The One-Minute Art Critic: G-Sting Courtroom Sketches! |
Having served on a jury in the Lloyd George U.S. Courthouse, I find myself noticing details in the drawings by Review-Journal courtroom illustrator David Stroud from the G-Sting corruption trial—the poignant "PLEASE WATCH YOUR STEP" sign in front of flinty-eyed cash-grabber Erin Kenny, for instance. And I like how Stroud colors the wall panels behind witnesses with a blue that seems to radiate from their heads like a halo. Appropriate, because the witnesses all look like pinched-face patrons from early Renaissance altar panels—not much you can do with seated people who wish they were sitting somewhere else. So I wish Stroud could imagine moments from their testimony, like Kenny bracing herself for a bout of vertigo, or Herrera getting up and down at Southern Highlands.
DVDs |
The Merv Griffin Show: 40 of the Most Interesting People of Our Time (NR) (4 stars)
$29.98
Today, Merv Griffin is known best as the creator of Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune. From 1962-82, however, the amiable singer hosted a talk show that could boast of introducing 25,000 prominent celebrities, entertainers and politicians—from John Wayne and Richard Nixon to Bertrand Russell and Abbie Hoffman—to afternoon and late-night audiences. This delightful collection of interviews recalls a period in television when engaging conversation was a far more valued commodity than hype. This 530-minute set is a sad reminder of NBC's boneheaded decision to destroy all video records of The Tonight Show, when it was based in New York in the '60s.
Brokeback Mountain (R) (5 stars)
$29.98
You, too, now can own the DVD the American Family Association didn't want Wal-Mart to stock, the Massachusetts Department of Corrections considered too risqué to screen for prisoners and the Motion Picture Academy deemed unworthy of an Oscar for Best Picture! Lee's evocation of star-crossed love in the High Lonesome arrives in DVD with some pretty decent bonus features, including the featurettes "Sharing the Story: The Making of Brokeback Mountain," "Directing From the Heart: Ang Lee" and "On Being A Cowboy," and interviews with screenwriters Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana.
Panic! at the Newsstand |
Magazine editors are canaries forever seeking a new mineshaft, looking for stories with a magic combination of fright factor and entertainment value. But who can blame them? Post-9/11, post-Katrina, post-"mission accomplished," the world seems to be in continual peril. Here's a quick survey of the latest.
Scary Story | Key Scary Assertion | How Screwed Are We? | |
Vanity Fair | Big investigative piece on global warming. | Soaring global temps could raise sea level "80 feet." | Pretty thoroughly. VF smells pretty, though. |
Outside | Profiles oil-depletion alarmist James Howard Kunstler. | Kunstler says oil shortage will cause "suburban collapse" in 10 years. | Experts unsure. Kunstler's no scientist; he's a theater major. |
National Geographic | Earthquake story. Cover line: Quake, the Next Big One. | "Earthquake prediction remains a matter of myth ..." | Nothing seems too scary in even-keeled NG. |