A friend and I recently discussed tattoos — the impulse to get one and our constant, eventual dissuasion from doing so. We’ve both nearly needled a limb, but every time “analysis paralysis” relegates...
Incommensurate with my literary habits is my musical illiteracy. Though I steep myself in close reading and relentlessly search for the perfect sentence, when it comes to music I rarely pay attention to...
Who was really the star of Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood? Nominally, it was Leonardo DiCaprio, or perhaps the bill was evenly split between himself and Brad Pitt. But if the last...
What makes the voices of singers like Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin, Bing Crosby and Sammy Davis Jr., so enduring? Substitute any velvet-noter — Andy Williams, Burl Ives, Harry Connick Jr., the bilious...
Literary film-adaptions always prove to be a set of complex accommodations, for devoted readers and untutored cinephiles both. Any deviation from the novel readers see as perfidy, while others might view...
I’ve talked before about the abstraction of identity through corporate brands. That scary, scentless iteration of the self, provided instead of created, in the hope of attaining a more perfect posture...
Withholding devices, that is, formal choices made to starve the viewer of junk-food expressionism, when shyly deployed, bore us into indifference. But when executed well, an artistic strategy that avoids...
What does it take to abandon the structure of your life and jump into an abyss of possibility and uncertainty?
“The creative adult is the child who survived,” Dave Itzkoff writes as the epigraph to...
Films about or involving disabled characters walk a tricky line between establishing an egalitarian intimacy and chastising audiences for their own insensitivity. A film’s potential message can often...
What does it mean to live in a city? How does it define the texture of human experience? Mark Twain said, “Human nature cannot be studied in cities except at a disadvantage — a village is the place....
Summer, traditionally, is a cinematic wasteland. All that the squinting eyes and coiled, sweaty necks see are mirages of art inside an icy darkness. So instead of picking through the dumpster, I want to...
It seems Shakespeare’s old bon mot about brevity and the soul of wit is going through a process of inversion.The comedy podcast, a new medium (at least compared to stand-up comedy) has helped bloom a...
