On the Square Today

In her latest On the Square column , Elizabeth Scalia considers advertising’s skewed vision of love:

According to Madison Avenue, heterosexual relationships in America contain one browbeaten, idiotic or insincere member (usually male) and one completely overbearing member (usually female). During regular season, baseball fans endured a summer full of extreme close-ups of a big-eyed girl demanding constant cute-isms of a weary boyfriend; she looks panicked when nauseating terms of endearment are not tripping off his tongue. In a voiceover, the anxious male—trying to avoid what we must understand will be an inevitable “scene” if he does not cough up a coo—nimbly saves himself by pronouncing his drink (Sweet Tea) and his dessert (Pie). Sweetie Pie is briefly assuaged, but her staggering insecurity demands more and so the ante is upped as she mews, “aw, Chipmunk . . . ”

Cue jingle: da-da-da-dah-dah, I’m lovin’ it.

Also today, Nathaniel Peters reviews the new film, The Way :

The Way, a new movie directed by Emilio Estevez and starring his father, Martin Sheen, tells the story of Tom, a Californian ophthalmologist (Sheen) whose son (Estevez) dies on the first day of his pilgrimage. Having retrieved and cremated the body, Tom then decides to finish the pilgrimage, carrying his son’s ashes along and burying them at different points along the way. A self-proclaimed lapsed Catholic, Tom doesn’t see much point in prayer during a time of grief. Nor was he close to his more free-spirited son. He embarks on the pilgrimage out of a sense of duty and a desire to help his son finish what he died attempting.