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Al Gore’s Hypothetical Candidacy

Al Gore’s Oscar was as predictable as the thunderous ovations he received at the Academy Awards last night. But it was also a reminder that there is nothing Democrats love more than a politician who...

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Bookshelf

• Otto Preminger? Who he? If you’re a paid-up member of the most extreme wing of the auteur theory of film criticism, which holds that directors are the golden gods of Hollywood and everyone else is...

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I’m Not There—Until They Hand Out Oscars

Midway through I’m Not There, director Todd Haynes’s soon-to-open film fantasia in which Bob Dylan is played by six different actors to signify different phases in the life of the Bard of Hibbing, the...

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ATONEMENT: The Same Surprise Twice

Your reaction to the film version of Atonement, which opens December 7, may depend on whether you can be shocked twice by the same revelation. Ian McEwan’s superlative 2001 novel starts with a fusty...

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Bookshelf

• Gertrude Himmelfarb, who apparently knows everything there is to know about Victorian England, has been publishing invaluable books about the Victorians for longer than it would be polite for me to...

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The Movie That Wants You To Be Extremely Depressed

Last night, my wife and I got around to seeing the acclaimed Away from Her, featuring sure-to-be-Oscar-nominated Julie Christie as a woman suffering from Alzheimer’s. Her husband is then forced to...

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More Hollywood Iraq Madness

Yet another Iraq movie started shooting this week. This one is a fictionalized version of the book Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone. Director Paul Greengrass is one of the...

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Oscar Time!

I’m on record as being an Oscar-cynic; as far as I’m concerned, the annual awards ceremony is, rather than a celebration of cinematic accomplishment, primarily an excuse for Hollywood to indulge in...

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The Bloody End

Despite the consensus view that P.T. Anderson’s latest film is a searing, visionary work, numerous critics have complained about the final scene of There Will Be Blood. The New Yorker’s David Denby...

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Listening to Clinton and Obama Speak…

…you would think, seriously, that the United States was on the verge of total and complete collapse in about three minutes. Meanwhile, CNN has cut repeatedly to an audience of Americans in desperate...

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The Democrats Are Having All The Fun

What a depressing night for Republicans! Whatever the Democratic debate lacked in substance, it made up for in sheer exuberance. With the writers strike sucking the fun out of Hollywood society, the...

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Oscar Predictions

Here’s the thing: I’m generally lousy at them, because I always overthink these things. So I suppose since everybody and his brother are saying No Country for Old Men is going to win, it probably is —...

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And the Oscar for Biggest Hypocrite Goes to. . .

The most interesting thing the French actress and new Oscar-winner Marion Cotillard said in a recent interview is not that she believes 9/11 was an inside job. There are plenty of big names in American...

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Friedman’s New Cold War

“The next American president will inherit many foreign policy challenges, but surely one of the biggest will be the cold war,” writes Tom Friedman in this morning’s New York Times.  “Yes, the next...

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And the Best Picture Oscar Goes to … Everybody

I hate the new Best Picture scheme. Sure there are always laudable efforts that get overlooked when you reduce the nominees to five in number, but this list makes it seems as if all you had to do was...

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A Blog Post I Wish I’d Written

On hearing a bon mot from someone, Oscar Wilde responded, “I wish I’d said that.” “You will, Oscar, you will,” replied his friend James McNeill Whistler. I know what he meant. I’ve just finished...

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Hollywood Celebrates

Will there be fireworks at the Hollywood Bowl? A fantastic bash in his honor, albeit with the guest of honor absent? Yes, from coast to coast, the moral zombies who populate the big and small screen...

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Flotsam and Jetsam

The local Pennsylvania media find Joe Sestak’s answers on earmarks to be all wet (“a vague, disingenuous attempt to polish his own credentials”): “The Democratic congressman and Senate candidate should...

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Christopher Hitchens, Jon Stewart, and More

In his moving article in Vanity Fair about his cancer, Christopher Hitchens disclosed that just before he went on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart, he violently threw up — the result of the illness he...

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Mark Zuckerberg as Time‘s ‘Person of the Year’: A Brilliant Choice

As is always the case, it seems, Time magazine’s selection of Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg as Person of the Year is generating scorn and outrage from people who had their own candidates —...

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