Even businesses admit healthcare competition is sick
Worth a look is this op-ed piece in today’s Post-Gazette. Writer M. Christine Whipple, head of the Pittsburgh Business Group on Health, asks whether UPMC really needs to build a new hospital in Monroeville. Whipple notes that the facility would be built near Forbes Regional, an existing (and recently improved) factility operated by UPMC rival…
Who Oversees the Overseers?
I’ll confess that when City Councilor Pat Dowd starts thundering about “transparency,” sometimes my mind starts wandering. After he took office earlier this year, for example, he was all het up about the transfer of years-old UDAG funds, monies that he maintained were not properly being allocated on the balance sheets of … OK, I’ll…
Do You Fear What I Fear?
In North Carolina, a man electrified his John McCain campaign sign so it delivered a nasty shock to the 9-year-old neighbor trying to steal it. In California, a man hanged a Sarah Palin effigy — stylish black pumps swaying softly in the breeze. In Pennsylvania, at a Palin rally, a corpulent man gleefully toted a…
The Spirit
I’ve never read Will Eisner’s classic original comic, so I have no opinion about how this film may or may not mangle the source material. What I saw was a stylized, retro-ish actioner by Frank Miller, similar in look to his 2005 film Sin City (lots of graphic-novelish black and white with splashes of color,…
Seven Pounds
Will Smith tries hard — bless his heart — but his innate likability and earnest dedication to looking deeply miserable here can’t raise this film from its maudlin doldrums or plot holes. Smith portrays a Los Angeles IRS agent seeking personal redemption through an extreme pay-it-forward scheme that dramatically changes the lives of seven strangers,…
Marley and Me
Newspaper columnist John Grogan (Owen Wilson) and his wife (Jennifer Anniston) adopt a Labrador puppy, known formally as “Marley” and informally as “the worst dog in the world,” for his rowdy behavior. David Frankl adapts Grogan’s popular eponymous memoir that tracks Marley’s lovable and frustrating antics as the pooch’s life coincides with relatable bumps and…
Let the Right One In
Tomas Alfredson’s drama is an intriguing hybrid of coming-of-age story and horror. Set in the early 1980s in wintry Stockholm, it details the budding relationship between a pair of 12-year-olds: Oskar, the wispy blond boy who is a perennial victim of bullying classmates, and Eli, a dark-haired girl who only comes out at night. We…
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
At the screening I attended, I could hear the audience snuffling, but I found David Fincher’s overly long, glossy account of one man’s odd life to be more emotionally distancing than engaging. Liberally adapted from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short story by Eric Roth (whose Forrest Gump this film remind me of), the film tells the…
Slumdog Millionaire
The best way to make the slums of India interesting to the 18-to-24 demographic is to hire Danny Boyle to direct a movie about them, and then to make sure he directs it like a Danny Boyle movie. Slumdog is loud, fast, brutal, kinetic and IN YOUR FACE! The first half is too good even…
Valkyrie and The Reader
Not one, but two films concerning Nazi Germany are set for Christmas release — and neither is particularly feel-good holiday fare. One’s a high-profile Hollywood thriller with a fizzled ending that you already know, and the other is a downbeat romance marred by the post-war reckoning of culpability. Knowing that the plot to kill Hitler…
Frost/Nixon
In the mid-1970s, British talk-show host David Frost set about to produce a series of televised one-on-one interviews with Richard Nixon, hoping to elicit a confession (or at least a revealing slip-up) from the former president. How these interviews came about and unfolded is the subject of this drama directed by Ron Howard and adapted…
Doubt
John Patrick Shanley has adapted and directs his own Pulitzer Prize-winning play about turmoil at a Catholic elementary school in the Bronx in the fall of 1964. There, the youngish Father Flynn (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is accused of improper behavior toward a student by the school’s principal, Sister Aloysius (Meryl Streep). The conflict is larger…
This Just In: December 25 – January 1
Highlights from the local TV news: Return policies revealed!
Hot Metal Diner
Bring plenty of appetite to this breakfast-and-lunch joint.
Pittsburgh Signs Project: 250 Signs of Western Pennsylvania
Pittsburgh Signs Project: 250 Signs of Western Pennsylvania Carnegie Mellon University Press, 203 pp., $29.95 I grew up in an affluent but sterile Pittsburgh suburb — one I got out of whenever I could. And it was easy to tell when I’d succeeded: Suddenly, signs would be everywhere. Instead of confining themselves to strip…
Philadelphia ensemble Relâche features Pittsburgh-based composer Eric Moe
“Eight Point Turn” aurally describes a ride through a stretch of Montana wilderness.
Local rockers Round Black Ghosts offer hooks and introspection
Round Black Ghosts have their own, distinct way of writing solid indie-rock and alternative songs.
Beyond Green Building
“Every time we’re allowed to cut down forest, and not pay the [financial] cost of that, we’re taking that capital and taking that inheritance away from [future generations].”
Pittsburgh n’@
Dispatches from the blogosphere: Where have all the bloggers gone?
Song-and-loop man Jeff Miller returns to Pittsburgh to track live album
“It took me about two years on my original one before I got my timing right were I wanted it to be, and wouldn’t make noticeable errors.”
Neighborhoods: East Liberty woman gets grant for outreach
Growing up, Ashley Moorefield turned to a mentor at the Homewood YMCA when things at home were rough. She credits her faith and her mentor with helping her rise above a less-than-perfect domestic situation — and now, at 23, she’s reaching out to younger girls and giving them a hand up, mentoring them through discussions…
Media: P-G going back for a second round of staff buyouts
Nearly two dozen of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s most experienced reporters and editors have taken a company-proffered buyout. But apparently that’s not enough of a staff reduction to stave off potential layoffs. The paper’s owner, Block Communications, has been experiencing revenue shortfalls, and is now dangling a somewhat reduced offer before all newsroom staff — about…
Boxing Day
Bloomfield fights sparking memories of the good old days
Verdetto’s
Wings and things worth crossing the freeway for.
Local musician Josh Beyer goes BIY — that’s “build it yourself”
“I’ll go to Goodwill and buy cheap plastic toys for a dollar, then give them a bigger purpose, so I can make alien sounds with them.”
Paper Chase
When college students ask my career advice — and of course given my station in life, they do so constantly — I urge them to stay out of journalism entirely. I suggest they pursue careers in industries like auto-manufacturing and hedge-fund management instead. “You won’t be successful,” I say. “But with luck, you can become…
Savage Love
I’m a 34-year-old straight woman living with a 32-year-old straight man. His daughter is 2, and I am the only mother she has ever known. (Her real mother is a crack whore somewhere.) My boyfriend tells me he loves me, but it doesn’t feel like he wants to spend any time with me. I pay…
At the Miller Gallery, anti-corporate pranksters The Yes Men Keep It Slick.
Curator Suparak has demonstrated a knack for exhibiting the work of those who require a hyphenated addendum to the word “artist.”
