January 2011
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Jason Bourne has contracted the worst case of amnesia in movie history and it's going to last for at least four long films (three of them already released). Bourne's type of amnesia is very convenient for plotting because he doesn't know who he is but yet retains an astonishing range of martial and intellectual skills.…
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Yesterday we watched and heard Puccini's La Fanciulla del West imported digitally from the big apple's Metropolitan Opera. It was shown on the enormous screen at our local Century Theater. I was overwhelmed. I usually watch opera from the nosebleed seats, which are expensive enough. With the new technology, and with the telescopic close-ups, I…
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Every little once in a while, a mountain lion creeps into the fold and snares a lamb, a calf, or a German shepherd. At even more infrequent intervals, a mountain lion attacks a human being (usually a child). Whenever there's a human-lion interaction, there comes a deluge of letters to the local newspaper demanding that…
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Certainly not either by inheritance or conversion or moral stance. Yet Sarah Palin seems to imagine that she's Jewish — in a peculiar, one-dimensional way. It's not always easy to guess at what's going on in that soup of a brain, but is it possible to determine what Sarah means when she claims to be…
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Eddie Rice has served in World War II, won a silver star, but lost his memory to a piece of shrapnel buried in this brain (the x-ray is flashed onto the screen). It's an "organic" rather than "psychological" amnesia and therefore incurable. Released from a hospital, Eddie returns home to L. A. to find that…
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This reminiscence will not mean much to anyone but my born-and-bred-in-Brooklyn readers. One of my smart schoolyard buddies, Jimmy Nolan, won a scholarship to Columbia. He was a year or two older than I, and the first of our gang/crowd to venture out of the neighborhood. The summer after his first college year, we were…
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I've been inspecting the entrails of slaughtered oxen and also observing the flights of birds. I've studied the movements of planets and tea leaves. I can now announce my predictions for the coming year. 1) there will be unusual weather patterns in North America; 2) a famous Hollywood actress will sue for divorce; moreover, another…
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Last night, on the big HDTV, with the collaboration of Netflix, and peering through our toes, we watched the John Ford cavalry movie "Rio Grande." I first saw this film in the year of its release (I was eleven years old) at the Leader Theater on Coney Island Avenue. In days of yore, it was the custom for the neighborhood urchins to…