Brendan Bernhard

Bend Over

Brendan Bernhard
Lately, David Beckham has been in the news in the United States, perhaps the only major country in which he is not a household name. The New York Times, Slate, Sports Illustrated and others have all devoted lengthy articles to him, and he presided in spirit over a popular movie......

Art vs. Science

Brendan Bernhard
Photos by Chris Winget (top) and NASA The poet W.H. Auden once said that hanging out with scientists made him feel like a shabby curate. Or like a witch doctor at a convention of neurosurgeons — I forget the exact wording. But I recalled the remark while watching a recent......

Americans are Broad

Brendan Bernhard
Photo by Sam Jones/Fox Keen Eddie, the new policier — yeah, right — on Fox (Tuesdays, 9 p.m.), is the kind of hopped-up Guy Ritchie knockoff that pulsates with so much energy it will make Ritchie himself, should he ever watch it, feel like an old man reared on the......
article placeholder

The Critic

Brendan Bernhard
Publish a book of criticism, as James Wood did in 1999 with The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief, and no one will think to interview you or take your picture. But write a novel, and out come the notebooks and cameras. Which was why, on a recent Sunday......

Poet Against the War

Brendan Bernhard
Dashing French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin (literally, “Dominick from Pine-Tree Town”) is to publish an 800-page book in France this week titled Éloge des Voleurs de Feu (“In Praise of Those Who Stole the Fire”). According to London’s Daily Telegraph, the opus will contain examples of de Villepin’s poetry,......

Marriage in Turnaround

Brendan Bernhard
Tall, handsome, loving, faithful and successful, Hollywood screenwriter Mark Colm (Eric Stoltz) is close to being the perfect husband. So perfect, in fact, that he should probably be wearing a skirt. He shops and cooks, feeds the pets, ferries his son to and from school, and generally does all the......
(function(r, d, u) { var s = d.createElement(r); s.async = true; s.setAttribute('data-cfasync', false); u += '&cb=' + Date.now() + Math.random(); s.src = u; var n = d.getElementsByTagName(r)[0]; n.parentNode.insertBefore(s, n); })('script', document, '//engine.laweekly.com/?221982862');

You Vill Vatch!

Brendan Bernhard
Photo by Cliff Lipson/CBSWhat’s a Nazi movie without fake German accents? Nothing much, say I. But with German accents, the thicker the better, well, that’s a different story. Take one of my favorite World War II movies, The Young Lions, starring Marlon Brando as a blond Nazi lieutenant destined to......
article placeholder

Love and Orthodoxy

Brendan Bernhard
Despite living in Westwood, with all those wondrous UCLA girls jogging up and down the block, R.B. Kitaj claims to have lost all interest in sex. He’s finally turned 70, and he feels old. (“Nonetheless,” he says, “UCLA is the sexiest acronym in the English language.”) Six years after moving......

How AMERICAN Is It?

Brendan Bernhard
It's easy to hate Fox News — it's loud, simplistic and relentlessly self-promoting. Its slogans — "Real journalism, fair and balanced" and "We report, you decide" — are repeated over and over, like a spin doctor's mantras, until they drum themselves into your skull. In fact, much of the time,......

A Head Above

Brendan Bernhard
Photo by Sam Jones Like a lot of television personalities (Ted Koppel is the most prominent example), Bill Maher has narrow shoulders and an unusually large head. On his new talk show, Real Time With Bill Maher (HBO, Fridays, 11:30 p.m.), his guests have included the political columnist Arianna Huffington,......