S.T. Karnick is a cultural critic and arts journalist who contributed reviews and essays on film, television, and literature to The Weekly Standard between 1999 and 2008. His writing for the magazine explored classic cinema, contemporary Hollywood, and popular fiction, with pieces on figures ranging from Buster Keaton to Michael Crichton. He has also been associated with various publications focused on culture and the arts.
Bestselling author and TV producer Michael Crichton, who died of cancer Tuesday at the age of 66, had an ambivalent view of science but an unfailingly benevolent attitude toward humanity. His writings are particularly important for having brought an intelligent, nuanced view on science to a popular…
Behind the Screen
THE NEW YORK TIMES analysis of Attorney General John Ashcroft's resignation, published today, reflects the general press coverage from the left, describing him, somewhat hyperbolically, as "one of the most powerful and divisive figures ever to serve as the nation's top law enforcement official."
The Affair of the 39 Cufflinks
Quicksilver
OVER THE YEARS, Perry Mason has become an American archetype: the wily lawyer who always gets his client off regardless of the niceties of legal procedure. Yet in the eighty-two books Erle Stanley Gardner wrote about his lawyer detective, published between 1933 and 1973, Mason remains largely an…
CRITICS HAVE NEVER cared much for Charlie Chan, but the portly Chinese-American detective has been a favorite for three-quarters of a century. Detective-Sergeant Charlie Chan of the Honolulu police became a globally recognized figure through the five novels Earl Derr Biggers published between 1925…
Every spring, like the tulips and the swallows, come the Oscars -- with their relentless press coverage, hype, predictions, film clips, huge audiences around the world waiting for the television broadcast of the awards ceremony, and, almost always, a good bit of controversy.
Most moviegoers -- if they remember him at all -- picture Buster Keaton as an absurd, slapstick clown, a charming but somewhat inferior rival to Charlie Chaplin from the days of silent film. And most movie critics -- if they write of him at all -- present Keaton as a tormented genius, abused by his…
"Leo McCarey," said the French director Jean Renoir, "understands people better than anyone in Hollywood." Ernst Lubitsch, the creator of brilliant, delightful screen comedies, said, "That boy McCarey is one of the best." Charles Laughton called him "the greatest comedy mind now living." Orson…
Fred Astaire -- classy, charming, elegant -- was born one hundred years ago this spring, and by the time of his death in 1987, he had become one of the most vivid cultural images of the century.
This hasn't been a good century for heroes. After the First World War, serious American fiction turned instead to figures like Jay Gatsby, Willy Loman, Dreiser's helpless victims, Faulkner's exemplars of decline, and Hemingway's scarred personalities. Unable to believe in the possibility of rising…