It has been both common and admirable in most of human history to extend the occasional indulgence to both the very aged and the truly great among us. Surely Michael Mann, the 80-year-old director with more than a few of the previous century’s finest films to his credit, is therefore entitled to the double helping of it you’ll need to meander through the first 20 or so minutes of Ferrari, which resembles nothing so much as the various establishing scenes of Heat and Miami Vice that take place after their trademark slam-bang opening sequences. We see Enzo Ferrari, played in essentially unrecognizable fashion by Adam Driver, in company with his mistress, his wife, his mother, his associates, and his local parish. This would be a good time to get some popcorn if you missed your chance during the previews because nothing occurs that will have any impact whatsoever on the rest of the film.
The qualifications of an author to write about his or her subject are rarely so well established in an opening line as Michael Hans Kater’s are in the first sentence of After the Nazis: The Story of Culture in West Germany: "On Tuesday, May 1, 1945, I was drying a small collection of Hitler stamps on the windowsill of my grandfather's house in a small village near Bremen in North Germany." Kater, a distinguished research professor emeritus of history at York University whose work has covered a wide range of German history, here finishes a trilogy of work concerning, respectively, culture in the Weimar Republic, Nazi Germany, and, now, just what the subtitle of this new work says.
A spoon that has little fork-like tines on the end is called, by most normal people, a “spork,” which I think we can all agree is a terrible-sounding word.
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) doubled down on his efforts to quash a New York State bill that would require new restaurants that open in rest stops on the highway to offer service seven days a week. Graham has focused his ire on the effect the bill would have on Chick-fil-A, which has a longstanding policy...
Former President Trump’s campaign said it will appeal the Maine secretary of state's Thursday decision to bar him from the state’s primary ballot. Secretary of State Shenna Bellows (D) determined Thursday that Trump’s actions surrounding the Jan. 6 Capitol riots violated the 14th Amendment’s clause barring those who “assist insurrection” from holding office. The Trump...
The White House on Thursday issued a joint communiqué with Mexico that included "democratic decline" as a root cause of migration, and hours later deleted the phrase. The Mexican version did not include the phrase but was otherwise an exact translation using the agreed-upon language. The joint statement was the result of a meeting between Mexican...
Maine’s secretary of state said Thursday that former President Trump was ineligible to be on the state's primary ballot under the 14th Amendment, becoming the second state to take such action. Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, a Democrat, said she had concluded that Trump "over the course of several months and culminating on January...
Former GOP presidential candidate Will Hurd, who is backing Nikki Haley for president, said Thursday he thought the former South Carolina governor would survive the controversy around her remarks about the Civil War. “People are trying to use this as a thing because she has momentum, and that momentum is not going to change,” Hurd,...
Sens. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) went after Elon Musk on Thursday, demanding that the Tesla owner correct false statements about the safety of the company’s vehicles. The letter comes after a report from Reuters last week found the company knowingly deployed defective parts to customers for years, avoiding recalls and potentially putting...