Word: thinking
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...think my job is easy. I'm paid to see the movies you pay to see. But there are times when I wonder if I shouldn't have tried a less onerous trade, like defusing IEDs or chairing the Fed. Such dark thoughts percolated during the 103 minutes I spent in the company of Did You Hear About the Morgans?, a comedy about a married couple on the outs (Sarah Jessica Parker and Hugh Grant) who, after exchanging glances with a mob hit man, are relocated in the FBI's Witness Protection Program to a Wyoming hamlet where two earth...
Grant seems to think he's in a better movie, and a few times makes it better (though he was more relaxed, clever and ingratiating on The Daily Show). After his first night away from New York's 24-hour symphony of noise, Paul awakens to observe that Wyoming is "very quiet. I thought I could actually hear my cells dividing." His role as sinning husband is to confess and win his wife back, but Grant's function in the film is to provide a running commentary on Parker's cartoonishly tense career gal. ("A week ago," he tells...
...televised debate that in the 1980s, he and actress Shirley MacLaine witnessed an unidentified flying object over her house. "You have to keep in mind," he told Tim Russert, "that Jimmy Carter saw a UFO and also that more people in this country have seen UFOs than I think approve of George Bush's presidency." (In fact, Jimmy Carter did once report seeing a UFO in Georgia and pledged during his presidential campaign to declassify all government files on flying saucers. Once elected, he didn...
...there’s always the follow-the-advice-of-a-fictional-movie route. We can think of a couple of entrepreneurial professors from Columbia who escaped from debt to make millions and a very catchy theme song. Their success was conditional on the existence of ghosts, and that endowment’s looking eerily spectral right about now isn’t it, Columbia? Unfortunately, we’re betting that’s a problem that even Mel Gibson couldn’t fix?...
With my place as a great historian secured, I moved on to my runner-up. I picked the person I think is the best chef in America, Thomas Keller. In a decade when food became both entertainment and politics, when obscure ingredients filled grocery-store aisles, when I had to go outside in zero-degree weather to suck in air in order to keep from barfing after gorging on 22 courses at his restaurant Per Se but then ate four more courses, Keller led the way by focusing on being the best instead of hosting a Food Network show...