psychology dector

We were the only two people in the darkened theater.   One entire row of seats had been roped off because they were damaged when part of the ceiling fell.   The place smelled of stale popcorn and body odor, and we had to wipe the accumulated buttery grease off of the vinyl seats before gingerly sitting down to await the show.   The film was Genius (Lionsgate, 2016), starring Jude Law and Colin Firth and directed by Michael Grandage.   I knew of Max Perkins and his editing work with most of the major writers of the early 20 th century:   Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Thomas Wolfe.   I knew he had performed more than just editing tasks for his writers, including being a surrogate father-figure.   But what unfolded in front of me over the next 104 minutes was something I had not seen before.   Grandage had managed to illustrate and dramatize what was not considered all that interesting:   a person editing a manuscript.   Gran...

If someone were to tell me that a smaller film about journalism and the molestation scandal in the Catholic Church would take home the Best Picture Oscar, I would not have believed it.   Yet, there was Tom McCarthy, writer and director of Spotlight (Anonymous Content / First Look Media / Participant Media, 2015), on stage last night at the end of the lengthy telecast thanking the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for their generosity in awarding the film Oscar’s ultimate honor.   It was truly a moment. Why was it a moment? Well, in a time when newspaper readership is in the dumper, a film about hardworking journalists succeeded in generating a discussion. In a time when our culture is mired in gossip, infotainment and the cult of celebrity with those celebrities having done nothing to earn that status except star in their own sex tapes and reality television shows, real, deeper truth and character won out. In a time when most people accept what they are fed by the...

Editor Robert B. Silvers in the offices of The New York Review of Books For more than fifty years now, The New York Review of Books has had its finger on the zeitgeist of American letters publishing every two weeks to a circulation of 135,000 subscribers.   On the occasion of its fiftieth year, Martin Scorsese and David Tedeschi have put together a riveting documentary entitled, The 50 Year Argument (HBO, 2014) about the life of this enterprise and the editors, writers, and artists who contribute to its pages.   Robert B. Silvers , the journal’s long-serving editor, describes how he edits his writers as well as his method for deciding what are the most important and interesting books of the season.   At one point in the film, Silvers reads from the review’s first and only editorial :   “ The New York Review of Books does not pretend to cover all the books of the season or even all the important ones.   Neither time nor space, however, have been spent on books...

Bill Cunningham’s photographs have graced the pages of The New York Times for decades. He is the quintessential street photographer, spending his days bicycling the busy thoroughfares to catch candid shots of fashion on the avenue. He is both a cultural anthropologist and documentarian of beauty. In his blue smock and working stiff’s clothes, he snaps away, catching exquisite intricacies of what is fashionable this season. Bill Cunningham New York (Zeitgeist Films, 2010) delves into his life as well as his work, both of which are so interconnected that one cannot separate one from the other. His is an ascetic’s existence. His apartment in the Carnegie Hall building is packed with file cabinets and boxes, containing thousands of negatives amassed during his daily shoots, of which only a few wind up being published on the pages of the newspaper. His bed rests on milk crates, and is little more than a mattress with a blanket. His apartment does not even have a bathroom. All of his time...

A film I saw recently did something to me that few films do these days: provoke an emotional response and several days’ worth of contemplation. The film was The Way (2010) , starring Martin Sheen and written, produced and directed by his son, Emilio Estevez. Truth is, I have been at a bit of a crossroads in my life these days. When friends and acquaintances have hit middle age, I watched as they dyed their hair, used Rogaine, and bought nifty little sports cars that screamed mid-life crisis. I knew that I would never succumb to such nonsense. My father’s hairline began receding just after high school; I still have my hair, but had the gene been passed to me, I would gladly shave my head entirely and be done with it. But middle age creeps into people’s lives in different ways. I am most bothered by feeling old—the pain, stiff joints, mental fog especially in the early mornings. I tell people as I limp into my office that “An old football injury is bothering me, but the funny thing is, ...

Competing for space in the American mind, which Allan Bloom famously declared closed more than twenty years ago, we have unemployment, a recessed economy, two wars, and a confederacy of dunces vying to be the next leader of the self-proclaimed “greatest country on earth.” Somewhere in the middle of that pack is American education. Every yahoo running for political office from dog catcher to president wants to be known as the education candidate. Yet once in office, those same politicians offer the old tired mantras of standardized test scores and teacher accountability. We must return America’s students to the top of the heap in math and science, they bray. Let’s hope they can read, too. We have been treated to a number of documentaries in the local cinema over the last few years regarding our education problems in America. There was the much ballyhooed Waiting For “Superman,” (2010) by the people who brought us global warming and the Al Gore PowerPoint lecture; there were also a num...