Martin Scorsese’s new feature film, now showing on Netflix, came highly anticipated by critics and audience alike. The anticipation shouldn’t come as a surprise because Scorsese is a director of high stature, who has been making films for over 50 years. The newest film, “The Irishman” has drawn some negative criticism, mainly from the critics.
Relentless love of competition is a profoundly American trait, but you’d never know it from the way the Lords of Baseball run their game. From the Designated Hitter and Astroturf™ to the Wild Card and those 1980s-era Houston Astros uniforms that looked like construction signs, Major League Baseball’s owners have never been short on terrible
Martin Scorsese's “The Irishman” is an Irishman without wit, charm, charisma, comedy, tragedy, or drink. He reeks not of whiskey, but of AirWick®. He induces the phantom smell of pine, so as to lessen the stench of piss. He looks like a man—an old man—who stinks, who bears the odor of infirmity and incontinence, who absorbs
The gust of wind. The glare of ice. The glint of metal. Between the elements outside and the forces inside, between the opening of a door that dilates like an iris and the turning of a camera that acts as an eye—between panning the room and focusing on a stranger with his back to the
In recent years, the Leftist Legion of Prudery has targeted “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” as inappropriate for public consumption. Now John Legend and Kelly Clarkson are out with a new version in which the man says, “It’s your body and your choice.” The 1940s Frank Loesser tune, covered by countless artists, thus emerges in 2019
If a full and fair analysis of the Trump-Russian collusion hoax ever is conducted, it will reveal the collateral damage suffered by innocent people ensnared by the wicked, multi-faceted operation launched by Barack Obama’s White House in the spring of 2016. There are plenty of infuriating passages in The Plot Against the President, a must-read
What would it be like to know oneself free after a life of chattel slavery and a 100-mile solitary escape, mostly on foot? It’s an ennobling thing to contemplate, and to aid our imaginations we have Harriet Tubman’s description of the moment she crossed the Maryland border into a free state. “When I found I
An editor once taught me an invaluable tip about liberal media bias. Sometimes the real news in a story is buried at, or near, the bottom of an article. That’s the direct opposite of Journalism 101, but it’s increasingly how the press operates today. We were once told, “if it bleeds, it leads.” That’s become, “if
There are some occasions when the editorial “we” is almost viscerally inadequate. Writing about my friend Peter Collier—the prolific biographer and novelist, literary impresario, and tireless cultural warrior—is one such. Although he made it a full decade beyond the biblically sanctioned allotment of three score and ten, the announcement early last month that Peter had
Bronze Age Pervert's (hereafter called “The Pervert”) writings are causing controversy everywhere I travel. He advises directly against admitting any admiration, but his chaos became mine as I carried his book with me. A Catholic passing through Bosnia who aided in the preservation of the Tridentine Mass laughed at the introduction. An intoxicated elder on
