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Re: The Emerald Atlas-- I'm not sure you have "a timeless writing style" if you evoke two book series published within the last decade and a half.
Best Books of April, 2011
This month our favorite new books offer a globe-trotting selection of great reading. Set in Europe, Canada, New York City, South Korea, Seattle, South Africa, India, and Afghanistan, these books are sure to make spring a season to remember for avid readers. Click on any book title below to re...
I was going to mention The Addiction.
I'd also mention the British miniseries Ultraviolet (no relation to the Milla Jovovich one), which has a very chilling enviro-fascist vampire in the form of Corin Redgrave, among others.
A Bloodsucker By Any Other Name: 10 Great Non-Traditional Movie Vampires
Though they have been portrayed in world folklore as inhuman creatures, Hollywood seems to prefer to depict vampires on the well-groomed side. A long list of aesthetically appealing performers, from Bela Lugosi to Gary Oldman and Robert Pattinson (not to mention Ingrid Pitt, Soledad Miranda an...
The Defenders. Socially progressive early legal drama.
Johnny Staccato. The late Trio showed some of these shows with John Cassavetes as a jazz-piano-playing private eye. In black and white, of course.
The Westerner. Brian Keith in Sam Peckinpah's first major project.
And I'd love a best of Tom Snyder's Tomorrow Show. There have to be, say, a dozen really wacked-out episodes (Meat Loaf, for one).
Where Are My Favorite TV Shows on DVD?
Some of television's finest hours are at last coming to DVD in the coming weeks, including the landmark miniseries Rich Man, Poor Man, the cult favorite Ellery Queen, and even The Bionic Woman with Lindsay Wagner. Most of the essentials from TV's pantheon are available on DVD, but I do keep wa...
The Defenders. Socially progressive early legal drama.
Johnny Staccato. The late Trio showed some of these shows with John Cassavetes as a jazz-piano-playing private eye. In black and white, of course.
The Westerner. Brian Keith in Sam Peckinpah's first major project.
And I'd love a best of Tom Snyder's Tomorrow Show. There have to be, say, a dozen really wacked-out episodes (Meat Loaf, for one).
Where Are My Favorite TV Shows on DVD?
Some of television's finest hours are at last coming to DVD in the coming weeks, including the landmark miniseries Rich Man, Poor Man, the cult favorite Ellery Queen, and even The Bionic Woman with Lindsay Wagner. Most of the essentials from TV's pantheon are available on DVD, but I do keep wa...
Cast iron's not hard to use at all. That said, unless you're cooking the things it's best at (like fried chicken), it's probably less versatile.
Generally, the pricing on sets is so advantageous it makes far more sense to get one than to pick and choose.
The Best Graduation Gift: The Starter Set or One Great Pan?
My niece Liesel recently finished college and will be starting graduate school in the fall. I'm planning on giving her a gift for her new apartment--something useful for the kitchen. (But of course!) My first inclination was to buy her a kitchen starter set, something with pots and pans, cooki...
So what, they didn't get TV in your town until the late 80s or something?
Kirk and Uhura
Perry Mason and Della Street
Rob and Laurie Petrie
Mannix and Peggy
John Steed and Emma Peel
Natasha and Boris
Ward and June
Most Sizzling TV Couples of All Time
We are not talking about cute and cuddly. We're not talking about sweet. (This is why The Office's Jim & Pam are not on the list.) We're talking about the stuff of legend, like when millions tuned in every week to see David and Maddie (Bruce Willis and Cybill Shepherd) spar on Moonlighting, righ...
"You're saying Wizard of Oz didn't make the cut!?"
Wizard of Oz did not do that well in 1939, and was thought of as a bit of a white elephant then. Its reputation came from TV, so while it's surely one of the half dozen most-seen movies of all time, it's not one of the most-seen in theaters.
""Birth of A Nation" from 1915 may beat them all"
There's a good discussion about this at the early film site Nitrateville, in which several people argue that there's no way the much lower population and prosperity in 1915 could have produced results that compare with the biggest hits of later decades:
http://www.nitrateville.com/viewtopic.php?t=5650
The Top Grossing Box-Office Films of All Time (Avatar is NOT #1)
Titanic's nearly 12-year reign as the all-time domestic box office champion fell today as Avatar, the other James Cameron pic, surpassed it with $603.8 million (Titanic's take was $600 million). Industry experts had seriously doubted any film would ever best that record because of the shortened...
Another Amazon list in which almost all the movies are from the last few years.
How about Night and Fog, The Shop on Main Street, The Pawnbroker, The Wannsee Conference, Shoah, Jacob the Liar...
10 Movies About the Holocaust
The U.N. Assembly dedicated Wednesday, January 27, as International Holocaust Remembrance Day, a date which marks the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Several poignant, yet brilliant films are set against the backdrop of this horrific era of our history. In the hands of extrao...
Ah yes, the funniest movies of all time are all from the last 5 years.
I guess at least that leaves a lot to be discovered.
Like W.C. Fields in It's a Gift.
What Movie Makes You Laugh the Hardest?
From our Who Knew? Department: Sunday, January 24, is Belly Laugh Day. Yup. I'm celebrating by going for a round of snort-laughs with some pals. We're re-watching Borat, which I originally saw while recovering at home from laparoscopic surgery via my abdomen. I don't know why I thought watch...
Actually, my vote would be for a director I'd written off until he came back with two remarkably strong films, All About My Mother and Talk To Her-- Pedro Almodovar.
That said, it's always amusing to think, imagine telling people when Every Which Way But Loose came out that someday the guy playing opposite the orangutan would have two Best Director Oscars and have had one film nominated... which was entirely in Japanese.
Best Director, 2000-2009: Clint Eastwood
Who is the greatest director of the last 10 years? It certainly could have been Martin Scorsese, who finally won his Oscar for the terrific film The Departed but also was nominated for The Aviator and Gangs of New York. It could be the Coen brothers, who churned out No Country for Old Men, A Ser...
"to be effortlessly beautiful and thin (The Beauty Myth), to participate in high-level public debates (Fire with Fire), to indulge sexual desire without condemnation or consequence (Promiscuities), to become a mother without hassle or pain (Misconceptions)."
You left out "and to be a movie star without actually having been in a movie anyone's seen since about 2001." Really, what's she been in since Tomb Raider? At best you could argue that Wanted was a mild offseason action hit and A Mighty Heart a critical success. But try and think, other than voiceover work in cartoons, what's the last thing you've actually seen her in? (For me it's Sky Captain, woo-hoo.)
Wolf's gaseous essay is a perfect match for Jolie's vaporous celebrity, rooted in next to no actual body of work.
Naomi Wolf and the Phenomenology of Angelina Jolie
Naomi Wolf's Harper's Bazaar essay on Angelina Jolie has attracted contemptuous comment. “An absurd, overwrought, swooning love letter,” Willa Paskin called it on DoubleX. Paskin’s disgust recalls Ron Rosenbaum’s condemnation of Tom Junod’s 2007 Esquire profile of the actress, which worked a s...
So one of your 10 best is a movie whose disc famously used the wrong, dumbed-down set of subtitles (Let the Right One In)? What does it take to make the second 10?
Editors' Picks: Best DVDs of the Year... So Far
We're halfway through the year, which means it's time for us to evaluate the best on DVD and Blu-ray to be released so far. With so many releases it was hard to narrow the field, but take a look at our list and let us know what you think. --Ellen Best DVDs of the Year... So Far 1. Slumdog Mill...
Speaking of La Quercia... they are the subject of my new Sky Full of Bacon video podcast. You get a full tour of their prosciuttificio's Italian-seasons-simulating design, as well as some thoughtful conversation about using humanely raised pigs:
http://www.vimeo.com/4763466
Food Notes: Prosciutto, Chef Memoir, and Pomposity
Illustration by Yevgeniy Solovyev from Charcuterie: The Craft of Salting, Smoking and Curing 1. Harold McGee waxed particularly eloquently in yesterday's NYTimes on the improving nature of American dry-cured ham and what makes it taste good. The pig "should be mature, well fed and free to run...
It's clear to me what Moynihan is saying, because it's clear to me what you're saying: that Stone was only a Stalinist because that was the way to oppose Hitler.
Moynihan is making it clear that Stone was a Stalinist before Hitler was widely seen as a menace, he was a Stalinist after Hitler was dead and Nazism vanquished, and most crucially of course, he was a Stalinist when that also meant being on Hitler's side.
[Ummm... No. Moynihan may or may not be "making that clear"--he's not that coherent. But Klehr, Haynes, and Vassilev say that Stone was *not* a Stalinist when that also meant being on Hitler's side: "1944 and 1945 notes do not indicate that Stone was an active KGB agent or even in direct contact with it after 1938, and given Stone’s initial anger over the Nazi-Soviet Pact, it is likely that he broke relations with the KGB in late 1939..."]
Reason Needs to Take Out the Garbage...
**UPDATE:** Michael C. Moynihan shows up in the comments section to object. Unfortunately, it's not clear what he is objecting to. He appears to say that spying on Hitler is bad--or at least that my presumption that "anti-Nazism justifies espionage" is false. I, by contrast, think that spying on ...
"The initial public fascination with Kennedy faded substantially after some inarticulate and uninformed interviews."
I think you wrote "public" when you meant "media."
I don't think the public has shared the media's lazy, tired Kennedy fascination in some 30 years, beyond the shallowest gossip-prurience level-- and even then, demand has been a fraction of supply.
The real reason Caroline Kennedy didn't get Hillary Clinton's Senate seat?
New information out just now explaining why Caroline Kennedy isn't Sen. Caroline Kennedy today. Ticket readers will recall that back in January when Hillary Clinton's New York Senate seat became vacant with her becoming secretary of State, the daughter of assassinated president John F. Kenned...
Since we're talking the Beard awards, I linked to as many of the nominated pieces of journalism as I could find online, starting here on my blog:
http://skyfullofbacon.com/blog/?p=190
Lotta good reading there. Oh, and let me recommend this nominee in the Multimedia category:
http://www.chicagoreader.com/features/stories/wholehog/
Since the two Sky Full of Bacon video podcasts in the nomination are by me...
Friday Afternoon Internet Happy Hour: Foodie Links Worth a Click
It's Friday again, and I know you're just sitting there whiling away those last few hours of the workday. Here are a few tasty links to get you through the afternoon: Get out your black tie or your beaded clutch purse (or both) and have your own James Beard Foundation Awards party on Monday nig...
"At the same time, I think it is safe to say that (to pick one of many examples) no barbecue joint will ever be reviewed in the little red book."
Uh... are there really any barbecue joints in either SF or NY worthy of being reviewed in the little red book?
Maybe by the time they get to Austin they'll do Cooper's and Black's.
Michelin Guide San Francisco: the Red Guide is coming to town
What's all clad in red and is coming to town? No, Christmas isn't coming to the City early this year, though if you asked a few chefs in town they might say that's exactly what has just happened to them. I'm talking about the Michelin Guide, that venerable and oh-so-French institution that's bee...
There are legal issues with posting a health violation-- which is, basically, alleging that someone has broken the law-- that don't enter the picture when you merely say food is lousy. At LTHForum.com we often have to pull these kinds of posts, though as Chowhound refugees ourselves, we ALWAYS send explanatory emails, it's only courteous to your members. If there's any way to salvage part of the message, we send it back to the person and tell them what they need to do to make it acceptable, too.
Not to hijack Chez Pim but this brings up another issue-- we've built up a pretty successful Chicago-based site around the dual purposes of talking about food online (like Chowhound) and eating it together in a group (unlike Chowhound, which discourages event planning pretty strongly). There are a lot of things you can do on our board that you can't really do very well on CH, either (photo essays, that kind of thing). Anyway, it seems to us that it would be interesting to branch out more to other cities (for purely non-profit, this-is-cool motives), develop a parallel community in another place which could use the board to plan events and talk about their own local scene in detail. Anyway, if anyone's annoyed with the limitations of CH and would like to explore an alternative, look at how our community works for Chicago and feel free to contact me about the possibilities. (Again, unlike the gambling and nudie sites, this is not for any commercial reason-- just looking to help and share good info with foodites in other cities.)
Mike G of LTHForum.com
The Incredible Shrinking Chowhound: censorship at work again?
image credit: Photobiker I was browsing Chowhound last night while waiting for you know who to come home when I came upon a series of very curious looking posts, by someone who called himself 'Photobiker'. This Photobiker dude apparently lives above the popular Yucatan-Vietnamese restaurant Yuc...
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