NR PLUS
Magazine February 20, 2012, Issue

The Joys of Action

By
Mark Wahlberg and Ben Foster in Contraband (Universal)
A review of Contraband

My favorite moment in Contraband, a palate-cleansing little thriller that’s perfect for moviegoers sated by December’s buffet of prestige movies, comes just after Mark Wahlberg’s New Orleans super-smuggler, Chris Farraday, has been yanked off the straight-and-narrow by the inevitable lure of One Last Job. His wife’s none-too-clever brother owes a fortune to a drug gang, and in lieu of paying off the debt, Farraday agrees to ship off to Panama and sneak a huge stack of counterfeit money back through U.S. customs. While his wife frets and his children worry, the smuggler affects the kind of distant, determined, prisoner-of-fate routine …

In This Issue

Articles

Politics & Policy

Two Decades Too Late

By
For months, former senator Rick Santorum has been talking about working-class woes and promoting a working-class-friendly economic agenda, and in late January President Obama’s State of the Union speech placed ...

Features

Politics & Policy

Money Bawl

By
When the Federal Reserve decided to loosen monetary policy in September 2007, not many people criticized it. The vote was unanimous. Few congressmen said anything about the move. Three years ...

Books, Arts & Manners

Politics & Policy

The Joys of Action

By
My favorite moment in Contraband, a palate-cleansing little thriller that’s perfect for moviegoers sated by December’s buffet of prestige movies, comes just after Mark Wahlberg’s New Orleans super-smuggler, Chris Farraday, ...
City Desk

The Origin

By
Washington Crossing the Delaware, the city’s most popular painting, belongs to its largest museum. But for a while, in the last century, we didn’t quite know what to do with ...

Sections

Athwart

To Newtly Go

By
Count me with Newt if the issue’s the moon. We should have had a base up there by 2001, just like the one in the movie. Of course, if we ...
Politics & Policy

Poetry

By
‘HORSEMAN, PASS BY’ Over time, the bravado fades; the long quiet of death helps a silence, encouraged, to take on a weight its first appearance failed to suggest; but not as an albatross, or death prefigured, or ...
Happy Warrior

The Catholic State

By
So the Health Commissar, Kathleen Sebelius, has decided that, under Obamacare, religious institutions, like any other employer, will be required to offer their workers free contraception, sterilization, and abortifacients. Well, ...
Politics & Policy

Letters

By
The Shame of FDR While the basic argument of Daniel Foster’s “For Shame” (January 23) — that the stigma associated with receiving public assistance has eroded, to our detriment — is ...
Politics & Policy

The Week

By
‐ We have to admit that President Obama’s line about not being consumed by personal ambition was pretty good. He should save it for volume three of his memoirs. ‐ To ...

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