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Star Trek Into Darkness

Less a classic "Star Trek" adventure than a Star Trek-flavored action flick, shot in the frenzied, handheld, cut-cut-cut style that’s become Hollywood’s norm, director J.J.…

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Stories We Tell

Families create their own narratives. Stories are passed on from generation to generation, and in this way the past continues to live, but it can…

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Ballad of Narayama

"The Ballad of Narayama" is a Japanese film of great beauty and elegant artifice, telling a story of startling cruelty. What a space it opens…

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Monsieur Hire

Patrice Leconte's "Monsieur Hire" is a tragedy about loneliness and erotomania, told about two solitary people who have nothing else in common. It involves a…

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Moving Forward

Mother’s Day I awakened to spirited calls from my children and grandchildren. As Roger wrote in his memoir, “Life Itself,” I came from a large family of nine, and I had four brothers and four…

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Nightmare on Wall Street 2: Enron's Revenge

When I first tried to understand what the whole financial meltdown was about, it sounded to me like some kind of perpetual motion machine -- a black box that reversed the first law of thermodynamics ("econo-dynamics"?) to produce energy from nothing, or money from debt. Turns out the principles behind the "financial instruments" that caused the collapse were indeed crafted in part by physicists and mathematicians who designed complex formulas that defied real-world understanding, but that appeared to guarantee profits out of nothing.

Here's my quick take on the smoke-and-mirrors magic-of-the-marketplace that deregulation made possible at the turn of the last century (y'all remember Enron) and how it's manifesting itself in today's financial crises -- using clips from CBS's "60 Minutes" report, "Wall Street's Shadow Market", (10/6/08) and Alex Gibney's documentary, "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room" (2005).

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#168 May 22, 2013

Marie writes: Now this is really neat. It made TIME's top 25 best blogs for 2012 and with good reason. Behold arti...

Cannes: Yacht parties, Faulkner, and cannibal families

If you go to a yacht party, don't expect to be living out your own version of "The Talented Mr. Ripley."

Postcards from Chaz to Roger

When Chaz has gone to Cannes without Roger in the past, she has written about the festival n the form of letters and ...

Love & Money with James Toback

James Toback discusses his new documentary, "Seduced and Abandoned," which traces the life of a failed movie project....

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