Search for Roman

For decades, there has been an escalating tension between the NCAA and the student-athletes who play college sports. The center of the conflict lies with Men’s Football and Basketball – two multi-billion dollar empires where the NCAA and its m...

It is an accepted truth that adapting a sublime novel does not always result in a sublime movie. To an extent, this is the problem with Never Let Me Go, Alex Garland's adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguru's book. The film's tone, which attempts to captur...

Spoiler Alert: To the extent that the term "spoiler" can be applied to something this formulaic, I suppose I ought to warn readers that I talk in general terms about how the movie ends. What do you get when you mix A Christmas Carol with a subst...

When I first saw Next Stop, Wonderland at a packed screening in the Egyptian Theater during this year's Sundance Film Festival, I was not impressed, and couldn't understand why Miramax Films would ante up $6 million for what is fundamentally a re-t...

It's strange how the concept of two people wandering around a city at night falling in love has come of age in 2008. First, there was In Search of a Midnight Kiss. Now there's Nick and Nora's Infinite Playlist. Of course, Richard Linklater can c...

I can kind-of, sort-of see how this story might work as a novel. Bad dialogue doesn't sound as howlingly awful when not spoken aloud. Idiotic plot contrivances don't seem as painful and obvious. A love affair depends only on the spell woven by t...

The Ninth Gate has two modes: tedious and moronic, with the two not being mutually exclusive. Then, one-hundred minutes into this seemingly interminable movie (which clocks in at about 2:10), things take a turn for the worse and The Ninth Gate spi...

Romantic comedies are a little like junk food: they're not healthy or sophisticated but, when made right, there's something addictive about their tasty familiarity. Going in, you know what you're going to get. There are no surprises, nasty or other...

I have not read Nicholas Sparks' The Notebook, but I have heard good word-of-mouth about the novel. Sadly, the elements that made the book special did not survive the transition to the screen. The Notebook, as adapted by Nick Cassavetes from a sc...

In Western culture, we are obsessed by the concept of celebrity. How else can one explain the plague of paparazzi that descends on public figures when they make appearances, or the popularity of gossip magazines and TV shows? Celebrities are l...