The week's bestselling books, Feb. 23
1. James by Percival Everett (Doubleday: $28) An action-packed reimagining of 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.'
2. All Fours by Miranda July (Riverhead Books: $29) A woman upends her domestic life in this irreverent novel.
3. Three Days in June by Anne Tyler (Knopf: $27) A socially awkward mother of the bride navigates the days before and after her daughter's wedding.
4. Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood (Riverhead Books: $28) A burned-out woman takes refuge in a small religious community hidden away on the stark plains of rural Australia.
5. Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan (Grove Press: $20) During the 1985 Christmas season, a coal merchant in an Irish village makes a troubling discovery.
6. The God of the Woods by Liz Moore (Riverhead Books: $30) Two worlds collide when a teenager vanishes from her Adirondacks summer camp.
7. Witchcraft for Wayward Girls by Grady Hendrix (Berkley: $30) In a home for pregnant young women in 1970 Florida, a book on witchcraft upends lives.
8. The Wedding People by Alison Espach (Henry Holt & Co.: $29) An unexpected wedding guest gets surprise help.
9. We Do Not Part by Han Kang, translated by e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris (Hogarth: $28) The story of a friendship between two women that reckons with a hidden chapter in Korean history.
10. Emily Wilde's Compendium of Lost Tales by Heather Fawcett (Del Rey: $29) The third installment of a series about a curmudgeonly scholar of folklore and the fae prince she loves.
…
1. The Let Them Theory by Mel Robbins (Hay House: $30) A guide on how to stop wasting energy on things you can't control.
2. The Sirens' Call by Chris Hayes (Penguin Press: $32) An analysis of how trivial distractions have reordered our politics and the fabric of society.
3. How We Learn to Be Brave by Mariann Edgar Budde (Avery: $28) A guide to navigating pivotal moments in life with faith and strength by the bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington.
4. Memorial Days by Geraldine Brooks (Viking: $28) A memoir of sudden loss, grief and the mysteries of life.
5. The Harder I Fight the More I Love You by Neko Case (Grand Central Publishing: $30) The singer-songwriter's vivid portrait of a turbulent life.
6. The Creative Act by Rick Rubin (Penguin: $32) The music producer's guidance on how to be a creative person.
7. The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates (One World: $30) The writer travels to three sites of conflict to explore how the stories we tell, and the ones we don't, shape our realities.
8. Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza by Peter Beinart (Knopf: $26) The political commentator ponders what it means to be Jewish in the shadow of war.
9. Scrambled or Sunny-Side Up? by Loren Ridinger (Post Hill Press: $29) The entrepreneur recounts how she turned heartbreaking loss into a powerful force for growth.
10. Culture Matters by Jenni Catron (Maxwell Leadership: $26) Real stories of businesses and leaders who created a strong, healthy culture.
…
1. Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar (Vintage: $18)
2. Orbital by Samantha Harvey (Grove Press: $17)
3. Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros (Entangled: Red Tower Books: $21)
4. Deep End by Ali Hazelwood (Berkley: $20)
5. Good Material by Dolly Alderton (Vintage: $18)
6. Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler (Grand Central: $20)
7. Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver (Harper Perennial: $22)
8. The Frozen River by Ariel Lawhon (Vintage: $18)
9. Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin (Vintage: $19)
10. North Woods by Daniel Mason (Random House Trade Paperbacks: $18)
…
1. On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder (Crown: $12)
2. The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron (TarcherPerigee: $20)
3. All About Love by bell hooks (Morrow: $17)
4. The Art Thief by Michael Finkel (Vintage: $18)
5. The Backyard Bird Chronicles by Amy Tan (Knopf: $35)
6. Everything Now by Rosecrans Baldwin (Picador: $19)
7. Room to Dream by David Lynch and Kristine McKenna (Random House Trade Paperbacks: $22)
8. The Eater Guide to Los Angeles by Eater (Abrams Image: $20)
9. Just Kids by Patti Smith (Ecco: $19)
10. Making It So by Patrick Stewart (Gallery Books: $21)
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For these folks, context is colonialism, racism, murder – of a type that only Israel is capable of – so there is no understanding or desire to understand the cause of anything that has happened, or what has actually been going on with aid and food. In fact, flotilla wisdom is riddled with so many evil falsehoods there is no space to refute even half of them here. Now that the loonies have taken over, the flotilla is just an emblem of the new normal rather than considered fringe or extreme, or a curiosity. This is because the boundary between the wackiness of grassroots activism and the sobriety of government and the prestige mainstream media – both of which are expected to at least look into facts, verify claims and consider bias – has evaporated. Raw anti-Israel feeling has simply taken over. Some of it is done terribly respectably. A study by Andrew Fox of the Henry Jackson Society found that 98 per cent of the world's media, including The New York Times and CNN, simply repeated Hamas's casualty figures. Meanwhile, the goings-on of the likes of the Madleen is legitimised by statements made by our government. When Keir Starmer and David Lammy, the Foreign Secretary, publicly call into question the motives of Israel and Gaza, insult the valiant Jewish State as 'appalling' and 'monstrous', threaten to halt trade with its ally, and act like Israel is exactly what Thunberg and friends say it is, then what's the difference? We might as well all be sailing on that flotilla. Thunberg's power seemed likely to fade away; nobody so niche, I used to comfort myself, can stay at the forefront for long. Times change, trends move on. But the reality is even grimmer than I anticipated. All the climate loonies have just migrated to the cause of Palestine. 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In exhausting 'Bad Shabbos,' cringe-comedy clichés are observed a little too faithfully
"Bad Shabbos' is a labored farce that borrows from so many other better comedies — 'Meet the Parents,' 'The Birdcage' and 'Weekend at Bernie's' to name a few — that it rarely transcends its frantic patchwork of repurposed gimmicks and tropes. Its lack of originality and emotional depth may have been more forgivable had the film been legit funny. But save a few random guffaws, this whacked-out tale of a Jewish family's Shabbat dinner that goes wildly off the rails may prompt more eye rolls and exasperated sighs than were surely on the menu. (To be fair, it won the Audience Award at the 2024 Tribeca Festival, so the film clearly has its fans.) It's another warmly contentious Sabbath at the Upper West Side Manhattan apartment of Ellen (Kyra Sedgwick) and Richard (David Paymer). The long-married couple will gather with their three adult children — anxious David (Jon Bass), put-upon Abby (Milana Vayntrub) and younger, neurodivergent Adam (Theo Taplitz) — for the family's weekly meal. Yet why is this Friday night different from all other Friday nights? For starters, guess who's coming for brisket? That would be a chipper mom (Catherine Curtin) and dubious dad (John Bedford Lloyd), the parents of Adam's Catholic fiancée Meg (Meghan Leathers), winging in from 'goyish' Wisconsin to meet their future in-laws. (Can Grammy Hall be far behind?) Adam knows his quirky, noisy — read Jewish — family could easily alienate Meg's parents and he's desperate for an incident-free gathering. Fat chance. That's because, aside from the observant Ellen's barely veiled disdain for non-Jews (she's pretty awful to the solicitous Meg, who's studying to convert), Abby's obnoxious boyfriend, Benjamin (Ashley Zukerman), will be joining her, and he never fails to antagonize the unstable, Klonopin-popping Adam. That Adam suffers chronic constipation and Benjamin has diarrhea-inducing colitis is no medical coincidence but one of several predictable signs that, well, something's gonna hit the fan. Read more: The 27 best movie theaters in Los Angeles In short order, an improbably staged accident leaves a dead body lying in the bathroom right before Meg's parents arrive. It sets off the evening's desperate downward spiral, lots of silly mayhem and an absurd cover-up. Suffice to say, any sane person would have immediately reported the guest's untimely demise to the authorities — but then, of course, there would be no movie. Still, co-writers Zack Weiner and Daniel Robbins (Robbins directed) don't provide a plausible enough reason for the group to so haplessly hide the corpse, making the death feel like more of a slapdash device than a cogent story twist. As a result, some may find the film as painful and awkward to watch as it is for the characters to experience. One bright spot is actor-rapper Cliff 'Method Man' Smith's endearing turn as Jordan, the building's hip doorman ('It's Shabbos, baby!'), who considers the Gelfands his favorite tenants and jumps in to help them out of their mess. At one point, he even amusingly dons a yarmulke and pretends to be an Ethiopian Jew (long story). But the ticking clock wedged in to add tension to Jordan's 'assistance' feels undercooked. The rest of the cast does their best to rise — or descend — to the occasion, with Sedgwick quite good in her largely thankless role as the controlling Jewish mother. Leathers is winning as David's devoted bride-to-be, with Curtin enjoyably nimble playing a kindly Midwest mom. But the usually reliable Paymer seems a bit lost in his oddly-conceived part as the befuddled Richard, a fan of self-help books. Because the film leans so heavily into its breakneck antics, the folks here mostly come off more as a collection of stereotypes than as realistic people tackling a credible crisis. Sure, it's broad comedy, but that shouldn't preclude sharpening the characters to better sweep us along on their nutty journey. (At just 81 minutes plus end credits, the film had room to grow.) In particular, Adam, a wannabe soldier for the Israel Defense Forces, starts out too troubled and extreme for his depiction to fade as it does. And though the writers may have been reaching for dark laughs, Ellen and Richard's excuse-laden coddling of their challenged child, presumably now in his 20s, teeters on negligence — or, at the very least, bad parenting. By the time the film gets around to revealing its more human side — epiphanies gained, lessons learned — it's too little, too late. Near the end, when an appalled Ellen says of the dizzy bunch, 'We're all horrible,' it's hard to disagree. Ultimately, the movie's heart may be in the right place (Robbins has said the film is inspired by his own New York Jewish roots), but its head not so much. Want to watch a Jewish guy and a gentile woman humorously navigate their relationship? Best to wait for the next season of the Netflix series 'Nobody Wants This.' Sign up for Indie Focus, a weekly newsletter about movies and what's going on in the wild world of cinema. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
