Author: Peter Tonguette

Like most reality TV shows, like most TV shows, like most storytelling, period, TLC’s My 600-lb Life depends on a certain predictable, unchanging format. But the specific way in which this one expresses its repetitiveness is uniquely depressing. The pattern approximately mirrors the tradition of celebrating Fat Tuesday just before Lent in cities like New…

Those of us who grew up in the 1980s are apt to associate the teen movie with other hallmarks of that decade’s culture, such as big hair, the Walkman, or Trump: The Game. Yet a new book demonstrates that the genre neither began nor ended with the Reagan administration. For better or for worse, movies…

In the 27 years since Wes Anderson made Rushmore, his movies have only become more deliriously decorative and ostentatiously ornamental. Among the things audiences will encounter in Anderson’s new movie, The Phoenician Scheme, are shoeboxes containing business plans, multiple rosaries, assorted assassins or would-be assassins, a diplomatic pouch holding handkerchiefs and other valuables, a fruit…

Val Kilmer was a movie star who perceived something lacking in the business of being a movie star. Although he had the countenance of a leading man and was born with a name that, though authentic, sounds almost made-up in the manner of, say, Rock Hudson, Kilmer consistently resisted and rejected the machinations of modern…

Any show that uses the title card “Baldwin Residence: East Hampton” is rather begging to be hate-watched. And on that basis, The Baldwins on TLC, which peers into the life of Alec, his second wife, Hilaria Baldwin, and their seven children, is undeniably addictive and sometimes perversely successful — but, for a whole host of…

More than any president in memory, Donald Trump is attuned to aesthetics.  This should scarcely come as a surprise, given that Trump is our first builder-turned-president. In his previous vocation as a real estate developer, Trump became familiar with the things that make a building more than merely functional but surpassingly beautiful. One senses that…

During his peak years of popularity and success, when Woody Allen stepped in front of the camera to whine, complain, or lament, he most often did so in the company of Tony Roberts. The veteran character actor died on Feb. 7 at age 85. Although Allen is best known for promulgating a certain set of…

The Future Was Now: Madmen, Mavericks, and the Epic Sci-Fi Summer of 1982; By Chris Nashawaty, Flatiron; 289 pp., $29.99 As we approach the dying days of a movie summer dominated by Deadpool & Wolverine, the premise of a new book by veteran film journalist Chris Nashawaty may sound like a bit of a tough sell.…

When I was 9 years old, long before I read Great Expectations, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, or anything at all by Louisa May Alcott, my favorite author was Stephen King.  How and why I first latched on to King remains something of a mystery to me, but I suspect that I had been exposed…

The simple fact that an old movie is beloved, fondly remembered, or the object of cult fascination does not necessarily mean it has lasting cultural currency. After all, we live among a tidal wave of so-called content that recycles the cinematic highlights and lowlights of the 1980s, but so many of these reboots and rehashes…