I wish I did. I want to like it.

I think it’s trying to do two things at once. It wants to be Empire, since it’s the second act. But it also wants to be (uh-oh, gender studies alert) a romance novel, complete with the tropes so brilliantly delineated by Janice Radway in her classic 1984 text Reading the Romance. (Someon…

Ça, c’est l’histoire de ma vie.

Mais merci, bien sûr. 

Withnail & I is one of the great films. Yet another reason to appreciate George Harrison.

The relationship with Marquand sure was as you describe. From all accounts I’ve read and heard, a truly nice guy, but not exactly a ball of fire.

In terms of the breakdown from Empire to Jedi, I’m of course more familiar with the collapse of Lucas and Gary Kurtz’s partnership. As I’m sure you know, Kurtz has openly…

I didn’t know that. Lucas and Kersh talked about ROTJ? 

Harry Lime

Urg — With all due respect, that’s the grimmest euphemism I’ve heard all day: embarking on a career of power means “learning about the complexities involved” in apartheid?

You might be confusing the word “impressive” with “terrifying”

We lament the divided nature of our country, but, really, what “middle ground” are we hoping to find? It’s a myth.

No, it isn’t.

It’s not the “divided nature” of our country we lament. It’s the stupidity, as the show reminds us. 

I think they’re both marvelous morality tales, and I don’t see hypocrisy in either.

I take it you know that Boiler Room was one of the essential inspirations for the director of WOWS, who not only paid homage to it but personally sponsored Ben Younger’s return to filmmaking.

I had no idea just how true that is until a recent relationship via which I became close friends with a bunch of (very well respected) bold faced entertainment names. They all deeply envy the stability of their friends in finance and law, they’re often surprisingly naive financially, they lease and never buy, etc. Of…

Kind of like a depressive Mozart.

Caruso, David (Stephen), iii—iv, 179, 181, 196—197

Harlem Nights is one of those puzzling movies that should be so much better than it actually is. It’s sort of painful to watch, because you can’t help but enter analysis mode.

The Cotton Club is like that, too, and both Coppola and Murphy say the same thing, that the good stuff ended up on the cutting room floor.

One…

Anything. Does anybody realize how inherently feeble a film is if a year after it comes out everybody has fun asking what the main character was doing?

Particularly punk rockers.

Breadwinners
Wage-earners
Academics
Undergraduates
Lawmakers
Modernists
Feminists
Anti-Feminists
Subordinates
Women Entering the Workforce
Females
Non-Voters
Essayists
Guests
Future Homeowners
Anti-Porn Feminists
Pornographers
Tacticians
Ghostwriters
Intellectuals
First Amendment Heroes
Co-Owners
Michelin Star-Winners
Punk Rockers
Litigants
Ex…

I’m going to be using #CaucasianConsternation as much as possible from now on. Not just online. In conversation. Public addresses. Recipes. Reports.

But there will always be, always have been, stupid douchebag asshats, no? In our era, they happen to be those big doofi, sinewy (or not!) musculature apprehended by tight polos — collars of course popped — and the whole gently feathered with a bodman olfactible drawn by a pump up a siphon tube through a nozzle to…

Genuine curiosity: why do you feel Wolf of Wall Street is a guide, not cautionary? I found it trenchant and impartial. It never idealizes its subject. It looks unblinking at the tragedy of Belfort’s victims — the suicide is presented as an afterthought, precisely the mindset of a sociopath — and it eschews…