Six months later, I'm still mad at her for leaving. But I hope that near the end she found a kind of peace, the peace you feel when you stop struggling against the tide and just let it carry you out. That's what I would feel if she'd had any other… Read full post »

The experience of having my mother take her life was enormously difficult and raised a lot of questions about what it meant to be a good daughter; I wasn’t sure if that meant trying to talk my mother out of killing herself, or helping her do it. I wrote the book… Read full post »

It's that I'm still coming to grips with how a woman could possibly have dreamed up this spartan American soldier in Iraq, who, while obsessively romancing death as a bomb-squad ace, outdoes the most extreme images of machismo ever produced by mainstream America. [. . .] Looks to me like she's… Read full post »

Sidibe's reticence -- her recognition that Precious may never feel comfortable with all-out happiness -- is part of what makes the performance so touching. Monologues are often the thing that net awards for actors, even though they're never the best test of an actor's skill, chiefly because they invo… Read full post »

To this conundrum, Hegemann has added a heaping dollop of generational special pleading, and the story has prompted teachers to offer multiple examples of students who don't seem to understand what plagiarism is or that it's wrong. Kids these days, this Cassandra-ish line of reasoning goes, have unfa… Read full post »

"Can I ask you a question about Canada?" he asked.

Sure, I replied, expecting something about healthcare or Anne Murray. Nope.

"Why are all you Canadians so terribly boring?"

Canadian national identity has always been a curious mixture of American populism and British propriety, a fact that, along wi… Read full post »

Sometimes, when I stand in a room of white men, I feel unfeminine and unsexual, no matter the strappy heels, the makeup, the dress. I know there are white men out there who find black women attractive, but you, John Mayer -- the guy down enough to be on"Chappelle's Show," the guy so… Read full post »

To me it was always about my bag lady fears. It's a fear that men don't have, by the way. It comes from distant parenting or childhood abandonment. I had that. It's what happens if you don’t have a nurturing environment as a child, and you think this could happen, that… Read full post »

After you've played God — twice, as Freeman has done in Tom Shadyac's "Bruce Almighty" and "Evan Almighty" — and been God, there's not really much left to do, except play Nelson Mandela. [. . .] The movie's first third is stiff and dull.

And through that section, so is Freeman.… Read full post »

Both Joyce Maynard and Salinger's daughter Margaret were vilified for violating the great man's privacy when they wrote about their own experiences with him and exposed his predatory, controlling relationships with women. Instead of exploring the insights these revelations might b… Read full post »

"[T]he lumbering, gentle Oher", "in a cautious and economical performance", "is the only one who automatically sits down at the table to eat, presumably out of simple good manners, but also out of some idea of what Thanksgiving should be, drawn less from his own experience than from Norman Rockwell's… Read full post »

But this will not be a post about the tele-genic properties of this or that movie critic -- no!

I would like to simply say that the "theme" of AVATAR is shmaltz, pure shmaltz, and no amount of discussion by a very cool-looking Columbia prof will disguise that fact. No amount… Read full post »

What passes for screenwriting these days is worrisome by any measure. "Avatar," the most successful film of all time (and a glorious spectacle), has some of the worst dialogue in recent memory. Now more than ever it's critical to recognize those that are striving to keep the art of the screenplay… Read full post »

In the independent-oriented 20s, the aggressively thin presumed over the fat and maternal (the Victorian Matriarch). With the communal closing-in in the 30s and 40s, maternal thighs just made you in-sync with the "mother actually did know best," plodding times. In case you haven't noticed, we're head… Read full post »

actually says that this is "the first generation in which more women than men have college degrees" and that women outearn men in less than a quarter of American heterosexual couples. If gender inequality that favored men hadn't been the norm for so long, such modest advances for women wouldn't be… Read full post »

A spending freeze? That’s the brilliant response of the Obama team to their first serious political setback?

It’s appalling on every level.

It’s bad economics, depressing demand when the economy is still suffering from mass unemployment. Jonathan Zasloff wri… Read full post »

People-friendly works, does it? If it does, then -- believe it or not -- Obama would have lost to Hillary, for Hillary was the one becoming a movement just before the democratic convention. Obama was seeming passive and distant (as he does now), and even though Hillary rose, he still ably… Read full post »

People-friendly works, does it? If it does, then -- believe it or not -- Obama would have lost to Hillary, for Hillary was the one becoming a movement just before the democratic convention. Obama was seeming passive and distant (as he does now), and even though Hillary rose, he still ably… Read full post »

My book "Draining the Amazon's Swamp:  All that we do when we read, write, watch, make -- live -- our fictions" is now available for (free) viewing/download.   Essays I wrote, 2002 - 2006.  Books and movies become part of our lived life, worlds we experience -- for real. &nbs… Read full post »

Seriously. Ask anyone who's seen it, ask someone who's just walking out of the theater — ask them what happened in the movie or if they remember any particular lines or scenes or dramatic or memorable moments. (Amity, response to post, “James Cameron: Artist, termite, or elephant man?&rdq… Read full post »

60's reach had to finally slip? 

People-friendly works, does it? If it does, then -- believe it or not -- Obama would have lost to Hillary, for Hillary was the one becoming a movement just before the democratic convention. Obama was seeming passive and distant (as he does now), and… Read full post »

But plumbing the appeal of Dwayne Johnson the actor requires setting the size of the package aside for a moment, the better to zero in on subtleties: The expressiveness of those unnaturally mobile eyebrows or the way, either in character or during the course of an on-camera interview, he almost seems… Read full post »

The application of the real world is the most powerful tool in our educator toolbox, and what better way to understand a philosophy about cultivating land than to do it? As we read pages of "Walden" and planted our seeds, quotes from Thoreau such as "I chose to live deliberately, to… Read full post »

The old Jack is long gone, though, replaced with this sad little half-caf Jack, who takes other people's feelings into account and looks straight into his own daughter's eyes when he's speaking to her. I mean, come on, Jack! What have you become?!

[. . .]

But does Wilty Jack find… Read full post »