Brett Ratner not only provides material for a good story, he even writes the headlines. “Your headline should be: ‘Yeshiva Prepared Ratner To Be Director,’” he said during a phone interview with The Arty Semite. Happily, yeshiva did a good job. Ratner is most famous for the “Rush Hour” trilogy of films. His latest comedy…
Writer-director pals Hayden Schlossberg and Jon Hurwitz have expectations to live up to. Fans of “Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle” and its sequel, “Harold & Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay,” are expecting even bigger laughs from the third installment in the comic duo’s franchise, “A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas,” which opens…
Mandy Patinkin has yet to meet a medium he cannot conquer. He first hit national prominence as Che Guevara opposite Patti LuPone’s Eva Perón in the Broadway production of “Evita,” for which he won a Tony Award. His film credits include “The Princess Bride,” in which he uttered the iconic lines: “My name is Inigo…
Elinor Nauen is Manhattan’s unofficial poet laureate of cars and baseball. Her newest book, “So Late Into the Night,” is a rollicking road trip on the model of Byron’s “Don Juan,” with over 600 stanzas of ottava rima about Derek Jeter (her non-Platonic obsession), road trips, her husband, morning minyan and herself. Nauen chatted with…
Jonathan Ames is a novelist, essayist, short story writer, and, most recently, the creator of “Bored to Death,” an HBO comedy starting its third season October 10. In the show, Jason Schwartzman stars as a fictional version of Ames who moonlights as a private detective on Craigslist to relieve a bad case of writer’s block….
In “Born,” a solo exhibition showing at the Sasha Wolf Gallery in New York through November 5, photographer Elinor Carucci presents intimate, at times unsettling, but always unflinchingly candid portraits of herself and her twin children. Born in Israel in 1971, Carucci started taking photographs at the age of 15. She moved to New York…
Cellist Alisa Weilerstein was at the Jerusalem International Chamber Music Festival last week when she received an unexpected phone call from the MacArthur Foundation telling her she was a recipient of their 2011 fellowship. The “Genius Award,” as it is called, is a no-strings-attached grant of $500,000, paid out over five years. Weilerstein, 29, is…
Those who appreciate Vanessa Hidary’s unique, fierce voice in her solo performances as the Hebrew Mamita can now enjoy her words in print, as well. “The Last Kaiser Roll in the Bodega,” Hidary’s first book, is a compelling compilation that paints a word picture of a bold Jewish woman ahead of her time. It is…
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