Results tagged “susangcole”

We sort of agree with Susan G. Cole. There, we said it.

If nothing else, Susan G. Cole, NOW's Senior Entertainment Editor, does live up to one part of her job title: she sure is entertaining.

Finally! We've been to a few disappointing Luminato displays of late, and a few disappointing "marquee" literary events, and so it is with great pleasure and relief that we can report that last week, both fiction lovers and Luminato-goers got exactly what they've been craving: well-executed programming that was as warm and inviting as it was ambitious. World Voices in Fiction brought four of the brightest new luminaries in contemporary fiction to the Al Green theatre Thursday night, to read from and discuss their recent works, and did so in a most satisfying fashion. The authors were brilliant and also, happily, comfortable in front of an audience. The space was welcoming and the pace relaxed, just right for a reading on a lazy summer night. (Organizers of all literary events take note: acoustics matter. So do lighting and sightlines. Please book your venues accordingly.) In short, it was just what a book-ish night should be.

Last night, Slumdog Millionaire won the Oscar for best picture. But did you know that it is "the most violent film to do so ever"? It's true, according to NOW's Senior Entertainment Editor Susan G. Cole, who has apparently never seen No Country For Old Men (which features a guy strangling a cop to death with handcuffs), The Departed (which features several guys shooting other guys in the head), Gladiator (which features plenty of beheadings and severed limbs), Silence of the Lambs (which features a guy who kills women and makes coats from their skin), Braveheart (which features an extended torture scene complete with disembowelling), or Schindler's List (which is about the holocaust). Good thing, though, that He's Just Not That Into You wasn't nominated for best picture this year, too: according to Cole, it features a scene of "a little boy who pushes [a little five year-old girl] into the sand, sneering at her that she smells like dog poo." When that girl goes to her mother, her mother tells her that "that little boy did those things...because he likes you." The scene, Cole writes, is "repulsive," "totally terrifying," and is an instance of "abusive parenting" and "excusing violence against women." Never you mind that Buffalo Bill guy.

Well, there have been a lot of films made about the ongoing conflict in Iraq and its effect on soldiers, and here’s another one! Stop-Loss is probably the glossiest, most-Hollywood looking attempt so far (no mean feat, considering Paul Haggis has had a shot already) and it remains to be seen if anyone in America really wants to be reminded that its sending its army off to fight a war that the majority of them didn’t want, especially when in many cases the soldiers don’t want to go. Haggis’s attempt at examining the psychological fallout of the Iraq war In The Valley of Elah absolutely sucked a big one at the box office, and honestly we don’t see this having much of a bigger impact, even though Ryan Philippe is generally considered nicer to look at than Tommy Lee Jones.