PJ Grisar is a Forward culture reporter. He can be reached at [email protected] and @pjgrisar on Twitter.
PJ Grisar
By PJ Grisar
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Culture A beloved book, a classic Italian film and now, a disturbingly timely opera
“The Garden of the Finzi-Continis” had what its creators call a “difficult birth.” Over a decade in the making, the opera, adapted from Giorgio Bassani’s book of the same name, which Vittorio De Sica made into an Oscar-winning 1970 film, was meant to be a part of the Minnesota Opera’s 2011 and then 2013 season….
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Culture How a film lover from Kingston, New York, grew up to be the inimitable Peter Bogdanovich
Peter Bogdanovich, the bandana-throated, Oscar-nominated director-writer who was a bridge figure between New Hollywood and the Hollywood Golden Age has died at 82. Encompassing such classics as “The Last Picture Show,” “Paper Moon” and “What’s Up, Doc?” Bogdanovich’s career ranged from intimate dramas to broad screwball comedies. He later charmed new audiences as Dr. Melfi’s…
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Culture 22 absolutely on-the-mark pop culture predictions for 2022
2021 was a year of new beginnings — not just for our newly reopened society, but also for the coronavirus pandemic, which continues to mutate into increasingly scary-sounding novel Greek letter variants. And so, we end 2021 on a note of uncertainty. In a year like this, when Taylor Swift surprised us with a 10-minute…
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Culture In ‘Curb,’ not even Alexander Vindman is safe from Larry David’s warped worldview
After 11 seasons of “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” Larry David, the master of his own moral universe, finally found a worthy foil in America’s other most upstanding Jew. On the show’s season finale, which aired Sunday, David met Lt. Colonel Alexander Vindman, the man who blew the whistle on President Trump’s call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr…
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Culture Why Bob Einstein — aka Marty Funkhouser from ‘Curb,’ aka Super Dave, aka Officer Judy — contained multitudes
Bob Einstein was a comedic test case in nature versus nurture. In the end, comedy was what came naturally. The son of vaudevillian Parkyakarkus (né Harry Einstein), who was a crackup on the radio and around the dinner table, Einstein had a showbiz pedigree. And yet, he rejected the call of entertainment until he was…
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Culture What Yiddish (and the Forward) are doing in the new ‘Spider-Man’
Everytime Spider-Man flirts with the fickle multiverse he encounters a couple of constants. The first is that a version of Spider-Man exists in every reality. The second is that Jews do too. Even, it would seem, the Jews who write for this very Jewish paper. In “Spider-Man: No Way Home,” Jews are everywhere. As David…
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Culture Today in corporate propaganda: Jeff Bezos and William Shatner take the ultimate ego trip — to space!
If there is something vaguely sinister about launching a beloved 90-year-old actor into space on very phallic rocket to distract the world from an egregious pattern of alleged labor rights abuses, making a one-hour corporate propaganda film about the initiative for your own streaming platform does little to convince us otherwise. But I commend Amazon…
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Culture The best Jewish (and Jew-ish) films of 2021
The cinematic year of 2021 felt like a time warp. Let’s put it this way. In March, the Grammys, a show known for its belated schedule, awarded Billie Eilish Best Song Written for Visual Media for the title track of the James Bond flick “No Time to Die,” a film that wouldn’t even be released…
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