in such a way that a cinematic collaboration is inevitable. Now it’s Matthew Barney and Bjork’s turn–and we’re happy to say that the results are stranger and more spectacular than anything Hollywood would turn out. … Read more
Today’s open adoptions give birth mothers a degree of peace of mind, as well as provide their children with a sense of identity that so often proved elusive to previous generations. But for much of the twentieth century, pregnant women were spirited off to strange and sometimes cruel places where they delivered and relinquished their … Read more
Writing under the sly pseudonym Lemony Snicket, Daniel Handler is the man responsible for the highly amusing A Series of Unfortunate Events, a string of bestselling tales for especially smart young readers–and for a large handful of slightly juvenile adult readers, the kind who take unabashed pleasure in bathroom humor and the satisfactions of revenge. … Read more
The appearance of a new George Saunders story is always cause for excitement among his steadily growing cult. There really isn’t another contemporary American writer who has tapped so effectively into the absurdities that result from our current climate of cultural confusion. In the process, Saunders has carved out his own niche in unlikely places–the … Read more