It may be centered around a dead man and the past, but at its heart it’s a book more concerned with the pain the living carry and the future it has shaped.
At 80 years of age, the iconoclast evinces the same passion that has animated his provocative work up to this point.
This time, Anderson comes to play from the outset, with a sense of openness, and of shared intimacy with Seitz, that might be somewhat misleading, but is nevertheless revealing.
The likelihood of finishing so quickly only enhances the resonance: The text itself becomes a moment that can pass.
The pleasure of writing, of pairing words with another to create a distinct or lingeringly atmospheric or poetic effect, seems beyond King’s concern these days.
Her trip in the Long Island Sound, on The Great Gatsby boat tour, serves as nothing more, really, than an unfunny tangent about the inept, perhaps “buzzed” guide and the others on board (probably “a wedding party”).
At 221 pages, it’s a tightly knit piece of fiction, an elegant examination of a complicated problem.
The novel suggests a print fusion of the filmmaker’s early, grungy, bluntly metaphorical work with the subtler, formally refined, classical elder-statesman films of his most recent period.
10:04 is a complex text, if anything else, and one does run the risk of trying to put all of Lerner’s fictional selves together, to mesh his one “joke cycle” into a coherent narrative.
It’d be a mistake not to consider that as much as Mizruchi succeeds in redefining the actor and debunking many of the negative criticisms, she provides an analysis that’s offered a bit too much as objective fact.
Besides a number of instances of clunky, clichéd writing, Pascale has a tendency to summarize and explain every movie and episode she references.
Palin’s depiction of Hamish Melville, the impossibly ethical activist against which Mabbut compares himself, is handled unexpectedly.
A compassionate, pragmatic anti-sentimentality, or an attempt at one, serves as the through line for his examination of one the most mythologized of all screen actors.
Chung turns almost exclusively to a discussion of Shin’s films within their cultural contexts and the financial history of his production company.
Nicholson astutely connects Eyes Wide Shut back to Interview with the Vampire through their intentionally strained eroticism, which serves to acknowledge the films’ respective true theme of the capitalist power that lingers under the superficial sexual roleplay.
It’s often a mistake to read characters as the author and her friends, and it wouldn’t be bothersome, in Friendship, if Gould had anything critical to reveal.
Rakoff acknowledges that it takes a lot to make people care—that it takes a lot, really, for somebody to appreciate you “revealing your goddam emotions to the world.”
King shrewdly connects Hodges’s torment, the stuff of formula cop movies, to larger American feelings of rootlessness and economic despair.
This is a satisfying survey of the artists who’re still actively turning the graphic novel into a new kind of literature.
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