Новости за 13.04.2017

How do you film futility? Movies are traditionally about action—getting the girl, winning the big game, accomplishing something. Screenwriters are taught from an early age the importance of giving their protagonist a goal, then loading him down with obstacles to overcome so he can achieve it. But not everybody gets what they want in life—how do movies deal with all the unhappy endings out there? A film like Inside Llewyn Davis finds dark humor in failure, but to treat futility—the eternal tilting... Читать дальше...

Scott Pruitt is gearing up to tell a crew of coal miners how the Trump administration is going to make coal mining great again. According to a press release, the Environmental Protection Agency administrator is visiting a mine in western Pennsylvania on Thursday, where he will talk about Trump’s executive order on climate change, which placed “unnecessary burdens on coal miners and coal-fired electric utilities,” and about the agency’s “Back-to-Basics” agenda, which “refocuses the EPA on protecting the environment... Читать дальше...

Early in 1982, President Ronald Reagan arrived in New York City to speak with an audience of business leaders gathered at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. A year into Reagan’s first term, the country had fallen into a deep recession. In his speech to the enthusiastic crowd, though, the president found reason to hope.

Ken Faught/Toronto Star/Getty

Grace Paley may be the most underrated of New York twentieth-century writers. Born Grace Goodside in the Bronx, in 1922, she grew up in a Russian-Jewish family with strong socialist ideals. Paley studied poetry with W. H. Auden at the New School. Of Auden, she told the Paris Review that, “He seemed an immortal to me.” “I loved his poems so much,” Paley said, “that I was using this British language all the time—I was saying trousers and subaltern and things like that.” They once arranged to meet up in a café... Читать дальше...

Terry Bishop, a West Texas native with a monogrammed belt buckle and a leather holster for his flip phone, looks out over the 2,000 acres of farmland he owns near the small town of Presidio. His property is a five-minute walk from the Mexican border, and Bishop knows what’s coming. “I’ve got no doubt he’s going to build it,” he says. “He promised he would.”

No franchise has had a stranger, more circuitous route to mega-billions tentpole status than The Fast and the Furious franchise. The original film, based on a Wall Street Journal story called “Racer X,” was moderately entertaining genre grunt work. The first sequel was so forgettable that the producers just dropped all the characters for the third film, Tokyo Drift, in 2006. But they struck with that film’s director, Justin Lin, who reignited the franchise with 2009’s Fast & Furious and took it to the next level with 2011’s Fast Five... Читать дальше...

Watching Donald Trump in action, I sometimes imagine a drowning sailor desperately flailing to stay afloat. As leaks and scandals reveal the depths of his administration’s corruption and ineptitude, the president resembles a man grasping for driftwood on choppy seas, beset by the media he believes has long sought to discredit him and the “deep state” supposedly working to undermine him.

The comeback strategy Republicans adopted after back-to-back election wipeouts in the 2006 midterms and Barack Obama’s victory in 2008 drew heavily on two relentless tactics: