Salon.com > Andrew O'Hehir http://www.salon.com Fri, 04 Jan 2013 03:11:02 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 Pick of the week: Beautiful white people hit by tsunami! http://www.salon.com/2013/01/04/pick_of_the_week_beautiful_white_people_hit_by_tsunami/ http://www.salon.com/2013/01/04/pick_of_the_week_beautiful_white_people_hit_by_tsunami/#comments Fri, 04 Jan 2013 01:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=13161281 Using natural disaster – or manmade apocalypse, ecological catastrophe, alien invasion – as the backdrop for human drama goes clear back to the invention of cinema as spectacle, and arguably a long way before that. Of course we’re not supposed to think that the big, dramatic flood is the main point of the Noah story in the Book of Genesis, or in the Epic of Gilgamesh. But it certainly helped hold the audience’s attention. Given that, it’s surprising that mainstream filmmakers have all but ignored the devastating Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004, an event that killed almost 100 times more people than the 9/11 attacks and may well have been the worst natural disaster in recorded history.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/01/04/pick_of_the_week_beautiful_white_people_hit_by_tsunami/feed/ 6 How fracking is corroding small-town America http://www.salon.com/2013/01/03/how_fracking_is_corroding_small_town_america/ http://www.salon.com/2013/01/03/how_fracking_is_corroding_small_town_america/#comments Thu, 03 Jan 2013 01:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=13160312 This isn't an article about the method of extracting natural gas from deep subterranean rock called hydrofracturing, or fracking, because you either already know where you stand on that issue or you're not much interested. And it's not exactly an article about Matt Damon and Gus Van Sant's fracking drama "Promised Land," even though the movie surprised me with the grace and sophistication of its portrayal of small-town America, along with nice supporting performances from Frances McDormand, Rosemarie DeWitt and John Krasinski. (I wish it hadn't been crammed into the most crowded season of the year, amid all kinds of movies with more star power and sizzle.) It might be about why "Promised Land" hit me so hard, and may hit you hard too if you spend time in the parts of America where the fracking debate is defining the future.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/01/03/how_fracking_is_corroding_small_town_america/feed/ 53 The “Zero Dark Thirty” debate isn’t really about torture http://www.salon.com/2012/12/29/the_zero_dark_thirty_debate_isnt_really_about_torture/ http://www.salon.com/2012/12/29/the_zero_dark_thirty_debate_isnt_really_about_torture/#comments Sat, 29 Dec 2012 17:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=13156550 Art can be created with moralistic intentions, but it is inherently a ruthless and amoral endeavor, whose meaning always gets away from its creator. It can certainly be used to soothe the savage breast, lend succor in an hour of darkness, and so on. But let’s not forget that children in the death camps were made to play Schubert by murderers and torturers who believed themselves to be civilized and cultured men. That thread of civilization and culture is what saves teenage genius Wladyslaw Szpilman’s life in Roman Polanski’s “The Pianist” – but the ironic question posed by that film is whether that’s a good reason for one man to live while millions of others died. Because he could play the piano?

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/12/29/the_zero_dark_thirty_debate_isnt_really_about_torture/feed/ 98 Pick of the week: A hypnotic tale of doomed romance set in colonial Africa http://www.salon.com/2012/12/28/pick_of_the_week_a_hypnotic_tale_of_doomed_romance_set_in_colonial_africa/ http://www.salon.com/2012/12/28/pick_of_the_week_a_hypnotic_tale_of_doomed_romance_set_in_colonial_africa/#comments Fri, 28 Dec 2012 01:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=13155858 This season’s movies have been unusually obsessed with history, and especially its less savory elements. But of all these meditations on the past, perhaps none is as peculiar or as haunting as “Tabu,” the new film from young Portuguese director Miguel Gomes. You definitely need to have patience with this movie, because it opens – after a melancholy and mysterious prologue about a 19th-century explorer, a ghost and a crocodile – as a low-key art-house drama, in black-and-white, about the intersecting lives of three elderly women in contemporary Lisbon. That in itself is refreshingly unfashionable (Gomes has said he wanted to focus on the kind of women “nobody gives a damn about”), but it takes a while for the disturbing undercurrents in their story to open the portals of memory and take us back into a tale of doomed romance in colonial Africa.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/12/28/pick_of_the_week_a_hypnotic_tale_of_doomed_romance_set_in_colonial_africa/feed/ 0 Tarantino’s incoherent three-hour bloodbath http://www.salon.com/2012/12/26/tarantinos_incoherent_three_hour_bloodbath/ http://www.salon.com/2012/12/26/tarantinos_incoherent_three_hour_bloodbath/#comments Wed, 26 Dec 2012 14:39:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=13154752 Quentin Tarantino no longer makes movies; he makes trailers. “Django Unchained” feels like a three-hour trailer for a movie that never happens, a slavery-revenge melodrama cum salt-‘n’-pepper action film that would be awesome if it actually existed. Like so many trailers, it’s packed with memorable scenes that don’t go anywhere, and keeps promising payoffs that remain theoretical. It’s got Western scenery on a grand scale and scenes of madcap comedy involving inept members of the Ku Klux Klan. It’s got veritable geysers and fountains and gushers of blood, an ocean of fake gore even by Tarantino’s standards. You could claim that he’s “quoting from Sam Peckinpah” with those slapsticky water balloons full of blood, except that that’s not quite it. It’s more like he’s quoting from crappy ‘70s drive-in movies that were quoting from “The Hills Have Eyes,” which was quoting from something else that was quoting from Peckinpah. (I may be missing an intermediate stage there, such as a cannibal film that was dubbed from Italian into Spanish and projected once, with the reels out of sequence, at a downtown Los Angeles theater in 1983.)

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/12/26/tarantinos_incoherent_three_hour_bloodbath/feed/ 52 Andrew O’Hehir’s 10 Best Movies of 2012 http://www.salon.com/2012/12/25/andrew_ohehirs_10_best_movies_of_2012/ http://www.salon.com/2012/12/25/andrew_ohehirs_10_best_movies_of_2012/#comments Tue, 25 Dec 2012 18:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=13148130 Well, listen – the next time the movie beat gets boring I’ll write another essay proclaiming the death of film culture. Apparently that was all it took to perk things up! Actually, the widely misinterpreted point I was trying to make, which was that film no longer holds the position of cultural centrality it once did, on either the highbrow or mass levels, remains valid. Even amid the undoubted richness of this fall and winter season, you can find examples of this: While films like Paul Thomas Anderson’s “The Master” and Michael Haneke’s “Amour” pile up rave reviews and critics’ group awards, they don’t resemble what the general public thinks of as a movie, and the number of Americans who pay to see them in a movie theater may not exceed the audience for a single episode of a hit cable show. (My No. 1 pick of the year, which will no doubt be described as an eccentric choice, failed to gross even $100,000 in the United States. That’s more like the audience for a cable-access show. In Polish.)

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/12/25/andrew_ohehirs_10_best_movies_of_2012/feed/ 57 David Chase: “I got sidetracked” by “The Sopranos” http://www.salon.com/2012/12/22/david_chase_i_got_sidetracked_by_the_sopranos/ http://www.salon.com/2012/12/22/david_chase_i_got_sidetracked_by_the_sopranos/#comments Sat, 22 Dec 2012 17:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=13151466 “Not Fade Away” feels like a familiar kind of movie – an ambitious coming-of-age story with a strong autobiographical element, from a first-time director immersed in pop music, the mysteries of sexuality and the agonies of family life. But this particular indie drama about rock ‘n’ roll and girls and suburban angst is set in the mid-1960s, and was made by someone who saw that decade firsthand. You don’t meet too many first-time filmmakers who are 67 years old, and who have already had a long and illustrious career as a writer and producer in a different medium.

OK, you don’t meet any. That’s because there is no one in the American entertainment industry exactly like David Chase, who got his start in television as a writer for the mid-‘70s paranormal series “Kolchak: The Night Stalker” (a pioneering show, after its fashion) and went on, many years later, to create one of the most famous ensemble dramas in TV history. Through it all, as they say, he really wanted to direct. So it is that we wind up in 2012 with “Not Fade Away,” which has all the young-man’s intensity of a debut film, but also views its characters and their lost world through the long lens of artistic distance.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/12/22/david_chase_i_got_sidetracked_by_the_sopranos/feed/ 2 Pick of the week: A wrenching tale of love and death http://www.salon.com/2012/12/21/pick_of_the_week_a_wrenching_tale_of_love_and_death/ http://www.salon.com/2012/12/21/pick_of_the_week_a_wrenching_tale_of_love_and_death/#comments Fri, 21 Dec 2012 01:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=13151209 We all know the end of the human story, at least on an individual level, and so it is in Michael Haneke’s extraordinary “Amour.” At the beginning of the film, firefighters break into a large and luxurious Parisian apartment, which appears abandoned, to discover that one of the interior rooms has been locked and sealed with tape. Once they gain entry to that room, they find the body of an elderly woman, wearing an elegant black dress and posed serenely on a bed that has been scattered with flowers. Then we go to blackout, and then come the opening credits, in total silence.

One way of describing “Amour” is to say that the rest of the film is an explanation of this macabre tableau and how it came to be, but one might equally say – especially since we’re in the universe of Michael Haneke – that it resists explanation, or does not require one. On its surface, “Amour” is the most straightforward and gentlest of all Haneke’s films, a delicate and wrenching tale of an older couple facing what awaits us all. In a recent conversation, Haneke told me that he intends no irony with the title, and indeed I see “Amour” less as a tale of suffering and death – although some of it is admittedly difficult to watch -- than as one about the dignity and nobility of human life even in the face of those things. (I’ll publish my interview with Haneke sometime in the weeks ahead, as the film is released more widely.)

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/12/21/pick_of_the_week_a_wrenching_tale_of_love_and_death/feed/ 1 “Jack Reacher”: Tom Cruise’s terrible timing http://www.salon.com/2012/12/18/jack_reacher_tom_cruises_terrible_timing/ http://www.salon.com/2012/12/18/jack_reacher_tom_cruises_terrible_timing/#comments Tue, 18 Dec 2012 21:44:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=13148980 In the larger narrative of Tom Cruise’s late-career comeback, the new Paramount thriller “Jack Reacher” had a clear role to play – at least, before it became toxic, thanks to its accidental and superficial similarity to a real-life tragedy. It would be insulting to suggest that Cruise or Christopher McQuarrie, the film’s writer and director, are “victims” in any way, or that the commercial fate of a mainstream entertainment has any meaning in the face of the unbearable grief and tragedy of Sandy Hook. But it’s also useful to remember that Cruise and McQuarrie have done nothing wrong or unusual, beyond what people in Hollywood do all the time, which is to spin out violent and grotesque fantasies for our enjoyment. I think the problem “Jack Reacher” suddenly represents is more about us than about the movie. Confronted with our evident eagerness to consume simulated real-world horror as entertainment, we feel ashamed, at least temporarily.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/12/18/jack_reacher_tom_cruises_terrible_timing/feed/ 26 Kristen Stewart: The thinking person’s movie star http://www.salon.com/2012/12/18/kristen_stewart_not_just_the_twilight_girl_everyone_s_on/ http://www.salon.com/2012/12/18/kristen_stewart_not_just_the_twilight_girl_everyone_s_on/#comments Tue, 18 Dec 2012 15:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=13125334 I met Kristen Stewart somewhat unexpectedly. And I really liked her! I mean, she’s a cagey, cautious person; you can feel her sizing you up while she decides whether you’re an idiot or a nutjob and discerns how much she should stick to polite, neutral remarks. You might be like that, too, if you were 22 years old and the highest-paid actress in the history of Hollywood, and if you had seen an ordinary domestic spat with your boyfriend – the sort of thing a whole lot of 22-year-olds go through, if I remember correctly – become an international front-page tabloid story.

I did not ask her anything about Robert Pattinson or the current state of her love life. Because it’s not my business, and I really don’t care! So if that’s what you want to read, you might have to look elsewhere. But even in a brief and necessarily superficial conversation, I got a few flashes of real personality: Stewart is a young woman with a mischievous wit and a penchant for murmured, foul-mouthed asides who is enthusiastic about her work and also aware that her rocket-like ascension from the little-known indie ingénue of “Into the Wild” and “Adventureland” to a huge superstar has been an incredibly strange story.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/12/18/kristen_stewart_not_just_the_twilight_girl_everyone_s_on/feed/ 7 How America’s toxic culture breeds mass murder http://www.salon.com/2012/12/15/how_americas_toxic_culture_breeds_mass_murder/ http://www.salon.com/2012/12/15/how_americas_toxic_culture_breeds_mass_murder/#comments Sat, 15 Dec 2012 17:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=13125735 As a parent, an American and a human being, I'm having trouble functioning in the wake of Friday’s elementary-school shootings in Newtown, Conn. You’ll read this some hours after I write it, so you’ll know more than I do now about the children and adults who have died and the families who are enduring unbearable losses, and about the life and death of Adam Lanza, the young man who apparently inflicted them. Those things are dreadfully important to the people involved, but they won’t change the bigger picture much. That’s a picture of grief and horror and profound collective mystification about how such a thing could happen, a picture of a disordered culture that produces these spectacular outbreaks of psychotic violence more and more often, even in an era of relatively low crime.

While the grief and horror are understandable, as well as fully justified – I’m forcing myself to move my fingers across the keyboard, when I would probably be better off sitting quietly in a darkened room, or spending time with my own children – maybe we shouldn’t be quite as bewildered as we claim to be. I don’t mean that we should understand, or even try to understand, how a person can become so angry and sick that he picks up a gun and starts shooting other people’s children at random. There may be artists and psychiatrists and philosophers who can glean something useful from looking into that kind of hateful and bottomless despair, but I sure don’t want to do it.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/12/15/how_americas_toxic_culture_breeds_mass_murder/feed/ 157 Pick of the week: Kathryn Bigelow’s mesmerizing post-9/11 nightmare http://www.salon.com/2012/12/14/pick_of_the_week_kathryn_bigelows_mesmerizing_post_911_nightmare/ http://www.salon.com/2012/12/14/pick_of_the_week_kathryn_bigelows_mesmerizing_post_911_nightmare/#comments Fri, 14 Dec 2012 01:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=13124337 I do not believe that Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal’s mesmerizing, operatic and profoundly troubling “Zero Dark Thirty” offers any apology or justification for torture, and certainly does not “glorify” it, to use Guardian columnist Glenn Greenwald’s term. But it’s important to recognize that the people who think it does are responding to the moral ambiguity of the movie, which pervades not just the question of torture as an instrument of American policy but its entire portrayal of the CIA’s obsessive and insanely expensive hunt for Osama bin Laden. Here’s the sense in which they’re not wrong: What “Zero Dark Thirty” has to say about torture and many other things is not entirely clear, and what you see in it depends on what you bring with you. That moral ambiguity will drive some viewers nuts, but in my view it is also the quality that makes “Zero Dark Thirty” something close to a masterpiece.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/12/14/pick_of_the_week_kathryn_bigelows_mesmerizing_post_911_nightmare/feed/ 76 “The Hobbit”: Middle-earth faces a phantom menace http://www.salon.com/2012/12/13/the_hobbit_middle_earth_faces_a_phantom_menace/ http://www.salon.com/2012/12/13/the_hobbit_middle_earth_faces_a_phantom_menace/#comments Thu, 13 Dec 2012 01:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=13123323 So let’s jump right in: Is Peter Jackson’s “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey” a gaseous and self-indulgent disaster, a “Phantom Menace”-scale overinflated blimp of a movie that casts retroactive shadows across Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings” trilogy? Counsel is leading the witness, as they used to say on “Law & Order,” but those were among the thoughts I had after leaving a screening of the first installment of Jackson’s prequel trilogy, especially as seen in the eerie and distracting 48 frames per second 3-D format. (The best single description of which came in a tweet from Salon contributor Bob Calhoun: It “looks like Jehovah’s Witness art.”)

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/12/13/the_hobbit_middle_earth_faces_a_phantom_menace/feed/ 35 Oscar’s ideological throwdown http://www.salon.com/2012/12/12/oscars_ideological_throwdown/ http://www.salon.com/2012/12/12/oscars_ideological_throwdown/#comments Wed, 12 Dec 2012 01:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=13121870 Hollywood could be getting an unexpected gift this season: An Oscar race that isn’t completely boring. With an impressive number of high-quality and high-visibility movies in the mix, movies that offer markedly different worldviews, interpretations of human experience and dramatized real-world events, the Academy Award struggle of 2013 ought to be a heated cultural imbroglio with all sorts of ideological overtones, one that lays bare some of the fault lines in American society.

Kathryn Bigelow’s Osama-hunting thriller “Zero Dark Thirty” has already been proclaimed the year’s best film by several critics’ groups (including the New York Film Critics Circle, to which I belong), and become the object of a left-wing counterattack, all before its official release. Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln” depicts our most revered president as a shrewd political manipulator, and has itself been mired in historical controversy about its presentation of the struggle to end slavery. Quentin Tarantino’s “Django Unchained” takes on our nation’s “peculiar institution” from a different angle, spinning an outrageous tale of a freed slave taking garish and bloody revenge on the antebellum slave-owning class, with the director’s usual indifference to accuracy, plausibility or taste. Michael Haneke’s “Amour,” a front-runner in the foreign-language race and a likely contender in other categories, tackles a subject that may be even more taboo than torture and slavery: The realities of old age and death that we will all face.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/12/12/oscars_ideological_throwdown/feed/ 10 The war on Christmas movies http://www.salon.com/2012/12/08/the_war_on_christmas_movies/ http://www.salon.com/2012/12/08/the_war_on_christmas_movies/#comments Sat, 08 Dec 2012 17:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=13118863 So is there really a “war on Christmas” being waged by pinko, lefty, pro-choice, sexually bewildered heathens, as Bill O’Reilly proclaims around this time every year? Well, I don’t know about that, but there’s definitely a war on Christmas movies in that nobody seems capable of making good ones and the list of unwatchably crappy ones grows longer every year. Admittedly, it’s hard for any movie of any kind to be more painful than Tim Allen’s “Santa Clause” series. (There are three of them. Three!) But then, you probably haven’t seen either the 1977 remake of “It’s a Wonderful Life” starring Marlo Thomas or whatever the “Christmas Carol” knockoff from the '90s was called in which Vanessa Williams played Ebony Scrooge.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/12/08/the_war_on_christmas_movies/feed/ 43 Pick of the week: “Deadfall” is a sexy, snowbound rural noir http://www.salon.com/2012/12/07/pick_of_the_week_deadfall_is_a_sexy_snowbound_rural_noir/ http://www.salon.com/2012/12/07/pick_of_the_week_deadfall_is_a_sexy_snowbound_rural_noir/#comments Fri, 07 Dec 2012 01:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=13117327 You won’t find Stefan Ruzowitzky’s “Deadfall” on anybody’s 10-best list for the year, but if you need a break from the po-faced seriousness of holiday moviegoing as much as I did, this atmospheric, suspenseful, snowbound crime thriller with a creepy, sexy undertow may be just the ticket. In other times and other circumstances, I can imagine “Deadfall” being a semi-big deal: We’ve got an Oscar-winning European director (Ruzowitzky’s “The Counterfeiters” captured the 2007 foreign-language prize) making his first American film, with a terrific B-movie cast, an eye for wintry northern landscapes, tremendous sense of pacing and a passion for genre filmmaking.

But the classic rural-noir setup of “Deadfall” is just slightly out of step with the times, and so it ends up on our collective doorsteps as a December indie release, reaching theaters several weeks after its VOD debut. Maybe screenwriter Zach Dean should have made Eric Bana’s folksy, charismatic stone-cold killer character into a one-man al-Qaida sleeper cell, sweeping through the north woods of Michigan on a frostbitten mission of jihad. Bana is one of those actors I always enjoy seeing, even though he’s often consigned to crap roles in crap movies. He’s good-looking, moves well and has a slightly snakelike charm, but may just lack that undefinable something that could have made him a major star rather than the guy who plays the lead in obscure thrillers.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/12/07/pick_of_the_week_deadfall_is_a_sexy_snowbound_rural_noir/feed/ 4 Why does “The Hobbit” look so weird? http://www.salon.com/2012/12/06/why_does_the_hobbit_look_so_weird/ http://www.salon.com/2012/12/06/why_does_the_hobbit_look_so_weird/#comments Thu, 06 Dec 2012 18:38:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=13117132 No movie all year arrives with the crazy fan anticipation of Peter Jackson’s “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey,” which has morphed from being a straightforward adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s 1937 children’s novel into the first installment of a full-blown (and perhaps overblown) prequel trilogy to Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings.” I’ll have a great deal more to say about all that next week, when “The Hobbit” finally reaches theaters. But without jumping the gun on a full review, there’s a technical and aesthetic issue we can talk about right now, one that has provoked considerable anxiety among LOTR fans ever since Jackson previewed some footage last year, and one that could poison the movie for many viewers.

“The Hobbit” looks really, really strange. At least it does when projected in 3-D, at the 48 frames per second rate (known as high-frame rate, or HFR) that Jackson intends as the preferred format. (The movie was shot on the latest iteration of cutting-edge digital video, using a brand-new camera called the Red Epic that was developed alongside the film.) Granted, most viewers probably won’t see it that way; outside major cities, theaters will primarily screen “The Hobbit” in more familiar formats, either 3-D or 2-D, at a conventional frame rate of 24 frames per second.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/12/06/why_does_the_hobbit_look_so_weird/feed/ 61 “Hyde Park on Hudson”: Bill Murray’s lonely, horny FDR http://www.salon.com/2012/12/06/hyde_park_on_hudson_bill_murrays_lonely_horny_fdr/ http://www.salon.com/2012/12/06/hyde_park_on_hudson_bill_murrays_lonely_horny_fdr/#comments Thu, 06 Dec 2012 01:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=13116243 Amid all the heavyweight, full-length movies of this holiday season, full of epic battle scenes, meaningful monologues and moments of brooding contemplation, “Hyde Park on Hudson” occupies a different niche. It’s a nostalgic historical drama involving the president of the United States, the king of England and a hot dog that's free of philosophical heavy lifting, and it's a story of extramarital love that’s barely naughty enough for grandma. It boasts a couple of delicate and understated performances that might make it into the Oscar race – Bill Murray as Franklin D. Roosevelt and Laura Linney as the distant cousin who becomes his lover – but are almost certain to be displaced in a year full of bigger names and more momentous roles.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/12/06/hyde_park_on_hudson_bill_murrays_lonely_horny_fdr/feed/ 12 Glenn Beck and Vince Vaughn’s showbiz purgatory! http://www.salon.com/2012/12/05/vince_vaughn_and_glenn_beck_its_showbiz_purgatory/ http://www.salon.com/2012/12/05/vince_vaughn_and_glenn_beck_its_showbiz_purgatory/#comments Wed, 05 Dec 2012 20:10:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=13116098 At first glance, the Wednesday press release announcing the production of something called “Pursuit of the Truth” just sounds like another bad idea for a soon-to-fail reality show. An “Apprentice” or “American Idol”-style competition between documentary filmmakers! That’s almost as interesting (at least to the average TV viewer) as a show about orthodontists or paving contractors. But drill down just a little, and “Pursuit of the Truth” starts to seem a bit sad and desperate, and quite possibly a unique confluence of craziness. Yes, two of the most tarnished brands in show business – Glenn Beck and Vince Vaughn – are together at last.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/12/05/vince_vaughn_and_glenn_beck_its_showbiz_purgatory/feed/ 9 How the New York critics jump-started the Oscar race http://www.salon.com/2012/12/04/how_the_new_york_critics_jump_started_the_oscar_race/ http://www.salon.com/2012/12/04/how_the_new_york_critics_jump_started_the_oscar_race/#comments Tue, 04 Dec 2012 01:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=13113937 After five hours of balloting in a windowless room at Manhattan’s Lincoln Center on Monday, the New York Film Critics Circle got the movie awards season off to a dramatic start with a few big surprises and several major snubs. Without doubt the big winner was Kathryn Bigelow’s “Zero Dark Thirty,” the gripping procedural thriller about the CIA’s decade-long hunt for Osama bin Laden, which won both best picture and best director. That film doesn’t reach theaters for two more weeks, but may now be seen as taking a microscopic lead in the Oscar race over Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln,” which also cleaned up, winning best actor for Daniel Day-Lewis in the title role, best supporting actress for Sally Field as Mary Todd Lincoln, and best screenplay for Pulitzer-winning playwright Tony Kushner.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/12/04/how_the_new_york_critics_jump_started_the_oscar_race/feed/ 12