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!

Monument Ave.
March 5, 2007 · No Comment

Nothing you haven’t seen before, plot-wise, but it has a lot of that patented Leary/Rescue Me riffing about nothing much that I always enjoy. It can be painful at times to watch Leary try to …

Monster
March 5, 2007 · No Comment

A pleasant surprise: entertaining, occasionally discomfiting, and a great, hype-worthy performance by Theron. (9/18/06)

Million Dollar Baby
March 5, 2007 · No Comment

I didn’t know about the last act, going in, but I was still expecting it to be pretty cheesy — I mean, it’s a boxing movie. But it’s very good at what it does; I …

A Mighty Wind
March 5, 2007 · No Comment

It’s not as out-and-out meanly funny as Best In Show, and Guest maybe might have leaned on a couple of the gags a little too hard, but my stomach still hurt from laughing afterward. Fred …

Midnight Run
March 5, 2007 · No Comment

I didn’t see the last five minutes (Netflix sent me a dicked-up disc), but I liked what I did see; it’s a little too long, but the number of different ways Farina comes up with …

Mean Girls
March 5, 2007 · No Comment

I could find about a hundred things to nitpick here, having gone to girls’ school and gathered reams of firsthand anthropological data on “girl world” sort of against my will, but the fact is that …

Maria Full of Grace
March 5, 2007 · No Comment

I really really liked this movie. Catalina Sandino Moreno is just wonderful in it, perfectly cast, and the scenes when she’s “downloading,” and then the entire flight sequence, had me holding my breath. It could …

The Man with the Golden Arm
March 5, 2007 · No Comment

For its time, it’s very good — a bit melodramatic in parts, but it keeps the Reefer Madness propaganda-type lines to a minimum. The best part, really, is the Zosch subplot; Eleanor Parker is excellent, …

The Man Who Wasn’t There
March 5, 2007 · No Comment

Nice little movie, lovely to look at, and typical of the Coens in that you don’t know for sure what to take from it, but you don’t mind that much. Thornton is excellent; the writing …

The Man Who Knew Too Much
March 5, 2007 · No Comment

You have to feel sorry for a director who’s trying to make a kidnapped-child picture when the child cast as the kidnappee is horrendously irritating, because the audience is not going to understand why the …