Brian De Palma’s film Passion is yet another De Palma exploration of the psycho-economics of sex as it plays out in the artifice of cinema. It features two female marketing executives (Rachel McAdams as Christine Stanford and Noomi Rapace as Isabelle James) who manipulate, plot against and turn (...)
I’m teaching a class right now in comic book movies, partly to trace the history of the genre from the 1940s on – when they began as Saturday morning serials – and partly to discover, if I could, why these films have moved to the mainstream of cinematic discourse. There’s no question about it (...)
Pete Seeger was my first hero. I cannot remember a time when I did not know who he was. I first listened to him on my parent’s 78s of the Almanac Singers singing “Talking Union” and “I Don’t Want Your Millions Mister,” and then on a Folkways record of work songs, singing “The Young Man Who Wouldn’t (...)
The two most important questions shaping the discussion of events in Ukraine should, in my opinion, be:
1. How (relatively) important is Kiev’s claim on sovereignty over the Crimea, transferred from Russia to Ukraine by the stroke of Nikita Khrushchev’s pen in 1954?
and
2. How (relatively) (...)
Haaretz is trying to sell us a new Avigdor Lieberman. In a headline from January 2, 2014, the newspaper notes that the reinstated Foreign Minister says Israel must give John Kerry’s peace efforts a chance. According to the article’s author, commentator Barak Ravid, Lieberman has changed his tune. (...)