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A Decade after 9/11

Phillipe And Jorge

Return of the Bud-I

Cherry Arnold’s award-winning documentary, Buddy, opens this Friday at the Providence Place Mall and the Showcase Cinema in Warwick. The Bud-I himself will not be making a surprise appearance unless Artie Coloian is named to the federal court in the next 24 hours. (This is not entirely impossible, considering the quality of judges the Bush Administration is responsible for. The only shortcoming Artie-boy has is that he’s not a law school grad of Regent College.)
 
We encourage everyone to get out this weekend to see Buddy for a number of reasons. First, it is a marvelous and enjoyable film. Second, you’ll be supporting both local filmmaking and independent cinema. The more people who go to see Buddy, the greater likelihood that large chains such as National Amusements (parent company of Providence Place and the Showcases) will be willing to take more risks in screening local product as well as risky independent and documentary films.
 
So congratulations to Cherry and a big tip of the sombrero to National Amusements for taking a chance on a film without national distribution nor studio muscle behind it. Now it’s time for you to do your part and support Buddy. We guarantee that you will be entertained.

Halberstam
One of this country’s best journalist/writers, David Halberstam, was killed in an automobile accident in Menlo Park, California, on Monday. He was 73 years old and, at the time of his death was, of course, working on a story. News reports say that he was on his way to interview former New York Giants quarterback Y.A. Tittle for a book that he was writing on the legendary 1958 NFL championship game between Tittle’s Giants and Johnny Unitas’s Baltimore Colts.
 
Halberstam made his bones reporting for the New York Times from Vietnam in the 1960s. His reports, which detailed the corruption of the phony-baloney South Vietnamese government and insinuated that the cardboard regime (can anyone say “Iraq”?) would ultimately be eaten alive by their opponents from the North, pissed off the US government and the military commanders alike. His work also led to Halberstam sharing the 1964 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting.
 
Halberstam went on to write 20 books, from his Vietnam classic The Best and the Brightest and The Teammates (about Red Sox icons Bobby Doerr, Dom DiMaggio, Johnny Pesky, and Ted Williams) to his recent book on Patriots’ coach Bill Belichick, The Education of a Coach.
 
His broad interests and penetrating analysis of matters from politics to sports made him one of the great class acts in American non-fiction writing.