- Nancy Franklin: The kids are not all right in “Skins.”
8220;Skins,” a dramatic series that began on MTV in January, may ring a bell with people who don’t watch MTV, or don’t even have children who watch MTV, because of the amount of attention it has received in the media. The series depicts the . . ....
- Need to Know – Brainstorming For Film, Motion Graphics and Animation – Tips and Advice
The process of Brainstorming sounds very painful, and I guess sometimes it can be, but in this article are a few pointers to help you get the most from your brainstorming session and hopefully make it an enjoyable part of the creative process. After all, the idea is always the most vital ingredient to any successful film, animation or graphic treatment, the same with everything we create....
- Lizzie Widdicombe: A pedicab ride with the actor Jesse Eisenberg.
Who’s the biggest nerd in the movies? Jesse Eisenberg, who played the older brother in “The Squid and the Whale” and starred in “Adventureland,” might seem like an outside contender, but he has three films opening this month—“Solitary Man” (with . . ....
- Lizzie Widdicombe: Forbidden Fruit
The three-week citywide performance-art festival Performa begins next week, opening not with a dinner but with a “food event”: “a series of food installations and happenings,” according to the invitation, “that will lead guests”—Cindy Sherman, Mario Batali—“on . . ....
- Lizzie Widdicombe: Scousers
Clive Owen fans fall into a few categories. There are those (largely female) who like Owen for his looks. Then there are others (mostly male) who like his grizzled demeanor as an action hero in movies like “The International” and “Children of Men.” He seems rough . . ....
- Laura Miller: A fantasy writer and his impatient fans.
The writer George R. R. Martin left Hollywood in 1994, determined to do what he wanted for a change. He’d had some success in television, working on a new version of “The Twilight Zone” and on the fantasy series “Beauty and the Beast.” But . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Lizzie Widdicombe: Bohemian, in NoHo.
paragraph class="noindent">New York does exclusivity well, but Tokyo does it better. There is a Japanese phrase, “Ichigensama okotowari,” that’s used by owners of certain discriminating restaurants and shops, and means, roughly, “We respectfully decline first-time visitors.” In other words: walk-ins . . ....
- Lizzie Widdicombe: Bohemian, in NoHo.
paragraph class="noindent">New York does exclusivity well, but Tokyo does it better. There is a Japanese phrase, “Ichigensama okotowari,” that’s used by owners of certain discriminating restaurants and shops, and means, roughly, “We respectfully decline first-time visitors.” In other words: walk-ins . . ....
- Lizzie Widdicombe: What would Shakespeare say about WikiLeaks?
8220;A sincere diplomat,” Stalin once said, “is like dry water or wooden iron.” As any diplomat knows, the role requires a doubleness not just of message but of manner—an extra slathering of the flatteries and false civilities that grease the wheels of all human . . ....
- Lizzie Widdicombe: France’s First Lady takes a tour of N.Y.U.
The other day, students in New York University’s visual-arts program received an e-mail advising them to be in their studios the following Monday afternoon. “They said that somebody famous was coming,” Robert Leonardi, a senior, recalled, “and that anything could happen.” A . . ....
- Lizzie Widdicombe: The Leopard at des Artistes.
8220;If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change,” says a young aristocrat in “The Leopard,” the 1958 book by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa and the 1963 Visconti movie, about the decline of the Italian ruling class during the Risorgimento. It . . ....
- Lizzie Widdicombe: Matador tailor Justo Algaba and the Metropolitan Opera’s “Carmen.”
Justo Algaba, one of the world’s most respected matador tailors, was in town the other day from Madrid, where he has a two-story shop devoted to the production of matador outfits, called trajes de luce (“suits of light”), because of their shimmery, multicolored adornments. Algaba . . ....
- Lizzie Widdicombe: Van Cleef & Arpels diamonds on display.
Paris, France, sometime in the nineteen-fifties. A woman walks into Van Cleef & Arpels and falls in love with a diamond necklace. It’s expensive—say, four hundred thousand francs. “Listen,” she tells the jeweller, “tomorrow I’m going to come with my . . ....
- Lizzie Widdicombe: Quentin Rowan, a.k.a. Q. R. Markham, plagiarism addict.
Spy novels embrace clichés—the double agent, the bomb-rigged briefcase—and “Assassin of Secrets,” published last fall, made a virtue of this tendency, piling one trope onto another to create a story that rang with wry knowingness. The book is set in the . . ....
- Books: “Townie.”
This charged memoir by the author of “House of Sand and Fog” begins as his parents’ marriage unravels, and his father, an acclaimed writer, leaves his mother struggling to support four kids. Living in poor towns in northern Massachusetts, Dubus and his siblings “roamed the neighborhoods . . . (Subscription required.)...
- David Denby: Roman Polanski’s “The Ghost Writer.”
Why did Tony Blair, in his ten years as Prime Minister, do exactly what the White House wanted on so many occasions? That’s the juicy question buried in the depths of Roman Polanski’s “The Ghost Writer,” an extraordinarily precise and well-made political thriller . . ....
- Anthony Lane: “Friends with Kids,” “Attenberg” reviews.
In order to understand “Friends with Kids,” think of it as “Friends” with kids. The place is the same—a pocket of New York—and the math is identical. Six long-standing pals: three women, three of the opposite flavor. Four of them divided . . ....
- Lizzie Widdicombe: Young Professionals United for Change watch the State of the Union.
Four years ago, the Young Professionals United for Change—three thousand black banker and lawyer types under the age of forty—held a formal gala in Washington to celebrate Barack Obama’s Inauguration. By contrast, the group’s State of the Union “watch party,” . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Lizzie Widdicombe: Colin Firth on being English.
Alert your mother: Colin Firth was in town last week. The British actor best known for playing variations on the repressed-but-sexy English gentleman, such as the aloof Mr. Darcy in the BBC’s “Pride and Prejudice,” and the uptight, but still eligible, Mark Darcy, foil . . ....
- Lizzie Widdicombe: Ben Walker plays Andrew Jackson in eyeliner.
The high-camp American-history rock musical “Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson” has been extended through June at the Public Theatre—good news for the packs of teen-age girls who can be seen hovering outside the lobby. They’re not all students of nineteenth-century populism . . ....
- Anthony Lane: “The Kids Are All Right” and “Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Inferno.”
Not long ago, in “Mother and Child,” Annette Bening played a controlling, easily angered woman who worked in a hospital and found her status as a parent challenged by unforeseen events. Now, in “The Kids Are All Right,” she opts for a complete change of tack . . ....
- Books: “The Enchanter.”
Zanganeh writes a love letter to literature and to Vladimir Nabokov, a writer who has charmed her with his “demonic artistry of words” and with the “joyousness of pure knowledge.” Zanganeh, once a reluctant reader, picks up “Ada, or Ardor” and quickly discovers that . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Lizzie Widdicombe: How top chefs fly with their knives.
Here’s a travel story that will send you back: Some years ago, Eric Ripert, the executive chef and co-owner of Le Bernardin, was returning to New York from Washington, D.C., where he’d cooked for a charity event. He put his carry-on bag through the . . ....
- Zadie Smith: Race, religion, and diversity in London after 9/11.
8220;Suddenly summoned to witness some thing great and horrendous, we keep fighting not to reduce it to our own smallness,” wrote John Updike ten years ago in these pages. He watched the towers fall with “the false intimacy of television,” from a tenth-floor apartment in . . ....
- Books: “The Pregnant Widow.”
Amis’s twelfth novel is a despairing, sex-obsessed pileup of ideas. It follows the travails of Keith Nearing, a twenty-year-old aspiring writer who spends the summer of 1970 in an Italian castle with his girlfriend, Lily, her beautiful friend Scheherazade, and a shifting collection of glamorous . . ....
- 12 Volt TV Upgrade For Semi-Trucks and RVs
Each RV, semi-truck and motor home deserves a real AC DC television. The thing many people don't know is how easy and advantageous the standard television upgrade might be. Most vehicles, which are equipped with a television, use a power inverter for supplying the television with power when the generator is off. You know what? It's disastrously wasteful....
- Anthony Lane: “The Trip” and “Road to Nowhere.”
To those expecting a mind-warping voyage through altered states, Michael Winterbottom’s “The Trip” will come as a disappointment. The time is now, the trip of the title is a gentle motoring holiday, and the setting is the North of England, whose hills are not in . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Goings on About Town: Readings and Talks
goatTitle-->“THALIA BOOK CLUB”
Lesley Stahl moderates a discussion about Joseph Heller’s “Catch-22,” which was first published fifty years ago. Robert Gottlieb, who edited the novel, will join the writer Christopher Buckley and Mike Nichols, the director of the 1970 film based . . ....
