Ouch! Even though I was instantly thrilled when I saw that Guy Ritchie had made a movie based on the old Man from UNCLE television series, I was also suspicious that the release date had been scheduled in mid-August, which is usually a dumping ground for dead dogs and moldy cheese. My enthusiasm was further …
Neither Ginny nor I are prone to tout our own abilities, but there are some things we can do, and that’s all there is to it. As it happens, one of them is sitting. Like Will Sonnet, the old TV character played by Walter Brennan put it. “No brag, just fact.” Not that we won’t pee …
I am so woefully behind in my blogging that I am only now getting around to subjects that weeks or months old! However, if the thought has survived rattling around in my head all this time, I suppose it deserves recording. Like many people, I was happy with the final episode of Mad Men‘s demi-season. …
As an early and excited fan of Mad Men (Okay, I realize that this doesn’t make me the first man on the moon, but I was there), it saddens me to say that I was pretty disappointed in this past season. I know others disagree–Troy Patterson in Slate called it the show’s best season ever–but …
The question of whether James Gandolfini was the greatest actor of his era will be settled sometime in the future. Commentators will have to decide whether an 86 hour performance as one character (plus 25 or so stellar supporting performances) required more of an actor, and delivered more from an actor, than did, say, twenty …
Three of the most interesting hours of my life were spent in the company of Henry Bromell, who died the other day at the age of 65. Henry was a writer–of short stories and television scripts mostly, but also of an also of a novel and of screenplays. Ann Kolson had assigned me to write …
Apart from that special day when the temperature was topping 90, a skunky stink was broaching the perimeter of the property, and poison ivy was breaking out all over my body–quite the trifecta!–nothing quite so pleased me this summer as those occasions when I happened upon Carly Rae Jepson singing “Call Me Maybe.” I know …
On Morning Joe today, Chris Matthews, a bulldozer on most days, completely demolishes GOP Party chairman Reince Priebus. “That cheap shot about ‘I don’t have a problem with my birth certificate’ was awful,” Matthews said of GOP hopeful Mitt Romney’s Friday embrace of the birther notion that President Barack Obama was not born in the …