Pirate Radio is a perfect example of why I don’t take critics’ comments at face value. The three reviews I read this morning were lukewarm with a small degree of trashing, but when I looked at the trailer, I knew it would be fun. Sure, the movie has its flaws–male humor; some sloppiness with chronological [...]
Posts Tagged as ‘Reviews’
October 6, 2009
Sins Invalid
Sins Invalid: An Unshamed Claim to Beauty in the Face of Invisibility
Nomy Lamm
“We are a new body of liberation,” proclaims Mistress of Ceremonies Cara Page, who opens Sins Invalid, a collection of skits by and about people with various disabilities. She introduces each performance and delivers poetic lines in between a parade of images and [...]
September 1, 2009
Will You Take Me As I Am: Book Review
Will You Take Me As I Am: Joni Mitchell’s Blue Period, by Michelle Mercer
After enjoying Girls Like Us so much, I began looking around for other books about the most interesting of its three subjects, Joni Mitchell. Lucky for me, bios of Joni seem to be on the way to becoming a cottage industry. Will [...]
July 13, 2009
A Trio of Movies
Netflix has me covered. I’m catching up with all the films I’ve missed the past decade or so. It’s a great service, don’t you think?
So this weekend I watched a trio of movies that have nothing in common with one another: Music and Lyrics, Holiday, and The Matrix.
Music and Lyrics: I adore both Hugh Grant [...]
April 15, 2009
My Baby Rides the Short Bus
Hot off the Press!
The anthology My Baby Rides the Short Bus is ready for pre-orders on Amazon.
This is something new in the world of disability writing–while I confess I haven’t seen it yet, their call for materials asked for stories from parents who feel like they don’t always fit in to disability organizations or support [...]
February 5, 2009
The Position: Book Review
The Position
by Meg Wolitzer
Scribner 2005
I don’t know when I’ve been more disappointed in a novel. The topic allegedly under consideration is what first attracted me: a family in which the four children stumble upon a sex self-help book written by their parents, which includes sketches of the couple fucking in every [...]
December 27, 2008
Bonobo: The Forgotten Ape
Bonobo: The Forgotten Ape
Frans De Waal and Frans Lanting
University of California Press, Berkeley
210 pp. $39.95
The bonobo ape was discovered relatively late–1929–and for decades was largely dismissed as a pigmy chimp, a smaller version, rather than a distinct class, within the chimpanzee species. What little information reached mainstream media tended to sensationalize their sexual behavior, without [...]
December 1, 2008
Fish Eat Fish: Game Review
Out of the Box Games
For ages 8 to Adult
2-5 players
20-30 minutes per game
$24.99
The first time I played Fish Eat Fish with my grandsons, I thought it was a boring, too-simple, silly game for toddlers. The next time we played—Thanksgiving weekend—we discovered we’d misinterpreted a key rule that makes the game more a matter of strategy [...]
November 19, 2008
Baseball Movies
As a way of getting through the lull between baseball seasons, my son Daryl and I decided to join Netflix and rent baseball movies. The descriptions that are impersonal sounding summaries were taken from the IMDB website (probably obvious).
Already Seen:
Bad News Bears (original, 1975 ONLY—no sequels or remakes, please!)
Maybe it’s because watching this with my [...]
June 10, 2008
My Year of Meats: Book Review
My Year of Meats by Ruth Ozeki
Viking Press, 1998
Whenever I get into a funk about writing, when I feel like it’s ultimately a wasteful self-indulgence that should be replaced by doing real political activism, I remind myself of The Jungle by Upton Sinclair. A novelistic exposé of the slaughterhouses and meat-packing plants of Chicago written [...]
