Screening Room
February 8, 2013
How Joe Wright Got Anna Right, and the Critics Got It Wrong 7
by Andrew D. Kaufman
But to criticize is easy. To create is hard. And Wright has shown himself to be every inch the creator, not on the level of Tolstoy, of course, but certainly on the same emotional and philosophical wave length.
January 29, 2013
Think of Bread in General: On Making Books Into Movies 12
by Alan Levinovitz
“Everyone accepts that stories and movies are different things.” Indeed. But how, exactly? Is one a higher art form than the other? Does one strengthen children’s brains while the other is more likely to rot them?
January 10, 2013
Ten Books to Read Now That HBO’s Girls Is Back 15
by Claire Miye Stanford
These are books that — like Girls – explore what it is like to be young and hungry — hungry for love and hungry for sex, but most of all, hungry for recognition and hungry for adulthood. Ultimately, the girls in these books, like the girls of Girls, are hungry to become the women they will one day be.
October 30, 2012
Big Bird is History: Why We Fund PBS 15
by Elizabeth Stevens
CTW’s Sesame Street started in 1969 as a grand experiment to see what would happen if you gave all children (inner city, rural kids, and suburban alike) entertaining pre-school lessons as a head start. When you consider the alternatives, this is an awfully cheap way to educate and unite kids all over the country.
October 26, 2012
Filming the Unfilmmable: On David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas 2
by Elizabeth Minkel
Cloud Atlas is no mere adaptation: it’s a big, ambitious structural overhaul, one that has been likened by Mitchell, amongst others, to a mosaic, all of his Russian dolls smashed to pieces and carefully reassembled.
October 5, 2012
When Costner Was King: An Actor’s Rise and Fall (and Rise?) 8
by Jeff Martin
With 1989’s Field of Dreams, my Costner man crush truly began. I honestly don’t remember seeing it in the theater. It must have been VHS. Either way, I remember the feeling. That film, pie-in-the-sky as it may be, still gets me.