Speed Racer, from the mysterious sibling filmmakers behind the Matrix trilogy, is opening to well-deserved critical derision. It’s a 135-minute insipid, soulless commodity that lifts some of the Japanese original’s storyline but absolutely none of the charm. The movie opens with a 34% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes; perhaps J. Hoberman’s pan gets it best: “Ideologically anti-corporate, previous Wachowski productions aspired to be something more than mind-less sensation; Speed Racer is thrilled to be......

Errol Morris in a conversation with Anthony Swofford after the screening of Standard Operating Procedure at the Tribeca Film Festival. Academy Award-winning director Errol Morris was on hand last night for a Tribeca Film Festival screening of his new documentary Standard Operating Procedure, a nuanced exploration of the detainee abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Those familiar with Morris’s innovative oeuvre won’t be surprised to hear that, far from a tendentious indictment of......

On Tuesday night at St. Ann's Warehouse, David Byrne, longtime advocate of bikes, big suits, lamp dancing and PowerPoint, will be joining a who's who list of New York performers to observe the fifth anniversary of the official start of the Iraq invasion. Called Speak Up!, the sold-out show is raising money for United for Peace and Justice and Iraq Veterans Against the War. If you don't have tickets, you might want to skip......

"The Blue Wall of Violence" courtesy of MoCADA Yesterday, The Daily News printed an article that began, "A cop-bashing art exhibit at a taxpayer-funded museum in Brooklyn portrays the city's Finest as trigger-happy racists who have put bull's-eyes on the backs of black New Yorkers." The exhibit is a retrospective of the artist Dread Scott's work called "Welcome to America," and the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts (MoCADA) is calling the paper out......

THEATER: Hemingway’s play The Fifth Column takes its now-familiar name from the Spanish Civil War, when General Emilio Mola, advancing on Madrid with four columns of troops, boasted of a hidden “fifth column” of fascist sympathizers waiting within the city. Hemingway, of course, was there for the action as a newspaper correspondent and dashed off the play while fascists bombarded his hotel. His rarely produced drama tells the “surprisingly funny story of the private......

Now that the cold weather is likely here to stay, at least until the next freak 60 degree day, you might want to hunker down with a cozy-sounding book. Steven Gdula's The Warmest Room in the House: How the Kitchen Became the Heart of the Twentieth-Century American Home ($29.95, Bloomsbury.), will warm you right up. This whirlwind tour of the past hundred years or so sheds light on how the kitchen was often a reflection......

taxi, by Runs With Scissors at flickrToday on the Gothamist Newsmap: an amputation on Hudson St. in Manhattan, an under-a-train fatality at Lenox Ave. and Central Park North in Manhattan, and a stabbing on 34th St. in Queens. Auvryn Scarlett, the sanitation truck driver who mowed down a pair of British tourists as they strolled down a midtown sidewalk, was arraigned on manslaughter charges yesterday. Saturday Night Live will attempt to make up for......

The above photo is a living replica of the Statue of Liberty, painstakingly recreated with 18,000 people at Camp Dodge in Des Moines, Iowa. The image is from 1918, and is one of many "living photographs" by Arthur Mole and John Thomas, who attempted to "recover the old image of national identity at the very moment when the United States entered the Great War in 1917." Flash forward to present day, shed some clothes,......

Don't have a Valentine's Day card yet? Print out this page, cut out the cards and give it to yourself! You can also download EPS versions of these Valentine's Day cards immortalized on the Simpsons' episode, I Love Lisa, at deconcept. Fun facts about Valentine Day's from the US Greeting Card Assocation: With an estimated 190 million cards to be exchaged, it's the second biggest card occasion after Christmas.1 billion "classroom valentines" will be......

Photograph of a Giants fan in Times Square by Johnia! on Flickr After the stunning Giants' Super Bowl win, people cheered like they hadn't seen a Super Bowl victory in 17 years! Throughout the city, folks were stumbling onto streets, chanting the names of players and even getting arrested. A thousand people flooded Times Square, reportedly jumping on cars and sitting on top of phone kiosks, but the Post says no one was arrested.......

The International Center of Photography is now in possession of something truly magnificent -- three lost valises of negatives belonging to wartime photographer Robert Capa. For the few of you who haven't heard of him, Robert Capa was a wartime photographer who died while on assignment in Indochina in 1954; he was only 41 years old. In his short life, he documented five wars and founded the famous Magnum photo agency.......

New York City officials are planning for a Dunkirk-like evacuation of Manhattan island in the case of an emergency. In the early days of World War II, a "bathtub navy" was assembled between Dunkirk, France and Dover, England, in order to move hundreds of thousands of soldiers from the Continent to safer ground as the Nazis advanced across France. Hundreds of small craft were sent across the English Channel to ferry stranded and cornered British......

Photograph of Kathy Bates and AMPAS President Sid Ganis announcing the nominations by Chris Pizzello/AP While the writers' strike continues and prospects of an awards ceremony are unclear, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences went ahead and announced the contenders for their 80th annual back-slapping ceremony. Oscar-winning friend of the academy Kathy Bates was on hand to announce this year's golden picks. From Bob Dylan to Michael Clayton, many of the nominations......

Photograph of Washington Square Park chess table by Paulo C on Flickr Brilliant, reclusive and eccentric, Chicago-born and Brooklyn-bred Bobby Fischer died at age 64 in Iceland. His spokesman said the cause was kidney failure, after a long illness. Fischer, who grew up playing in chess clubs in Brooklyn and Manhattan, beat Boris Spassky in a 1972 match, becoming the first and only American to become world champion, a Cold War hero, and popularized......

Anthony Lappé is a writer, blogger, television producer and executive editor of GNN.tv, the web site for the Guerrilla News Network. He's written for mainstream press like the Times and was the National Affairs Editor for Black Book, and in 2003 he collaborated on the award-winning Showtime documentary about Iraq called BattleGround: 21 Days on the Empire’s Edge, which covered the front lines of the simmering guerrilla war in Iraq in 2003. Part of what......

The Parks Dept. decided to throw in the towel on litigation that's been going on for three years and conceded to reevaluate its requirement that no more than 50,000 people could gather on Central Park's Great Lawn at one time. Aside from six allotted exceptions (per year) that include four reserved for performances by the Metropolitan Opera and the NY Philharmonic, the city's rationale for crowd-size restrictions was that very large crowds could damage the......

READING: It's another First Tuesday event at McNally Robinson, and this time around author and activist Mark Crispin Miller invites Anthony Lappe to center stage. The executive editor of the Guerilla News Network also produced an award-winning documentary on the war in Iraq for Showtime. More recently, he's created a graphic novel called Shooting War with illustrator Dan Goldman, which is "a spoof of the network news, the war in Iraq, and the burgeoning 'citizen......

Mayor Bloomberg's trip to the University of Oklahoma to caucus with a bipartisan group of current and former politicians and grouse about Washington gridlock only fueled the fires of speculation that he is preparing a Presidential run. People are already strategizing about who his ideal running mate would be. Bloomberg is sticking to his (anti-)guns, however, and still claiming that he is not a candidate. But his pollster told the LA Times that our Mayor......

Armed with cheesecake from Junior's, Mayor Bloomberg headed to Oklahoma for the summit of Republicans and Democrats to discuss a third party White House run. Organized by former senators David Boren and Sam Nunn at the University of Oklahoma (which Boren is the president of), the group has been working since meeting last night . Here's some of Boren's opening statement:We have come together at a crucial moment. These are not ordinary times. For the......

Brooklyn writers are banding together to be the latest voice against Bruce Ratner's vision for Atlantic Yards. A number of local wordsmiths have contributed to Brooklyn Was Mine, an anthology consisting of short essays and stories put together by two Vogue editor to benefit Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn (a non-profit that fights development while uniting the community). From the press release:"Brooklyn has given birth to some of America's greatest literary voices," note the anthology's co-editors,......

READING: Olympia Dukakis, who you know from such films as Moonstruck and Steel Magnolias, will be at Barnes & Noble tonight. She'll be reading from a brand spakin' new edition of Bertolt Brecht’s play Mother Courage and Her Children. She recently put down the Oscar and picked up a pen to write the forward to the antiwar classic. 7pm // Barnes & Noble [1972 Broadway] // Free EVENT: Tonight the Raw Word Reading hits Galapagos,......

A sparkling new 700-pound ball, tons of confetti, and over a million people helped ring in the New Year from Times Square last night/early today. Mayor Bloomberg and police Police Academy valedictorian Karolina Wierzchowska, who also served in the Iraq War, hit the switch that brought the famous Times Square New Year's ball down. The Daily News called it a "shimmering pole dance," and it was the 100th time Times Square has had a......

Earlier today, former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto was killed during a rally. The Western-educated (Harvard, Oxford) Bhutto had been living in Dubai and London for eight years, but returned in October to prepare for Pakistan's national elections (to be held next month) with hopes of returning to power. However, her return parade was bombed, killing 134 people and injuring more than 400. [Her obituary in the NY Times.] U.S. politicians weighed in on......

Prestige filmmakers take note: If you want the Times critics to really love you, what you need to do is put the fear in them. At least it worked for Tim Burton; his adaptation of Steven Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd gave reviewer A.O. Scott nightmares. And for that, Scott deems the film “close to a masterpiece, a work of extreme – I am tempted to say evil – genius.” (Current Rotten Tomato rating: 88% fresh.) One......

Proliferating in great number in the wake of the Civil War by freed slaves migrating north, who had little economic resources, "storefront churches" are primarily a black and urban phenomena, where small congregations could worship in smaller numbers. More recently, the ecclesiastic form has been adopted by other ethnic groups such as recent immigrants. The site Fotki has a collection of 100 images of storefront churches located in Brooklyn that makes for some interesting......

Today on the Gothamist Newsmap: a ceiling collapse at Franklin Ave. and Union St. in Brooklyn, a pedestrian was fatally struck on Queens Blvd. in Woodhaven, Queens, and an unusual rescue on the south bound tower of the Throgs Neck Bridge in Queens. An undercover cop forgot to turn off the wire he was wearing while discussing 11 bags of cocaine he seized in a Brooklyn bust that were never turned in. He was......

FOOD: If you haven't been indulging enough this holiday season, have we got a sweet soiree for you. Chocoholics come together tonight to indulge in the finest goodies from around the world. Expect music, cocktails and a giant chocolate buffet. 6:30pm // Katra Lounge [247 Bowery] // $15 THEATER: The Irish Repertory Theatre has turned to Dublin native George Bernard Shaw’s comedy The Devil’s Disciple, which was his first financial success in 1897 after a......

Early this morning Hayden Panettiere and other Hollywood elite looked ready to hit the town for a night out even though it was 5:30am. They were announcing this year's Golden Globe nominees, often a good sign for who will be nominated for that other gold statue. All in all New York-based shows and movies fared well as the envelopes were opened sheets of paper were read from. 30 Rock (Best Television Series, Comedy or Musical......

Christie's is finally getting on the overpriced vintage concert t-shirt bandwagon. Today they bring 30 rock tees to the block as part of their Rock and Pop Memorabilia auction, and all are expected to sell for up to $4,500 each. Remember when Stella McCartney was creating overpriced rock tees for Chloe? We sort of blame her for this."The fact that these T-shirts exist in such pristine condition is remarkable because most people didn't keep these......

Chumley’s owner Steve Shlopak recently poured his heart out to The Observer, admitting that the former speakeasy is now “just a dirt hole” with only two walls still up! The 1831 West Village landmark was closed in April when a chimney collapsed during repairs on an interior wall. Shlopak went into further disheartening detail:The rest of the building is held up with construction scaffolding. There is no ceiling and there is no floor... It’s almost......