Gaby Wenig is a writer who contributed film and cultural criticism to The Weekly Standard in 2003 and 2004. Her articles covered movies and Hollywood, including pieces on the cinematic treatment of the Columbine tragedy and screen adaptations of Evelyn Waugh's work.
EVELYN WAUGH thought movies vapid and dishonest, one of the evils of the modern age. In the Waughian universe, the film industry attracted self-promoters and hucksters, always at the ready to trade their own self worth for a bloated swell of bogus importance. Hollywood is the setting for the…
I ONCE ASKED my Jewish studies teacher, a mother of eleven, why women were expected to take care of children, and not men. "Women have breasts," she said, enunciating every word slowly while gesturing vaguely at her chest, "that they use to feed the babies. Men don't." In the years since, when I…
The new $100 million filming of "Peter Pan," directed by P.J. Hogan for Universal Pictures, bills itself as "the timeless story as you've never seen it before." Much of it looks very familiar, however. Sure, there are some new special effects that make the children's flight to Neverland look as if…
IN GUS VAN SANT'S recent film "Elephant"--at the point where a student enters the school library, dressed in camouflage gear, machine gun at the ready--another student lifts his camera and focuses. It's a chilling moment, with both poised to shoot. Of course, what's chilling about it is that a…
LAST WEEK a friend and I made our way to Hollywood Park to watch a horserace--for the first time in our lives. Anticipating the glamour of the sport of kings, we found the charm of a littered Greyhound Bus terminal. Horseracing now is a bygone sport, a washed-up relic of the days when people…
AT THE END of "Gangs of New York," Martin Scorsese inserts a montage of the city across time--from a decrepit nineteenth-century slum to the modern megalopolis of Manhattan. In the last shot, right before the credits roll, two buildings stand out: the twin towers of the World Trade Center. They…