Salon.com > Jude Law http://www.salon.com Thu, 23 May 2013 01:58:00 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 “Side Effects”: A chilly, mysterious thriller ends a strange and brilliant career http://www.salon.com/2013/02/07/side_effects_a_chilly_mysterious_thriller_ends_a_strange_and_brilliant_career/ http://www.salon.com/2013/02/07/side_effects_a_chilly_mysterious_thriller_ends_a_strange_and_brilliant_career/#comments Thu, 07 Feb 2013 01:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=13192895 It’s not enough to say that the absence of human feeling is characteristic of Steven Soderbergh’s films. It’s more that the absence of human feeling is Soderbergh’s principal subject matter, and central to his diagnosis of contemporary society and its pathologies. From his 1989 debut with “Sex, Lies, and Videotape” onward, Soderbergh has seemed divided between a yearning for human contact and a (supposedly) detached and dispassionate belief that it can’t happen anymore and maybe never could.

In Soderbergh’s new movie “Side Effects,” which he says will be his last as a cinema director, all human interaction is mediated by some abstract force, whether that’s money or a commodified and quotation-marked notion of sexuality or an impressive range of psychoactive pharmaceuticals, most notably a fictional antidepressant called “Ablixa” that serves as an enormous plot MacGuffin. This follows such recent Soderbergh films as “Contagion” (scripted, like “Side Effects,” by frequent collaborator Scott Z. Burns), whose true protagonist is arguably a pandemic virus; “Haywire,” in which almost every meeting between characters leads to violence; and “Magic Mike” and “The Girlfriend Experience,” tonally opposite but thematically linked films that depict human sexuality as a marketplace and prostitution as its governing metaphor.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/02/07/side_effects_a_chilly_mysterious_thriller_ends_a_strange_and_brilliant_career/feed/ 5 Tolstoy meets “Moulin Rouge” http://www.salon.com/2012/11/15/keira_knightleys_explosive_new_anna_karenina/ http://www.salon.com/2012/11/15/keira_knightleys_explosive_new_anna_karenina/#comments Thu, 15 Nov 2012 16:45:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=13073346 It’s hopeless to expect any film adaptation to capture every aspect of “Anna Karenina,” both because it’s a jillion pages long and because it’s arguably the greatest of all Russian novels. It’s a complex social satire of the late Russian Empire, a half-accidental feminist manifesto, an essay on the ambiguous and irresistible power of romantic love and a parable of Christian suffering and sacrifice. It’s the story of three marriages – one a disaster, one an unhappy compromise and the third a wonderful surprise – and two great loves, which over and over again contradicts its famous opening line: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/11/15/keira_knightleys_explosive_new_anna_karenina/feed/ 14 “360″: A globetrotting quest for bad sex http://www.salon.com/2012/08/02/360_a_globetrotting_quest_for_bad_sex/ http://www.salon.com/2012/08/02/360_a_globetrotting_quest_for_bad_sex/#comments Thu, 02 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12970319 It’s easy to hate movies that are abundantly terrible or immoral or stupid, but I almost feel like a jerk telling you that Fernando Meirelles’ globetrotting drama “360” is a mistake from beginning to end. What kind of person could dislike a film made with such abundant craftsmanship in such a range of locations, with a talented international cast and a truckload of good intentions? Well, all those things are precisely the problem: “360” is a mid-level example of the enduring and mostly terrible genre whose classics include Paul Haggis’ Oscar-sweeping “Crash” and Alejandro González Iñárritu’s “Babel,” in which lustrous photography, impeccable production design, attractive actors and an excruciating chain of coincidence are meant to signal profundity and meaningfulness. We’re all connected, you see, as long as what you mean by “we” is good-looking people who hang out in hotel bars.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/08/02/360_a_globetrotting_quest_for_bad_sex/feed/ 7 “Sherlock Holmes”: Downey by Law http://www.salon.com/2009/12/24/sherlock_holmes/ http://www.salon.com/2009/12/24/sherlock_holmes/#comments Thu, 24 Dec 2009 01:35:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/stephanie_zacharek/2009/12/23/sherlock_holmes Guy Ritchie's "Sherlock Holmes" is entertaining in a glossy, mindless way — every corner of it is packed with hyperkinetic life, which is not to say that it's likely to stick in your memory for more than a few hours after you've seen it. The screenplay and story are credited to no fewer than five writers, and that's not even counting Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who created the characters — and brought them to life with his elegant prose — in the first place. Ritchie seems to think that a detective-and-doctor team who solve crimes by, oh, thinking about them just isn't dynamic enough for the screen, so he turns Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John Watson — played by Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law — into action heroes: They kick, punch and karate-chop their way through various scenarios in which the cutting is fast, even when the motion is slow, and the computer-generated effects are plentiful.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2009/12/24/sherlock_holmes/feed/ 30 Films of the decade: “A.I. Artificial Intelligence” http://www.salon.com/2009/12/14/rosenbaum_2/ http://www.salon.com/2009/12/14/rosenbaum_2/#comments Mon, 14 Dec 2009 03:12:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/film_salon/2009/12/13/rosenbaum I'm not the only one to consider "A.I. Artificial Intelligence" a very great and deeply misunderstood film; others as disparate as Andrew Sarris and the late Stan Brakhage have more or less agreed with me, as well as my friend and favorite academic critic, James Naremore. (Click the link above to read my full review.) But it's also clear to me that any ordinary auteurist way of processing cinema can't begin to handle this masterwork adequately: Reading it simply as a Spielberg film, as most detractors do, or even trying to read it simply as a Kubrick film, is a pretty futile exercise with limited rewards, even though the fingerprints of both directors are all over it. Seeing it as a perpetually unresolved dialectic between Kubrick and Spielberg starts to yield a complicated kind of sense -- an ambiguity where the bleakest pessimism and the most ecstatic kind of feel-good enchantment swiftly alternate and even occasionally blend, not to mention a far more enriching experience, however troubling and unresolved. As a profound meditation on the difference between what's human and what isn't, it also constitutes one of the best allegories about cinema that I know.

Film Salon has invited a group of special guests to write about their favorite film(s) of the 2000s. To read the entire series, go here.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2009/12/14/rosenbaum_2/feed/ 26 Wong Kar-wai’s blueberry-pie America http://www.salon.com/2008/04/03/wong/ http://www.salon.com/2008/04/03/wong/#comments Thu, 03 Apr 2008 10:11:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/beyond_the_multiplex//feature/2008/04/03/wong

The Weinstein Co.

Jude Law and Norah Jones kiss in "My Blueberry Nights."

You can argue that the Chinese-born, Hong Kong-based filmmaker Wong Kar-wai was jumping off a cliff by making "My Blueberry Nights" -- a movie written in English, shot in the United States, and starring an untested pop singer with no acting experience -- but you can't argue it was the first time. In eight feature films spread over two decades, Wong has made a violent gangland drama, a period romance, a 1960s coming-of-age picture, an elliptical science-fiction epic and a tale of bohemian gay lovers shot in Argentina. It's difficult to say whether any of his pictures belong to the same genre as any of the others, but they're all defiantly Wong Kar-wai films that seem to fuse the traditions of Western and Eastern art cinema, languorous dreamlike experiences where plot is secondary to mood and where the beauty of each episode, each face, each room and each moment is paramount.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2008/04/03/wong/feed/ 0 Indie box office: Lennon’s assassin a hit, man http://www.salon.com/2008/04/01/bo_5/ http://www.salon.com/2008/04/01/bo_5/#comments Tue, 01 Apr 2008 09:04:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/beyond_the_multiplex//feature/2008/04/01/bo

Arthouse Films

Still from "The Cool School."

I was tied up in screenings on Monday, and when I wasn't doing that I was hunkered down, trying to sharpen my mind and harden my spirit, or something of the sort, in preparation for a Tuesday interview with Wong Kar-wai. How do you tell an artist you admire immensely that you think he's made a dreadful mistake, one that raises a whole range of questions about his entire career? I've now seen "My Blueberry Nights" -- that's Wong's forthcoming English-language debut, an episodic American road movie with Norah Jones, Jude Law, Natalie Portman and Rachel Weisz -- twice, first last year as the opening-night film at Cannes, and second a week ago. (It opens in the United States on Friday.) I guess he re-cut it in between or something, but it hasn't improved.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2008/04/01/bo_5/feed/ 6 Beyond the Multiplex http://www.salon.com/2007/05/17/cannes_2_3/ http://www.salon.com/2007/05/17/cannes_2_3/#comments Thu, 17 May 2007 15:45:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/review/2007/05/17/cannes_2 You have to suspend all varieties of disbelief and float along with "My Blueberry Nights," which opened the 60th Festival de Cannes with a splashy red-carpet premiere on Wednesday night. That's rather like the attitude required by this festival, both so inconvenient and so delightful, and by the storybook landscape of the Côte d'Azur. Reactions to the opening film have been muted here so far, more polite than enthusiastic. Costar Jude Law was the principal focus of paparazzi attention, climbing the steps of the Palais des Festivals in Ray-Bans and a classic tuxedo; with all the gentlemanly grace you'd expect, he tried to deflect the focus toward a winsome, awkward, clearly overwhelmed Norah Jones, the film's unlikely lead. (I'm underqualified as a fashion critic, but did she choose the slightly dorky gown, with the high waist and poofy sleeves, on purpose?)

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2007/05/17/cannes_2_3/feed/ 2 “Breaking and Entering” http://www.salon.com/2007/01/26/breaking/ http://www.salon.com/2007/01/26/breaking/#comments Fri, 26 Jan 2007 13:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/review/2007/01/26/breaking Midlife is a bummer. But for Anthony Minghella, it's a rarefied, tasteful bummer. From the opening voice-over in "Breaking and Entering" -- in which Jude Law's slouching-toward-middle-age architect wonders in crisp, plummy tones what it means when longtime partners simply stop looking at one another -- we know we're headed for "If we could only learn to unclench our jaws, we might be able to live life more fully" territory. Marital malaise, the impermeability of class and ethnic barriers, the difficulties of raising a child who has special needs: Minghella covers it all in this tale of well-heeled Londoners who suddenly find themselves looking on the dark side of life. There's even an Eastern European hooker named Oana (played by Vera Farmiga) who imparts words of wisdom to our hero in a carnival fortuneteller accent. "Breaking and Entering" might have been farce, if Minghella weren't so dead-serious.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2007/01/26/breaking/feed/ 1 “The Holiday” http://www.salon.com/2006/12/08/holiday_5/ http://www.salon.com/2006/12/08/holiday_5/#comments Fri, 08 Dec 2006 12:06:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/review/2006/12/08/holiday Here's the good news: "The Holiday" springs from a terrific romantic-comedy premise. An Englishwoman (Kate Winslet) and an American (Cameron Diaz) switch houses, and countries, for two weeks, during which time each meets the man of her dreams.

Here's the bad news: It's written and directed by Nancy Meyers.

Meyers doesn't bless us, thank God, with an offering every Christmas. Yet the gap between pictures is never nearly enough time to recuperate. For Meyers, the surest way to reach the so-called chick-flick audience (which consists of men as well as women) is to condescend to it: Movies like the 2000 "What Women Want" and the 2003 "Something's Gotta Give" seem to have been assembled from marketing-survey checkboxes, which is far easier than wrangling with actual characters or complicated emotions. (Are over-50 women sexy? Yes. Is it OK if they date younger men? Sometimes. But it makes everyone more comfortable, doesn't it, if they seek out age-appropriate mates? Absolutely.)

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2006/12/08/holiday_5/feed/ 14 “All the King’s Men” http://www.salon.com/2006/09/22/all_king/ http://www.salon.com/2006/09/22/all_king/#comments Fri, 22 Sep 2006 11:30:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/review/2006/09/22/all_king In 1949, when director Robert Rossen released his juiced-up, noirish adaptation of Robert Penn Warren's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, "All the King's Men," there were probably some people who felt that a great work had been desecrated. But Rossen's movie has a throbbing pulse: It honors its source material by coming at it with blunt purposefulness. And Broderick Crawford, as the thuggish but efficient career politician Willie Stark (whose character Warren modeled on Depression-era Louisiana Gov. Huey Long), uses sharp left-hook shorthand to telegraph the way sincere populist ideals can all too easily give way to corruption. There's no mistaking what Crawford's Willie Stark is thinking at any given moment. His motives and desires are planted right on Crawford's boxer's mug, like scars.

So what the hell does Sean Penn think he's doing in Steven Zaillian's bizarrely conceived re-slapdashtation of "All the King's Men"? Both the performance and the movie around it are virtually incomprehensible. This is supposed to be a story about a charismatic and ambitious politician who earns the loyalty of the populace by telling it to them straight, and yet half the time we have no idea what Penn's Willie Stark is going on about -- or what Zaillian wants us to think about him.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2006/09/22/all_king/feed/ 15 Jude the not so obscure http://www.salon.com/2005/08/18/jude_3/ http://www.salon.com/2005/08/18/jude_3/#comments Thu, 18 Aug 2005 19:40:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/life//feature/2005/08/18/jude Poor Jude Law. First he gets busted bopping the nanny, then he gets caught in flagrante, all alone, in all his glorious, flag-waving, free-falling euphemism, stark nakedness outside his mother's house in France. The blogosphere is all abuzz about Mr. Law's particular parts, and if you haven't seen them by now, you're either dead or on dial-up. And if you're a man, you're either wincing in sympathy with Mr. Law or secretly asking yourself a question no man should ever have to face: How do I measure up to People magazine's Sexiest Man Alive?

I can't speak for gay men (they are speaking for themselves), but since you're asking, please let me step in and say as a woman who knows you won't believe me: Barring freaks of nature on both extremes, size doesn't matter. And these photos prove it.

Not because of Mr. Law's merits or demerits, depending on where you stand on the cut/uncut shower/grower divides but because, and can I say it again, please? We really don't care.

But you're not listening, are you. All you're thinking is: How do I measure up to Jude Law?

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2005/08/18/jude_3/feed/ 0 The Chronicles of Nanny-a http://www.salon.com/2005/07/24/nannies_3/ http://www.salon.com/2005/07/24/nannies_3/#comments Sun, 24 Jul 2005 21:01:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/life//feature/2005/07/24/nannies It's not often you get two nanny maelstroms in one week. Nannies, after all, often fly under the radar as invisible laborers, changing diapers, taking kids to school, making life easier for the parents who hire them.

But this week, nannies are news. First came a New York Times story in Sunday's "Modern Love" column by a mother who fired her nanny after reading her blog; it provoked an angry blogged response from the canned caretaker. Just a day later, news broke that "Alfie" dog Jude Law had cheated on his fiancée with his kids' nanny.

The stories are very different, but they both highlight an uncomfortable condition of middle- and upper-class life that we don't like to talk about very much. It's incredibly hard to wrap our heads around the tricky contradictions and muddled ways we view the people -- usually female, with varying degrees of education, money and racial advantages -- who help parents privileged enough to employ them balance the responsibilities of work, social life and child rearing. It's a powder-keg relationship, packed with class, gender and age anxieties, doused with the lighter fluid of psychological transference and jealousy. When it explodes, as it has in these two cases, neither nannies nor mommies nor jilted girlfriends come out looking good.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2005/07/24/nannies_3/feed/ 0 “Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events” http://www.salon.com/2004/12/17/lemony_snicket/ http://www.salon.com/2004/12/17/lemony_snicket/#comments Fri, 17 Dec 2004 19:54:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/review/2004/12/17/lemony_snicket Most people who love to read hate to see Hollywood get ahold of their favorite books. But even more heartbreaking than a movie that gets a book completely wrong is one in which every detail, from the costumes to the faces of the actors to the production design to the spirit of the dialogue, is calibrated with exceptional thought and care to capture the essence of a book -- and is still mysteriously, inexplicably dull.

"Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events," based on the enormously popular series of children's books in which some very bad things happen to three very appealing orphans, is that sort of movie: As it ticks by, laboriously, it leaves you feeling that you should be enjoying it more than you are.

There's so much right with "A Series of Unfortunate Events" that it's hard to believe it goes so wrong. The story is narrated by a mysterious gentleman, seen only in murky shadows as he taps away at the keys of an old manual typewriter; he goes by the name of Lemony Snicket. (In real life, a boring construct with which we won't concern ourselves now, Lemony Snicket is the pseudonym of novelist Daniel Handler; in the movie, Lemony Snicket is played by Jude Law, and his crisp enunciation perfectly suits the sorrowful Victorian undertones of Handler's pleasurably grim work.)

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2004/12/17/lemony_snicket/feed/ 0 “Closer” http://www.salon.com/2004/12/03/closer_2/ http://www.salon.com/2004/12/03/closer_2/#comments Fri, 03 Dec 2004 21:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/review/2004/12/03/closer The big selling point, if there is one, of Mike Nichols' version of the Patrick Marber play "Closer" is seeing big-name star Julia Roberts use words like "fuck." In Nichols' world that, as well as casting Natalie Portman as a stripper, Jude Law as a shallow philanderer and Clive Owen as a horn-dog dermatologist, supposedly represents some kind of revolutionary sexual frankness, the sort of thing anyone interested in honest art should be flocking to.

But "Closer" is so bloodless that it feels like an act of arty dishonesty. Nichols and Marber seem to think they're serving up the raw goods of modern romance, but they're really just arranging its pickled innards on a pristine, chilly porcelain plate. It's a marvel of modern filmmaking in the way it so immediately renders universal human experience almost unrecognizable.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2004/12/03/closer_2/feed/ 0 “Alfie” http://www.salon.com/2004/11/05/alfie/ http://www.salon.com/2004/11/05/alfie/#comments Fri, 05 Nov 2004 21:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/review/2004/11/05/alfie The problem with "Alfie" -- both Lewis Gilbert's 1966 original and Charles Shyer's new remake -- is that its story, a squooshy redemption fable masquerading as astute character observation, asks the impossible of its lead actor. The difference is that Michael Caine delivered the impossible; Jude Law can't.

In the original "Alfie," Caine plays a chilly cad who's irresistible to women: In just one instance of the picture's sledgehammer subtlety, he consistently refers to Jane Asher, the shy, eager-to-please country girl who slavishly cooks and cleans for (and sleeps with) him, as "it" -- the movie wants us to know that in Alfie's eyes, a woman ranks much lower than even a regular human being. But as Caine plays him, Alfie doesn't need to use harsh, impersonal pronouns: His coldness wafts off him like vapor off dry ice. He has a sensitive side, but it's fully veiled by that polar smoke -- we may get glimpses of the anguished, animal shape of his soul, but by design, we can't get close enough to smooth down and calm its fur. Still, we know it's there -- that kind of subliminal conviction is just part of what an extraordinary actor like Caine is capable of.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2004/11/05/alfie/feed/ 0 “Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow” http://www.salon.com/2004/09/17/sky_captain/ http://www.salon.com/2004/09/17/sky_captain/#comments Fri, 17 Sep 2004 20:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/review/2004/09/17/sky_captain Kerry Conran's "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow" is so captivating to look at that you can almost forget there's virtually nothing to it. Set in a nostalgically futuristic fantasy version of New York, circa 1939, "Sky Captain" was filmed with live actors but no sets or locations. This means that its stars, Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow and Angelina Jolie, are very real, but the zeppelins, toylike fighter planes and giant Machine Age robots -- not to mention the dreamy Radio City Music Hall interior used in one scene -- are not, no matter how much we may want to believe in them.

Every detail was filled in lovingly, or at least obsessively, after the fact, by digital means. The result looks like nothing you've ever seen before, compiled very knowingly from many things you probably have: film noir, sci-fi pulp adventures from the '30s with garishly exhilarating covers, old Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers serials, and last, but not least, German Expressionist masterpieces like "Metropolis."

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2004/09/17/sky_captain/feed/ 0 Will Jake and Heath shatter Hollywood’s taboo against gay sex? http://www.salon.com/2004/01/14/brokeback/ http://www.salon.com/2004/01/14/brokeback/#comments Wed, 14 Jan 2004 21:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/feature/2004/01/14/brokeback Welcome to Gay New 2004. It follows Gay Old 2003, when sodomy became legal in all 50 states, gay marriage or "civil unions" became a possibility in three, and the media pulled a muscle patting itself on the back for accepting a fistful of swish television characters. Now, for the first time in as long as most of us can remember, a sweeping gay romance is about to get the imprimatur of mainstream -- or at least prestigious -- Hollywood stamped all over it. ("Making Love," from 1982, with Harry Hamlin and Michael Ontkean? Anyone?)

The casting call is out for "Brokeback Mountain," the Ang Lee-directed adaptation of Annie Proulx's short story, replete with sunsets, horses, howling windstorms and a heartbreaking love story between two young cowboys. Although the casting isn't yet official, Hollywood sources say that heartthrobs Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger are in negotiations to star.

Should the contracts not get signed, though, there will be no shortage of well-groomed actors with representation who could be candidates to don the Stetsons and chaps. In the months since Lee announced that he would direct the movie, fans have taken to Internet chat rooms with a vengeance, begging the unhearing movie gods to cast everyone from Viggo Mortensen and Brad Pitt, or Jude Law and Benicio Del Toro, or Joaquin Phoenix and Johnny Depp (all of whom are a bit ripe to play characters whose stories begin at age 19).

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2004/01/14/brokeback/feed/ 0 “Cold Mountain” http://www.salon.com/2003/12/25/cold_mountain/ http://www.salon.com/2003/12/25/cold_mountain/#comments Thu, 25 Dec 2003 21:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/review/2003/12/25/cold_mountain "Cold Mountain," the long-awaited Civil War epic adapted by Anthony Minghella from Charles Frazier's acclaimed novel, is ruthless and realistic in its portrayal of the hardships faced by Southerners during the war between the states. The white ones, that is: There are about 12 African-Americans in "Cold Mountain," and if you don't blink you might catch them as they scoot by discreetly in a few select scenes, blending into the background in a "Don't mind me!" blur. But then, discretion is the county "Cold Mountain" lives in. Slaves are referred to, with exquisite drawing-room politeness, as "Negroes." Best to acknowledge their existence only minimally, lest the whole notion of slavery blight the chilly romantic sheen that Minghella has worked so hard to achieve.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2003/12/25/cold_mountain/feed/ 0 The Fix http://www.salon.com/2003/04/09/fix_wed_4/ http://www.salon.com/2003/04/09/fix_wed_4/#comments Wed, 09 Apr 2003 18:23:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/col/fix/2003/04/09/fix_wed All Madonna, all the time! Mark your calendars, folks. The P.R. goddess is going to be everywhere this month. There's a live performance and Q&A with contest winners on MTV, then spots on "Today," "Dateline" and David Letterman. Oh, and don't forget the guest appearance on "Will and Grace." We expect she's maneuvering to play at the fall of Baghdad. (Ananova)

Whoa, little cowgirl! Rumors are that Pamela Anderson wanted to wear a big ol' hat to the country music video awards on Monday but the idea was nixed. Good thing: She wanted to sport a chapeau that was half American flag, half Confederate flag. Oh well, a lot of the audience wouldn't have been looking at her head, anyway. (Page Six)

Whether you love him or loathe him, Aaron Brown is always there and we must say that his demeanor is soothing amid all the media madness. And who else would say to a reporter, "There are times when there was nothing ... There was no place to go. There was no guest booked. There was no embed phoning in. My preference in that moment is to say, 'Let's everybody have a quiet six minutes.' But that is not an option." Perhaps someday if Mr. Brown gets tired of news he can put on Mister Rogers' sneakers. (N.Y. Observer)

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