Deborah Harkness is not only an enormously successful novelist who writes about trendy things like vampires. She's also a respected historian of science — a professor at the University of Southern California — and a wine expert.
In fact there's a lot of wine appreciation in Harkness' breakthrough novel, A Discovery of Witches. Her academic work involves the study of alchemy — the transformation of matter. She says wine is like alchemy, too.
Novelist Jess Walter's most recent novel is Beautiful Ruins.
At dawn, the sun curls across the lake's placid surface like a twist of lemon on a gin martini. Easing into my kayak on this glacier-cut, 12,000-year-old lake, I feel as I always do on its water: alone in the world.
Herschell Gordon Lewis is cheerfully ambivalent about his place in film history. "What's really puzzling: if you go to a legitimate distributor such as Netflix, Netflix has a number of my movies," says Lewis from his home in Florida. "And again, that's a very sad commentary on what's going on in the world of motion pictures — but I'm not about to object to it."
Among the many things to which we turn our thoughts in summer is road-tripping — particularly apt because Glen Weldon and Stephen Thompson were both traveling this week, bringing Mike Katzif and Barrie Hardymon to the discussion with me and Trey Graham. We had a chat about all manner of road movies, from the classic dust-and-motorcycles type to the kind that might not even appear to be a road movie until you look more closely.
In Savages, the love triangle among Chon (Taylor Kitsch), O (Blake Lively) and Ben (Aaron Johnson) is disrupted when O is kidnapped by a Mexican cartel.
Often I'm asked, "What's the worst movie ever made?" and I say, "I don't know, but my own least favorite is Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers." The early script by Quentin Tarantino was heavily revised, and the final film became a celebration of serial killers, now existential heroes with absolute freedom. Beyond the bombardment that was Stone's direction, the worldview was abominable.
Originally published on Wed December 19, 2012 3:43 pm
Ask Me Another's grand prize winners have walked away with some enviable, one-of-a-kind gifts, which were chosen and presented by none other than their show's Mystery Guest.
Robert (Martin Donovan, left), a writer in need of inspiration, sits with his uncultured kidnapper, Gus (David Morse), in Collaborator. Donovan also wrote and directed the film.
Credit Julie Kirkwood / Tribeca Film
Gus serves as Robert's foil but his own motivations are never fully drawn out.
Robert Longfellow, the auspiciously named playwright at the center of Collaborator, was at one point good enough to be sincerely called "the voice of his generation." What a convenient shortcut for a film about a writer! The moniker says everything — he's basically Arthur Miller, see? — without his needing to say anything. It doesn't matter what the man wrote, only that people thought it was grand.
Hugo Weaving and Tom Russell as Kev and Chook in Last Ride. Chook's love of animals and lesser propensity for the outdoors clash with the life lessons Kev tries to teach him in the Australian wilderness.
Credit Rhys Graham / Music Box Films
While we watch Kev and Chook run from the law, the southern Australian landscape becomes a character of its own.
Kev, the man at the center of Last Ride, has a very particular skill set: He can lift wallets, steal cars and survive in the Australian bush, sleeping under the stars and dining on fresh wild rabbit. Taking care of his 10-year-old son, however, comes less naturally to him.
In Savages, two drug dealers — Chon (Taylor Kitsch, left), a former Navy SEAL, and Ben (Aaron Johnson), a pacifist — are forced to take up arms when they anger the head of a Mexican cartel.
Credit Francois Duhamel / Universal Studios
O (Blake Lively), Ben's and Chon's girlfriend, has a not-so-friendly chat with Lado (Benicio Del Toro), an enforcer for the Tijuana cartel that kidnaps O to ensure a drug deal goes through.
Both factions in Oliver Stone's new movie refer to each other, not without reason, as "savages." But this drug-war thriller is not nearly so feral as such previous Stone rampages as U-Turn and Natural Born Killers. Occasionally, it even seems righteous.
In TheDo-Deca-Pentathlon,Mark (Steve Zissis) and Jeremy (Mark Kelly) re-initiate a 25-event childhood contest to determine once and for all who is the better brother.
Credit Red Flag Releasing
Jeremy, a pro poker player living in Las Vegas, competes in laser tag against his brother, whom he envies for having a comfortable married life.
What would the Olympics look like if they were carried out not by the best exemplars of athletic prowess that the world has to offer, but rather by pudgy 30-somethings playing skee-ball and having underwater breath-holding contests? Pretty pathetic, of course — but combine the self-serious grandeur of Olympics coverage with those half-ass athletes, and you've got the comic foundation for Jay and Mark Duplass' The Do-Deca-Pentathlon.
Ethiopian novelist Maaza Mengiste reads from her latest novel on the second night of this year's Calabash festival. Mengiste says the audience at Calabash is one of a kind.
Credit Hugh Wright /
Calabash co-founder Kwame Dawes (left) facilitates a discussion with author and sociology scholar Orlando Patterson at this year's Calabash International Literary Festival in Treasure Beach, Jamaica.
There's a stretch of beach in the small Jamaican fishing village of Treasure Beach where booths sell poetry books right alongside jerk chicken, and local villagers mix with international literati. On a weekend in late May, some 2,000 people sit entranced as author and poet Fred D'Aguiar reads them his work from a bamboo lectern.
Around the time I turned 12, I figured out exactly what I wanted to be when I grew up: an alcoholic.
I didn't actually know what it meant to be an alcoholic, but I knew that one day, I would drink copious amounts and dash around the streets of Paris, preferably in the company of bullfighters, bankrupts, impotent newspaper correspondents, and morbidly depressed, exotically beautiful divorcees.
From the flowers, to the dress, to the cake, it's easy for brides to get caught up in planning the wedding. But after the honeymoon, a lot of couples ask, "now what?" Wedding Cake for Breakfast features essays by 23 brides in the year after they say "I do." Host Michel Martin talks with co-editor Wendy Sherman and contributor Andrea King Collier.
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