Since the Oscars there have been dozens of articles I’ve noticed links to, and some I’ve skimmed or read, in different kinds of publications, about how “everyone” (or “EVERY WOMAN ON THE INTERNET”) can’t stand Anne Hathaway, and I haven’t been able to make heads or tails of it. (See The New York Times, Huffington […]
Movies
I just get such a kick out of the Pirates trilogy (the Gore Verbinski movies; not the fool’s-gold fourth entry that I won’t even see). It’s such an aesthetic triumph; it’s such delightfully arty populism. I love how the writers “reverse engineered a trilogy” by finding inconsequential, throwaway elements in the first movie (Captain Jack […]
What do Benjamin Braddock, Gordon Gekko and Don Draper have in common (beyond the obvious strained comparison)? The alliterative naming isn’t always a writer’s deliberate stab at mythmaking, but it’s a self-conscious maneuver that draws attention to the character’s archetypal characteristics by leveraging your mnemonic systems, forcing you to memorize the name even if you […]