The New Republic

"Wearing Nothing but Attitude" --New York Times, May 1, 2005 READ MORE >>

Early in Bottle Rocket, writer-director Wes Anderson's 1996 debut film, a little girl asks her recently de-institutionalized 26-year-old brother when he will be coming home. "I can't come home," he explains. "I'm an adult." With that scene Anderson, himself 26 at the time, announced the theme that would dominate all his movies to date: the plight of the man-child, too old to live life like a kid but not mature enough to stop trying. READ MORE >>

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So my body went on growing, by night, went on pleading & singing to the earth I was born to be woven back into: Love, let me see if I can't sink my roots deeper into you, your minerals & water, your leaf-rot & gold, telling & un- telling of the oldest tales inscribed on wind-carved rocks, silt & grass, your song & prayers, your oaths & myths, your nights & days in one unending lament, your luminous swarm of wet kisses & stings, your spleen and mind, READ MORE >>

EROS (Warner Independent) WINTER SOLSTICE (Paramount Classics) READ MORE >>

MANY CATHODE-ILLUMINATED years have passed since the term "infotainment" settled into reality and started appearing without quotation marks. The devolution of the evening news into a hybrid sort of entertainment is an old tale. In its original form, it simply meant that hard news stories would still be broadcast, but that there would be fewer of them, and more segments about lifestyle issues, celebrity shenanigans, and the like. How quaint it all was. READ MORE >>

The Man Who Invented the Chromosome: A Life of Cyril Darlington By Oren Solomon Harman(Harvard University Press, 329 pp., $49.95) READ MORE >>

Maybe--hopefully--it was just a one-time concession, an effort to get the Chinese censors off his back once and for all. Regular readers may recall my review last year of Hero, the gorgeous, innovative martial-arts epic by Zhang Yimou that concluded with an appalling paean to authoritarianism in general and the "one China" policy of Tibetan and Taiwanese subjugation in particular. Zhang's followup effort, thankfully, is less morally fraught. READ MORE >>

It was a glorious spring day so my husband and I took the subway up to 104th Street to visit one of our favorite places in the city--the formal gardens in Central Park. They are not nearly so expansive or well known as the Brooklyn Botanic Garden or those in the Bronx, but they are particularly lovely, tucked away in that part of the park that is so far north that even many of the most ardent park lovers are unaware of their existence. READ MORE >>

About midway through Hotel Rwanda there's a powerful, if somewhat heavy-handed, scene in which a good-hearted U.N. colonel (Nick Nolte) makes clear to hotel manager Paul Rusesabagina (Don Cheadle) why the West won't intervene to stop the ongoing Rwandan genocide. "We think you're dirt, Paul," he explains sadly. "You're black. You're not even a nigger. You're an African." READ MORE >>