March means the beginning of spring in some parts of the world, but it is still winter in other areas. While the March winds are still blowing, enjoy these comfort foods. Then, as spring begins, enjoy the refreshing flavor of…
Features
“Life After Life” Written by Kate Atkinson
by Betty Hafner • • 0 Comments
When you pick up British writer Kate Atkinson’s popular 2013 novel “Life After Life,” you have to be willing to enter a new world of storytelling. As Atkinson casually says in interviews, it has a “high-concept” structure. One look at…
Mike at the Movies
by Mike Cuthbert • • 0 Comments
Pompeii (PG-13) ** This is a movie, not a documentary. It is a movie we’ve all seen before. It involves a slave who is a gladiator, small but effective, a black slave who is the noblest character in the cast,…
Mike at the Movies
by Mike Cuthbert • • 0 Comments
The Monuments Men (PG-13) **** George Clooney gambled on his audience and their patience in this odd war film. Many critics find it too episodic and slight for true praise, and episodic it is. Perhaps Clooney, who wrote and directed…
Flying Kangaroos and Penguins
by Nora H. Caplan • • 0 Comments
After a three-hour delay at BWI Airport and a six-hour flight across the continental USA, our plane finally touched down in Los Angeles. We were tired and eager to deplane. But the pilot announced over the intercom that air traffic…
“The Goldfinch” Written by Donna Tartt
by Betty Hafner • • Comments Off
Mississippi-born writer Donna Tartt told an interviewer that she writes to create a work like the ones she loved as a child—“galloping, gleeful, you-don’t-know-what’s-going-to-happen-next.” Her stunning, almost 800-page novel “The Goldfinch” is overflowing with that spirit. With her elaborately constructed…
Mike at the Movies
by Mike Cuthbert • • Comments Off
August: Osage County (R) ***** This film will take over your mind and start gnawing at your soul before you know what happened. It is the story of a family brought together by what nobody will admit was the suicide…
‘The Aviator’s Wife’ Written by Melanie Benjamin
by Betty Hafner • • Comments Off
Melanie Benjamin tells readers she was compelled to write “The Aviator’s Wife” (2013) to help people become familiar with “the truly operatic scale of Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s life and marriage.” Yet readers will have to accept a blurred line between…
Mike at the Movies
by Mike Cuthbert • • Comments Off
“Saving Mr. Banks” (PG-13) ***** In an outstanding holiday season of new films, this is certainly one of the top choices. It relates how Walt Disney worked for 20 years to get the rights to make the movie “Mary Poppins”…
Following the Trail of Harry Potter in London
by Eileen ODonnell Schlichting • • Comments Off
My tour began, like the Harry Potter series, with the cupboard under the stairs. The cupboard was the first set on display at Warner Brothers Studio Tour London, where for two hours I roamed among the sketches, sets and costumes…