The Critic
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Curiously, when Weezer – the geek rock group responsible making awkward cool decades before anyone had ever heard of Jesse Eisenberg – announce a new record, their fans tend to experience existential terror, not unabashed glee. In the 25 years since founding, their results are always an anxiety-producing unknown. Such is the case with their…
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Last week, on my way down to New York City, I stopped at Cornell University to see their new Architecture, Art and Planning building, Milstein Hall. The OMA-designed facility looks like a Mies van der Rohe-style box propped up on a concrete ant hill, floating not incongruously between the kind of Victorian and Georgian structures…
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In a sense, I grew up listening to Bob Marley’s music. My mother was born and raised in Mandeville, Jamaica, and although I wouldn’t say she was necessarily a big fan — we probably listened to The Very Best of Andrew Lloyd Webber more than Legend — I definitely wore a One Love t-shirt in…
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Obviously, Lena Dunham’s new dramedy, Girls, isn’t about men. But as a guy, I have to complain a little about how grossness of the dudes on the show. To be plain, Dunham’s character, Hannah, is dating Frankenstein, and her best-friend Marnie is dating a 12-year-old girl trapped in a 16-year-old boy’s body. Let’s have a…
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I was really excited for HBO’s new comedy Veep, starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus. Like any good satire, I hoped it would shine a slightly harsh but terribly amusing light on its subject matter — in this case the fraught American political system, and specifically the neutered, ineffectual office of the Vice President. Watching it, though, I…
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I just finished reading a review of Titanic by Slate Magazine’s Dana Stevens. The review is premised on the fact that when James Cameron’s epic was first released in 1997, Stevens snubbed it for being “a schlocky, sentimental blockbuster that would force [her] to listen to that Celine Dion song again.” She claims, admittedly snobbishly,…
Matthew Hague 