Ann Lemons Pollack
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Taking Shelter
Horror stories, especially when diverted to the movie screen, usually get boring rather soon, at least in my opinion. Every once in a while, however, someone breaks out of the old mold and we get something interesting, even fascinating. Such is the case with “Take Shelter,” where Jeff Nichols’ screenplay brings reality so close to
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Sholom Aleichem: Laughing in the Dark
Sholom Aleichem, who proved that Yiddish could be a language of literature as well as of the streets, made and lost many fortunes as a market investor in the days before insider trading. He created a character named Menachem Mendl who echoed his, and his father’s, roller-coaster financial lives, even as he later created Tevye,
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The Rum Diary
Johnny Depp obviously is a great fan of Hunter S. Thompson, who invented gonzo journalism with his series of "Fear and Loathing. . . ." reports for Rolling Stone. Depp portrayed the Thompson character, Raoul Duke, in "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," met him during the filming. Later, Depp helped arrange for the publication
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Black Power Mixtape 1967-75
In 1967, a group of Swedish television journalists traveled to the U.S. to do a series of reports on a troubled society. They arrived here in the spring of 1968, when it sometimes seemed that our nation was falling apart. Martin Luther King Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. were assassinated, cities were in flames,
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PW Pizza
There’s a certain pizza-cooking aroma that we sometimes catch, one that goes back to our adolescent years and early encounters with the ethereal pie. Whenever it comes, we salivate and if we’re about to enter a restaurant, it tends to raise our expectations. The expectations aren’t always met, however; we’ve learned that scent is no
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Margin Call
I think that Kevin Spacey is a great actor, but even great actors can't do much with a poor script, and that's why he's such a disappointment in "Margin Call," a movie that was supposed to be this year's "Wall Street," but ended up somewhere on Skid Row. Spacey is Sam Roberts, way up in
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Toast
Nigel Slater is an English chef and writer who had an unhappy childhood for many reasons — his beloved Mum died after a lingering illness when he was young; he and Dad didn't get along very well; he hated his step-Mum and he was concerned about his sexuality. That's enough to write a book about
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Blackthorn
Maybe it's true that only the good die young. Remember when we saw Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid meet their deaths in a hail of bullets? Well, the magic of movies strikes again. We just thought that he died — because here's "Blackthorn," set some years later in 1927 in Bolivia, and here's Butch,
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Restless
Almost all of us can accept the fact that people have strange hobbies, but "Restless," which opens today, displays one of the strangest. Enoch Brae (a charming Henry Hopper) goes to funerals. He doesn't know the person who died, nor any of the deceased friends or relatives. He likes to hang out in funeral parlors.
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This Week’s Wine October 20, 2011
I've been a fan of wines from France's Rhone Valley for a long time; at least since before the phrase "Rhone Ranger," came onto the scene. My first memory of it is in a wine story by an English writer, and I was delighted at the linguistics involved, and that I had met a movement