Tolstoy is a figure I have always kept at arm’s length; beyond reading Anna Karenina (easily the greatest novel ever written; really no other deserves to be put in the same paragraph with it; I hated it) and the most famous short stories, I have mostly avoided him. That he was full of hatred and [...]
Any American with talent and artistic ambition must be a little haunted by Orson Welles. On the one hand, there is his achievement – he wrote (cowrote), directed, and starred in Citizen Kane, universally acknowledged as one of the five or so greatest films of all time, when he was 25 – and on the [...]
It’s not immediately obvious that the main message of the movie Religulous – that religion is ridiculous and we have no room for it anymore in the world – would appeal to any person (like myself) who describes himself as religious. Religious people have seen atheists set up paper tigers and rip them apart before. [...]
Spike Lee’s When the Levees Broke.
03-Jun-09“Mean old Levee taught me to weep and moan.” - old Blues song.
If you want to get on the emotional inside of the experience of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans – and hence to feel the depth of America’s racial and economic segregation – then you would do well to watch Spike Lee’s documentary [...]