My brother and sister-in-law are having a tough time right now. Their beloved dog Holly is suffering major organ failure and won’t survive much longer. Our whole family shares their grief. I suffered a less tragic but heartfelt loss yesterday. I canceled my Tribune subscription and ordered the Times. After 25 years of home delivery, 22 of [...]
This nonsense about drilling offshore infuriates me. It won’t do a thing to lower prices, it is sure to turn clean beaches into tarball traps, and it prevents people from discussing practical ways to cut consumption. Case in point: How many times have you driven past a fast-food or Starbucks outlet with six to 12 cars [...]
Funny women salvage surrogate comedy Kate Holbrook is a successful Philadelphia business executive. At age 37, she has it all — including a ticking biological clock. She’d like to have a baby (husband optional), but that doesn’t seem medically likely. Besides, she’s too busy and spoiled to go through the actual pains of pregnancy and birth. So [...]
Spurlock’s search finds that people are people. Everywhere. Remember Morgan Spurlock? He’s the plucky, plainspoken guy who earned comic-documentary cred with “Super Size Me,” in which he stuffed himself with McDonald’s junk for a whole month while his health and love life slid down the tubes. After an unimpressive stint as a TV documentarian, Spurlock returns to [...]
Pacino thriller is bloody nonsense If someone tells you he intends to kill you in exactly 88 minutes, what would you do? Personally, I’d dash to the nearest police station and hang around for an hour and a half or so. But not Dr. Jack Gramm. This professor is a forensic psychologist with a lucrative, admirable sideline: He [...]
Jackie-Jet show filled out with mumbo-jumbo and splashy effects A fantasy-adventure-comedy geared for mass audiences, “The Forbidden Kingdom” is a sort of kung-foolish paella, with a little of everything thrown in so that everyone can find something to like. For kung-fu fanatics, there’s the first-ever pairing of legends Jet Li and Jackie Chan. For youngsters, there’s a [...]
Stones, Scorsese team up for Imaximum exposure. Shine a Light: We love the Rolling Stones, as much for their longevity as for the great albums they made in the ’60s and ’70s. The material never seems stale in this startlingly close-up concert film from director Martin Scorsese. He’s a Stones fan, too, as anyone who knows [...]
An “Island” only young children can love Nim’s Island: Oh, Lord, please make Abigail Breslin grow up before she has another chance to play an insufferably precocious, spoiled child. After her splendid, unaffected work in “Little Miss Sunshine,” she did the cloying, cute-kid bit in “Definitely, Maybe” and now she’s starring in a juvenile fantasy-adventure that [...]
Prison-camp drama raises tough questions about actual event. The Counterfeiters: Just when you think you’ve seen every Holocaust story possible, along comes “The Counterfeiters,” this year’s Oscar-winning foreign-language film. Yes, it’s in German and set largely in a concentration camp, but this drama — based on the memoir of a Jewish survivor — raises issues that [...]
