For a wholesome paean to Nordic rituals, do not watch Ari Aster’s Midsommar
Emily C. Skaftun
The Norwegian American
As we entered the theater, my friend asked me what I knew about Midsommar. “It’s Swedish…” I answered. I’d heard little about the movie, enough to guess it wasn’t a comedy, but not enough to be fully prepared.
Continue reading “No innocent romp”
Frances grew up in a tiny New York apartment with her parents and younger sister, where they all still live even though both girls are in college. “Everything about my family was small,” she tells us, enumerating the smallness of their aspirations, physical stature, and living quarters: “Our apartment unfurled itself…the sofa bed opening up for my parents, filling the living room until it was nothing but a man and a woman in bed, with no room left, the foot of the mattress reaching just to the knob of the front door.”
One can just imagine a loving family surviving such conditions, but the love is gone.
Continue reading “Lit by poetry: Dinerstein’s “The Sunlit Night” illuminates”If this review wanders, that is natural. You see, I wrote it with my eyes closed.
If you missed even one episode of the previous season of House — the last one — you might not have recognized “Twenty Vicodin” as part of the same show. That guy looks like House, you might have thought, but what’s he doing in that blue shirt?
After the season finale cliffhanger that left us with House on the lam in some tropical place after smashing his car through Cuddy’s living room, it seemed like there was nowhere left for the series to go.
Except, of course, for jail.
Continue reading “House: You’ve Gotta Shank Someone on the First Day, or They Don’t Respect You”
Former president Theodore Roosevelt is listed as a guest star in “Bart Stops to Smell the Roosevelts,” an episode that seems designed to make me eat my words from last week. After the first third of the episode, which I never expect to relate to the rest, the plot was generally linear and coherent.
Continue reading “The Simpsons: Once More, with Plot”
I’ve been watching Mythbusters since the beginning, and at this point I’m generally surprised and impressed that they can still find “myths” to test. “Bikes and Bazookas” half qualified, with Adam and Jamie comparing the idea that motorcycles are better for the environment than cars, and the junior Mythbusters testing a scene from a movie.
Continue reading “Mythbusters: Of RPGs and MPGs”
After a pilot that was generally cute, funny, and almost as life-affirming as the end of Dirty Dancing, New Girl returned this week with the all-important second episode. The biggest change between this week and last is a change of roommates: the Black roommate from the first episode (who may have had a name but as far as I could tell was just called “Coach”) is out, and a new Black guy, Winston (Lamorne Morris), is in. It seems Coach (Damon Wayans Jr.) was unavailable, but I know a lot of viewers are out there scratching their heads over this one, wondering what was wrong with Coach or whether the show’s makers thought that viewers simply wouldn’t notice the switch.
Continue reading “New Girl: New Guy, New TV, Silly Hats for All”Remember the summer of 1995? The DVD had just been invented, the O.J. Simpson trial (no relation) was dragging its way into the history books, and the question on everyone’s mind was, “Who shot Mr. Burns?”
