I saw the first episode of The Newsroom, Aaron Sorkin’s take on the so-called inner workings of television news and in the very first scene I got the message. The anchor Will McAvoy, played by Jeff Daniels, excoriates a young female student who asks the question: Why are we the greatest nation in the world?
Read more: The Newsroom, The Show
There are many ways to assess the content of Katherine Boo’s remarkable book Behind the Beautiful Forevers which is about, in general terms, the disenfranchised, struggling, impoverished underclass of India.
Beyond the general however, is the harsh statistic that India contains one-third of the impoverished people on the planet. This, despite a surging Indian middle and upper class that has burnished the reputation of India as a place where democracy has proven its worth and created an economic transformation which has made India a power player on the global chessboard.
Read more: The Dark Underbelly of Modern India
PRIVATE LIES is a mesmerizing read, starting with the powerful voice of Ken Kramer in the opening pages. I’m not going to provide a detailed plot summary, other than to say that this novel is a commanding glimpse into the minds of four very distinct characters.
Read more: “Private Lies” Review by Aaron Lazar
I have been trying to figure out how a movie reportedly costing close to two hundred million dollars has failed to find a paying audience. The reviews have been either glowing or certainly respectful.
The enormously talented Martin Scorsese directed the movie based upon a successful children’s book by Brian Selznick, The Invention of Hugo Cabret, which deals with the adventures of a 12-year-old boy who literally lives within the cavernous confines of a massive Parisian train station in 1931, whose principal chore is to keep the numerous clocks in the station in working order after the death of his drunken uncle, who had been charged with that operation.
Read more: Hugo, I Went
Some, but not all live theatrical productions transfer well into movies. The movie Carnage is one of those most unfortunate cases. When I saw the award winning play, written by Yasmina Reza on Broadway, I found myself howling with uncontrollable laughter. The movie was somewhat somber and alarmingly unfunny.
Briefly, the plot goes something like this. Two eleven year old boys get into a fight resulting in one of them being injured. The parents of the injured boy invite the parents of the alleged perpetrator to their apartment to discuss how best to reconcile the boys.
Read more: Doing Carnage to Carnage
There is a subtle subtext in the movie, The Artist, which powerfully grabs your imagination in ways that define the essence of storytelling and the manner in which movies can reach into the emotional truth of the human condition.
Something stunningly clever is at work in the minds of the French filmmakers who have created this exquisite original that not only grabs your total attention but also encompasses the many reasons why movies have had such an enormous impact on our lives.
Read more: The Artist, the Pinnacle of the Movie Maker’s Art
Having read all three of Stieg Larsson’s novel trilogy featuring his super heroine Lisbeth Salander, and having seen all three of the Swedish movies adapted from those books as well as the American version, I have arrived at one conclusion.
The Swedes win, at least when it comes to the first film adaptation of the trilogy, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.
Read more: A Smorgasbord of Kinky Sex
After seeing Clint Eastwood’s excellent biopic, J.Edgar, I was reminded of Mark Anthony’s funeral oration in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar: “I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him. The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.”
With excellent reproductions of the era and the magnificent acting of Leonardo DiCaprio and a wonderful cast, Eastwood tells the story of J. Edgar Hoover, a sexually conflicted, complex, and single-minded man who was both extravagantly reviled and praised for founding, building and operating, with dictatorial efficiency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and forging it into a powerful arm of the Federal Government.
Read more: J. Edgar, the Bad and the Good
Just finished reading “In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin,” by Erik Larson. It deals with the life, trials and tribulations of the American Ambassador to Germany, William E. Dodd, in the crucial years of Hitler’s rise to power. In what must be a gargantuan feat of research, Larson has read everything he could gets his hands on in the period including memoirs from ex-Nazi’s, communists, family friends and lovers of the Ambassador’s flirtatious daughter Martha, to weave together a most remarkable tapestry.
Read more: A Book Worth Reading
