Books/Films/Media
Because, despite today’s spring-like weather, the world still sucks and we wanted to say something mean about someone, we dropped in at the Housing Works Bookstore and Café’, located on Crosby Street, and our faith in humanity was slightly restored. Main floor and mezzanine look more like an eccentric—though literate millionaire’s library. And, just like Barnes and Noble (which, we’re told, is mean to puppies), in the cafe section tables awaited and we read and we ate—knishes, quiche, sandwiches, soup, [...]
Posted in Books/Films/Media, Food & Fashion on March 7th, 2010 | 
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bookstore cafe Housing Works Soho
We saw these two several weeks back, during the non-stop swoon-fest over Sesame Street’s 40th Anniversary, and we just had to puke. Are we the only people on earth whose bodies haven’t been taken over by pods and who KNOW that Sesame Street is evil and worse than crack? Forget the absurd studies (paid for by the Children’s Television Workshop–the billion-dollar mega-corporation that bankrolls Sesame Street), that claim kids who watch Sesame Street learn more about reading then actually reading; [...]
Posted in Books/Films/Media on December 10th, 2009 | No Comments »
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television
EVEN WITHOUT PHOTOSHOP, THIS WRECKING BALL, RENTED FOR THE MOVE THE OTHER GUYS, IS A DOUBLE-TAKER. The Other Guys stars two sure-to-be-hasbeens, Will Ferrell and Marky Mark, in what we used to call a caper/comedy. If the film is half as cool as the wrecking ball, we might catch it on late-night TV.
Posted in Arts & Events, Books/Films/Media on November 12th, 2009 | No Comments »
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cool stuff
WE HAVE A SOFT SPOT FOR FAMILY ENTERTAINMENT LIKE SCARFACE AND GOODFELLAS, but when it comes to pure shmaltz, American Gangster takes the cake.
The “true” story chronicles Frank Lucas (Denzel Washington). a heroin dealer who adopts the financial wizardry of his Italian mafia peers to run the Harlemites working under him, and Richie Roberts (Russell Crowe, his arm still aching from throwing telephones at concierges), a cop whose honesty makes him a pariah within the corrupt police community. Even with [...]
Posted in Books/Films/Media, The City on November 15th, 2007 | 1 Comment »
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Eric Siegel movies reviews
Here’s the thing: you are Jonathan Lethem, bookish writer, raised by bohemian parents in the Boerum Hill section of Brooklyn, as a kid read a lot — books, magazines, the newspaper — graduated high school and went to college. Now, you write a novel called Motherless Brooklyn about a street tough you kind of knew in the Brooklyn neighborhood where you grew up, but didn’t really hang with. Your main character, an oversized orphan with Tourette’s Syndrome who works [...]
Posted in Books/Films/Media, The City on March 10th, 2007 | 1 Comment »
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Jonathan Lethem literature reviews
THOUGH EVERY TV SET IN THE WORLD WAS TUNED TO THE WORLD TRADE CENTER ON SEPT 11, those trapped in the North Tower had no idea that the South Tower had collapsed. And we who watched from our rooftops (see the Recharger banner) had no idea what was happening to them. Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn’s 102 Minutes – a detailed account of what went on inside the towers from the first crash to the final implosion – clears some [...]
Posted in Books/Films/Media, The City on February 10th, 2007 | No Comments »
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Jim Dwyer Kevin Flynn non-fiction reviews
Two things about Molly Ivins, who passed today of cancer at 62, made us grit our teeth in envy — she was tall and she was funny. In astonishing contrast to the self-important boobs and sheep-like prigs who pretend to report the news these days, she was also fearless. Technically, her beat was Texas, so we are breaking our own NYC-only rule by writing this; but Dubya Bush, the guy who has brought the mid-east to the brink of catastrophic [...]
Posted in Books/Films/Media, The City on February 1st, 2007 | No Comments »
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Molly Ivins
Before we picked it up, Atonement fit all our don’t-read-this-suck-ass-thing criteria:
a) it is a Big Important Book
b) it is a bestseller and
c) it came highly recommended by a lot of people.
Think The Kite Runner. And for the first 150 pages or so, we asked ourselves, Why, Recharger, do you read Big Important Books? They all suck. None of these Big Important Writers — Arundhati Roy or Khaled Hosseini or their ilkhood who write semi-historical novels about childhood tragedy — [...]
Posted in Books/Films/Media, The City on January 21st, 2007 | No Comments »
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Ian McEwan literature reviews
Call us naive, but we are a teensy shocked that the three statuettes Dreamgirls won at last night’s Golden Globes were not hooted off the stage. While we were eternally grateful to the foreign journalists who last year bestowed a Golden Globe on Sandra Oh, the object of all our love for ever and ever and ever and ever and ever, we are convinced that this year they were smoking serious crack.
While Dreamgirls has its moments–Eddie Murphy everytime he’s on [...]
Posted in Books/Films/Media, The City on January 16th, 2007 | No Comments »
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golden globes movies
Pick-up on Noon Street, by Raymond Chandler.
Chandler is about style. Fashion, interiors, language–spare, readable, cynical language. The language of people wounded by life, clinging to particles of self-respect. Those are Chandler’s strengths.
Plot is not his strength. After reading all four stories in the collection, I couldn’t distinguish one from the other. I could admire the hell out of the writing, but the writing was so much stronger than plot it ended up distracting me; don’t ask me to tell you [...]
Posted in Books/Films/Media, The City on December 28th, 2006 | No Comments »
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literature Raymond Chandler reviews
