Baseball

“I wrote 63 songs this year. They’re all about Jeter.” Just kidding. The game we love, the players we hate, and more.

Culture and Criticism

From Norman Mailer to Wendy Pepper — everything on film, TV, books, music, and snacks (shut up, raisins), plus the Girls’ Bike Club.

Donors Choose and Contests

Helping public schools, winning prizes, sending a crazy lady in a tomato costume out in public.

Stories, True and Otherwise

Monologues, travelogues, fiction, and fart humor. And hens. Don’t forget the hens.

The Vine

The Tomato Nation advice column addresses your questions on etiquette, grammar, romance, and pet misbehavior. Ask The Readers about books or fashion today!

Superman IV — The Quest for Peace
March 5, 2007 · No Comment

Uch. At least Superman III had some camp value; everyone in the third installment showed up to work, in any case, but this one is just bad — Reeve is given miserable dialogue, even clonkier …

Superman III
March 5, 2007 · No Comment

Where to begin? Well, let’s start with “it sucked” and go from there, because…iiiiit suuuuucked, people. It’s over two hours long, and it’s an hour-and-a-half movie, if that, but every Richard Pryor twitch and mug …

Street Fight
March 5, 2007 · No Comment

A guy Scrapper and I grew up with directed the documentary, which is about the 2002 mayoral race in Newark and how scrappy it got between the incumbent, Sharpe James, and the challenger, Cory Booker, …

Stevie
March 5, 2007 · No Comment

It’s wonderfully done — so sad and uncomfortable to watch, but unadorned and straightforward and captivating from the first minute. I liked Hoop Dreams a lot — it’s the same guy — but I didn’t …

Spellbound (spelling bee)
March 5, 2007 · No Comment

I  really liked it, although I really didn’t like most of the kids, honestly. I guess I should allow for the fact that they’re At That Age, some of them, but a couple of them …

Spellbound (Hitchcock)
March 5, 2007 · One Comment

Gregory Peck is sooooo young and cute in it, and Bergman is amazing; I could listen to her speak all day.That accent is like a cold drink.The movie itself is on the affected side, though, …

61*
March 5, 2007 · No Comment

Can you believe I never saw this before? I really liked it, too. A lot of it is not believable, and a lot of it was literally lifted verbatim from the Ken Burns miniseries…but I …

Sideways
March 5, 2007 · No Comment

I liked it a lot; I loved the performances. I’ve said it before, but Paul Giamatti is just outstanding, and I hope we see more of Sandra Oh; she’s excellent. But it never quite caught …

Shoot the Piano Player
March 5, 2007 · No Comment

Why I love Truffaut: he doesn’t feel the need to explain everything, and if he wants to get into a 20-minute flashback in a movie that’s only 84 minutes long to begin with, he just …

Sherrybaby
March 5, 2007 · No Comment

Good stuff. It’s tough to watch in spots, but in a good way, and Maggie Gyllenhaal is really good — plus it’s one of the few movies that gets Jersey right. The accents are right, …