Peter Tonguette

The Big Lebowski and its kind normalized marijuana in our culture. Continue Reading »

The normalization of chemical substances may seem like a phenomenon peculiar to our postmodern moment, but a movie made nearly seventy years ago sounded the alarm before many of us were even born. Continue Reading »

Seen today, Jazz on a Summer’s Day shimmers with its glimpses of a world in which people, for all their differences, shared so much. When was the last time so many people got together with such geniality and grace?  Continue Reading »

The history of American cinema in the twen­tieth century is understood today as a march from inhibition to expression. The films produced during the long reign of the Motion Picture Production Code, from 1934 to 1968, are assumed to be deficient for honoring limits on what could be seen and heard . . . . Continue Reading »

Throughout his career, Bogdanovich stood apart from his New Hollywood peers, presenting a far milder view of human nature untainted by cynicism. Continue Reading »

When Stephen Sondheim died in late November at ninety-one, the eulogies, tributes, and bouquets from critics and ­tastemakers were entirely expected. The Broadway composer and lyricist left the Earth having earned multiple Tonys and Grammys, a Pulitzer Prize, an Oscar, a Kennedy Center Honor, and a . . . . Continue Reading »

Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, who comprised the most consequential partnership in the history of American musical theater, were brought together by chance. It happened in the early 1940s, when each on his own cottoned to the idea of adapting the play Green Grow the Lilacs into . . . . Continue Reading »

One of the hoariest clichés of American popular culture is anti-suburban sentiment. Common throughout literature, film, and television, it arguably received its most tuneful expression in Malvina Reynolds’s 1962 song “Little Boxes,” which disparages the tracts of affordable housing that were . . . . Continue Reading »