9/11, full circle: Clint Eastwood’s ‘Sully’

September 12, 2016

It’s no accident that Warner Bros. released “Sully” on the weekend of 9/11.

The Clint Eastwood thriller – about the 2009 “Miracle on the Hudson,” in which Capt. Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger guided a US Airways airbus, crippled by a bird strike, onto the icy waters of the river, thus saving all 155 souls on board – is 9/11 in reverse or, perhaps, come full circle. Instead of terrorists piloting planes into skyscrapers, Sully (the reliably excellent Tom Hanks), assisted by co-pilot Jeff Skiles (Aaron Eckhart), sought to avert that catastrophe by heading toward the only unobstructed area, the open waters of the Hudson.

It’s giving nothing away, however, to say that the film opens with the alternative scenario. We watch the airbus pierce glass and steel with the sickening feeling that by now is all-too-familiar before we see Sully jolt awake. The alternative scenario is one of his nightmares so it doesn’t have to be ours. It is to Eastwood’s credit as a storyteller – working from a taut screenplay by Tom Komarnicki based on Sullenberger’s book, “Highest Duty” – that we see snatches of the accident and its heroic aftermath many times from many different perspectives before we see it unfold twice in real time. ...

Nick Kyrgios and the mystery of temperament

August 28, 2016

So The New York Times Magazine’s US Open Special is basically a cover story on bad boy du jour Nick Kyrgios, pictured biting on the cross he wears around his neck and, oh, you can imagine the posts in response – not just about the cross but on Nick in general.

But the cross is an interesting metaphor here. Then Jesus told his disciples, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul? Or what shall a man give in return for his soul?” (Matthew 16: 24-36)

What indeed. ...

The shirt off his back (we wish): Mr. Darcy’s singular garment is coming to America

March 10, 2016

At a time when the news – foreign and domestic – seems so terrible, here’s something to gladden the heart of many a lady (and more than a few gentleman):

Mr. Darcy’s shirt is coming to America.

Yes, the shirt that is for women what the wet T-shirt contest is for men will be part of “Will & Jane: Shakespeare, Austen, and the Cult of Celebrity,” an exhibit opening in August at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington D.C. (And, I need not add, we are so there.) The show will feature the shirt – one of several used, given the need for a fresh one for each take – that Colin Firth wore as Mr. Darcy in a key scene in the 1995 smash BBC miniseries of Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice.” ...

New York, New York

January 18, 2016

As a lifelong New Yorker, I love going to the city and I love leaving it.

My happiest journey was always riding the Madison Avenue bus up to The Metropolitan Museum of Art in spring with my Aunt Mary for work. I still love riding the bus there for work.

But I always exhale when the train hits the ’burbs. Something about seeing a greater ratio of greenery to concrete eases me.

New York is a tough, tough place. Come to it with a chip on your shoulder, someone once told me, and it will crush you. Approach it humbly and it will open like a flower. ...

Sister acts: The beauty trap, continued

January 11, 2016

At first glance, Carrie Fisher, a contemporary actress and author, and St. Teresa of Ávila, a 17th century philosopher, abbess and mystic, wouldn’t appear to have much in common (even though Fisher was reportedly a script doctor on “Sister Act”).

But the two both wound up in the particularly meaty Jan. 10 edition of The New York Times’ Week in Review as unwitting examples of how far women still have to go when it comes to being defined by men, particularly where their looks are concerned.

Fisher, who reprises her role as Princess Leia in “Star Wars: The Force Awakens,” found herself embroiled in an Internet brouhaha in which posters were unable to forgive the princess for aging – as if the Web were a particularly petulant Peter Pan. This prompted novelist Jennifer Weiner to write a piece in which she opined that we all need to let it go, including that endlessly self-improving Weight Watchers’ investor, Oprah. ...

‘A dangerous gift’: ‘Concussion’ and the NFL

January 3, 2016

“Concussion” – the new movie about football and head trauma – is a beautiful film beautifully rendered. That may be an odd choice of words for a story about two of the sometimes uglier games men play – power and violence – but then, football, like humanity, is a multifaceted subject, at once mindless and Shakespearean, as one character notes.

This football tale is told from the viewpoint of an outsider who longs to be an insider, a Nigerian immigrant who has grown up thinking of America as God’s country. Armed with a slew of degrees from Nigeria, New York and London, Dr. Bennet Omalu (Will Smith) is a proud, accomplished but obscure forensics pathologist working for Dr. Cyril Wecht (Albert Brooks), the chief medical examiner in Allegheny County, Pa., in 2002 when he is given what he describes as “a dangerous gift” – a gift for knowing. ...