I have seen a lot of Shakespeare in parks, but I am fairly new to other theater presented outdoors. The last show I saw from Apollinaire was Cyrano de Bergerac, also in Mary O’Malley Park. Even though it was not Shakespeare, that text has a certain poetic bombast that doesn’t feel out of place when […]
My friends always laugh at me when I tell them Bring it On is about race relations. Because, you know, it’s about cheerleaders. But it actually IS about race relations. That iconic 2000 film was a quotable, hilarious, rip-roaring exploration of urban race relations, gender roles and outsider assimilation conflict. It Was! Screenwriters of massive […]
If I were a Legally Blonde character I would be a not-so-delicate combo of snobby conservative Vivienne Kensington and frumpy, loudmouth intellectual-liberal Enid Hoopes; but despite this uber-brunette pedigree, I am an unabashed Elle Woods fan. I think she’s the greatest. The world needs kind and well-meaning characters like Elle and her empathetic optimism, and […]
I wasn’t going to write about Mirror, Mirror. The movie, to me, was so obviously horrendous that my vicious take down of it would just seem like a bunch of humorless whining. Then I stumbled upon a surprising number of positive reviews and I felt compelled to share (for the record, it’s getting a 55% approval […]
Having devoured the books in a matter of days, I was more than excited about the film adaptation of The Hunger Games. With the inevitable elimination of that all-too-troublesome first person narrative, thoughtful and promising casting, a director who is a sworn fan and oh-so-welcome authorial input on the screenplay, I was pretty convinced that […]
I Love You, Beth Cooper is Larry Doyle’s first novel (he also wrote Go, Mutants!, the subject of my first review here at My Books). I Love You, Beth Cooper’s about a boy—Denis Cooverman, captain of the debate team and valedictorian of BGHS (Buffalo Grove High School), to be precise—and his ill-advised attempt to make […]
For fans of Jane Austen, like me, the publication of Death Comes to Pemberley was cause for a little celebration. The author, P.D. James, was born in Oxford in 1920, and is an accomplished and well respected writer. In her 92-year-old hands, I felt that this sequel to the classic Pride and Prejudice would be […]
It would be very easy to hate Carnage, Roman Polanski’s simple but searing adaptation of Yasmina Reza’s Tony-winning play The God of Carnage (or, Le Dieu du Carnage, really). The characters are so dreadful, so maddening, so obnoxiously self righteous that I wanted to hurl things at the screen. But about halfway through, I finally […]