A Non-Commercial Decade Of Dominance!
Cosmoetica Bylines 1 2 3 4 5 6 Schneider Online 1 2 3 4 5 Archives GFSI Essays Seek & Destroy Books Schneider Fiction True Life Cinemension
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Webliography: Title/Subject/Author
1) Unions/Failures The stereotype of why unionism has for the most part failed in this nation has to do with outdated notions of corruption, Mafia involvement, racketeering (Teamsters & Longshoremen), and radical politics (UMW & Wobblies). This is not true. Yes, there have been instances of all the previously mentioned excesses, but that’s not why the last three decades have seen union strength in this nation decline from near 40% of all workplaces to barely hovering about 10%. Nor is the standard argument that unions are relics the answer either....
Scopin' the dope.
2) Atanarjuat/A Review The other day I watched the DVD of Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner I had picked up used at Blockbuster for less than $7. I wasted my money. I bought in to the hype surrounding this very bad 2001 film. Virtually every review on www.metacritic.com & www.rottentomatoes.com, the 2 largest film review sites on the web, is fall-down, asskissingly praise-filled for this film. Seeing the trailer, it seemed promising, & I had put the film on my list of must gets....
The PC Elitists strike!
3) Oprah/Hellbound? ‘How in the hell can I bully a billionaire who outweighs me by several 100 lbs.? How can you decry Oprah? Easy, she’s the living embodiment of the dumbing down of American discourse....
How now....?
4) Online Things/Reflections A few months ago several people urged me to start writing memoirs of my life. In addition they urged me to start placing some prose pieces on websites other than my own Cosmoetica. The reasoning was to widen name recognition for a potential reading audience for the memoirs. ‘Twas sound advice and I’ve taken up the calls for both the memoirs and writing for other sites.....
Check out Hackwriters, dear readers.
5) The Butterfly Effect/A Review The epigraph to this article is from my poem called The Barber and is an illustration of the butterfly effect. This is a belief that small actions can have large consequences down the road, or - as popularly phrased- ‘A butterfly flapped its wings 60 years ago in Brazil, and today an earthquake hit China.’ This nostrum was first uttered in the 19th Century....
Depending on whether you read on you will-
6) Chick Lit/Real Shit/Jessica Schneider I admit that I don’t always match the color of my purse with that of my shoes. No big deal, right? But in a Chick-Lit novel, this is a travesty. I used to think that literarily, we were standing on the precipice of a very large abyss. But after familiarizing myself with the genre known as Chick-Lit, I realize that we are actually at the bottom....
Where's a KFC when you need 1?
7) John Stossel/Pro or Con Man? In the 1970s I recall watching John Stossel as a consumer advocate for WABC-TV in New York. He seemed to be a less sensationalistic Geraldo Rivera. Oy! What a quarter century has wrought....
ABC's Lowest Common Denominator!
8) Ranking Websites/Scams? In the middle of last year someone suggested I check out a site called Alexa.com. It was a website that ranked other sites for popularity. The catch was you had to download their toolbar. The toolbar itself is pretty neat- with a really good popup blocker. The downside is that the Alexa folk can track your websurfing- although this matters not to me since I assume my life is an open book....
Alexa & Ranking.com Under The Microscope!
9) Capitalism/Solutions People think too dualistically. There are people who feel that any good things said about capitalism are evidence of a cold Simon Legreevian heart, while there are those that bristle over the pointing out of capitalism’s manifest failures. The truth is that capitalism, as a system, has failed so convincingly that there really & truly are no capitalistic states in the world. And by that I don’t mean the sort of social-capitalism that most of Europe embraces. The fact is that there is no such thing as a ‘free market’. The idea that there is an invisible hand controlling things for the betterment of all is such specious reasoning as to be laughable....
Waiting for the trickle down....?
10) Bush-Kerry/Who cares? Four years ago Americans had a chance to really show that they meant it when they wanted ‘real change’ in politics. The outgoing President was Constitutionally barred from seeking reelection, and the 4 main contenders from the two major parties offered striking choices to the electorate- not just between themselves, but within their own party affiliation.
Bitch, bitch, bitch....
11) The Bush Bind/It Lives! Sitting Presidents are always subject to criticisms fair and not. Our current President is no different. Usually the charges made by the other party are the standard ones any opposing party would hurl - they have truths and untruths admixed liberally within. Rare is it, though, that the charges are both damning and almost certainly true in toto....
The heat is on....
12) On Bill Clinton/Retrospective A week or 2 after George W. Bush assumed the Presidency in early 2001 I was struck with the vision of a disastrous 4 years that lay ahead....
Wailin' for Willy!
13) Kill Bill, Vol. 2/A Review A week from last Saturday was a day of violence in my home. In the early afternoon my wife & I caught a matinee of Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill, Vol. 2., & in the evening I watched the DVD of Heat- Michael Mann’s 1995 crime extravaganza. Unfortunately, both films were underwhelming- not only as works of art but as, well, action films....
O, Quentin, why hast thou?
14) Heat/DVD Review Director Michael Mann seems to be a B director of A films. By that I mean his films lack any vision, or unifying elements that stamp them ‘Michael Mann’- he is so hit and miss in so many ways. Think about it- whatever you think of him, the moment a Tarantino film starts you know it. Mann would have, 50 years ago, been the talented but consummate studio director....
The ABCs or CBAs?
15) Y Tu Mama Tambien I bought a used DVD of Y Tu Mama Tambien (the uncut version) quite a few months ago, but never quite got around to watching it till recently. The 2002 film got generally rave reviews from most critics for being ‘frank’ in its sexuality....
When dicks collide!
16) Lost In Translation/DVD Review All men recall a woman from their past that sticks in their mind, not as some drop dead gorgeous goddess nor as some hideous dog that made them want to retch....
Nice crack, Scarlett!
17) The Da Vinci Code/A Dan-To-Dan Letter I recently finished your mega-seller The Da Vinci Code at the prodding of my wife. I have to be up front-- it’s a really bad book-- not horrible, merely really bad in the way most off the rack thriller books are-- see Tom Clancy’s mind-numbing yawners. That said, in no way shape nor form do you pretend to be in the least bit literary....
Scamming the Christian Right!
18) Takes On Cassius/A Poem/Dan Schneider
19) Big Red/A Poem/Dan Schneider
20) The Dangers Of Memoir: Dave Eggers & Frank McCourt As I’ve recently been working on my own memoirs, at the behest of others, I have gotten around to reading quite a few memoirs of others. Without doubt, they have been uniformly poor books- either flat-out terribly written or with solid writing, but horribly edited. I have read memoirs that tell others how to write memoir, memoirs about ‘traumatic’ events and lives (read- melodramatic), memoirs about non-traumatic lives (read-dull), and memoirs apparently written for no other reason that a publisher trying to gull the reading public....
Oy vey!
21) 'Tis/A Review I finally got around to reading Frank McCourt’s 1999 memoir follow up to his 1996 mega-selling Angela’ Ashes called ‘Tis- which was the last one word chapter in Ashes. There are similarities and differences between the two books. Of course, the protagonist is the same- Frank McCourt, but the mís-en-scene has changed....
Deux!
22) The Day Bush Stood Still/Review The other day I bought the DVD of one of my favorite all-time films: The Day The Earth Stood Still. In watching it I was struck by how relevant this sci-fi classic from over 50 years ago is to today’s political milieu....
Bush Barada Nikto!
23) Love Actually/Review The good thing about DVDs is that, aside from superior audiovisual quality, the extras that come with them can be engaging, more often than worthless. Usually, the best extras on a DVD are the film commentary tracks, and the making of featurettes....
Airports....
24) Val Kilmer/Overview Val Kilmer is both one of the best film actors going and one of the most disappointing. In films such as The Doors, Tombstone and The Salton Sea he shows a depth of character insight rare amongst contemporary actors...
The 3 Bears Principle.
25) Election/2004 I write this piece the day after the final Presidential debate of 2004. I now know who who’s gonna win the election....
The final moments.
26) Reagan/Myths No, not the one that he preferred Huggies over Depends- but the one about winning the Cold War….Anyway, late last year there was a brouhaha over a telefilm called The Reagans that was to air on the CBS network....
Asleep, but in charge!
27) The Kid Stays In The Picture/Review The Kid Stays In the Picture is another in a series of stylistic documentaries over the last few years that seems to be reinvigorating the form by using different narrative and filmic techniques in service to a story....
The basso profundo of nada.
28) The Fog Of War/Review Errol Morris came to fame in the late 1980s with his anti-police corruption documentary The Thin Blue Line, and has spent the last couple decades gracing cinephiles with controversial, yet distinguished, films....
For the time capsule.
29) 8 Poems/Dan Schneider House at London Ghetto Poets you will find these poems: The Indian Killer, Ellis Island Sonnets, 38. Morning Mist Near Glacier Point, Winter, "A Good Christian Burial", The Great Irish Famine, The Gross Clinic, 46. Mount Williamson, Sierra Nevada, From Manzanar, & The Butterfly
30) The Image Gap/Bush's Win The people of America have spoken- and in a de facto landslide. President Bush seems to have been re-elected, winning Florida comfortably, and Ohio, as well. Democrats are pondering why?....
Democratic leaders need to read this piece!
33) 2 Poems/Dan Schneider Rockwell's America & El Jaleo
31) What The #$*! Do We Know?/Review Recently, on a visit from my mother-in-law, I was surprised that she wanted to take me and my wife to see a documentary film about ‘quantum physics’. The surprise came from the fact that she is far more wont to New Agey beliefs than either of us....
What the- indeed!
32) Memories/Review I had long suspected that the American geeky infatuation with Japanese animation (aka Japanimation or anime) stemmed from the same impulses that veered Western Intellectuals into the Eastern Mystical religions....
Animé indeed!
33) Big Fish/Review Tim Burton is such a predictable director of films that even when, on the surface, he seems to be stretching himself, he’s actually merely distorting art towards his own relentlessly immature aesthetic. In a sense he’s the dark filmic counterpoint to Steven Spielberg’s gauzey light pabulum....
Hooking little.
34) Desert Solitaire/Review In 1968 Edward Abbey wrote a memoir, Desert Solitaire, A Season In The Wilderness, that would instantly be hailed as a nature classic, as well as his bestselling work. While familiar with EA's name the only work of his I'd read up to this point was a woeful collection of the man's 'poetry'. Believe me, when I say there's a definite reason for the quotes around the word poetry. Apparently the work is considered somewhat of a nature hymn....
The Un-Walden.
35) Capturing The Friedmans/DVD Review This documentary film by Andrew Jarecki, founder of Moviefone, is simply one of the best ever made. It does everything a documentary should- ask questions, provide insights, and allow a viewer to draw their own, if differing, conclusions. The film started out as a short film on New York City clowns, following the lifestyle of Silly Billy- played by David Friedman. During the course of filming Jarecki found out that Friedman’s brother and father, Jesse and Arnold Friedman, were convicted pedophiles- which makes the viewer wonder about David’s chosen profession....
The quease of great art....
36) I Am Legend/Book Review For some reason I’ve never been able to get the image of Vincent Price out of my head, especially from his role in the 1964 Italian film called The Last Man On Earth, based upon the Richard Matheson novel I Am Legend. Yes, seven years later another film, The Omega Man, with Charlton Heston, was made from the book, but the Price film is both better and more faithful to the source material....
Night of the Right?
37) The Mayor Of Sunset Strip/DVD Review Alchemy tries to get something from another thing, magic tries to get something from nothing. These ideas stuck in my mind watching The Mayor Of Sunset Strip - a documentary about a cipher of a man named Rodney Bingenheimer, and his coterie of even less significant hangers-on....
No bingo for Bingenheimer!
38) House Of Sand And Fog/DVD Review Having watched old-time movie serials and pro wrestling for most of my life, as well as soap operas for the last quarter-century I have become something of an expert in the forms of drama and melodrama....
S&M beats S&F.
39) Life Of Pi/Review Having been raised by Great Depression Era parents I was steeped, as a child, in that greatest of all sins- waste. This sin is most noticeable in contemporary writing. I have railed for years against the prose broken into lines that passes for poetry these days, not stating it’s prose merely because it lacksmusic, but because it goes counter to the notion of concision as a poetic ideal- the most said in the fewest words. Of course, real prose is not immune to the sin of waste. Contemporary memoirs, such as Dave Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius go on for hundreds of pages when they lack the well written paragraphs and actual story to fill even a ten page short story....
Sominex is better.
40) The Lost Skeleton Of Cadavra/DVD Review The 1950s were the Golden Age of schlock sci fi films- ranging from films so bad they’ve become classics- Plan 9 From Outer Space, and Robot Monster, to some better than expected films like The Brain From Planet Arous, and Them. It’s the first set of films that is taken aim at by the film The Lost Skeleton Of Cadavra....
Sleep, or not?
41) The Village/DVD Review I’m weird. I seem to be the only person who recognizes how poorly written M. Night Shyamalan’s films are. Is it because I’m a Hitchcock aficionado? No. I just have an ability to read narrative arcs and see where things are going. It was obvious that Bruce Willis was dead in The Sixth Sense, that Samuel L. Jackson was the bad guy in Unbreakable, and that, well, Signs sucked altogether....
Surprise- no surprise!
42) Mystic River/Review It is a truism in the world of soap opera (the purest form of modern melodrama) that the characters must always do the dumbest possible thing to propel the story forward. While this is not egregious in melodrama, it is so in drama. Yet, a large portion of film today is pure melodrama. I think of highly lauded films like Michael Mann’s Heat as melodrama incarnate....
Jazz dies!
43) Dubliners/Critique Many years ago I got into an argument with a drunken professor over James Joyce. My contention was that no scholars had ever looked into the role that Joyce’s syphilis had in the breakdown of his narrative abilities. Most have taken for granted that all of the dashing of Joyce’s style from Dubliners, his first published fiction, through Finnegans Wake, his last, was by choice. I disagreed and argued that there were too many ‘rough spots’ in the musical prosetry to have been left on purpose....
Symphonic stories.
44) Cathedral/Raymond Carver I first encountered Raymond Carver’s writing as a poet many years ago and was singularly unimpressed. In truth the writing was merely bloated prose descriptions of banal things broken into lines. Having seen much of this in contemporary published poetry I consigned him to the nether regions as another writer whose contemporary reputation far exceeded his corpus’s worth....
Pass the JD!
45) Girl, Interrupted/Susanna Kaysen My wife was recently going through old books of hers she wanted to sell back to used bookstores and asked if I wanted to read some. I told her to put them on my TO READ pile. One of the books was Susanna Kaysen’s memoir ‘Girl, Interrupted,’ about her several year experience before, during, and after her stay in a famed Massachusetts mental institution (McLean Hospital for Mental Health) in the late 1960s that also housed Ray Charles, and Sylvia Plath....
No Angelina Jolie lips- yea!
46) Getting Mother's Body/Suzan-Lori Parks Formula for praise in the PC World of literature (especially if a hack) - rip off the ideas of a better, deader writer, fill it with baggage from more modern times, & try to pass it off as an homage. While, in reality, it’s a sure sign of creative bankruptcy, if you’re a woman or minority, you will be perversely praised as original, for doing something heroic to tweak your oppressive forebears....
Leave it be!
47) Iraq, The Boy Who Cried Wolf, & The Couch Potato's Burden/Reprint War is horrible, among the worst of all human actions, yet there are times it is just, called for, and necessary. In American history the Union cause against the Confederacy was just, ennobled by the drive against slavery. So were the Allies in World War II, against Imperial Japan, Nazi Germany, and Fascism. However, not many wars can claim to be relatively clear cut as those two....
Playing their game, and beating them!
48) I Was Amelia Earhart/Jane Mendelsohn There’s an old Warner Brothers cartoon that spoofs opera wherein Bugs Bunny tortures Elmer Fudd through a series of misadventures, including one where they are married in an absurdist moment. Elmer rages and one almost expects a bodice-ripping type end, save that this is a cartoon, Elmer male, it was made in the 1950s, and instead Elmer gets physically abused in some way....
Ah, the milken breasts!
49) A Tree Grows In Brooklyn/Betty Smith I only recently got around to reading Betty Smith’s 1943 memoir-cum-novel A Tree Grows In Brooklyn, mainly because it had a reputation as an Oprah Winfrey sort of book, meaning I thought it must be one of those tomes filled with good intentions but short on literary merit. After all, the first mention of it I can recall was a snide comment in an old Bugs Bunny cartoon from the 1940s. Boy, do I love to be wrong about things like this....
Masterpiece!
50) Touching The Void/DVD Review The simplest of words can sometimes convey far more than the most elaborate action scenes. This runs counter to the whole ‘a picture is worth a thousand words’, yet is nonetheless true....
Echolalia?
51) Touching The Void/Book Review Having recently watched the DVD of the film version of Touching The Void my wife decided she needed to read the book, so ordered it online for a buck or so. Now, the nostrum that applies in such cases is generally that the film is never good as the book....
High on heights.
52) In America/DVD Review In America was a highly regarded film that was released in 2003. I found a DVD copy in the rental store’s bargain bin and bought it on that reputation. While not a bad film I again must wonder why is it that critics tend to rave about merely, at best, competent films?....
Sing, child, sing!
53) American Splendor/DVD Review American Splendor is one of those films that gets overpraised not so much for what it is, but for what it is not- i.e.- another in the mind-numbingly dull pieces of pabulum spewed out by Hollywood. The film is part-surrealism, part-documentary, part biography....
All hail Harvey!
54) Stranger In A Strange Land/Robert Heinlein Robert Heinlein’s Stranger In A Strange Land is one of those books I’ve had on my need to read list for nearly twenty years. The problem is I’ve never been a big sci -fi fan, at least in terms of writing. Do to the power of image over word sci fi is the one genre where the nostrum of the film never equaling the book is untrue....
All hail Heinlein!
55) Embers/Sándor Márai Perhaps as critical as the production of great art and literature is the ability to recognize it, and then promote it. Over the years the massive weight of bad literature- poetry, and especially fiction (for it’s far easier to write prose than poetry)- gets more daunting with the tens of thousands of books released every year by writers whose transparent lack of talent makes one question the very motives of the editors, publishers, and critics....
Daring the cliché!
56) King Arthur/DVD Review If I proffered these four words to you- Keira Knightley in leather- is there any way in hell a reasonable man would think that the film that offered such could be bad? No, no way, no way in hell! But, it is- really bad! And that film is 2004’s King Arthur, and the utterer of those sentiments is me, a well-known Arthuriana buff- in fact, I was once contracted to write an epic poem on that subject....
Burn that disk!
57) A Good Scent From A Strange Mountain/Robert Olen Butler I had heard the name Robert Olen Butler before, mentioned as a Southern writer, which generally connotes a certain way of approaching writing- especially short stories. But, it was as a novelist that I heard is name, this time and the people mentioning his name were not enamored of his novelry. Yet, all claimed that his short fiction was far superior....
Smells ok?
58) Ten Little Indians/Sherman Alexie Here is what any decent, self-respecting critic should do whenever he comes upon the work of someone he knows- be up front about it. Such is the case with Sherman Alexie’s latest book, Ten Little Indians. That said, I was never a bosom buddy of Alexie’s, but I did meet him several times in Minneapolis, when he was in town for several events sponsored by the reprehensible (or perhaps abominable, evil, or dread?) literary organization The Loft....
Only nine, but Sherm flunked math.
59) Lost In The City/Edward P. Jones Synchronicity is, more or less, a random event that seems to have more than a random meaning. Such it was when I read Edward P. Jones’ short story collection Lost In The City directly after having read Sherman Alexie’s Ten Little Indians. The reason was that Alexie’s book showed off everything that’s wrong with PC Elitist art and literature, coming from a person in an ethnic minority, while Jones’ book- a 1992 National Book Award finalist, reprinted after the great success of his 2003 NBA and Pulitzer prize winning novel The Known World- showed off almost everything that minority writers can do to ‘fight the stereotype’, as Alexie preaches, but does not practice....
Who needs to be found?
60) Idlewild/Nick Sagan You know you’re in for not too good a reading experience when the only real words of praise a book can muster is being compared to a film, and having the author’s lineage trotted out. In the case of Nick Sagan’s first book, Idlewild, the film was The Matrix, and the lineage was his famed father, pop astronomer Carl Sagan....
Matrix, Schmatrix!
61) Infinite Possibilities/Robert Heinlein For my birthday my wife bought me a book that consisted of three Robert Heinlein juvenile novels. The book was called Infinite Possibilities, and she did so because she knew that I had though Stranger In A Strange Land, his most well known book, was good. I had a sneaking suspicion, though, that Heinlein was one of those authors who was a one hit wonder, and these novels confirmed that suspicion....
Finity works better.
62) Selected Stories/Philip K. Dick Let me start by debunking three of the critical myths about Philip K. Dick: 1) He is in no way shape nor form as great a writer as Franz Kafka. 2) Like most sci fi writers his stories are long on machinations (albeit often clever) and very short on characterization, and especially realistic dialogue. 3) He is in no sense of the word a surrealist....
Rod Serling was better.
63) A Canticle For Leibowitz/Walter Miller Having grown up watching 1950s sci fi I was familiar with many of the Doomsday tropes from such films as The World, The Flesh, & The Devil, & On The Beach. Most were fairly pessimistic. So, I was a bit surprised when I picked up & read Walter Miller’s A Canticle For Leibowitz, in that it both used & subverted the genre & its tropes....
Repent!
65) Sanctuary/William Faulkner Ok, so everyone has for years told me how great a writer William Faulkner was. So, I read ‘As I Lay Dying’ - mediocre at best, and no real strengths at characterization are revealed. Instead, a bunch of yokel stereotypes. So, I mark that off as just one of those things. Then I read his ‘Collected Stories.’ Atrocious! Nothing but stereotypes in every tale....
Chainsaws kill better!
66) Updike vs. Carver/The Grudge Match Let me state - both men were bad poets, but this piece is about their prose, ok? There, I said it. Now on to the raison d’etre: I recently picked up my first piece of John Updike fiction- the short story collection ‘Problems And Other Stories,’ after years of hearing his name bandied about with that of John Cheever, Saul Bellow, and Norman Mailer as a giant of what would be called Dead White Male writers....
Ding-ding!
67) Metallica/Some Kind Of Monster The documentary film Metallica: Some Kind Of Monster is an example of a not so good piece of art about a subject that is not so good. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a Metallica fan, and not one of those morons who refuse to grow up and believe their early thrash songs that sound all alike are somehow artistically superior to their later songs with melody and lyrics with a little more depth....
Oy!
68) Girl With Curious Hair/David Foster Wallace David Foster Wallace is one of those really bad writers who decided, long ago, that he would hide his lack of talent, acumen, and skill behind a blizzard of words, then laugh at anyone unwilling to engage them as not understanding his genius....
C-R-A-P-O-M-O!
69) Nine Stories/J.D. Salinger J.D. Salinger is the Terence Malick of the writing world, save that his art is not as productive and not as qualitatively good as Malick. Both men are acquired tastes to most...both are notoriously reclusive, with Malick readying only his fourth film in a third of a century this year. Salinger has managed to only proffer three readily available literary works in his nearly sixty year long career - that being the overrated The Catcher In The Rye - a good- but nowhere near great - novel, the hit and miss Franny And Zooey, and the collection of short stories known as Nine Stories, which has a reputation of being, along with James Joyce’s Dubliners, one of the great short story collections of all times....
Overrated.
70) Collected Stories/Richard Yates During the time I was reading The Collected Stories Of Richard Yates I happened to come across a review of the book in a book of reviews by Joyce Carol Oates, which proved that she is as clueless about writing as she is about painting....
Underrated.
71) The Songs Of Distant Earth/Arthur C. Clarke Recently, I decided that I needed to read some classic sci fi writers to air out my mind after many months of intense memoir writing. I got some sci fi short story anthologies, some classic novels in the field, & hope to see some links in the ‘big themes’ that the best of sci fi engages like ‘literary fiction’ of the past used to do. Among the books I got were Arthur C. Clarke’s The Songs Of Distant Earth & Childhood’s End. I read the former yesterday & enjoyed it much....
Sing muse!
72) Childhood's End/Arthur C. Clarke Childhood’s End is 1 of the earliest novels in the oeuvre of Arthur C. Clarke, & 1 of his best. 1 of the interesting things about reviewing very successful works long after their debut is how their very success can sometimes make the work seem less than it originally was. This is because the success of its themes, images, or narrative become so copied that they become clichéd. Such is the case with CE’s opening....
No schnooly?
73) Hunted Past Reason/Richard Matheson I hate being right almost all the time. For example, after reading several dozen of the piss poor and predictable short stories of Richard Matheson, many of them literally the basis for Twilight Zone episodes, and the rest written as if they were, I became convinced that his masterwork, I Am Legend, was just one of those freak examples of a writer getting whispered to by the Muse, and not really having a lot to do with the actual work. Ok, I don’t believe in Muse- but freak occurrences? Yes. And I was right. O, where to begin with this ill-begotten monstrosity? Perhaps the beginning....
No Reason would be more accurate.
74) Monster/DVD Review It was about five years after its release that a good friend of mine finally talked me into coming over to his place to watch the film Schindler’s List. His wife was away on business, and he offered free pizza, so I relented. I had resisted the urge to see Steven Spielberg’s schlocksterpiece because I knew, from both Spielberg’s intellectually thin corpus and the reviews I read, that the film was gonna be a disaster of a PC screed....
Bad, really bad.
75) Anton Chekhov/In Depth I’d long heard that Russian writer Anton Chekhov had written short stories, but like most people it was on the strength of his plays, those intense little mood pieces, that I knew him best....
The Master of short fiction!
76) Godzilla On My Mind/William Tsutsui I have always been a fan of the Godzilla movie series, so when I heard that there was finally going to be a book that dealt with the series in a bit more depth than websites do, but with none of the ridiculous pseudo-intellectualism that has infected such subject matter as the homoerotic sexual dynamics The Three Stooges or capitalist theory’s relevance to Gilligan’s Island, I was pleased....
Mine too!
77) Labyrinths/Jorge Luis Borges Reading Jorge Luis Borges is like trying to build a brick wall or house without any bricks. He is an eminently quotable, but ultimately forgettable and puerile, writer. This is not to state that there are not some brilliant metaphors, nor outstanding paragraphs, but there is no real intellectual nor philosophical depths to his work, however fanciful and/or fantastic its de-narrative. It is all a surface sheen designed to reflect the biases and imbuements of typical readers....
Ficciones, bah!
78) Ernest Hemingway/Short Stories One of the problems with Ernest Hemingway’s novels- and I’ll admit it’s been years since I’ve read the classics, is that he was like a tomcat constantly needing to piss his masculinity over every page, resulting in my need to turn away from the page. He was capable of soaring poetry in his clipped style, later adapted by such writers as Mickey Spillane, to good effect, yet not a one of the books, save for the novella The Old Man And The Sea, could be termed truly great. In a sense, although he in many ways the antithesis if James Joyce- Hemingway’s prose is terse, hard, rapid fire, and prosaic in its apparent construction, whereas Joyce’s is fluid, mellifluous, and poetic- he also shares a kinship in that both men were exceedingly hit and miss writers. Both were capable of greatness, both wrote horribly, like the little girl with the curl in the middle of her forehead- although Hemingway’s worst is just stilted and dull, whereas Finnegans Wake is an abomination- and both men wavered on the cusp of whether or not they deserve to be acclaimed great writers, notwithstanding Hemingway’s Nobel Prize....
Fails better than succeeds!
79) The Aviator/Martin Scorsese The problem that almost all biopics have is that they tell far too much of their subjects’ life facts so that most of the drama is drained. They never seem to find the important nor key moments in a life in which to imbue the tale, rather they cram a life with minutia, and miss out on any real insight. Such it is with Martin Scorsese’s latest film, now out on DVD. ‘The Aviator’ spans twenty or so years in the life of Howard Hughes, the reclusive billionaire and eccentric, but never delves into the man, merely glossing the surface of its subject, mainly due to the pallid script by John Logan of ‘Gladiator’ infamy. Having recently watched a DVD version of ‘Raging Bull,’ from 1980, the difference is stark....
See Hemingway!
80) John Cheever/The Stories Of all the archetypal New Yorker short story writers of the Twentieth Century- John O’Hara, John Updike, Alice Adams, J.D. Salinger- perhaps the best of them was John Cheever- and he was certainly the best of the three big Johns. That said, I do not particularly like John Cheever’s stories. Of the over sixty tales in this collection a good thee quarters involved characters that do not personally interest me - mid-Twentieth Century upper crust whites, martini-totalling who seem as stranded on the island of Manhattan, or his fictive suburb of Shady Hill, physically as their views of the world are intellectually. In his world even middle class people have maids....
Pretty bitchin'!
81) An Unfortunate Addendum/Hurricane Katrina, etc. As I begin this addendum on the 1st of October, 2005, little over two months after completing the final draft of Show & Tell: A White Man’s Antiphonal Primer On Race, I am saddened to report that much of what I expounded upon in the book has born some of the strange fruit (albeit in newer forms) that Billie Holiday first sang about nearly seventy years ago. The fury of Hurricane Katrina devastated much of Louisiana and Mississippi’s Gulf Coast, but it was not the worst disaster that occurred during those several weeks of late August and early September. No, far more pain and suffering was caused by human incompetence and indifference than that the storm caused.....
Racism bites back!
82) Jersey Girl/DVD Review Ben Affleck can act? Strike the question mark- Ben Affleck can act! In the first film I ever saw him in, Chasing Amy, by Kevin Smith, I had no doubt. Then, I saw every film he’s made since, and I assumed that Chasing Amy was the exception. Having heard the reviews, last year, of the latest Smith-Affleck film, Jersey Girl, I figured it was on par with the execrable Dogma, or the other film that starred the Bennifer combo of Affleck and Jennifer Lopez- Gigli, which has already become one of Hollywood’s legendary bombs....
Bennifer bites back!
83) Alexander/Oliver Stone Late last year Alexander, director Oliver Stone’s film version of the life of Alexander the Great, came out to dismal reviews and worse box office. (But good overseas returns).There were controversies over its portrayal of the bisexuality of its protagonist, as well as the poor screenplay, stilted dialogue, and many other things....
Oo-la-la!
84) Milan Kundera/Alan Lightman I recently read Alan Lightman’s Reunion and Milan Kundera’s Ignorance, and much is similar in the two books, unfortunately in the most negative light. Both involve reunions of former lovers....
Pass the pillow.
85) Close Range/E. Annie Proulx Annie Proulx is one of those writers who is not far from being a great writer, but is not really a good writer either. Or so I can state, at least in reference to this collection of short stories, Close Range: Wyoming Stories....
Taking her to task....
86) Sixty Stories/Donald Barthelme To start this essay and review I need to tell you what Donald Barthelme was- a fantasist; and a really bad one, at that. I will explain this in the bulk of this piece. But first, I need to briefly tell you the many things he was not, despite the many claims to the contrary by disciples, sycophants, and bad critics....
Fraud, phony, charlatan- take your pick.
87) Foundation/Isaac Asimov A couple of months ago I picked up a leather-bound book that had six Isaac Asimov novels in it. It contains the Foundation and Robot trilogies, consisting of Foundation, Foundation And Empire, Second Foundation, The Stars, Like Dust, The Naked Sun, and I, Robot. The Foundation trilogy won a Hugo Award in 1965 for Best All-Time Series, beating such war horses as JRR Tolkien’s The Lord Of The Rings, and Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Barsoom novels, and if the other two books are as good I can see why. I will be reading each novel over the course of coming months, and reviewing each....
Masterpiece....
88) Coffees & Cigarettes/Jim Jarmusch If John Sayles is the Stanley Kubrick of the American Independent film scene, able to get his sundry, tightly wought, but distinct films to reach a sizable market, then Jim Jarmusch is its Martin Scorsese- whose restive films ever seem to probe the boundaries of form. Or, at least in Scorsese’s case, up until his last few attempts at blockbuster melodrama. The latest Jarmuschian experiment is a series of eleven black and white short films that spanned a seventeen year range....
Choke not.
89) Napoleon Dynamite/DVD Review Jared Hess’s cult classic from 2004, Napoleon Dynamite, immediately drew me back to such films as Rushmore, Election, and Welcome To The Dollhouse- films that deal with high school life in comic ways. Yet, of those films, Napoleon Dynamite is probably the most off the wall....
Idiots!
90) 13 Going On 30/DVD Review Jennifer Garner is an actress I’ve seen alot of, publicity-wise, but the only other thing I’d ever seen her in was the mediocre comic book film Daredevil, with her now husband Ben Affleck. There she was merely leather-clad eye candy. In 13 Going On 30 she proves she can act, and has a winsome Julia Roberts-like star quality....
Jennifer Garner- a goddess who can act!
91) The Middle Mind/Book Review In a word, Curtis White’s 2003 HarperCollins book The Middle Mind, which is an extrapolation upon a Harper’s article of the same name published a year earlier, is a bad book. But, the attempted discursions in the book, while bad, are not nearly as bad as the book’s biggest detractors would have you believe. That’s because both the book and its detractors are part of what White, himself, terms ‘The Middle Mind’- or the de facto bourgeois mindset that most people in modern America use in discourse. The problem is that White’s very definitions and remedies are so convoluted that he often contradicts himself....
The pot and the kettle....
92) Foundation And Empire/Isaac Asimov Foundation And Empire, by Isaac Asimov is the second book in the original Foundation trilogy, which won a Hugo Award in 1965 for Best All-Time Series. It follows much the same narrative structure as the first book, Foundation, save that the book has only two ‘books’, to the original’s five, which allows for less epic scene setting, and much more character development. And don’t let some of the books’ critics fool you. The characterizations in these books are wonderful, deep, and complex. They simply are not done in the usual ways....
The quest continues....
93) Big Fish/Daniel Wallace There is little doubt that all of the major arts in this nation are converging in a nadir that is not pretty. Think of it: in literature, the poetry is stale, formless, filled with the rantings of hipster wannabes or bloated Academics or PC Elitists, and the fiction and memoirs are dominated by lite crap as Chick Lit or the gaseous eructations known as Postmodernism. Film has seen no young studs like those that arrived in the 1960s or 1970s....
Hook'em....
94) Reynolds Price/Collected Stories While reading Reynolds Price’s The Collected Stories (culled from his two prior collections- The Names and Faces of Heroes and Permanent Errors- as well as new tales) it occurred to me that he was chiefly a proponent of the idea that it is better to have an ambition to excel rather than an ambition to acquire. Almost all of Price’s protagonists seek to better themselves in the face of death, hardship, ignominy, or the like, yet few subscribe to the materialism that plagues his native land. Thus, he seems to come from an older time when this was the rule- not the exception, even though he was born in 1933, well into the Twentieth Century....
Masterful at best.
95) Deep River/Shusaku Endo A friend of mine, who was doing some housecleaning, passed on to me some books of his he no longer wanted. Included in them was the last novel by famed Japanese novelist Shusaku Endo, author of the world renowned Silence. Endo’s also known for being Japan’s leading intellectual light on spiritual matters, especially those concerning Christianity....
What flows.
96) Capote/Film Review The only reason to make a film about someone as controversially repugnant as Truman Capote would be to illuminate his greatest quality- his superb prose writing. At his best, Capote was one of last century’s greatest wordsmiths. Instead, the current film, Capote, focuses on the lesser things the man was known for- his showmanship, sensationalism, and homosexuality- although in that last category what is shown is tame and watered down....
Just misses greatness.
97) Shopgirl/Film Review Shopgirl is one of those very good films that somehow leaves you wanting it to have been something better, something great, which it is not. It indeed had a chance to be a truly great film, save for a few glitches, most of them having to do with the screenplay, but opted for the true Lowest Common Denominator Hollywood flaw of ‘playing it safe’....
Just misses greatness, part deux.
98) Miles Gone By/William F. Buckley I have long lambasted the kiss ass critics of other works who are blatantly currying favor to get their own mediocre (at best) works published, and rightfully so. That said, I shall not do the same, so I will begin this book review by admitting a bias- more accurately, a set of biases I have regarding William F. Buckley, Jr. He is the godfather of the modern American Conservative movement....
The Conservative Colossus.
99) The Up Series/Michael Apted It is a rare synchronicity that finds me in agreement with American pop film critic Roger Ebert. Usually, he shows no real understanding of the role good writing plays in filmmaking, and routinely praises the use of clichés, such as the tripe of Steven Spielberg and other Hollywood fare. However, when he declared The Up Series of documentary films, by Michael Apted, now out on DVD, ‘an inspired, almost noble use of the film medium, Apted penetrates to the central mystery of life’, I not only concur, but almost forgive him for recommending Saving Private Ryan. I said almost, now....
Art meets Science....aaahhh!!!
100) Siddhartha/Herman Hesse Siddhartha, a bildungsroman by Herman Hesse, first published in 1922, is simply one of the greatest books ever written. I say that not because I agree with its essential philosophy (which is problematic in some of its over-simplicity), a predisposition that far too often accounts for why critics recommend or do not recommend a work of art, but because it is the embodiment of one of the oldest maxims that defines great literature: saying the most in the least amount of words. Technically, the book- which I have read several times, the last over a decade ago, is a long novella of just under 40,000 words....
Masterful.
101) Wallace Stegner/Collected Stories (scroll below Siddhartha review) Wallace Stegner is primarily known for his novel Angle Of Repose, and as a 'Western writer', but this is a misnomer, for that implies that the setting for his stories is also the subject of his stories. It is not, and he does not have much truck with the Larry McMurtrys nor Zane Greys of literature....
No Zane Grey, he!
102) Second Foundation/Isaac Asimov Second Foundation (despite its title) is the third part of the original Foundation trilogy by Isaac Asimov, and it’s a hell of a good book, as well as an extremely bleak book in its portrayal of the human future. The first part, Search By The Mule, published as Now You See It... in the January, 1948 edition of Astounding Science Fiction....
The end comes too soon.
103) Crime & Punishment/Fyodor Dostoevsky There are perhaps no more valuable publishing houses on the planet than Great Britain’s Wordsworth Editions and America’s Dover Thrift Editions. In an era where literature is at a low ebb, these two houses have released great works of public domain classic literature at very affordable prices- usually at anywhere from 10-50% off the prices that the same titles can be gotten at larger publishing houses....
A reinterpretation.
104) The Chronicles Of Narnia/Film Review Answer 1: a more literate and less Byzantine Lord Of The Rings Answer 2: a deeper and more realistic Harry Potter Answer 3: a more mature Oz Question: What is The Chronicles Of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe?....
Good for the kids.
105) Frank O'Connor/Collected Stories Perhaps overrated. Or disappointing, dull, bad, or tedious. My quandary is in having to relate how profoundly disappointing is the Collected Stories of an acclaimed master like Frank O'Connor. O'Connor’s tales are murky, filled with the worst Irish stereotypes (really caricatures, not characters), bad conversation, and just no real reason for most of the tales to exists, save as documenting how dull and dim were the 20th Century Irish writings. And conversation dominates almost every tale....
Ho-hum, bogtrotters galore!
106) William Trevor/Collected Stories Reading William Trevor's The Collected Stories, which clocks in at eighty-five tales and 1261 pages, is a chore. It is not because it is such a hefty tome, nor because the pages are large and the type small, but because of the very deliberate writing style of the man. That said, Trevor is a good writer--a very good writer at his best, but that appears in about twenty and eight of the stories respectively. The rest of the book is filled with solidly written tales, but a bit formulaic, logy and lack energy....
Dilettantism redivivus.
107) Last Call/K.L. Cook Some years ago when I used to attend readings around the Twin Cities there was a noted 'storyteller' name Loren Niemi who used to give readings all the time. The quotation marks around his profession is because Niemi was not a writer, per se, as much as an old fashioned storyteller, who crafted spoken word tales like the old sages of the tribal era did. And he was a talented craftsman, never failing to, in any of the three or so dozen times I saw him perform about town, have the audience in the proverbial palm of his hand. Literally, people would rear up at the edges of their seats, in anticipation of the coup de grace, the payoff, the climax of the tale....
Potential....muted.
108) Les Miserables/Victor Hugo Les Miserables, by Victor Hugo, is the type of work that is almost beyond the measure of excellence or not. Hugo so indulgent, so excessive, that the book becomes almost otherworldly, an edifice out in an ether of its own, subject to its own literary rules. It is simple in narrative construction, but byzantinely complex in the curlicues of detail. It is such a diverse work that it is almost a cosmos unto itself, apart from the time and reality of mortal men and writers....
Overrated....but still good.
109) American Psycho/Book Review By now it should not startle me that readers and critics in America, if not worldwide, are bad. I mean, really, really bad- to the point of wretchedness. Just yesternight I saw a major network newscast decrying the fact that over 20% of college graduates in this country are functionally illiterate. Add in those people who are deliterate- i.e.- can read and understand grammar, but are clueless as to the deeper things inside a narrative, or even a sentence....
Misunderstood, still not that good.
110) Infinite Jest/Book Review Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace is the worst science fiction novel ever written. The truth is it might be the worst novel ever written, or at least published, but given the fact that Wallace has stiff competition from the burgeoning spawn of PC Elitist writers, not to mention his own PoMo kith, such as Rick Moody, Dave Eggers, and that ilk, I think I’ll stick with just calling it the worst sci fi has ever produced....
Or Infinite Pest?
111) Once Upon A Time In The West/DVD Review I had never seen the uncut version of Sergio Leone’s famed Once Upon A Time In The West, before stumbling across the DVD at a bargain price. I had seen major portions of it, chopped up by censors, studio heads, and the nitwits who need to run commercials for local television stations....
Chaw, baby!
112) Naked/David Sedaris I have listened to some of David Sedaris’s work on public radio, seen him on several occasions on PBS, and once saw him in person at a Twin Cities outlet for comedians. And one thing always ran through my mind. Given that he was, at best, marginally funny, in that way that Big Gay Al from South Park is, was whatever humor was gleaned from his arid observations a thing innate within the work, or merely a product of his personae....
Garbage.
113) I Have Landed/Stephen Jay Gould In the five years that Cosmoetica has been online one of the most popular, lauded, and requested essays is my elegy for biologist Stephen Jay Gould, posted 6/1/02, called Peaches, Tarpaper, & Stephen Jay Gould. It has been so popular due to a) its subject matter and b) the depth of the writing....
The Master.
114) Tropics Of Shit/Henry Miller There is truth to the claim that sometimes a bad writer can be closer to greatness than a good writer, because the bad writer may just be slightly off in all the areas he or she needs to be great in, while the good writer is merely solid in all areas, but never comes close to greatness in any area. This, however, is not the case with Henry Miller. He is a bad writer....
Stick the finger in, then hurl!
115) Collected Stories/Evan S. Connell Evan S. Connell is best known for his novels Mrs. Bridge, Mr. Bridge, and his non-fiction account of General George Armstrong Custer, Son Of The Morning Star....
Here or there?
116) Mrs. Bridge/Mr. Bridge Immediately after reading the two Tropics novels of Henry Miller I turned to read the paired Bridge novels of Evan S. Connell, Mrs. Bridge and Mr. Bridge. I was suspicious of their value....
Masterpiece2.
117) Mr. And Mrs. Bridge/DVD Review Having recently read the masterful separate books Mrs. Bridge and Mr. Bridge, by Evan S. Connell, I was anxious to see the 1990 Merchant/Ivory film that combined the two books into one, Mr. Bridge & Mrs. Bridge. While not a bad film, it falls far short of the books....
Why?
118) Joyce Carol Oates/Essays Before picking up this 1999 Joyce Carol Oates book of nonfiction pieces, called Where I’ve Been, And Where I’m Going, I’d only read a handful of her ‘poems’ and stories in assorted magazines, and a dozen or so of her essays regarding pugilism, and recalled little of what might be called style- pro or con....
A hack's hack.
119) The New World/Terrence Malick Terrence Malick is simply the greatest living American filmmaker. Only Stanley Kubrick was his equal or superior. That’s not to say that Martin Scorsese nor Woody Allen have not made great films, but they’ve both made stinkers in their careers, and neither has had a great film in over a decade (although I’ve heard good things about Allen’s current Match Point)....
Greatness, pure....
120) Five Decades/Irwin Shaw I was a young boy when Rich Man, Poor Man became the first big miniseries that dominated network television in the mid-1970s, and it was that work, and book, written by Irwin Shaw (né Irwin Gilbert Shamforoff, February 27, 1913-May 16, 1984), that set off the miniseries craze of adapting popular works of fiction and nonfiction that dominated television for another decade, not Alex Haley’s Roots, as is popularly misperceived....
Forgotten Master!
121) The Left Hand Of Darkness/Ursula LeGuin This is the third book by Ursula LeGuin that I’ve read. The first was the novel The Lathe Of Heaven, which is a great book. The next was a collection of short stories called Changing Planes. It was horrid....
Not quite right?
122) James Emanuel/The Overlooked When thinking of overlooked contemporary books, I think of the novels of William Kennedy and Charles Johnson; but, on reflection, since they write prose and have won Pulitzer Prizes and National Book Awards, how neglected can they be? True, they don’t sell like Frank McCourt nor Dan Brown, nor get the praise lesser contemporaries John Updike and Toni Morrison do....
Yet, again.
123) Ha Jin/Waiting Late in Ha Jin’s 1999 National Book Award winning Politically Correct novel Waiting the main character Doctor Lin Kong bemoans the fact that he is a ‘superfluous man’. This recapitulates the fact that the tale, itself, is superfluous; mainly because of its PC nature....
I am still waiting for the story.
124) Disgrace/J.M. Coetzee J.M. Coetzee’s 1999 novel Disgrace won the Booker Prize that year (the second time he won it, which is the U.K. equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize or National Book Award in the United States)....
Irony?
125) A Very Long Engagement/DVD Review With the possible exception of America’s Claire Danes, the French actress Audrey Tautou is probably the most interesting actress alive to simply watch onscreen. It’s not that Danes and Tautou are not beautiful, they are. But they are not gorgeous screen sirens, they have an accessibility to them that makes ordinary men feel that they could some day have a girl like that fall in love with them....
Ah, Audrey Tautou!
126) Grizzly Man/DVD Review Why is glorifying the insane and stupid an American obsession over the last couple of decades? The documentary Grizzly Man does not attempt to answer this query, yet it does its best to bring this tendency to its odd apogee, and is literally unlike any other documentary film I’ve ever seen....
Looney Tune?
127) Dhalgren/Book Review Samuel Delany’s Dhalgren is generally considered a science fiction novel, but, in a real sense, it’s more of a fantasy than science fiction- hard or not, and it is not a particularly good piece of sci fi, set in the then-near future of the late 1970s. Instead, it is a weird amalgam of the worst of High Modernism and proto-Post-Modernism. No, Delany’s a bit better of a wordsmith than the dregs that have spanned the decades from Donald Barthelme to David Foster Wallace, but he’s not a master, nor a ‘poet’....
Pornorama?
128) Remembrance Of Things Past/Marcel Proust A la recherche du temps perdu, by Marcel Proust is not really a novel, by any stretch of the imagination, for it violates the precepts of novel writing- plot, characterization, etc., to an even greater degree than Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick does, and it is not considered an autobiography, because it twists facts, and uses fictive techniques for its nonfiction. In that sense it predates Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood by half a century....
Whoa!
129) Lafcadio Hearn/Selected Writings Lafcadio Hearn is one of those writers I knew the name of for years -- who could forget Lafcadio Hearn? -- yet could not exactly place with any book, movement, style, nor philosophy. Then, a while back, I stumbled upon his Selected Writings at a used bookstore....
Breakthrough?
130) Alice Adams/ Short Stories (scroll below the Lafcadio Hearn review) As my wife and I were browsing in a discount overstock bookstore I came upon a $4.99 edition of The Stories Of Alice Adams. Her name was familiar as a staple of the New Yorker-Harper's-Atlantic axis of late 20th Century literature. Yet, I need not have known that fact for after reading the tales it was clear that her stories were perfectly constructed into the tidy formulae needed to get an in into that world. This is not to say that she was a bad writer, just that she was predictable and formulaic....
Sawing wood?
131) Lafcadio Hearn/Selected Writings Lafcadio Hearn is one of those writers I knew the name of for years- who could forget Lafcadio Hearn?- yet could not exactly place with any book, movement, style, nor philosophy. Then, a while back, I stumbled upon his Selected Writings....
Deux?
132) I Am Serpico/An Appreciation Over thirty years ago, I remember going in to a movie theater with my father. It was just me and him. Usually, I would go with both my parents, or along with them and my sister, or even just sneak in with a friend to the old Ridgewood Theater, off of Myrtle Avenue -- usually to see the latest James Bond or Godzilla flick....
Still a hero!
133) Gabriel Garcia Marquez/Collected Stories I have never thought that Gabriel Garcia Marquez deserved his 1982 Nobel Prize for literature. I think that it was manifestly an award given because of the politicized nature of the author’s work. The three novels of his that I’ve read- Love In A Time Of Cholera, The General In His Labyrinth, and One Hundred Years Of Solitude- are examples of occasionally poetic phrases and images trying to tidy up nonexistent narratives, cardboard caricatures, and a puerile imagination....
Immature and overrated!
134) Jhumpa Lahiri/Interpreter Of Maladies (Review is in the Reviewer's Choice column- scroll midway down) Were Jhumpa Lahiri in a writing group I ran I would tell her the stories that comprise Interpreter Of Maladies, winner of the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, make for good first drafts, generally, but that, of the nine short stories, six of them exist simply because the characters are Indian, and Lahiri feels this makes them a compelling enough subject....
Ethnic bullshit.
135) Doris Lessing/Stories Doris Lessing, who was born Doris May Taylor, of British parents, in Persia (now Iran) on October 22, 1919, and grew up in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), is simply one of the best short story writers of the last century....
Better than most.
136) Them/Jon Ronson Imagine writing a whole book making fun of retards or fat people. Yes, there are some natural chuckles to be mined, but imagine Jay Leno or David Letterman pointing his cameras into his audience, finding a Downs Syndrome kid, and then saying, ‘Look, there’s a Downs Syndrome kid!'....
Oy!
137) George Washington/DVD Review George Washington was the first feature film ever made by indy wunderkind director David Gordon Green. It was released in 2000, to generally favorable reviews, and it truly deserved them. It has been recently released on an invaluable Criterion Collection DVD which I recently purchased....
Excellence!
138) Why We Fight/Frank Capra There has been a political documentary, of recent vintage, called Why We Fight, which tries to examine the infamous Military Industrial Complex and its grip on this nation. It is considered both polemical and incisive in making its case against both that complex and the war fiasco we are currently involved in in Iraq....
Over there!
139) Casa De Los Babys/John Sayles There’s a moment in Johns Sayles’ latest film, ‘Casa De Los Babys’, that is among the most poignant ever filmed. A young maid and an unnamed Latin American country’s main baby mill is engaged in a conversation with an Irish woman down to adopt....
Oh baby!
140) Silver City/John Sayles Lost in the glare of Michael Moore’s 2004 pseudo-documentary ‘Fahrenheit 911’ was independent filmmaker John Sayles’ far more incisive filmic take on politics called ‘Silver City’....
Besting Michael Moore!
141) Truman Capote/Complete Stories Of the twenty stories that comprise the surprisingly slim (for a writer of his renown) ‘The Complete Stories Of Truman Capote’, only two can be classified as great, or at least excellent, while only two others can be called good. The rest are not even passable, despite the occasional memorable image or well-crafted sentence, for the narratives are weak, trite, and transparent....
Disappointing.
142) Richard Ford/A Multitude Of Sins This is a writer, and possibly a great one. I had heard of Richard Ford before, as he is a Pulitzer Prize winner for ‘Independence Day’, but - so what? Many Pulitzer and National Book Award winners reek. Even Nobelists have sucked big time....
Great possibilities.
143) Freaks/DVD Review Tod Browning’s 1932 cult classic film Freaks is not what most people seem to think it is. It is neither a blatantly exploitative film nor a film of profound compassion. Of all of his films, silent or not, it is in many ways both his most artlessly produced yet also his most indelible -- even more so than Dracula, which came out a year before....
Eeewww.
144) The Five Obstructions/DVD Review Imagine making a stylish sexy film about a Plain Jane. That’s the feeling I got watching the 90 minute, 2004 film The Five Obstructions, jointly made and produced by Danish filmmakers Jørgen Leth and Lars Von Trier....
Interesting technique.
145) The Assassination of Richard Nixon/DVD Review I picked up a cheap used version of The Assassination Of Richard Nixon simply because I spent much of my youth listening to my dad yell at the 37th President during the years of the Watergate scandal, and figured that there might be some posthumous vicarious thrill that he could glean from my watching such a film with such a title....
One can dream....
146) Tales Of The Night/Peter Høeg Peter Høeg’s Tales Of The Night, translated by Barbara Haveland, is not a difficult book to read because of the nature of the tales, but because of the dense and clunky style his prose wields. I have not read his much lauded novel Smilla’s Sense Of Snow, published in 1992, two years after this book was released in Denmark....
Duuuuuuuuuuuull....
147) Cane/Jean Toomer I’d long known Jean Toomer as a famed poet from the 1920s Harlem Renaissance era, and found his poetry to be interesting, at best. He did not have the musical flair of Langston Hughes, nor the formal excellence of Countee Cullen, the two other titans of that scene, but his 1923 book Cane was his magnum opus, however slim. I say book because the work is not a novel, as it’s often classified, nor is it a work of pure poetry, or prose poetry, as it has alternately been classified....
Masterpiece.
148) Dorothy Parker/Complete Stories (9th review down) Dorothy Parker (1893-1967) was cute, sexy, witty, vivacious, delightfully vicious, and the only member of the infamously bad Algonquin Round Table that had even a modicum of real writing talent, and it's on full display in this collection of her finest short fictions....
Oo-la-la.
149) Fourth Murder: The Eye Sinister Poem/A Poem/ Dan Schneider
150) Rashomon/DVD Review Akira Kurosawa had been a filmmaker for almost a decade, since his 1943 debut film Sugata Sanshiro, and had some renown in his native Japan, when, in 1950, his film Rashomon rocketed him to international acclaim, including the Academy Award For Best Foreign Film, after winning the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival brought the film and its director, and Japanese cinema, a Western audience....
Why the end?
151) The Seventh Seal/DVD Review One of the things that separate a great artist from a lesser one is his ability to switch forms, themes, and the like, yet still imprint that unmistakable essence that lets a viewer know which artist they are dealing with immediately. Rarely has there been a greater and more vivid example of this reality than in comparing the two films Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman released in 1957: The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries....
Death wins? I say it's a fix.
152) Slan/A.E. Van Vogt Slan is one of those Golden Age sci fi novels that while being dated, in terms of scientific jargon and ideas, is far more relevant than much of the hamhanded writing published in science fiction, or even literary fiction, these days. Given the civil rights issues involved in the ceaseless War On Terror, and things such as gay rights, the right to die, etc., Slan is as relevant as it was in the days leading up to World War Two, given its many and manifest Nazi parallels....
Neglected but relevant.
153) Aguirre: The Wrath Of God/DVD Review Werner Herzog may just be the best film director of the last forty years. Period. And I mean worldwide. While some directors of film rely primarily on precision - think Alfred Hitchcock, intellect - think Ingmar Bergman and Stanley Kubrick, visual poesy-think Terrence Malick, or visceral reaction - think Akira Kurosawa, there is no other major filmmaker that I can think of who combines all of these things so skillfully, as well as having a mastery of music, outside of Herzog. From musical scoring to narrative pacing to visual imagery, he reigns supreme....
Excellence defined!
154) Die Mommie Die!/DVD Review Why is it that the most banal and straightforward films get lauded by the Motion Picture Academy, while films that push boundaries and take risks, especially if comedies, get ignored? And why is it that there is no separate category for comedies and musicals for the Oscars?....
Satirical brilliance!
155) Everything Is Illuminated/DVD Review Everything Is Illuminated was a surprise 2002 hit novel by Jonathan Safran Foer, which was a thinly veiled fictional account of his 1999 trip to Ukraine to research his Jewish roots during World War Two....
Great little film.
156) Nine Lives/DVD Review Need the sins of the father be visited upon the son? Not if the terrific, nay, great, little 2005 film, Nine Lives, written and directed by Rodrigo Garcia is Exhibit A....
Great film. Period.
157) Angel On The Roof/Russell Banks I started reading The Angel On The Roof: The Stories Of Russell Banks, his de facto Collected Stories- thirty-one of them, twenty-two old tales and nine new ones, right after I had finished David Foster Wallace’s Girl With Curious Hair. Thank God!....
Great short fiction.
158) Catch As Catch Can/Joseph Heller (7th review down) If there's ever been a greater example of a single author milking a single bit of work more than Joseph Heller I don't want to read him. It's been years since I read his classic Catch-22 satire of the Army during World War Two - although I aim to read it again within the year- and it was a good book, to my best recollection. But, my word, give it a rest....
Milking it dry.
159) Samuel Fuller/A Third Face Samuel Fuller (1912-1997) is best known as the maverick director of war films, like The Steel Helmet, from the 1950s, through his 1980 epic The Big Red One (which was only recently fully restored on DVD). Yet, his 2002 memoir, from Alfred A. Knopf, A Third Face: My Tale Of Writing, Fighting, And Filmmaking, shows that he was alot more than that....
The man.
160) The Bicycle Thief/DVD Review Vittorio De Sica’s The Bicycle Thief (Ladri Di Biciclette), made in 1948, is one of the all time great films, and, in its Neo-realistic cinéma vérité simplicity, it shows how utterly creatively bankrupt most filmmaking these days is. And by that I mean worldwide, not just the obvious flaws of the Hollywood crap factory. Lean, spare, poetic - it tells one story, but tells it very well, and that story becomes universal, and is applicable to all people who have ever suffered, or been driven to do desperate things....
Still resonating....
161) The World At War/DVD Review It was not long after my family moved into the very first home we had ever owned, in our line's history, that I recall watching, with my dad, a really good television show called The World At War, which recounted the history of the Second World War. For my dad, born in 1916, it was a bittersweet look back at his early adulthood, for after having served for several years with distinction in President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Civilian Conservation Corps. My dad was amongst the first men to volunteer to serve in the military after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, but was rejected as 4F because of a childhood broken ankle that never fully healed, and left him a gimp....
Essential viewing.
162) The Idiot/Book Review (under The World At War review) In his lifetime, Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote four famed novels that secured his literary place in history. Chronologically they were Crime And Punishment, The Idiot, The Possessed (or Devils), and The Brothers Karamazov. The last named book I read many years ago, in my youth, and found it quite boring, although I will reread it in the future. Crime And Punishment I read last year, and, while it had some good things to offer, it was too bogged down in stereotypes, and had a dreadfully weak end. I have recently read The Idiot, which leaves only Devils to go....
Essential reading.
163) Shadows/John Cassavetes In many ways, the filmic career of independent filmmaking legend John Cassavetes is the polar opposite of someone like Alfred Hitchcock, the consummate studio director. Where Hitchcock infamously treated his actors as cattle, Cassavetes sought to work with them improvisationally. Where every element in a Hitchcock shot is composed immaculately, Cassavetes cared less for the way a scene was figuratively composed than in how it felt, or what it conveyed, emotionally....
Cultural significance vs. artistic merit.
164) 52 McGs/Chris Calhoun (9th review down) Certainly more wasteful books (in terms of unrecycled paper and deforestation, as well as intellectual inertia) have been published than 52 McGs, edited by Chris Calhoun, which is a collection of fifty-two of the supposedly most interesting, and well-written, of seven hundred or so obituaries published by a New York Times writer named Robert McGill Thomas, Jr. But even the vapid prose of such hacks as Elizabeth Wurtzel, Dave Eggers, Maya Angelou, Joyce Carol Oates, T.C. Boyle, and David Foster Wallace, can at least be defended by stating that there may have actually been an attempt at something creative going on, despite their repeated failures....
What's wrong with publishing.
165) David And Lisa/DVD Review One of the earliest independent film successes in America, both in terms of box office and critical acclaim at international film festivals (including Oscar nominations for direction and screenplay), was director Frank Perry’s issue oriented ‘David And Lisa’, produced by Paul M. Heller (‘My Left Foot’), which was the first starring vehicle for two young actors of great potential whose careers eventually fizzled: Keir Dullea, who would reach his career apogee in Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 masterpiece, '2001: A Space Odyssey'....
Early indy classic.
166) Selected Stories/Alice Munro Canadian prosist Alice Munro is not a particularly bad writer, but she’s not a particularly good nor engaging one either. Terms such as mundane, dull, and ho-hum come to mind. While she is certainly not the worst writer published, she’s only a passable writer, at best, and vastly overrated. I recently read her ‘Selected Stories’ not long after reading a similar collection of Doris Lessing’s best known short fiction, and it’s possible that there was a residual feeling of letdown after Lessing’s superb collection. But, I’m too good a critic for that. The truth is that for all her overhype Munro’s stories are merely ok, at best....
Mediocrity defined.
167) The Birds & Other Stories/Daphne Du Maurier The name Daphne Du Maurier was familiar to me only in relation to the Alfred Hitchcock film ‘The Birds’, based upon a short story she had written. Yes, I knew that the films ‘Jamaica Inn’ and ‘Rebecca’ were based upon her novels, but it was ‘The Birds’ that was my reference point, and as I thought the film was a good one....
Excellence defined.
168) Wild Strawberries/DVD Review Watching Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries for the first time was an interesting experience for three main reasons. One, the film itself is terrific. Two, I watched it the same night as the 2006 Academy Awards, and was struck by how Bergman’s film never condescends to its viewer, unlike the major-nominated Politically Correct films Hollywood churns out and rewards. Three, having always known of Bergman from the films of American filmmaker Woody Allen, I was struck at just how much Allen steals from Bergman....
Bergman classic.
169) Oscar Wilde/DVD Review While comic and filmmaker Woody Allen once said that writing drama was like 'sitting at the grown ups table' vis-à-vis writing comedy, there is little doubt that writing good or even great comedy is an art form that few have done well with, much less mastered. There is as wide a gulf between great comedy and great drama as there is between even greater genres of art- say writing great poetry and great history, or great plays and great short stories, or even great short fiction and great novels....
The master.
170) John Crowley/Short Fiction I had never heard of John Crowley before I stumbled upon a copy of his Novelties & Souvenirs, Collected Short Fiction, a HarperCollins Perennial book from 2004, at a discount bookseller. The subtitle of the book sums up his work- Collected Short Fiction. This is because the tales, fifteen in all, are not really short stories in the classical sense, but more like the bland Ficciones of a Jorge Luis Borges, in that they are scenes, presented usually from a detached, or odd, perspective, with almost no character development nor plot....
Ho-hum.
171) L'Avventura/DVD Review Some films that are labelled classics, or great films, are not even good films. Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless immediately comes to mind. Others, like Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura, whose title literally means The Adventure, as well as Italian slang for a one night stand, are not necessarily bad, but still only interesting failures, and not worthy of their reputation. L’Avventura was the first in a trilogy of black and white widescreen films Antonioni would make about alienation and personal anomy. The making of such trilogies was the rage at the time in European cinema, and, to an extent, still is. The trilogy was rounded out by La Notte and L'Eclisse in the two following years....
Misses the mark.
172) La Notte/DVD Review La Notte (The Night), the 1961 film by Michelangelo Antonioni, and the second of his Alienation Trilogy, is a huge artistic leap up from its predecessor film. It’s not so much that L’Avventura was a bad film - it’s not. It has its moments, and a good premise that swiftly decays into anomie and melodrama, whereas La Notte, even at an hour and fifty-five minutes in length, is a highly focused, layered, and concentrated, adult drama about the ennui that occurs in a marriage of dilettantes where all of one’s life has been plotted out beforehand, yet happiness still eludes its participants. Yet, La Notte is not Italian neo-realism....
Bull's-eye!
173) L'Eclisse/DVD Review Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Eclisse (The Eclipse), his 1962 black and white capstone of his Alienation Trilogy that began with L’Avventura and continued with La Notte, is arguably a great film, but still a cut or two below its immediate predecessor, the indisputably brilliant La Notte, simply because it lacks the story and excellent portrayal of a human relationship that that earlier film has. It is, however, a superior film to L’Avventura, in that its sustains it sublime weirdness and disaffecting qualities throughout the film, whereas that first film in the trilogy petered out into a dull ending after an intriguing and mysterious premise....
At the edge.
174) The Naked Kiss/DVD Review Maverick American filmmaker Samuel Fuller was both a progressive and a prude, and no film of his better illustrates this schismic personal dichotomy, echoed in his art’s use of high and low techniques, than his 1964 black and white film noir melodrama The Naked Kiss, a cult classic whose title derives from its lead character....
Cult classic.
175) Scenes From A Marriage/DVD Review Leo Tolstoy once opined that all happy families are happy in but a few ways, while those that are not suffer in many unique ways. This apothegm was never more well evinced than in filmmaker Ingmar Bergman's five-hour 1973 Swedish telefilm Scener ur ett äktenskap / Scenes from a Marriage, a miniseries that was even more influential in Europe than the American television miniseries Roots, which captivated American audiences only a few years later. Bergman's miniseries was repackaged for foreign markets....
Great from Great.
176) The Diary Of A Rapist/Book Review (6th review down) Evan S. Connell's The Diary Of A Rapist fails as a novel for two large reasons. First, is the technical reason that its usage of small diary entries limits the point of view of his narrator, the rapist Earl Summerfield, which necessitates his not portraying fully his own predicament because the character simply cannot....
Bad from great.
177) Solaris/DVD Review I first saw the 2002 Steven Soderbergh version of Solaris, starring George Clooney, then read Stanislaw Lem’s novel, then watched this — Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1972 169-minute film version of the book, Solyaris / Solaris, winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival that year....
Neglected masterpiece.
178) Ikiru/Film Film Review Ikiru (To Live), by Akira Kurosawa, is sort of a ‘lost’ film. No, it was never really lost, but it is unlike the archetypal Kurosawa film that Western audiences think of him making, and thereby lost in his canon. It is not some historical epic filled with honor, samurais, and swordplay....
Masterpiece to the max.
179) The Cocoanuts/DVD Review The Marx Brothers have never been as good as some other great comedy teams, be it the verbal brilliance of Abbott & Costello, the pathos laden antics of Laurel & Hardy, nor the violent slapstick of The Three Stooges. The reason is because the team’s success or failure basically falls all on the shoulders of its lone truly brilliant member, Groucho Marx....
Groucho is born!
180) Mr. Arkadin/DVD Review The first time I saw Orson Welles’s 1955 black and white film Mr. Arkadin was a few years ago, on a cheap 91-minute DVD version put out by LaserLight DVD. It was a film often called Welles’s “European Citizen Kane,” and had a bizarre introduction by a fey and gloved actor Tony Curtis. It was a very poor-quality disk, with a scratched and highly white-contrasted print that looked washed out. This turned out to be what was known as the American version of the film....
Neglected and buffed pearl.
181) Seven Samurai/DVD Review Some films do get better with repeated viewings. Akira Kurosawa’s 1954 black-and-white film Shichinin no samurai / Seven Samurai is one of them. It fully deserved winning the 1954 Venice Film Festival’s Silver Lion, as well as two Academy awards, for Best Art Direction — Set Decoration and Best Costume Design. On first view, Seven Samurai is simply a great action film, but with subsequent viewings the finer points of characterization come through in each moment, seeping into the mind subliminally and purposefully....
Eat this, George Lucas!
182) Angela Carter/Short Stories Reading Burning Your Boats: The Collected Short Stories of Angela Carter (1940-1993) brought to my mind two things. The first came while reading the book’s Introduction by Salman Rushdie. Some years ago, a good friend of mine excitedly handed me a copy of The Satanic Verses, with several pages marked off especially. We were at a function, but he insisted that I read them. I did, and asked him what was so urgent in the text that I needed to read them. It was a passage describing a character who was manifestly the Ayatollah Khomeini. It describes him stewing in his apartment in France, plotting his overthrow of the Shah of Iran....
Derivative, in the least.
183) 8½/DVD Review In his 1988 film Another Woman, director Woody Allen has one of his minor characters, named Paul (Harris Yulin), confront the film’s lead character Marion (Gena Rowlands) with a comment that she made upon his attempts at writing. Years earlier, when Paul had shown Marion a manuscript of some of his writing, Marion declared to him, ‘This is overblown. It’s too emotional. It’s maudlin. Your dreams may be….meaningful to you, but to the objective observer….they’re, they’re.…it’s so embarrassing.’ I use this quote from Allen because....
Better with age, but still some flaws.
184) My Best Fiend/DVD Review Werner Herzog’s 1999 documentary, Mein liebster Feind - Klaus Kinski / Klaus Kinski: My Best Fiend, is yet another in the dazzling array of Herzog documentary — or documentary-like — films. This one follows the director’s turbulent friendship and creative partnership with the legendary German actor Klaus Kinski. Herzog also serves as narrator, in German (with English subtitles, or dubbed into English)....
Wink, wink....
185) Plagiarism, Clichés, Influence, And Google (Part 1) In recent years the state of literature has been in manifest decline for a variety of reasons. Instead of seeking to ameliorate the situation, the people who run the publishing industry have exacerbated the decline with increased cronyism, the fostering of -isms and schools of bad writing, the refusal to publish real criticism, and having publishers, editors, agents, and critics refusing to do their jobs....
The accused....
186) Plagiarism, Clichés, Influence, And Google (Part 2) But, just what is 'homage', as Vice describes it? Let me give you a blatant show of 'true homage', which makes some of Vice's claims a bit lazy. One of the most famous American poems of last century was Elizabeth Bishop's The Man-Moth, which was a dream-like poem conceived after she read a newspaper typo for mammoth- the prehistoric hairy elephant cousin. It has a unique structural format, and child-like rhythm that is unmistakable....
Explanations.
187) Plagiarism, Clichés, Influence, And Google (Part 3) I have often outright encouraged young poets and writers to imitate great writers, for only through imitation can you slip into the skin of a great thought and its process- if the artist is able to at all, and understand it immanently. Then, once you write and master the imitative styles of assorted artists, that thing unique within every writer of potential will likely surface, and an amalgam of originality plus the best ways to deploy the best techniques of the best writers will emerge....
Results.
188) The Magdalene Sisters/DVD Review Brutally psychopathic lesbian nuns and lascivious paedophile priests, what else is new? No, seriously, watching the DVD of The Magdalene Sisters was like a time machine for me....
Nuns run wild!
189) Tabloid Dreams/Book Review (4th Review Down) After winning a Pulitzer Prize for his 1992 short story collection of Vietnam-based stories, A Good Scent From A Strange Mountain, Robert Olen Butler followed it up with a collection of a dozen tales, Tabloid Dreams, based upon the sort of headlines ripped from the tabloid weekly newspapers one finds on checkout lines at supermarkets. After a lackluster career as a novelist, Butler seemed to be verging on becoming a great writer for, even though A Good Scent From A Strange Mountain had its ups and downs, there were two or three genuinely great short stories. The work in Tabloid Dreams, however, seems to manifest that A Good Scent From A Strange Mountain was an aberration....
Disappointment.
190) A Jacques Barzun Reader/Book Review Jacques Barzun is sort of the social sciences’ equivalent of Harold Bloom, albeit less personally and intellectually noxious. He is, however, the quintessential living ‘Dead White Male’ scholar whose knowledge about his subject matter is very broad- he can write seemingly convincingly on opera, politics, baseball, Paris in the 1830s, and Raymond Chandler, but whose depth of wisdom about any one thing is paper-thin....
DWM in extremis.
191) Umberto D./DVD Review Lost between the glare of his earlier Ladri di biciclette / The Bicycle Thief, and his later films with Sophia Loren, Vittorio De Sica’s 1952 film Umberto D. stands as an almost forgotten masterpiece of Italian Neo-Realism, and one of the last films that could claim to be of that movement alone....
Forgotten great.
192) Ugetsu/DVD Review Ugetsu (Ugetsu monogatari), a 1953 film by Kenji Mizoguchi, which won the Venice Film Festival's top prize (the Silver Lion Award for Best Direction) that year, is one of the best films to ever deal with the subject of human desire, and not only the obvious sexual aspects of the emotion. While ostensibly it is labeled a ghost story, since its Japanese title means Tales Of The Pale And Silvery Moon After The Rain, the story is a complex one that hides behind its astonishingly simple narrative and revelation, and is based upon two tales from a 1776 book of tales by Ueda Akinari, and a third story from French writer Guy de Maupassant. Mizoguchi and screenwriter Yoshikata Yoda adapted elements from all three tales to create something new and relevant....
Classic.
193) Same Place, Same Things/Tim Gautreaux Having recently read a short story collection called The Mountains Won’t Remember Us, by Robert Morgan, set in southern Appalachia, I was heartened after reading the first two of twelve stories in Same Place, Same Things, by Tim Gautreaux....
Zzzzzz....
194) Blowup/DVD Review Blowup was Michelangelo Antonioni’s first English language film. Made in Great Britain in 1966, it’s a flat-out great film, at a crisp 111 minutes. It was nominated for two Academy Awards: Best Director and Best Original Screenplay (Antonioni, Tonino Guerra, and Edward Bond, adapted from the short story Las Babas del Diablo, by Argentine writer Julio Cortazar) and won the National Society of Film Critics’ Best Film award of the year....
Masterful Michelangelo.
195) Blue/DVD Review Krzysztof Kieslowski was one of the more interesting filmmakers of the last quarter century. The centerpiece of his claim to greatness is the "Trois Couleurs" (Three Colors) trilogy of films that he directed and co-wrote (with Krzysztof Piesiewicz) in the early to mid-1990s, filming them all at the same time. Bleu / Blue, Blanc / White, and Rouge / Red represent the three colors of the French flag, and symbolize the three virtues of liberty, equality, and fraternity respectively....
Stunning visual feast.
196) White/DVD Review The middle film of director Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Polish-French "Trois Couleurs" (Three Colors) trilogy of Bleu / Blue, Blanc / White, and Rouge / Red is a black comedy — and it is generally considered the weakest of the three films. This is true, though given the high quality of the tercet, White is still an excellent film. Compared with the mind-numbing comedies that Hollywood regularly cranks out, it is exceptional. And at a mere hour and a half, this 1994 film never drags....
Better'n most comedies.
197) Red/DVD Review The final film of Krzysztof Kieslowski’s "Trois couleurs" (Three Colors) trilogy, the 1994 release Rouge/ Red, is almost universally acclaimed as the best of the three films. For once, the general consensus is correct. Of course, if one is to believe some of the online reviews of this film — and of the whole trilogy — there are plenty of people who seriously question whether or not Three Colors is a better trilogy than the two trilogies of Star Wars, that of The Matrix, or even The Lord of the Rings....
Excellent end.
198) Day Of Wrath/DVD Review Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1943 film Day Of Wrath (Vredens dag), adapted from Hans Wiers-Jenssens’ novel, Day Of Wrath, by Dreyer, is an earlier, better version of the issues tackled in Arthur Miller’s play, The Crucible, because, even though the film was made during the Nazi occupation of Denmark, and there are obvious parallels to be drawn between that and the film’s narrative, it is never as psychologically obvious nor melodramatic as Miller’s later allegory on McCarthyism....
Arthur Miller bettered.
199) Shame/DVD Review I should no longer be surprised when critics miss the most obvious things in works of art, because they are human beings, and the vast majority of human beings are lazy by nature. That said, the simplistic notion that Ingmar Bergman’s great 1968 drama Skammen / Shame is merely anti-war does a great deal of damage to the reputation of this highly complex and nuanced film....
Anti-war, pro-art?
200) Chaplin's Goliath/DVD Review The Time: Mid-1970s, summer vacation, 1 am. The Place: My dining room, in front of a small 15” black and white Philco tv. On WOR, Channel 9 in New York City, there is a 90 minute talk show called The Joe Franklin Show. It is unlike any of the other talk shows of the era. It is not like Phil Donahue, Mike Douglas, David Steinberg, Dick Cavett, David Susskind, nor Johnny Carson....
Forgotten funnyman.
201) A Great Day In Harlem/DVD Review I recall first seeing the lauded and multiply awarded jazz documentary A Great Day In Harlem a dozen or so years ago on PBS, and while not a jazz fan nor aficionado, it was a short film (only an hour) that seemed to compress much of jazz history into a convenient package....
The thing, not the music.
202) The War Against Cliché/Martin Amis Book Review ‘All writing is a war against cliché. Not just the clichés of the pen but the clichés of the mind and the clichés of the heart.' Of recent vintage there has been a spate of the talentless children of talented literary figures getting into print. The two worst examples are Thomas Steinbeck- son of John Steinbeck, who whined of ‘being forced to write a novel’ by his publishers....
Et tu?
203) Breathless/DVD Review The fact that an artist writes boringly to convey boredom, or childishly to convey puerility, has no effect on the resultant work being neither boring nor puerile. Self-awareness of a flaw does not alleviate the flaw. For this to not be true, intent in art would have to matter....
Eek!
204) Matthew Ridgway/Book Review (6th review down) Of all the great American military leaders the last century produced, from Black Jack Pershing to the World War Two icons- Dwight D, Eisenhower, Chester Nimitz, George Patton, Omar Bradley, George Marshall, Douglas MacArthur, through Stormin' Norman Schwarzkopf, perhaps the greatest of them all, militarily speaking, was General Matthew Bunker Ridgway, the man who took over from MacArthur after Big Mac was dismissed by President Harry S. Truman during the Korean War....
Forgotten hero.
205) The Wages Of Fear/DVD Review Think that space invaders, aliens, dinosaurs, cyborgs, or monsters of one sort or another are needed to make a film a thriller? If so, I recommend you watch Henri-Georges Clouzot's 1953 black and white masterpiece The Wages Of Fear (La Salaire De La Peur), about the evils of runaway greed and capitalism, all in the name of oil. It'll change your mind. Over half a century later, and in light of the current American war folly for oil in the Middle East, the film is remarkably resonant and cogent - even down to the loudest criticism of American profiteering and imperialism coming from….the French....
Purely great.
206) Blood Of The Poet/DVD Review I recently got The Orphic Trilogy of films written and directed by Jean Cocteau: Le Sang d’un poète / The Blood of a Poet (1930), Orphée / Orpheus (1950), and Le Testament d’Orphée / The Testament of Orpheus (1960)....
Atrocity.
207) Strangers On A Train/DVD Review Strangers On A Train, the 1951 black and white film by Alfred Hitchcock, is a damned good movie- with many of the requisite Hitchcockian flourishes, but it is not a great film, despite many great aspects about it. The reason for this devolves down to one basic fact- it's merely a melodrama, not a true drama. Melodrama always depends upon the propulsion of the plot by the characters within doing the dumbest possible things to get to the next scene. Melodrama thrives on the lowest common denominator....
Neglected gem.
208) Faces/DVD Review Faces, by John Cassavetes, is a 1968 film generally credited as being the first popular independent film in America to make an impact in the public consciousness. But, it is more than that. It is a film that totally subverted the dominant themes and forms of Hollywood cinema, at the time, showed that 'adult' films, truly adult, not a euphemism for pornography, could have mass appeal, and paved the way for the great auteur decade of American filmmaking that was the 1970s....
Cassavetes gets great.
209) Saraband/DVD Review In 2003 Swedish film legend Ingmar Bergman made his last film ever- although he’s said that before, some two decades after his prior farewell to film with ‘Fanny And Alexander’. He should have never come back after that valedictory, for his effort, ‘Saraband’, a supposed sequel to his 1973 Swedish television smash ‘Scenes From A Marriage’, is a bad film - the worst I’ve yet to see from Bergman, and a bad film by any measure. His other ‘bad’ films, ‘Cries And Whispers’ and ‘The Serpent’s Egg’, at least had some redeeming features....
Whoops!
210) Collected Stories/Isaac Bashevis Singer Isaac Bashevis Singer is not a good short story writer. Isaac Bashevis Singer is not a bad short story writer. Isaac Bashevis Singer is not a mediocre short story writer. He is all and none of these things because he is primarily not a short story writer, in the modern sense. Yes, a handful of his forty-seven tales in the Collected Stories are short stories, but most of them are really Polish and Jewish fables....
Mythmaker.
211) Complete Stories/Zora Neale Hurston Isaac Bashevis Singer with a tan….and breasts. That’s what I was thinking of Zora Neale Hurston as I read her ‘Complete Stories’, except she’s not as good a writer nor tale teller. Or, perhaps a less skilled Sherwood Anderson. There is a sense one gets when reading theses tales that Hurston was born too late....
Just missing.
212) Selected Stories/John O'Hara I picked up an old Modern Library edition of the ‘Selected Short Stories of John O’Hara’, and was alternating my reading of them with a short story collection by post-modern poseur David Foster Wallace. The difference in skill and accomplishment is immense. As could be expected, Wallace’s work is utter tripe - devoid of wordly skill, insight, and any hints of good conversation or character development....
Mid-century master?
213) Le Notti Bianche/DVD Review Luchino Visconti’s 1957 film, Le Notti Bianche / White Nights, winner of the Silver Lion Award at that year’s Venice Film Festival, and adapted from a Fyodor Dostoevsky story of the same name, is not quite a great film — it lacks both great and new ideas. Even so, it is a very good film that uses the elaborate Hollywood-inspired sets of that era — crafted by Enzo Eusepi on a Cinecittà sound stage that is manifestly artificial — to create a very un-Hollywoodian tale of love....
Marcello rocks again.
214) The Circus (Part 1)/DVD Review/Dan Schneider One can argue that Charlie Chaplin wrote, directed, and starred in greater films than his neglected 1928 gem, The Circus, his last fully silent film, which he also wrote with Joseph Plunkett, but one cannot reasonably argue that he made a funnier film; nor can one argue that The Circus is not a great film itself. Yet, critics, fans of Chaplin, and even Chaplin himself, long overlooked this great film....
The Master of Disaster.
215) The Circus (Part 2)/DVD Review This sense of a narrative bildingsroman that the audience is left with is recapitulated within the structure of the film, and its effect upon the viewer, which starts of with some of the greatest gags in film history- like the pickpocket scene, and the hall of mirrors brilliance, which prefigured Orson Welles' brilliantly derivative scene, two decades later, in The Lady From Shanghai....
Laugh, clown, laugh....
216) Wild Ducks Flying Backwards/Book Review Tom Robbins, a self-proclaimed Zen Hedonist, is one of those writers whose name is now vaguely known- although it has slipped considerably in recognition and reputation from his 1970s heyday, but whose works are doomed to end up in antique shops in a century as people hold up his moldering books and wonder why and how his banal and flat out bad writing ever got into print in the first place. In short, they will either loathe us as barbarians, laugh at us as fools, or pity us as cretins for rewarding such bad writing with publication....
Oy!
217) Good Bye Lenin!/DVD Review Wolfgang Becker’s 2003 film, Good Bye Lenin!, is not a great film, but it is far better than the usual Hollywood tripe, as well as being a cut above most independent films released by filmmakers not named John Sayles....
Solid stuff.
218) Rear Window/DVD Review Some films show their age, and others do not. Despite its reputation as a classic of great filmmaking, Alfred Hitchcock's 1954 film Rear Window, unfortunately, shows its age far too much. No, it's certainly not a bad film, by any standard, and is a pretty good one, but it's not one of Hitchcock's best, much less a great film, or deserving of any place in the Top 100 Films lists of the last few years. Technically, it deserves many plaudits, but what really fails is the screenplay....
Overrated, but Grace is a Goddess.
219) F For Fake/DVD Review One of the greatest pieces of charlatanry in Orson Welles' brilliant pseudo-documentary F For Fake, released in 1974, is the idea that Welles' lover and one time sculptress, Oja Kodar (née Olga Palinkas), had any real hand in crafting the film; specifically in writing it alongside Welles. Don't get me wrong; I have nothing against the woman nor the claim, for the claim is in keeping with the whole tenor of the film, and when she was young, well, the lovely Ms. Kodar looked positively ferocious in a bikini....
Masterful.
220) Blind Chance/DVD Review If you have ever held a pupa in your grip, you know that, if held up to a light, at a certain angle, the fully formed insect can be seen, even though it has yet to emerge. This was the sensation that I had while watching Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski's 1981 film Blind Chance (Przypadek), after having seen his glorious Three Colors trilogy. It is a film that could have been great, had it been made a decade later in Kieslowski's career, but made when it was it merely provides us with tantalizing glimpses of his later greatness....
The pupa moves....
221) How To Draw A Bunny/DVD Review Henry Darger. That is the name that hovers behind this 2002 documentary film, How To Draw A Bunny, by John Walter, which won the Special Jury Prize at the 2002 Sundance Film Festival, and details the life and wannabe legend of minor pop artist Ray Johnson (1927-1995). For those not in the know, Henry Darger was a hermit who, upon his death in the early 1970s, became a bit of a sensation when some bad artistes found and published excerpts from his lifelong continuing novel, with collages, about a make believe planet where naked girls with penises battled aliens who did not believe in Jesus Christ....
Art? Please....
222) The Serpent's Egg/DVD Review When Ingmar Bergman was in self-imposed exile from Sweden, in the late 1970s, over a flap where he was accused by the Swedish government of tax evasion, he made several films abroad. One of them was The Serpent's Egg (Das Schlangenei-Örmens ägg), an English language film (his second- The Touch was the first) made in 1978, in West Berlin studios, for legendary film producer Dino de Laurentiis, who was reeling from the financial disaster that was his 1976 remake of King Kong....
Ingmar lays one.
223) Orpheus/DVD Review The second film in Jean Cocteau’s so-called Orphic Trilogy, Orphée / Orpheus (the truth is, the films in this ‘trilogy’ do not make up an actual trilogy), deals with the classic Orpheus and Eurydice myth. It is also a better film than its predecessor, Le Sang d’un poète / The Blood of a Poet, in the three-film The Criterion Collection release....
Not again!
224) Persona/DVD Review Persona, Ingmar Bergman's 1966 black and white film, reminds me of Herman Hesse's novella Siddhartha. Not in the subject matter, but in that both works of art perfectly marry their messages with their forms, and both say so much with so little a narrative spine. In that sense, both are great works of art that transcend any of the discomfit their often dubious artistic and social claims make....
Style over substance. So what?
225) Babes In Toyland/DVD Review (Part 1) The scariest dreams are tattered and not seamless. They are not like slick Hollywood special effects laden films, but like those lower budget masterpieces; Carnival Of Souls or the original Night Of The Living Dead....
Scary?
226) Babes In Toyland/DVD Review (Part 2) Babes In Toyland, while it may not be technically a better film than The Wizard Of Oz, is the better and more effective film, and its moments of strangeness and scariness far surpass the Judy Garland vehicle....
The plot.
227) Babes In Toyland/DVD Review (Part 3) But it’s not just the anarchy of Babes In Toyland that leaves decades long nightmarish images in the mind of a child. Really look at some of the deeper goings on....
The End.
228) All The Real Girls/DVD Review All The Real Girls was David Gordon Green’s 2003 follow up film to his 2000 debut film George Washington, which became an underground classic. The good news is that All The Real Girls is a superior film to that earlier excellent film, and Green shows real growth as a filmmaker....
Southern classic.
229) Nosferatu/DVD Review Werner Herzog is an artist out of his time….and that's a very good thing for lovers of great films. His own great 1979 film Nosferatu, Phantom Of The Night (Nosferatu, Phantom Der Nacht), which was released in America as Nosferatu, The Vampire, is less a classic vampire film and more a Post-Apocalyptic tale....
Herzog strikes again!
230) The Conversation/DVD Review There are some works of art that are both obviously derivative of others and obviously inferior to the originals. Those simply ape the earlier work, tweak a few minor things, and try to pass off their theft as ‘homage.’ The Conversation (1974), written and directed by Francis Ford Coppola, is not one of those minor works....
Coppola's classic.
231) Tokyo Story/DVD Review There are many roads to greatness. This is a notion that I have always held to be true. No greater example of this could be given than by comparing the films of two of the greatest filmmakers from Japan. Of course, most people have heard of Akira Kurosawa and his classics like Seven Samurai, Rashomon, and Ikiru. But there is also Yasujiro Ozu (1903-1963), whose canon of films is set in modern times far more often than Kurosawa's. Where Kurosawa was grand, Ozu is small....
Ozu prime.
232) Seconds Of Pleasure/Book Review Why did Eugene O'Neill decide to publish a book of his poems? Granted, I could ask the same of, say, Leonard Nimoy, but the famed Star Trek actor never laid claim to caring for the written word the way the great American playwright did. Yet, both published hideous doggerel for the same reason- they could, because of their celebrity....
Bad.
233) Civilwarland In Bad Decline/Book Review Every so often I come across a writer I think will be bad, due to an image they cultivate, but turns out to be a good one, just as there are writers I think will be good, via reputation or personal recommendations, that turn out to be atrocious. Then, there are writers that split the difference....
Better.
234) Rope/DVD Review Alfred Hitchcock is always considered a fine technical craftsman of film, but he has always been perceived as something less of an artistic filmmaker in comparison to other world greats, such as Akira Kurosawa, Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, Orson Welles, Stanley Kubrick, or even his fellow countryman David Lean. This is because as well plotted, acted, and directed as his films manifestly are, they appear to most critics as mere shiny baubles- all style and little substance....
Best.
235) The Mountains Won't Remember Us/Book Review (6th Review down) Not all bad writing is bad. That statement may confuse people who are longtime readers of mine. What I mean by it is that all writing that is considered bad is not necessarily badly written. There are writers whose work avoids the obvious cliches, easy stereotypes, bad music (especially in poetry), and the glaring maladies that kill a written work, which tends to fail in only a handful of ways, yet whose writing is just painfully dull, and essentially pointless, and far from being good. In fact, even though it is 'better written' than most bad writing, often the worse writing has better potential because at least it is individuated....
Snoozer.
236) Whity/DVD Review In 1970 the German film director Rainer Werner Fassbinder wrote and directed a German language American Western film that, unlike the Spaghetti Westerns of that era- also filmed in Almer�a, Andaluc�a, Spain, was not played straight, but more like a silent era Expressionistic film, replete with melodramatic music, cartoonish face makeup, and over the top acting, especially in the physical movements of the actors' bodies. It's one of those films that is so highly stylized, so earnestly trying to be deep and/or profound that it is instead really, really bad; but in the best possible sense of the word bad. It's so bad a film that it is often hysterically funny....
Plan 9?
237) 49 Up/DVD Review Yes, he did it again! One of the great filmic projects of the 20th Century, Michael Apted's The Up Series, makes its entrée into the new millennium with the seventh bravura installment of its documentary format....
He did it again!
238) La Dolce Vita/DVD Review La Dolce Vita (The Sweet Life), as ironic a title as has ever been used in motion picture history, Federico Fellini's 1960 film commentary on modern hedonism and anomy, and filmed in 1959 in Rome, may just be the best film in his canon, for it combines the Neo-Realism of earlier classics like La Strada and Nights Of Cabiria, while admixing some of the surreal touches of his later classics....
Marcello in top form.
239) Without A Hero/Book Review This book was written after its writer, Thomas John Boyle, became T. Coraghessan Boyle, but before he morphed into merely T.C. Boyle. Some online sites suggest that Coraghessan was a middle name made up because it was 'sexier' than mere John, or T.J., while others claim it as his second middle name from birth. I don't know which is true, but the first option seems far more in line with the egoistic ravings of this man, not to mention the self-consciously bad boy poses he strikes in the photos of himself. Regardless of his ultimate poseur nature, however, Boyle is a bad writer- very bad....
Oy!
240) Testament Of Orpheus/DVD Review The third film in Jean Cocteau’s "Orphic Trilogy," Le Testament d’Orphée, ou ne me demandez pas pourquoi! / The Testament of Orpheus, is also the third film in The Criterion Collection’s boxed set release. While it’s the best of the trio, it’s nowhere near a good film. The Testament of Orpheus does have perhaps the best score and its 80 minutes offer a dozen or so moments that have some spark of creativity, yet, Cocteau is much too narcissistic and his much film too self-indulgent....
Cocteau blows.
241) The Big Red One/DVD Review Having seen the original version of Sam Fuller's The Big Red One, years ago, on television, I could see glimmers of something far grander, but did not know what it could be, and given the callowness of my youth, even had I known what was missing, I could not have mentally interpolated back what the studio that financed the film, Lorimar, had cut. Fuller was basically a B film auteur, having made his reputation on 1950s and 1960s B war films....
Fuller kicks ass!
242) Godzilla/Gojira/DVD Review Heaven. When I came across the long-awaited release of the original 1954 Japanese monster film Gojira on DVD, I thought I had struck heaven. That it was accompanied by its Americanized cousin, Godzilla, King of the Monsters, only doubled the joy of expectation. And for once, I was not disappointed. The mark of a good critic is admitting biases, so I will state up front that as a young boy, growing up in the late 1960s and early 1970s, I watched the annual American release of the latest Godzilla film at the old Ridgewood Theater....
Roar!
243) Vertigo/DVD Review Watching the films of Alfred Hitchcock reminds one of the fairy tale of Goldilocks And The Three Bears. Not so much in the actual filmic nature of the art, but in the critical reception accorded the films. As example, some of the films that are labeled masterpieces, like Psycho or The Birds, are just right in their assessment. Other films that are critically neglected are, in fact, among Hitchcock's better films, such as Rope and Frenzy. Then there are the films that are hailed as masterpieces, but which are profound disappointments. If they are not outright bad films, they certainly are only marginally solid films, and achieve their solidity mainly through technical accomplishments. In this category I would place Rear Window and Vertigo....
Overrated.
244) Vincent & Theo/DVD Review Vincent & Theo, a 1990 film by director Robert Altman, may be the worst film ever made by a major director who has made a great film. Watching this two hour and twenty minute abomination left me, and my wife, stunned by its wretchedness. From the nonexistent narrative, to the indulgence of every artistic cliché imaginable....
Ugh!
245) Regeneration (aka Behind The Lines)/DVD Review In 1998 I saw a great war film that was lost in the glare of the nearly simultaneous American film releases of Terrence Malick’s remake of The Thin Red Line- which is a great film, and Steven Spielberg’s cliché and stereotype-dripping Saving Private Ryan. It was a 1997 Canadian and British film called Regeneration, directed by Gillies MacKinnon....
Butchers!
246) Brotherhood Of The Bomb/Book Review (3rd review down) In the world of historians, Daniel J. Boorstin stands head and shoulders above all lesser writers in that nonfiction genre, much as Loren Eiseley and, to a lesser extent, Stephen Jay Gould, reign supreme as literary craftsmen in the sciences. This thought was inescapable to me as I read yet another in a prolix series of books about the historic import of scientists. Since the two disciplines- science and history- often intertwine when reading books about the Manhattan Project comparisons of the writers of such books with the aforementioned trinity is inevitable....
Dull. Period.
247) Soylent Green/DVD Review In terms of the arts, the 1970s were a very turbulent era. In literature and the visual arts, it was the closing of a great fifty or sixty year period of creativity that has yet to be restarted. In music it was a decade that many see as a low point, due to corporate rock and disco. On television it was a Golden Age for situation comedies, from The Odd Couple to the Mary Tyler Moore Show to M*A*S*H to All In The Family, but in film it was even a greater period of creativity, in all genres, that saw the rise of the American auteur....
Chuck Heston gets it in the end.
248) Collected Stories/Grace Paley Book Review The very things that have made Grace Paley a terrible poet unfortunately affect her bad fiction as well. She is preachy, pedantic, and damns any notion of advancing skill or craftsmanship over screeding and speechifying. And it’s doubly a shame because her earliest stories showed some potential, however limited, but even more drive....
Ugh!
249) After The Quake/Book Review Haruki Murakami is one of the most well known Japanese novelists still living, but his small collection of six short stories, ‘After The Quake’, is a good intro to this writer. The book’s stories revolve around the brief time between a January, 1995 earthquake that devastated the city of Kobe, and the terrorist poison gas attacks in a subway a couple of months later in Tokyo....
Yea!
250) 3 Women/DVD Review Robert Altman’s 1977 film ‘3 Women’, which he wrote and directed from a dream he had, is not a bad film, but not a great film either. It is one of those films, ala Robert Browning, whose reach exceeds its grasp, but not in the good way. It is intended to work on a dream level, yet it is too realistic in its detail for much of the film to be seen as all dream....
Oddness immanent.
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