A Non-Commercial Decade Of Dominance!
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Webliography: Title/Subject/Author
501) Campaign 2008/Obama/Dan Schneider I am a political Independent who has voted in the last three Presidential General Elections for Ralph Nader. I did so, despite my Democratic roots, because I am a pragmatist and the last three Republican candidates for President were unappealing- not a budding Abe Lincoln nor Teddy Roosevelt in the lot. In 1992 I voted for Bill Clinton because of the disastrous 12 years of Reagan-Bush policies that destroyed the middle class, decimated the poor, and threatened civil liberties with their radical agenda for the Supreme Court. The choice was clear. The only other choices were the elder George Bush, who reaped the evil Ronald Reagan sowed, or a psychotic billionaire dwarf named Ross Perot, whose only vindication, all these years later, is that he was correct about the large flushing sound created by NAFTA....
Da man.
502) Stardust Memories/DVD Review/Dan Schneider One of the interesting things about a great work of art is how, upon re-experience a) it holds up and/or b) deepens into something even better. From the first time I saw Woody Allen’s 88-minute black-and-white 1980 effort Stardust Memories (made early on in Woody’s Golden Era of 1977-1992) on a VHS tape, I knew I was watching one of the greatest films ever made....
A classic.
503) Never Let Me Go/Book Review/Jessica Schneider One of the bad things about being a great writer is that readers will come to expect that writer to reach greatness every time, and so if a work falls just short at very good or merely excellent, this can be a disappointment. This is just what Kazuo Ishiguro’s most recent novel, Never Let Me Go does. Because I have read now all of the works of Ishiguro — who has written great books like The Remains of the Day and An Artist of the Floating World as well as near great books such as A Pale View of Hills and The Unconsoled -- I can say that Never Let Me Go let me down a bit but that is only because I expect more from him than I would other writers....
Pretty good.
504) Rescue Dawn/DVD Review/Dan Schneider It’s been quite a few years since Werner Herzog did a major fictive film. The last couple of decades has seen an increasing veer into documentaries and more experimental cinema. However, with the 2007 film, Rescue Dawn, Herzog shows that the years have not taken their all too inexorable toll on the visionary mind. While the film is not an inarguably great masterpiece along the lines of some of his classic fictive films from the 1970s, it is a terrific war film, but, more so, a terrific prison escape and action film, even as it wholly subverts many of those subgenre’s worst banalities....
Herzog in command.
505) Approaching 70/Poem/Dan Schneider
Aging's not so bad.
506) Ruthless/Book Review/Jessica Schneider If you are laughing upon sight of this review of Ruthless: A Tell-All Book, I can say that I join you in your laughing. I’m going to be upfront and say that I’m no fan of Oprah Winfrey for many reasons. Yet, one would think that I’d be giving this trashy anti-Oprah book positive reviews then, right? First, a bit of background....
Oprah sucks- old news.
507) All Aunt Hagar's Children/Book Review/Dan Schneider Reading the latest book of short stories put out by Pulitzer Prize winner Edward P. Jones, All Aunt Hagar’s Children, was a profound disappointment because, unlike bad writers like Dave Eggers, T.C. Boyle, David Foster Wallace, newcomers like Donald Ray Pollock, or literary leeches like Thomas Steinbeck, Jones actually has (or had) writing talent. His 1991 book of short stories, Lost In The City, actually was a great piece of literature, with an astounding nine of its fourteen stories reaching greatness (utterly unheard of for published manuscripts). However, The Known World, his 2003 novel that actually won him the Pulitzer, was merely a mediocrity....
Bad from great.
508) Anne Of Green Gables/Book Review/Jessica Schneider I have been a longtime fan of the Anne of Green Gables made-for-TV movies, starring Megan Follows as Anne. Those films had done such a good job that I thought they’d be impossible to beat, and hence I only finally got around to reading the classic children’s tale, published back in 1908. The book is a very good one, and certainly a great children’s tale, yet it falls just short of the films....
Quality lit.
509) Last Year In Marienbad/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Forget all prior claims you’ve read about Alain Resnais‘ 90-minute, black-and-white L’Année dernière à Marienbad / Last Year in Marienbad (1961) from the bad to the good, from publicity nonsense which declaims the three main characters are named after letters (they are actually unnamed), and see it raw; for then you’ll see why greatness is its own company. That’s because the difference between this truly great film, a work of art considered a cinematic high point, and the 1962 Carnival of Souls, considered a B-horror film, are minimal. Their similarities, however, are considerable, even though I doubt that the latter film’s director, Herk Harvey, had even seen Last Year in Marienbad while making his only feature. I say this because Last Year in Marienbad truly is one of those works of art that the moment it is experienced the viewer connects with it as something they feel has always been. It is like that tune you hear that becomes a Top 40 hit, and you swear you’ve known it for years....
Escherian bliss.
510) Vampyr/DVD Review/Dan Schneider The Criterion Collection will shortly be releasing a two-disk version of the 1932 black and white classic horror film by Carl Theodor Dreyer, Vampyr. I first watched this film about twenty years ago, on a VHS release, and, unlike many others, immediately recognized it as a supernal piece of cinema. Then, I did not have the critical knowledge to discern why, but I do now, and will explicate....
A classic.
512) High And Low/DVD Review/Dan Schneider While most well known for his classic Japanese period dramas, such as Seven Samurai, Rashomon, and Throne Of Blood, the fact is that director Akira Kurosawa’s lasting legacy will be sustained by his towering achievements in then contemporary Japanese drama — films such as Ikiru, The Bad Sleep Well, and 1963’s black and white crime drama High And Low.....
Akira kicks ass.
511) Sonnet For My Pretty Skirt/Poem/Jessica Schneider
Good stuff.
513) The Rules Of The Game/DVD Review/Dan Schneider French filmmaker Jean Renoir’s 1939 black and white classic, The Rules Of The Game (La Règle Du Jeu), routinely shows up on Top Five lists for best films ever, along with classics like Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane, Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, and Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story....
Overrated.
514) Vampyr/DVD Review/Dan Schneider The Criterion Collection will shortly be releasing a two-disk version of the 1932 black and white classic horror film by Carl Theodor Dreyer, Vampyr. I first watched this film about twenty years ago, on a VHS release, and, unlike many others, immediately recognized it as a supernal piece of cinema. Then, I did not have the critical knowledge to discern why, but I do now, and will explicate....
A classic.
515) Shock Corridor/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Director Sam Fuller’s Shock Corridor is one of those wildly aberrant works of art than can be called great, on some levels, and utter schlock, on other levels. And both are correct assessments of this film that can only be termed a didactic melodrama. What results, though, is that one is left with a so-so film- not the piece of pulp garbage that many reviewers first assailed the black and white film (with dream sequence snippets in color) as, upon its release in 1963, nor the masterpiece that revisionists have proffered in later auteur-based assessments. It had been almost a quarter century since I last watched the film, but recently popped in The Criterion Collection DVD of the film, and rediscovered its ‘charms.’....
Hit and miss.
516) The Wild Places/Book Review/Jessica Schneider Whenever I read a book that isn’t great but merely good, the writer will fall into two categories. The first is where the writer could be great, if only some trimming and tweaking were done. Frank McCourt falls into this category with his classic memoir Angela’s Ashes, for while the book is filled with terrific scenes and description, structurally the book is weak. The second involves a writer that, despite being good technically, lacks the “highs” of the first writer. Macfarlane falls into this second category, for while The Wild Places is technically a good, solid book, there is something missing from the writing that no amount of tweaking could ever make it a great work....
So-so.
517) Borat/DVD Review/Dan Schneider A couple of years ago, in 2006, the biggest comedy hit was a film called Borat: Cultural Learnings Of America For Make Benefit Glorious Nation Of Kazakhstan. The film grew out of a recurring character on a British television show, Da Ali G. Show, created by Jewish comedian Sacha Baron Cohen. I mention the man’s religion because the film attacks anti-Semitism in a brutally funny way, even as many dull-witted critics accuse the film of that bias....
Hilarious.
518) Pather Panchali/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Somewhere between the Oriental placidity of a great Yasujiro Ozu film and the harsh reality of a great Vittorio De Sica drama lies the world of Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali, the first of his Apu Trilogy of films. And in case there was any doubt, that place is a very, very good one for any filmmaker to be, for the two aforementioned filmmakers were masters of their own sorts of films, and- if this one, and first, film of Ray’s is an indication, the same plaudits can be ascribed to Ray, a former advertising firm’s employee who struck out on his own to raise Indian cinema from the melodramatic doldrums it had been in since its creation....
Classic.
519) Au Hasard Balthazar/DVD Review/Dan Schneider The greatness of Robert Bresson’s 1966 black and white film, Au Hasard Balthazar (which, translated, means something like Randomly Balthazar or By Chance Balthazar), comes not from only one aspect of it, nor even just a few. Virtually every aspect of the film reeks and resonates greatness, although, despite this being the near full consensus opinion of film lovers and critics alike, a reading of the criticism suggests it is one of the most poorly understood films....
Nonpareil.
520) Red Clay, Blue Cadillac/Book Review/Dan Schneider Michael Malone is most well known for being the lead writer on the American soap opera One Life To Live. As someone who has watched soap operas and other serial fictions for years. I do not hold this against him. However, having read his collection of twelve stories centered on Southern belles, Red Clay, Blue Cadillac, I can say that he certainly doesn't hide the fact of his past employment....
Better than expected.
521) The Conscience Of A Liberal/Book Review/Dan Schneider In reading Paul Krugman’s 2007 book, The Conscience Of A Liberal, I wanted to be able to speak of his writing style, as much as of his opinions, politically and economically. This is because I simply get tired of books being criticized simply for their arguments and not how they are presented. In the last year or so, as example, I got two books that exemplified this approach....
Good stuff.
522) Fire/DVD Review/Dan Schneider I watched the 1996 Canadian film Fire by Indian filmmaker Deepa Mehta after having long heard of its taboo nature based mainly on its depiction of lesbianism. And while not a silly film — such as the softcore When Night Is Falling or the horrid Hollywood ‘Hook’em’ Brokeback Mountain — Fire is nowhere near a great film, either. As for the lesbianism, there is very little skin and the ‘love story’ is rather demure. On the other hand, there is far too much radical Feminist (capital F) ideology that lowers the intellectual argument of Mehta’s film — the most obvious being that the film follows the line that all men are scum who use, abuse, neglect, and/or degrade women. Compounding matters, the two wannabe lesbians, Radha (Bollywood star Shabana Azmi) and Sita (Nandita Das), are drop dead gorgeous; they’re hardly ‘real-world’ lesbians along the lines of an Indian Andrea Dworkin, Rosie O’Donnell, or Ellen DeGeneres....
Ok.
523) An Autumn Afternoon/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Goddamn, Yasujiro Ozu’s great. Thus my first thought whilst taking in the last few moments of the Japanese film master’s last completed film, 1962’s An Autumn Afternoon (Sanma No Aj -- which, according to online sources, translates as The Taste Of Mackerel — a feeling Ozu reputedly wanted to evoke with this film). Yes, many critics have pointed out that it shares many concerns with earlier Ozu fims, and films that are considered greater films, but there is no doubt that this film is a great film, and arguably one of Ozu’s finest. It is in color, and clocks in at 112 minutes in length....
Great.
524) Say It Like Obama/DVD Review/Jessica Schneider Even the deepest McCain supporters cannot deny the talent that Barack Obama has for oration. His articulation, mannerisms, and wording all play a role in a delivery that has placed him beside the likes of Martin Luther King Jr. and JFK. His speeches have been quoted all around the globe, even published in their very own book. He is so good, in fact, that his opposition has seized on this and tried to turn his skill into a negative. “They’re just words,” some have said. “He’s only a celebrity,” others have claimed. But there is no denying Barack Obama’s ability to captivate an audience, and in Shel Leanne’s book, titled Say It Like Obama: The Power of Speaking With Purpose and Vision, readers are given insights into just how to use these techniques for themselves....
Say it!
525) Aparajito/DVD Review/Dan Schneider The first film of Satyajit Ray’s Apu Trilogy, Pather Panchali, was such a great film that, naturally, the second film in the series was bound to suffer a bit of a letdown. Thus, Aparajito (The Unvanquished), based on the novel Aparajita, by Bibhutibhushan Banerjee, is not the unadulterated great piece of art that Pather Panchali is. Like many middle films of a series, it suffers from the infamous middle filmitis — when films that are not first in a series rely too heavily upon an audience’s memories of earlier films to inform them of the traits of characters, the chronology of prior events, and a general knowledge of the world the film series is set in....
Classic.
526) La Jetee/Sans Soleil/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Over the years, I had heard of the name Chris Marker, as an avante-garde filmmaker, but having sat through many lost hours, in my early twenties, watching Warhol Factory films and their dread knockoffs, one can understand why I was never particularly moved to engage the films of this man; especially considering that he was French, from that nation that launched the careers of such notable filmic failures as Jean Cocteau and Jean-Luc Godard. But, then I did something amazing. I actually dropped my biases, and watched and engaged the work of art before me (or, technically, the two works of art), and let it, not the opinions of others, dictate my reaction....
Great.
527) Flash Of Genius/Film Review/Dan Schneider The new film, Flash Of Genius, by first time director Marc Abraham, is one of those films that is well made, well acted, and well shot; technically, there is little to argue with. But, it’s still utterly predictable; as predictable as the sports film that features an underdog you just know will win in the end. As with most films that ultimately fail, this film fails for its screenplay. No film can succeed without a good screenplay — one with good dialogue, good characterization, and a good tale. The plot, also, has to come alive, and distinguish itself....
Eh.
528) Missing/DVD Review/Dan Schneider The 1982 political film, Missing, by Costa-Gavras (his first American production), is soon to be released on DVD by The Criterion Collection. It’s a good film, but not a great one. This is mostly because it lacks any real poetry, the way Ingmar Bergman’s anti-war film, Shame, has. Yes, it’s well plotted, well acted, well directed, and scrupulously avoids sentimentality. But it also avoids any real higher purpose. Yes, Costa-Gavras is perhaps the foremost political filmmaker of our time, but that does not absolve an artist for failing to strive to dig deeper, core into something more essential, or give a perspective on a known event in a different way that allows for a newer understanding. Of course, these things are not requirements, but they are the hallmarks of greatness....
Missed potential.
529) The Gulag Archipelago/Book Review/Jessica Schneider The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956 is a great firsthand account of the Russian prison camps, written by someone who not only lived in them but can also write well. Never turgid, the narrative does not suffer the handicap of many historical texts in which readers are bogged down with dates and irrelevant detail....
Good stuff.
530) The Wink Of The Zenith/Book Review/Jessica Schneider Few writers have lived exciting lives with Jack London-type adventures. And in Floyd Skloot's latest memoir, The Wink of the Zenith: The Shaping of a Writer's Life, one is given a quiet slice of Americana that is neither extraordinary nor shaped with lyrical passion. But Zenith is much more solidly written than most writers' memoirs - I mean the standard "writer's life" written by yet another upper-middle-class suburbanite complaining about the woes of suburbia. I found it a relief to read here about a real person with real-life issues, rather than the cliched hyperbole found in most writers of the ills (alcoholism, self-indulgence, drug use, etc.) they have brought on themselves....
Solid.
531) W./Film Review/Dan Schneider Oliver Stone’s latest film, W., a seeming semi-satire on only the first term of President George W. Bush (no Hurricane Katrina, no BS on "the Surge has worked," no economic disaster), is a hit and miss affair which, given Stone’s track record in film this decade, is possibly a slight improvement on those earlier films. Recall the deadening mediocrity of U-Turn and utter pointlessness of Any Given Sunday, or the not quite campy enough schlock of Alexander? If you don’t, consider yourself lucky....
Yawn.
532) An Appreciation Of The Songwriting And Music Of John Arthur Martinez/Music Review/Dan Schneider Recently, my wife and I spent a night at a local resort called the Canyon Of The Eagles, northwest of Burnet, Texas. As it was a week before Halloween, things were decked out in orange and black, and faux spider webs abounded. On out first evening there, after we returned from eating in Burnet, at about 7:45 pm, we saw that there was to be a small concert in front of the resort’s restaurant area....
More Good stuff.
533) Sister Carrie/Book Review/Jessica Schneider Sister Carrie is the first novel I’ve read by Theodore Dreiser. Previously, I’d read some of his short stories, which were excellent. I am pleased to say that Sister Carrie does not disappoint, though there are a few things about the book that intrigued me, as well as Dreiser himself as a writer....
Still More Good stuff.
534) Wayfaring At Waverly In Silver Lake/Book Review/Dan Schneider James McCourt is one of those writers who seems to have gotten in print via connections, and the fact that he is a 'gay writer'. I say this because it is the only discernible reason available given his actual writing ability. That said, I had to Google him to find out that he is a 'gay writer', for, thankfully, although he has many ills as a writer, illustrating his sex life does not infect every tale in this book, as it too often does the work of gay writers such as David Leavitt....
Schlock.
535) Obama/Centrist Presidency/Dan Schneider Given Senator Barack Obama's victory over Senator John McCain, last night, now is the time to dispel a few myths about what it all means. But first, let me toot my own horn a bit, for way back in early June I predicted here that the man would win with between 300 and 320 electoral votes; months before others came to a similar feeling. Most pundits foresaw another squeaker, ala 2000 or 2004. I did not; and it seems I was even too cautious. As of this morning, Obama holds a 349-163 electoral vote lead, with only North Carolina's 15 and Missouri's 11 outstanding. It looks like North Carolina will fall into Obama's camp later today, with Missouri too close to call. McCain has a slight lead, but thousands of provisional ballots from urban areas could swing it to Obama, in a week or so. The final tally will likely be 364-174 or 375-163 Obama....
Moving on.
536) Fame/Book Review/Jessica Schneider There are some who need no last names. Paris. Lindsay. Britney. Sadly, just read those three words in context and you likely know the individuals I am speaking about. Why do we know about them, or more importantly, why do we care? Philosopher Mark Rowlands provides readers with an insightful look into what fame is, what motivates it, and how it has, in recent years, evolved. Fame is part of a series called The Art of Living put out by Acumen, and in it Rowlands argues that part of the problem is the culture’s “inability to distinguish quality from bullshit,” hence bringing about the rise of people who are merely famous for being famous....
Good.
537) The Spy Who Came In From The Cold/DVD Review/Dan Schneider The Criterion Collection’s latest release is the 1965 black and white spy classic, The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, directed by Martin Ritt, whose best known films include the Woody Allen blacklist film, The Front, and the Sally Field union drama, Norma Rae. Like those, this is a very well directed and taut film. And, like those later films, this one also misses out on greatness....
Excellent.
538) Damnation/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Bela Tarr became the most well known Hungarian director of films with the 1987 release of Damnation (Kárhozat). And it’s no wonder. While not an inarguably great film, it is certainly close, and a good case for its greatness can be made. More cogently, the film showed Tarr as a filmmaker who is singular, despite some manifest parallels to the work of Andrei Tarkovsky and Theo Angelopoulos. This 117 minute long black and white film, shown in a 1.66:1 aspect ratio is similar in structure to Tarkovsky’s Stalker, and in pacing to Angelopoulos’s films, although its visual imagery is straight out of the Italian Neo-Realism of the 1940s and 1950s....
Damn good.
539) Man Bites Dog/DVD Review/Dan Schneider The 1992 Belgian mockumentary C’est arrivé près de chez vous / Man Bites Dog (or, somewhat literally, It Happened in Your Neighborhood) is one of those films that is neither bad nor good, and not really its own "thing," either. By that I mean that it is manifestly influenced by works that came before it, so it is nothing original, while also displaying techniques that other films have expanded upon. Yet, since most of these techniques and themes were not originally created within Man Bites Dog, it cannot be said to be influential in its own right. Rather, it is a conduit between other, often better, films....
So-so.
540) Crime And Punishment/DVD Review/Dan Schneider 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. Among the great titles that I was to get from Dover was Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime And Punishment, the definitive 1914 Constance Garnett translation....
Masterpiece....not quite.
541) McTeague/Book Review/Jessica Schneider Readers might not know a whole lot about Frank Norris due to his short life (1870-1902), but he is part of that school of modern style writers that include Theodore Dreiser and Stephen Crane. Annoying purple prose still lingering from the days of the Victorian Era? You will not find that here. Unfortunately, Norris died at the age of 32 due to a ruptured appendix. McTeague is probably the most well known of his works (published in 1899), even though a number of additional titles were published after his death. Now after having read McTeague, I can say that his loss is a greater tragedy for literature - for who knows what additional masterpieces might have awaited him?....
Good.
542) 81/2/DVD Review/Dan Schneider 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, played by 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 his underrated 1980 masterpiece, Stardust Memories, arguably the best film he ever made (along with Another Woman and three or four others), is always unfairly negatively compared to Italian New Wave domo Federico Fellini’s 1963 opus 8½ (Otto e mezzo). I think it’s a facile comparison, as well as a wrong one....
Good.
543) The Bicycle Thief/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Vittorio De Sica’s The Bicycle Thief (Ladri Di Biciclette), made in 1948, in black and white, is one of the all time great films, and, in its Neo-realistic cinema verité 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. Its screenplay is deceptively slight, but that does not mean it is not great. Oftentimes, it is assumed that a great screenplay must be witty like Woody Allen films, deep like Ingmar Bergman films, or characteristically complex like Robert Altman films, but great screenplays can also be the antithesis of those things. A great screenplay may be like that in Stanley Kubrick’s for 2001: A Space Odyssey, full of symbolism writ large, and on the other hand, it can be like The Bicycle Thief, which is symbolic precisely because it is so intensely personal....
Great.
544) The Double Life Of Veronique/DVD Review/Dan Schneider The Double Life Of Véronique (La Double Vie De Véronique) is the 1991 French-Polish film by Krzysztof Kieslowski, written by himself and Krzysztof Piesiewicz that was the presage for the greatness of the Three Colors Trilogy (Blue, White, and Red), and was an international sensation at both the Cannes and New York film festivals, for here is where the gilt-hazed camera work of Slawomir Idziak, the music of Zbigniew Preisner (although slyly credited to the fictional Van den Budenmayer in the film- a running joke within Kieslowski’s later works), and Kieslowski’s own vision first touched greatness- even if it is a conditional greatness, more of sensuality than sense. The film has been rhapsodized by international film critics as Kieslowski’s ‘coming out’ film, but one can see it is clearly a bridge between the direction he was headed with his tv series The Decalogue, and where he ended up in the Trilogy....
Misses greatness.
545) Aguirre: The Wrath Of God/Dan Schneider 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....
Masterpiece.
546) The Philosopher And The Wolf/Book Review/Dan Schneider Philosopher Mark Rowlands is not what one would classically think of as a great writer, in that his prose is not supernally poetic like Loren Eiseley’s, he does not use easily understood but well-targeted metaphors like Stephen Jay Gould, nor does he have the raw power that Friedrich Nietszche did. But he manages to convey highly nuanced and deep concepts in remarkably simple sentences and constructs as he grounds each seemingly pedestrian sentence with its neighbor in ways that crescendo....
Masterful
547) The Wages Of Fear/DVD Review/Dan Schneider 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. However, when they’re right they’re right. If one wants to know why ‘Ugly Americans’ are loathed in the Middle East it’s not because of the rhetorical claptrap about a ‘clash of cultures’, nor Evil vs. Freedom, but because of decades of exploitation where a select group of mainly American corporations, unanswerable to anyone, get rich off of exploiting the masses where they swoop in. It happened in the Middle East, as well as in Latin America- perhaps the only place in the world where anti-Americanism (really anti-American corporate imperialism) rivals or surpasses that in the Middle East. As a minor character in the film rails, ‘Wherever there’s oil, there’s always Americans.’ But, if all this film were was an anti-American screed it would still not grip viewers today. What it is, is a great portrait of the extremes that human beings- ok, men, will go to just to have things, and to what lengths their machismo will drive them....
Underrated greatness.
548) Day Of Wrath/DVD Review/Dan Schneider 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. This is never made more clear than at the film’s end, where the psychologically fragile Anne (Lisbeth Movin) is betrayed by her horrid mother-in-law, her lover, and her own psyche, and actually comes to believe in her own guilt of being a witch, for wishing the death of her aged husband....
Black and white heaven?
549) Deliverance/DVD Review/Dan Schneider New on the Fox Network: When Good Movies Go Bad! Or, a review of John Boorman’s 1972 film Deliverance, which he produced and directed, based upon James Dickey’s 1970 novel of the same name. Dickey also wrote the screenplay, which explains a lot, especially if you are familiar with his ‘poetry.’ The actual look of the film, however, is sensational. The cinematography of nature, by Vilmos Zsigmond, is still stunning after thirty-five years- especially those scenes shot in twilight, dusk, and night, and the first forty-five or so minutes sets the basis of a good tale which could have been something really special. Then, Dickey digs into his own personal bag of fetishes (his most famous poem is The Sheep Child, about bestiality) and latencies and the film becomes an almost nonstop stream of a narrative propelled by the Dumbest Possible Action theory of film....
Oy!
550) Casablanca/DVD Review/Dan Schneider About three years ago I finally gave in to watch It’s a Wonderful Life for the first time. I had hesitated because of the five- and ten-minute snippets of the film I had seen, and for its reputation as a hokey Christmas story ‘chestnut.’ Well, was I wrong, for It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) is a truly great film, and arguably the best Frank Capra ever made. It also is a good example of the auteur theory of filmmaking, in that the film fits very well within the Capra canon. From the first five minutes the viewer knows that no one but Frank Capra could have directed it. With that in mind, I decided to finally give in and watch Casablanca from start to finish. Like It’s a Wonderful Life, it’s a film from the 1940s (1942 to be exact) whose hold on audiences has not abated. However, unlike It’s a Wonderful Life, Casablanca often turns up in the Top Ten Greatest Films of All Time lists, and this is wrong — for while Casablanca is overall a good film (I’d give it a 75-80 score out of 100), it is nowhere near greatness for reasons technical, aesthetic, and artistic. I will detail these reasons in this essay, and demonstrate that, while the film is eminently likable, likability and greatness are wholly different qualities that a thing possesses — be that thing a work of art, an idea, or just the execution of a plan....
Overrated.
551) Frenzy/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Have you ever wondered about what a famous artist’s work would be like if they were living in the present age? Imagine Van Gogh living in Los Angeles, or Dante writing of the military debacle in Iraq. Well, imagine what Alfred Hitchcock- either of the early British thrillers or 1950s vintage era Hollywood classics, would be like if he were given a free hand in the 21st Century. Fortunately, cineastes need not strain their imaginations too much, for his penultimate film, 1972’s Frenzy- his first film made in England in over twenty years, gives hints as to what a 21st Century Hitchcock would provide; and it’s assuredly good. In fact, save for a too rushed last fifteen or twenty minutes, it would be the equal of his three or four greatest films....
Better than most of Hitch's films.
552) Satyricon/DVD Review/Dan Schneider The best way to understand director Federico Fellini’s audacious 1968 film Satyricon (also known as Fellini Satyricon, because 1967 saw the release of Satyricon by fellow Italian filmmaker Gian Luigi Polidoro) is within the context of its year of release. That pivotal year saw the release of such indelible film classics as The Graduate, Planet of the Apes, Night Of The Living Dead, and 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Satyricon is very much in league with all of those films. It is even more sexually daring than The Graduate (especially homosexually), as politically subversive as Planet Of The Apes, as relentless as Night Of The Living Dead, and as far out as 2001: A Space Odyssey. I would also add that it is as symbolic as that landmark of television from the U.K., The Prisoner. But, is it a great film? I’d say no, although it is a very intriguing film, and not nearly as bad a film as its worst critics claim. That said, it is not the cinematic masterpiece its boosters claim, even if it had undoubted influence on such later films as Bob Guccione’s sadomasochistic Caligula....
Better than expected.
553) The Devil In The White City/Book Review/Jessica Schneider The Devil in the White City is a book that my stepfather recommended to me, and my stepfather is someone who reads Jimmy Buffett books, so I did not have high hopes. Yet this is more a disappointment than it is a bad book. It had the potential to be an excellent one, but falls short....
Solid.
554) Ordet/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Denmark’s Carl Theodor Dreyer was one of the great auteurs of early cinema, and such masterpieces as Vampyr and Day Of Wrath attest to that fact. Many critics, however, have hailed either his earlier silent film, The Passion Of Joan Of Arc, or his later Ordet (The Word) as his greatest work, and while I’ve never seen the earlier film in a full reatoration, having just watched Ordet I can say, uncategorically, that it is not in a league with Vampyr nor Day Of Wrath. This is not to say that the film is a bad one, but it is nowhere near a great one....
Good but unsatisfying.
555) Damnation/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Bela Tarr became the most well known Hungarian director of films with the 1987 release of Damnation (Kárhozat). And it’s no wonder. While not an inarguably great film, it is certainly close, and a good case for its greatness can be made. More cogently, the film showed Tarr as a filmmaker who is singular, despite some manifest parallels to the work of Andrei Tarkovsky and Theo Angelopoulos. This 117 minute long black and white film, shown in a 1.66:1 aspect ratio is similar in structure to Tarkovsky’s Stalker, and in pacing to Angelopoulos’s films, although its visual imagery is straight out of the Italian Neo-Realism of the 1940s and 1950s....
Damn good.
556) Ikiru/DVD Review/Dan Schneider 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 Western audiences think of him making, and thereby lost in his canon. It is not some historical epic filled with honor, samurais, and swordplay. It is more in line with the genre of retrospective life films in the vein of Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane or Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries, in that we drop in the on the life of an ordinary man- in this case lifelong low level Tokyo city bureaucrat office head Kanji Watanabe (Takashi Shimura), a few months before his death by stomach cancer, and witness how this ‘living mummy’, as his co-workers chide him (one of the nicer things they say about him), reclaims meaning in a life long since blanched of it. Unlike Charles Foster Kane, a business magnate, or Isak Borg, a renowned Academic, Watanabe is the sort of man most people would ignore....
Magnificent.
557) La Dolce Vita/DVD Review/Dan Schneider 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. Plus, it is the best written and most ambitious of his films. In many ways, its lead star, Marcello Mastroianni, would play a similar version of this film’s lead character, gossip journalist Marcello Rubini, in Michelangelo Antonioni’s La Notte ( The Night ), which followed the travails of a marriage over a single night. While this film does not follow a marriage, it does follow Marcello’s personal travails over the course of a week full of nights and early mornings- although not necessarily in that order. Otherwise it may have been better titled La Settimana (The Week), or La Vuoto Vita (The Empty Life)....
Masterpiece.
558) Mysterious Skin/DVD Review/Dan Schneider In watching the 2004 drama, Mysterious Skin, by filmmaker Gregg Araki, I was reminded of the old gilding the lily nostrum, in that a little bit less would have been a whole lot more, qualitatively, for this film. This is a very good film that certainly had the potential to be great, but its excesses knock it a notch or two below, just enough that it barely makes the argument for near greatness. On the surface, it may be said to be much like a 1970s ABC Afterschool Special of a film, admixed with a sometimes gratuitous penchant for over the top sexuality. Despite that, however, it does succeed as a teen-based drama in ways that another teen drama, Mean Creek, did not, but also in ways that a similarly themed, and also excellent, film like L.I.E. did not....
Good, but could have been more.
559) Vertigo/DVD Review/Dan Schneider 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.
560) Lolita/Book Review/Dan Schneider Lolita. It’s been on my to read pile for a while now. It is a novel that, with reputation and all, stands as one of the Modern Library’s 100 Best Novels of the Twentieth Century. Not that I appeal to authority, but given the book’s literary presence, in no way do I think Lolita qualifies as one of the 100 Best Novels of the Twentieth Century. It’s a good book certainly, but much of its reputation, I have to believe, is due to the controversial subject matter for its day, as well as critics cribbing from one another their overpraise for the book....
Good stuff.
561) Faces/DVD Review/Dan Schneider 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. That things have regressed severely, since then, only shows how much a young Cassavetes is needed these days....
Great stuff.
562) First Men In The Moon/DVD Review/Dan Schneider The 1964 film version of H.G. Wells’ First Men In The Moon is a film I was never really fond of. Yes, it was directed by the estimable B film legend Nathan Juran, who brought the world such great B film classics as The Brain From Planet Arous, 20 Million Miles To Earth, and The 7th Voyage Of Sinbad, but it lacked the great special effects, hamminess, and babeoliciousness of those three films. On top of all that, it lacked the really horrid technical schlockery to propel it to the ‘so bad it’s good’ category either that films like Plan 9 From Outer Space and Robot Monster occupy....
Sci fi mainstay.
563) Blade Runner/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Director Ridley Scott’s dystopian 1982 sci-fi drama Blade Runner is one of those Hollywood productions whose initially mixed reviews were actually closer to the mark than the decades of hagiography that followed. That’s not to say that Blade Runner is a bad film; it’s only a much-ballyhooed mediocrity — due mostly to its sluggish screenplay — rather than a great film. Adapted (by Hampton Fancher and David Peoples) from the equally so-so novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick – a writer whose ideas for stories always outstripped his ability to render them into good prose — Blade Runner pales in comparison to Paul Verhoeven’s later Dick adaptation, Total Recall (1990), as well as to Scott’s prior sci-fi classic, Alien (1979)....
Mediocre.
564) The Whore's Child/Richard Russo/Dan Schneider Perhaps the best way to judge a short story writer is to look at how he ends his tales. If the stories end on a high note, or end well, and leave the reader wanting more, then there's a good chance the whole tale was pretty good. This serves as a good shorthand way for telling if a book of short fiction you are browsing through is worth buying. Just go to the end of the stories and if most are well written, buy the book. With that in mind, I state to you, if you come across Richard Russo's The Whore's Child And Other Stories in a mark down bin, please, just burn this book....
Burn the book!
565) The Easter Parade/Richard Yates/Jessica Schneider Something happens with every Richard Yates book I read. I sit down to read it, and I find myself unable to be pulled away. This first occurred when I read his 1961 gem of a novel Revolutionary Road, and now the same has occurred for his 1976 novel Easter Parade....
Classic.
566) Hobson's Choice/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Having grown up on the more well known films of David Lean, from his 1940s period pieces, like Great Expectations and Oliver Twist, to his famed epics, The Bridge On The River Kwai, Lawrence Of Arabia, and Dr. Zhivago, I was surprised to learn that he even made comedies. In fact, he only made two, 1945’s Blithe Spirit, based on a Noel Coward play, and the film under review, 1954’s Hobson’s Choice (Lean’s last black and white film), based upon a 1916 play of the same title by Harold Brighouse....
Good stuff.
567) Wild Strawberries/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Watching Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries for the first time was an interesting experience because of three 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 in many of his films- from camera angles and techniques, to outright theft of scenes. Not that I am accusing Allen of wrongdoing, for T.S. Eliot basically admitted that if an artist is to steal, they should steal from the greats, and Bergman crafted a great film, rife for purloining, back in 1957....
Great.
568) The Mammy/Book Review/Jessica Schneider The Mammy is the first book in the Agnes Browne trilogy, which deals with a working class Irish family during the 1960s. The book is slim, finishing with large-sized font, just under 175 pages. Agnes Browne is the Mammy the book speaks of — she’s the mother of seven who has found herself recently widowed. Forced to find a way to care for her family, the opening scene involves her going down to the Department of Social Welfare to pick up her check, yet the office has yet to receive her husband’s death certificate (he dies only hours before the book begins). Agnes wastes no time....
Ok.
569) Lonely Planets/Book Review/Dan Schneider Lonely Planets: The Natural Philosophy Of Alien Life, a 2004 book by astrobiologist David Grinspoon, is a terrific science book because it is informative, solidly written, and gives insights into not only history but its writer’s life and philosophy (natural and otherwise). Its only flaw is that it shows some signs of being dated, even just five years on. As an example, Grinspoon declares Mars is likely a dead world, for its lack of water. But, last year, water was indeed discovered on Mars, and far more of it than thought just five years ago. Also, more extrasolar planets have been discovered in the five years since the book’s publication than in the nine from first discovery till then....
Good stuff.
570) Hearts Of Darkness/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Sometimes a film can get a reputation way beyond its worth, yet still be a good film. In watching the DVD release of Hearts Of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse, Eleanor Coppola’s documentary on the making of the war epic Apocalypse Now, by her husband Francis Ford Coppola, this struck me as true. The title of this hour and a half long film, of course, comes from the source material for Apocalypse Now, Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart Of Darkness. While there is no doubt that Apocalypse Now is a great film, the documentary about it is not. Yes, it is a useful and instructive document, but, in many ways, it reminded me of the document about the making of Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny And Alexander, which had almost no commentary....
So-so.
571) The Samurai Trilogy/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Hiroshi Inagaki’s 1954-1956 three part color film, The Samurai Trilogy, is unlike many filmic trilogies for the very fact that it is, indeed, one exactly five hour long film, and not three separate linked films, for the first two films have no real endings. In this way it has much in common with The Lord Of The Rings trilogy. However, whereas those three are separate films, more or less, their source work is not. Yes, J.R.R. Tolkien’s book is often printed in three separate volumes, but it is one work. This three part film is also derived from one singular literary work, from Eiji Yoshikawa’s 1935 novel Musashi, loosely based upon the real life 17th Century Japanese folk hero, the samurai Musashi Miyamoto, who penned a classic book called The Book Of Five Rings....
Solid.
572) The Financier/Book Review/Jessica Schneider Greed. Money. Power. Given our current financial times, I am surprised more are not speaking about Theodore Dreiser. The Financier is Dreiser’s 1912 novel following his most well known work, Sister Carrie. The Financier is set during the 1860s and '70s, though little dates the work as a whole, for the lead character, Frank Cowperwood, could be any corrupt CEO living on Wall Street today....
Good read.
573) Diary Of A Country Priest/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Robert Bresson’s 1950 breakthrough film, Diary Of A Country Priest (Journal D’Un Cure De Campagne), is one of those films that is absolutely antithetical to everything a Hollywood film stands for. It is obsessive, detailed, slow, and opaque. This, however, does not mean it is a great film, as so many knee-jerk critics claim it is. It is not; but it is a very interesting film. Ostensibly, it may seem to be a film on religion and/or suffering, or, as film critic Fréderic Bonnard claims, in The Criterion Collection’s DVD essay on the film, a film ‘about imprisonment,’ but it’s neither, really. It’s more cogently a film about masochism, guilt, and pathological privation, although it does touch upon religion, suffering, and imprisonment. The film was not only directed by Bresson (his fourth of thirteen films), but also adapted by Bresson from the 1936 novel of the same title by Georges Bernanos....
Solid.
574) Robinson Crusoe On Mars/DVD Review/Dan Schneider It had been over thirty years since I last saw the 1964 science fiction film Robinson Crusoe On Mars, when I recently watched The Criterion Collection's DVD. I'd only seen it in black and white, and then in a truncated version that cut the brief nude scene. What stuck with me, and struck me again on rewatch, was just how good and emotionally realistic this film was. Yes, the special effects are dated, and the reuse of the flying saucers from The War Of The Worlds (another film by this film's director, Byron Haskin), and there are some clunkier moments, as when the film's lead brandishes a six-shooter rather than a ray gun....
Underrated.
575) Tulips/Sylvia Plath/Jessica Schneider "Their redness talks to my wound, it corresponds." This is one of the lines in the poem "Tulips" by Sylvia Plath. Whenever one is analyzing poetry (or any work of art for that matter) it is important to avoid two things: 1) to not become too pedantic in one's approach and 2) continually rely on the artist's biography to fill in details. In the case of Plath, too often critics will rehash the same fodder when it comes to understanding her poetry: that she was depressed, lonely, suicidal, etc. While these factors certainly do work their way into her art, they are not the reasons for why her art succeeds in the ways that it does....
Poetic analysis.
576) Evil Brain From Outer Space/DVD Review/Dan Schneider In all my years watching Gamera and Godzilla films, I thought I had seen all the possible Japanese monster movie variants, but, somehow, this little film slid by my attention. First, while this is technically a review of a DVD, the fact is that I watched this 1956 black and white film on one of those cheapo 50-movie packs from Mill Creek Entertainment, so there was absolutely nothing in terms of extra features. Yet, so what? If one were to expect features for a film that was clearly made for a 1950 television Captain Video And His Video Rangers knockoff for Japan, well, one would be silly....
Good crap.
577) Marnie/DVD Review/Dan Schneider After his back to back commercial and critical triumphs of Psycho and The Birds, Alfred Hitchcock decided to go ‘interior.’ By that, I mean he decided to get unfortunately Freudian in his approach to crime, as he had throughout his career. Unfortunately, all but a few of his films suffer from their reliance on the outmoded and simplistic approaches to psychology that he employed. One of them was Marnie, his 1964 color follow up to the two terrific films mentioned at the start, starring his The Birds female lead, Tippi Hedren....
Ok.
578) A Pure Drop/Book Review/Jessica Schneider Rare is it to have two artists, one a father and the other a son, both who have talent in the same field. Think about it: while there are many offspring who try to follow in their parents' footsteps, the usual occurrence is that the child is nothing but a distant drop of what the parent was, and that is putting it kindly. Examples would be Sylvia Plath and Frieda Hughes, John and Thomas Steinbeck, Anne and Linda Sexton. Even more odd is it to have a parent artist die at the age of 28, only then to have his son die at the age of 30....
Jeff Buckley....still dead.
579) Days Of '36/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Greek film director Theo Angelopoulos‘ 1972 effort Meres Tou ‘36 / Days of ‘36, winner of the International Film Critics Association award at the Berlin Film Festival, is the least of the several films of his that I’ve seen. It is also, by over a decade and a half, the earliest one I’ve seen so far, and at one hour and 45 minutes it is by a good margin the shortest as well. Days of ‘36 clearly comes across as an ‘early’ work in the artist’s canon because, especially when compared to his later efforts, one can clearly see Angelopoulos being unsure of the potential success of his decisions....
Classic.
580) The Decalogue/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Art that can claim greatness deals with complex issues in complex ways. If the answers or questions posed were simple they could be framed in a single sentence, or a ten second film, then the art would not be its own best explanation. This thought stuck with me as I watched Krzysztof Kieślowski’s complex and fascinating, if flawed, The Decalogue, illuminating aspects of the Ten Commandments from the third, transitional phase of his career, which included this 1988-89 Polish television series, filmed in 1987 and 1988, as well as the two subsequent feature films derived from episodes five and six, A Short Film About Killing and A Short Film About Love. Kieślowski’s filmic career can be divided into four parts....
Good.
581) A Good School/Book Review/Jessica Schneider A Good School is a good, solid novel, but that is about it. While many writers would be so lucky to able to actually have a good novel worthy of publication, A Good School is a bit of a let down, when compared to other works by Yates, but it is still something worth the read....
Good book.
582) Il Generale Della Rovere/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Il Generale Della Rovere was one of Roberto Rossellini’s most successful films commercially, winning the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, and there is a simple reason why. It’s not that good a film. It’s a rather formulaic film, slathered with faux patriotic sloganeering, whitewashed politics, and a rather banal cinematic approach. Rossellini was, along with the film’s star, Vittorio De Sica, one of the two big name directors of what was known as Italian Neo-Realism. But while 1945’s Rome: Open City was also a financial success for Rossellini, he went almost fifteen years between that success and this one, in 1959. De Sica, however, had more commercial and critical success in the interim....
Overrated.
583) Nosferatu, Phantom Of The Night/DVD Review/Dan Schneider 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, having more in common (especially image-wise) with films like On The Beach, The Quiet Earth, the Vincent Price classic The Last Man On Earth (based on Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend), and even the first Night Of The Living Dead, than with the Hollywood Dracula mythos, and even its silent filmic predecessor, Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau’s 1922 classic Nosferatu, A Symphony of Horrors (Nosferatu, Eine Symphonie Des Grauens), because Herzog is a filmmaker not afraid to turn his camera eye on ugliness, and use that as a way to limn reality better and more clearly in his search for his own ‘ecstatic truth.’ Herzog has always specialized in eye level realism, wherein he generally eschews those glossy gorgeous postcard-like shots that many filmmakers often substitute for depth....
Classic.
584) Cold Spring Harbor/Book Review/Jessica Schneider Little gets past the eyes of Richard Yates. He is a writer who can take a dismal, ordinary set of characters and make them into real, flesh and bone beings, simply by the way he describes their patterns of behavior, their mannerisms, their dialogue. Cold Spring Harbor is his last novel, published in 1986, and it carries with it all the benefits of being a Yates novel: spare yet descriptive, insightful dialogue about seemingly “simple things,” peppered with his acute observational skills for human behavior....
Good.
585) The Dark Knight/DVD Review/Dan Schneider A few years ago, despite repeated critical praise and entreaties from friends and colleagues, I gave up on ever wasting my precious time on earth watching another Steven Spielberg film. Time and again I was told by others, "No, this time I really mean it, it’s a GREAT film," and time and again I would leave the theater angry or nauseous....
So-so.
586) Collected Stories/David Leavitt/Dan Schneider If I told you that a writer was best known for a) having the first published ‘gay’ story in The New Yorker, and b) getting sued by poet Stephen Spender, the most famous poet that no one can remember a line he’s written, for allegedly plagiarizing parts of Spender’s autobiography World Within World for a novel of his called While England Sleeps, what odds would you lay on that writer being any good?....
A hack's hack.
587) Blind Chance/DVD Review/Dan Schneider 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 Kielsowski’s career, but made when it was it merely has tantalizing glimpses of his later greatness. However, it is, by no means, a bad film, and certainly quite a bit superior to two later films that owe it quite a bit of debt - Germany’s Run, Lola, Run, directed by Tom Tykwer, and Britain’s Sliding Doors - a Gwyneth Paltrow vehicle, directed by Peter Howitt, both from 1998....
Solid.
588) Thames: The Biography/Book Review/Dan Schneider 'Water is permanent; water is destructive; everything returns to its depths." Such is probably the simplest way to sum up Peter Ackroyd's Thames. Ackroyd invites readers to imagine not just a river, but also the idea of a river. With richly organized chapters rife with detail, Ackroyd provides insight on all things Thames: history, geology, mythology, hydrology, and how this all pertains to the larger aspects of culture....
It flows.
589) Help!/DVD Review/Dan Schneider I have never been a huge Beatles fan. I acknowledge them as a fine pop quartet, but I have never swooned over them as the greatest rock band of all time, despite sales records, because they were pop, not rock. Rock was The Who, Led Zeppelin, or The Rolling Stones. But even were one to accept them as the greatest pop group of all time, their film work has to be considered distinct....
It needs it.
590) Spider-Man 3/DVD Review/Dan Schneider There are times when I enjoy being wrong. Not that failure in any field is energizing, but when one is wrong about a presupposition, based upon an especially large body of evidence that seems to support one's bias, it is a positive, especially when that bias was toward the negative. Having recently watched The Dark Knight, and seen that it is a poor followup to Batman Begins, and having seen how well made and written the first two Spider-Man films were (even if the second was not as good as the first), my expectation was that Spider-Man 3 would continue the line of declension downward toward the Hollywood Lowest Common Denominator followed by even the few promising film franchises out there....
Better than advertised.
591) L'Avventura/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Some films that are labeled 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....
Eh.
592) My Kid Could Paint That/DVD Review/Dan Schneider In a real sense, the 83-minute documentary My Kid Could Paint That is one of the most disgusting films of all time. It disgusts because a) it so vividly displays the utter nonsense and stupidity of the modern art scamming that has gone on for the last half century or more (especially in Abstract Expressionism) — and that’s a good thing; and b) it so vividly displays the exploitation of an innocent child, Marla Olmstead, to meet the personal and psychological demands and needs of her Mark and Laura — and that’s a bad thing....
Nailing more art frauds.
593) La Notte/DVD Review/Dan Schneider La Notte (The Night), the 1961 film by Michelangelo Antonioni, and the second of his Alienation Trilogy, after L’Avventura and before L’Eclisse, is a huge artistic leap up from its predecessor film. It’s not so much that L’Avventura was such 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 neorealism, in the vein of what dominated that country’s cinema in the prior decade, and this is clear from this film’s opening shots, of slowly scaling down the side of a skyscraper to the strains of an otherworldly jazz-like score....
Masterpiece.
594) A Tragic Honesty/Book Review/Jessica Schneider To say that Richard Yates lived a troubled life would be an understatement. In fact, after learning of his life, it is easy to see just where he got all his material, and why he writes so well about alcoholics. In many ways his troubles were not only cliché (the tortured, depressed, lonely, mentally unstable, financially struggling artist that no one appreciates or understands), they were also self-induced....
Pass the scotch!
595) L'Eclisse/DVD Review/Dan Schneider 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....
Classic.
596) Wild Man Blues/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Barbara Kopple’s 1998 documentary on filmmaker Woody Allen’s 1996 tour of Europe with his New Orleans Jazz Band (reputedly 18 concerts, and seven countries, in 23 days), Wild Man Blues, is one of the most pointless, dull, and utterly inert documentaries I’ve ever seen. I’ve long been a fan of Allen’s films, and even his worst films (see The Curse Of The Jade Scorpion) are a cut or three above their typical Hollywood counterparts. And Kopple is a noted documentarian of quality (see Harlan County, USA). But, this film is nothing but a manifest ploy to rehabilitate the man’s image after his 1991 scandal of splitting up with actress Mia Farrow and shacking up with her daughter....
Ugh.
597) Ugetsu/DVD Review/Dan Schneider 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....
Greta film.
598) Fiction/Book Review/Jessica Schneider In reading the sophomore novel by ara 13, my reaction was (while reading it) that I’d not ever read anything quite like it before. Fiction is actually a work of metafiction, and while I have read other metafictional books in the past, Fiction is unusual in its narrative approach and style - and I mean that as a good thing. Although it is difficult to pinpoint any particular writer 13’s novel reminds me of, I would have to say the closest thing might be Nathanael West, albeit 13 tends to veer off into more philosophical elements than West does, though both writers share a certain element of humor....
Ara what?
599) Carson McCullers/Book Review/Dan Schneider In reading The Collected Stories Of Carson McCullers I was expecting good, and possibly great, things. After all, her first published novel, The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter is a near great novel. However, this collection of twenty-one pieces proves that McCullers was better in the longer forms of fiction, and, at best, mediocre in the short story form. This is in keeping with the fact that few artists can excel to the point of greatness, in more than one art, or even in more than one genre in the art....
Good, not great.
600) The Limey/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Director Steven Soderbergh’s 1999 so-called crime drama The Limey is easily the best Soderbergh effort I’ve seen. That’s partly due to the innovative narrative structure, which makes all but the last few minutes of this great film a flashback. The rest is due to an excellent script by Lem Dobbs, whose other great success came a year earlier, in Alex Proyas’ sci-fi thriller Dark City. Both films, despite their apparent differences, are acutely focused on human memory and both deal with the fragility of such in novel ways....
A masterpiece.
601) The Golden Notebook/Book Review/Jessica Schneider There is an old joke among writers, poets mainly, about how one of the worst types of poems is that which involves a speaker talking about sitting in a caf writing a poem about writing a poem. The Golden Notebook is essentially the novel equivalent of that; only this is about a writer trying to write a novel. Although Lessing is a much more skilled writer than many of those young poets who write poems about writing poems, The Golden Notebook is a novel which takes risks yet fails at them....
Solid.
602) Fidel Castro, My Life/Book Review/Jessica Schneider There are many different ways one could approach when reviewing this book. On one hand, it's an excellent source when thinking of Fidel Castro. Not so much because of historical and objective accuracy, but one of Castro's character. On the other hand, could one claim this a pleasant read? Unless you are just a die-hard Fidel fanatic, I think most readers would find this boring....
Ok.
603) Betty Smith Biography/Book Review/Jessica Schneider "And without true modesty, I am a world famous writer. A hundred years after I'm dead, people will still be reading, "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn."' -Betty Smith in a letter to her granddaughter Although a hundred years has not passed since Betty Smith's death in January of 1972, as of yet she seems to have been right in her assessment. With more than 35 years since her death, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn has elevated into the rankings as one of the greatest classics of all time....
Quality stuff?
604) The Seventh Seal/DVD Review/Dan Schneider One of the things that separates 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....
Classic.
605) Climates/DVD Review/Dan Schneider 2006’s Climates (Iklimler, literally Weather Conditions) is the third film of Turkish director and screenwriter Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s that I’ve seen, and it is the first one in which he has starred in as an actor. Each of the films has gotten better than its predecessor, and, since his previous film, Distant, touched greatness, Climates had its work cut out for it; but it succeeded....
Great weather?
606) Stroszek/DVD Review/Dan Schneider There has never been a filmmaker remotely like Werner Herzog. He blends fiction and nonfiction in ways no filmmaker before or since has done, and almost always it works, and works exceedingly well. Who else could craft memorable films with the psychotic actor Klaus Kinski? Make a ‘science fiction’ documentary (Lessons of Darkness) about the burning oil wells of Gulf War One? Craft an oddly moving, if undefinable film (Even Dwarfs Started Small) using a cast comprised solely of midgets and dwarfs? Make Count Dracula seem pathetic (Nosferatu the Vampyre)? Make a man obsessed with moving a boat over a mountain into one of film’s great achievements (Fitzcarraldo)? Or make a film (Grizzly Man) about an idiot who is so dumb he gets eaten alive by the grizzly bears he seeks to "protect," and make it work? No one....
Cool.
607) Satantango/DVD Review/Dan Schneider In 1994, Hungarian filmmaker Bela Tarr released a seven hour black and white film called Satantango (Satan’s Tango in English) that presented a conundrum for both the purveyors of plot-driven, character-empty Lowest Common Denominator blockbuster action summer movies and those who favor the cerebral, pretentious, film school fawning indulgences of Eurotrash (aka World Cinema) filmmaking. The conundrum was how can time be manipulated by the artist (filmmaker) so that the viewer (percipient) is removed from its passage? No, that theme is never directly stated nor implied in the film’s frames, but it is there, and Satantango is a film that, like Chris Marker’s La Jetee, will stand as a milestone in cinema history. Like Marker’s film, Satantango is a great film, and I will detail and argue such in this essay. But, I believe that it could well be the sort of film that, decades hence, serves as the template for what remains of modern cinema culture....
Masterpiece.
608) Dark City/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Australian filmmaker Alex Proyas’s 1998 film Dark City has been compared to many prior science fiction films, from Metropolis to Blade Runner, but, simply put, it’s better than those films. The comparison to Blade Runner, especially, is inapt, because that film is all style and little substance -- a claim made of Dark City, but, in truth, the film is mostly substance, with style about the edges. Yet, the style is so memorable that viewers and critics have had a hard time realizing it is a film that is original fiction, and not based upon a comic strip, as the urban legend goes....
Great.
609) Shadows/DVD Review/Dan Schneider 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. Hitchcock’s tales were always plot-first narratives, with the human element put in the background. Cassavetes put the human experience forefront in every one of his films. If some things did not make much sense logically, so be it....
Good.
610) It Came From Beneath The Sea/DVD Review/Dan Schneider I looked through one of my DVD sets, Columbia Pictures’ "The Fantastic Films of Ray Harryhausen, Legendary Science Fiction Series," and plucked an old fave of mine to rewatch: the 78-minute, black-and-white, 1955 classic It Came from Beneath the Sea. While not one of the more hyped Ray Harryhausen productions, this sci-fi effort is still a cut above the usual drive-in fare of that era. As a plus — drum roll — it stars Faith Domergue, the goddess of Cold War era sci-fi flicks such as This Island Earth and Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet....
Classic sci fi.
611) Tokyo Story/DVD Review/Dan Schneider 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....
Classic.
612) American Hunger/DVD Review/Jessica Schneider Imagine reading a great classic novel like Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, and then reading "a follow up story" about Francie Nolan in later years. How can a writer expect to have a successful follow up of what already is a great work, and expect it to match that of the original? Such is the case with Richard Wright’s American Hunger, a slim, 146-page continuation of his great classic memoir, Black Boy....
So-so.
613) The Cyclist/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s 1987 picture The Cyclist (Bicycleran) is one of those odd little films (a mere 78 minutes in length) that, technically, is not that impressive, but whose narrative makes it worth watching. Makhmalbaf wrote and directed the film, and also may have edited it. Its technical merits are few, save for the spare screenplay. There are, however, no greatly structured scenes, no effects of any note, and the most interesting shots are those of the lead character on his bicycle and another character riding a motorbike around and around in a pit....
Solid.
614) Three Monkeys/DVD Review/Nuri Bilge Ceylan Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan is one of the current Big Three film giants of Europe in that he is a throwback to the days of visionary directors like Stanley Kubrick, Michelangelo Antonioni, Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, and Andrei Tarkovsky. Along with Greece’s Theo Angelopoulos and Hungary’s Bela Tarr, Ceylan has grown into a rarefied stratosphere, and his last film, 2006’s Climates, was a masterpiece....
Disappointing.
615) Melvin Goes To Dinner/DVD Review/Dan Schneider On the down side is the fact that the 2003 film Melvin Goes To Dinner, directed by first timer Bob Odenkirk, is a watered down yuppy version of the great 1981 Louis Malle film My Dinner With Andre. On the up side is that if you are going to imitate something, at least choose something great, for the imitation, while not great, is likely to be good, which My Dinner With Melvin is. It was written by actor/playwright Michael Blieden, adapted from his play Phyro-Giants, and had a no name cast, as opposed to 2001’s similarly themed HBO film Dinner With Friends, which starred Dennis Quaid, Toni Collette, Andie McDowell, and Greg Kinnear....
Solid.
616) Seductive Poison/Book Review/Jessica Schneider Jonestown. Most of us who were alive during that time remember something. I was only two and a half in November of 1978, though that did not stop me from having nightmares involving “the scary dark haired man in sunglasses.” Deborah Layton’s Seductive Poison: A Jonestown Survivor's Story of Life and Death in the People's Temple, published over a decade ago, gives a first hand account of what The Peoples Temple, Jim Jones and the nightmarish Jonestown were like, followed with her means for escape, and her eventual reporting of Jones....
Kool!
617) Thumbsucker/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Thumbsucker is the first film made by indy director Mike Mills, in 2005, and it’s a solid film, but nowhere near as good as one might presume according to its plaudits. The story was adapted from an autobiographical 1999 novel by Walter Kirn, and while it is uniformly well acted the basic problem is that it is yet in another of the series of ‘American suburbia is hell’ films. Given the last few years of terrorism and war this simply does not resonate as strongly as it did a decade or so ago, and even then the horrors of being well-fed, having a good roof over one’s head, and having to listen to one’s parents was, to say the least, a tad overdone....
Solid.
618) Disturbing The Peace/Book Review/Dan Schneider This is the fifth novel from Richard Yates I’ve read, and although I still have two more to go, I am wondering if Yates is merely a “Two Hit Novel Novelist,” with his greatest homeruns being Revolutionary Road and The Easter Parade. Granted, anyone will tell you that two hits is better than one (or like many fiction writers today: none), but Yates, along with Kazuo Ishiguro and Milan Kundera, seems to have so far achieved two great novels, while the rest of the books by those writers remain near misses....
Ok.
619) Werckmeister Harmonies/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Oftentimes, when bad critics run out of clever things to say about a film or director that they like, but know few others will appreciate, they will trot out the old ‘he’s an acquired taste’ gambit. Well, this is not true of Hungarian filmmaker Bela Tarr. One simply appreciates a master craftsman at the top of his game, or not. It is one of the rarest things in art, to be able to ‘turn on’ someone to appreciate greatness. In fact, putting art aside, greatness is one of the things most difficult to comprehend; and this is, ironically, the very thing that Tarr’s 2000 film, Werckmeister Harmonies (Werckmeister Harmóniák), is about....
Great.
620) The Zookeeper's Wife/Book Review/Jessica Schneider I have to say that I was pleasantly pleased after having read Diane Ackerman's latest non-fiction book, The Zookeeper's Wife. This is my first time reading anything of hers, and I was also surprised to find that she has talent as a poet. I say 'surprised' because more often than not, those who claim to have written poetry really don't succeed at it very much at all, but Ackerman, who has a nature bent to her work, possesses both literary quality and a good sense of historical and scientific background, which makes this book work....
Solid.
621) The Mascot/Book Review/Jessica Schneider A Jewish Nazi? Just reading the title with those two incompatible words, and one can see why this book has been published and pushed. If you think you've heard all the stories involving World War II, well clearly you haven't. Of course we will never know all of them, but in this new memoir by Mark Kurzem, he describes his young father's life during the war and how a Jewish boy went from being, in a sense, target practice for the Nazis to becoming one of them....
Meager.
622) God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater/Book Review/Jessica Schneider It is hard not to enjoy Vonnegut. Although Slaughterhouse Five still remains my favorite book of his, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater is a quick and entertaining read that cleverly pokes fun at capitalism and greed while being fun all the way through. Eliot Rosewater is a fat slob. His family has recently inherited a large sum of money ($87,472,033.61 to be exact)....
Good Vonnegut.
623) A Tragic Honesty/Book Review/Jessica Schneider To say that Richard Yates lived a troubled life would be an understatement. In fact, after learning of his life, it is easy to see just where he got all his material, and why he writes so well about alcoholics. In many ways his troubles were not only cliche (the tortured, depressed, lonely, mentally unstable, financially struggling artist that no one appreciates or understands) they were also self-induced....
Ok.
624) Broken Flowers/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Bill Murray is the closest thing to a modern Charlie Chaplin, not in being a filmmaker, but in creating an onscreen persona. His ‘dour schlemiel’ is every bit as iconic as Chaplin’s tramp. He has played the same basic character in films from Groundhog Day to Lost In Translation to his latest incarnation in Jim Jarmusch’s latest film Broken Flowers. This film is one of those works of art that should be filed under ‘nice attempt’, but is ultimately a failure. And it fails for the simplest of reasons that all bad films fail: a bad screenplay, which was written by Jarmusch himself....
Mediocre.
625) Bergman Island/DVD Review/Dan Schneider An odd thing occurred to me while watching The Criterion Collection’s new release, Bergman Island. It was a feeling that this documentary was really a DVD extra rather than a feature. Then, lo and behold, whilst researching the disk online I found out that I was correct. This film was indeed an extra feature on the company’s latest re-release of another Bergman film, The Seventh Seal. And that includes its own extra feature -- a half hour video essay on Bergman’s filmic canon by film historian Peter Cowie....
Ok.
626) Death Becomes Them/Book Review/Jessica Schneider If you were a filmmaker, and had the opportunity to make a film about a supposed great artist or “legend,” would you focus on that person’s last dying moments, when he or she is in a drugged out daze, or on what made that person noteworthy to begin with? I choose the latter, but after reading Death Becomes Them: Unearthing the Suicides of the Brilliant, the Famous, and the Notorious by Alix Strauss, the book references a film made by Gus Van Sant, chronicling the “Last Days” of Nirvana singer Kurt Cobain (actually, the character has a different name but anyone can see this is based on Cobain). In the trailer, the Cobain character wanders around, doped up, slurring and drooling in a dress, falling over in his depressed stupor. Ironically, the film is titled “Last Days” for this very reason....
Yawn.
627) Whatever Works/Film Review/Dan Schneider I have often said that great art is hermetic, meaning that it is often at such a level of conception and execution that most people simply cannot even comprehend how the great art was conceived and wrought. But, lesser art that still has moments of greatness, opens up the art to be accessed and then studied and possibly replicated. Such was rarely as obviously displayed as in Woody Allen’s latest film, the comedy Whatever Works. I have seen every Woody Allen film, save the film just prior to this, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, and – unless that film defies all expectations set by Allen’s post-Golden Age films (1993-present; the Golden Age was 1977-1992) – I can confidently say that the film world will never see another Woody Allen masterpiece along the lines of Hannah And Her Sisters, Stardust Memories, Radio Days, Crimes And Misdemeanors, nor Another Woman. It is simply beyond Allen now....
Solid.
628) The Role Of Women's Fiction/Essay/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, and have been for some time....
Ok.
629) The Remains Of The Day/Book Review/Jessica Schneider The Remains of The Day by Kazuo Ishiguro breaks every axiom one learns from some creative writing 101 workshop that tells you 'show don't tell.' Why? This entire book is telling, and it tells very well, from the perspective of Mr. Stevens, an English Butler who is ruminating on his life, while taking this road trip. Set during World War Two, Mr. Stevens questions greatness, and asks himself what makes one a great butler over a mediocre one? Ishiguro does a wonderful job of getting into the mind of someone who holds his work very high, and who regards his job with great pride....
Good.
630) Enron: The Smartest Guys In The Room/DVD Review/Dan Schneider For those who think they know what the Enron scandal was about, they’ll have to admit they didn’t know a tenth of it after they’ve watched this documentary, Enron: The Smartest Guys In The Room, directed by Alex Gibney, narrated by Peter Coyote, based upon the bestselling exposé by Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind. That said, I disagree with some of the premises the film is based upon- that being McLean’s claim that the story is about people, not numbers. This is because the film shows that the three main criminals that ran Enron into the ground, Chairman Ken Lay, CEO Jeff Skilling, and CFO Andrew Fastow, are nothing but selfish, run of the mill middle aged white men with a hard on for money- money alone. There is not a thing unique about these guys. There are versions of these lowest of life forms in every corporation....
Great doc.
631) American Taboo/Book Review/Jessica Schneider American Taboo is one of those books to take a pass on; but the reasons are not due to some of the complaints I've read on Amazon. Many of the reviews are negative, claiming the writing to be poor. Now, I have learned that very often when "everyday people" claim something to be poorly written, they usually don't know what they are talking about....
Yawn.
632) A Mencken Chrestomathy/Book Review/Jessica Schneider If you want to have some fun, read though this selection of H.L. Mencken's book of criticism. Although a variety of topics are covered, such as science and religion, his literary coverage is by far the most entertaining, especially what he says about literature and literati....
Good.
633) Revolutionary Road/Book Review/Dan Schneider I finally got around to reading Richard Yates’ much lauded first novel, Revolutionary Road, and, despite all the hype and blurbery, it was a huge disappointment. No, it was not the sort of patent PoMo garbage that is pushed by the David Foster Wallace or Dave Eggers sort, nor is it the deliterate crap foisted upon readers by T.C. Boyle nor Joyce Carol Oates. In fact, despite stylistic differences and thematic concerns that do not mix, the writer Yates’ book most brought to my mind was the vastly overrated Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison — specifically her unfortunately overpraised novel Beloved. Like that book, Revolutionary Road could have used a good editor to weed through the structural flaws and the melodramatic characters....
Overrated.
634) Collected Stories/Chester Himes/Dan Schneider The Collected Stories of Chester Himes is an example of what is missing from short fiction today. Too often stories are bloated with superfluous information or just prattle endlessly with regards to description, yet the description isn't particularly memorable, and nor is it insightful. Or they try to over explain everything, rather than allowing the metaphors and scenes speak for themselves....
Good.
635) Suite Francaise/Book Review/Jessica Schneider It is difficult to review a work that one not only knows is unfinished, but also one that reads that way. Such has never been a stronger case than with Irene Nemirovsky's 'novel' Suite Franaise. The book has been marketed as a novel when really it is two unfinished novellas, and according to the appendix in the back of the book, Nemirovsky was intending to make the final book contain five parts but unfortunately she was sent to die in the Auschwitz death camp in 1942 before she was able to finish it....
Ok.
636) Texas State Parks/Guide/Jessica Schneider Official Guide To Texas State Parks And Historic Sites is a must have for anyone with an interest in the history of Texas geography. The book is an excellent source to not only what the State Parks are, their location, as well as what they offer, but Official Guide To Texas State Parks And Historic Sites also provides readers with the brief history behind each park....
Solid.
637) The Man From London/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Style over substance. That is the plaint of many a critic when they come across a film or book or any work of art they do not like, but which has undeniable merit, at least technically, if not in a few other measures as well. But the fact is that my opening words have little to do with most of the gripes labeled as such. While there are artworks for which the opening plaint is valid, far more often the correct plaint is good style, poor execution....
Mediocre.
638) What Is Art?/Book Review/Jessica Schneider Something to keep in mind whenever approaching a work by any writer is that just because someone has talent in one area does not necessarily mean that talent will transfer over into another. Such cannot be made clearer than in Leo Tolstoy's What Is Art?....
Not good.
639) Maids Of Wilko/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Polish filmmaker Andrzej Wajda’s 1979 film Maids Of Wilko (Panny Z Wilka- also translated as Young Girls Of Wilko) shows that, like such filmmakers as Ingmar Bergman, Robert Bresson, and Yasujiro Ozu, he is an artist more interested in endurances than mere ‘scenes.’ His characters speak as if philosophers, but in a naturalistic style. They are not the hyper-educated bourgeoisie of Bergman, the spiritual elitists of Bresson, nor the everyday philosophes of Ozu. Yet, there’s something more to them, and Wajda, than what is on the screen, even if the film, as a whole, fails to reach great heights....
Good stuff.
640) Days Of Heaven/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Days Of Heaven is a 1978 film by director Terrence Malick that, in a way, typifies his small oeuvre (which also includes Badlands, The Thin Red Line, and The New World) even as it stands alone and apart (and many critics would add above) from the others. There is no doubt that the film is great. The only real question is: just how great a film is it? Merely great, or one of those works for the pantheon? Is it a work of the cinematic art form that transcends that art form and becomes one of the great works of art, period? Is it one of those works that becomes one of the great achievements of the species? I say yes to both of the last two questions, even though I will state that it is not Malick’s greatest film; The Thin Red Line is....
Great stuff.
641) Texas Hill Country/Book Review/Jessica Schneider Texas Hill Country is a pleasant looking coffee-table book put out by the University of Texas Press that revisits the beauty and essence of the Texas Hill Country via way of John Graves’ essay within, as well as the numerous photographs by Wyman Meinzer. Both the essay and photos run nicely along side one another, but the book is what it is essentially for the photos....
Nice photos.
642) Baldwin And Wright/Essay/Jessica Schneider "Uncle Tom's Cabin is a very bad novel, having, in its self-righteous, virtuous sentimentality, much in common with Little Women. ... But this, let us say, was beyond Mrs. Stowe's powers; she was not so much a novelist as an impassioned pamphleteer." This is what James Baldwin states in his essay, "Everybody's Protest Novel." Then he goes on to note, "Our passion for categorization, life neatly fitted into pegs, has led to an unforeseen, paradoxical distress; a confusion, a breakdown of meaning."
Interesting.
643) The World Of Apu/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Like many trilogies, Satyajit Ray’s Apu Trilogy follows a familiar pattern: a first film that is an undeniably great achievement, a second film that is the worst (albeit in this case, still a good film), and a final film that is (almost?) as great as the original, and a big improvement over the second entry, Aparajito....
Excellent.
644) Marie Antoinette/DVD Review/Jessica Schneider Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette is a really bad film. What irritates me though, is that this film, directed by a person who has only gotten where she is on account of her lineage, now has convinced me that she really has no talent as a filmmaker. Although I'm one of the few who appreciated and defended her film Lost in Translation as being something that showed 'potential', despite her winning the Oscar for its ridiculous screenwriting....
Bad.
645) The Up Series/DVD Review/Jessica Schneider 'Give me a child until he is seven, and I will give you the man.' -Jesuit Proverb This is the motto behind The Up Series. And if there is one film series you should force yourself to watch, The Up Series would be it. Directed by Michael Apted, I speak from experience: once you start it, you won't stop till finished. For over a year now, my husband has been telling me to 'Watch the Up series' and because it is a film that runs probably close to 700 minutes, I've been putting it off....
Great.
646) By Brakhage/DVD Review/Dan Schneider One of the best things about the DVD revolution is that it allows potential viewers of marginalized cinema and television access to relatively cheap versions of the art forms they enjoy. And, unlike visual art, they do not have to spend great sums of money to own ‘originals’ of the thing because, is there really an ‘original’ version of a film? Does one really want to own the actual first full film strip that made up the final version of a film? After all, there is enough foment over films that have multiple ends and/or edits: Director’s Cuts, Final Cuts, Theatrical Cuts, Unrated Cuts, Original Cuts, etc. Yet, like other art forms, the visual arts- even cinema, has been subjected to the works of cinematic poseurs and frauds. These frauds can be intentional or not, yet cults of devotees tend to sprout up about them; and it should be noted I’m talking about those bad filmmakers who claimed the mantle of auteur, not the many B film level directors who simply wanted to entertain- thus highlighting the destructive role of pretense in art....
Fraud.
647) Anne Sexton/Analysis/Jessica Schneider Anne Sexton is a very good poet whose first few books, To Bedlam and Part Way Back, All My Pretty Ones, and Transformations contain most of her best work. She is a poet who proves that it's not what you say, but how it is said in poetry that matters most....
Okay.
648) On Chesil Beach/Book Review/Jessica Schneider Yawn. On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan is an OK book, but nothing more than that. It's not bad, and nor is it really good either. It's actually one of those books that after having finished it, upon reflection, I do not think it's as good as I first thought. I actually do not understand the public's obsession with McEwan. Critics seem to praise him to no end, talking about how immensely talented he is....
Ok.
649) Lolita/Book Review/Jessica Schneider Lolita. It's been on my to read pile for a while now. It is a novel that, with reputation and all, stands as one of the Modern Library's 100 Best Novels of the Twentieth Century. It's a good book certainly, but much of its reputation, I have to believe, is due to the controversial subject matter for its day, as well as critics cribbing from one another their overpraise for the book....
Mediocre.
650) Gertrud/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Apologists for bad art almost always speak of ‘intent’, and, in a similar vein, bad critics always try to justify their ‘liking’ a bad film by praising it obliquely, often using words like ‘abstract’ in place of ‘dullness’, or calling a boring film an ‘etude’, even if it is trite. Such is what one will find if one reads the reviews for Danish filmmaker Carl Theodor Dreyer’s final film Gertrud, made in 1964. Well, my advice to such critics is to look past the bullshit and deal with what is really onscreen. Gertrud is a bad film, and is one in a long line of bad ‘last films’ made by great filmmakers. Recently, I watched Ingmar Bergman’s final film, Saraband, and it was a black mark on an otherwise sterling career. While this film is not as bad as that, it’s close, and Dreyer did not have nearly as many great films to his credit as Bergman has to offset his failure....
Sucks.
651) The Stories Of J.F. Powers/Book Review/Dan Schneider Every so often there is an artist that has a great reputation, yet a small cult following, that turns out to truly be a great artist. Then, there are all the other times that one recognizes that the repute for greatness is merely the mistaken dementia of the cultic ideologues....
Aargh!
652) The Human Condition/DVD Review/Dan Schneider One of the most overused terms in art is the word epic. Perhaps only the term surreal (and its variants) has been more abused. Generally, the term epic should only be applied to works of art that are large, in some manner, and have a wide field of inquiry. Simply being long does not qualify. Think of some of the first works to be granted the appellation: the Greek poems of Homer and Virgil. They were, despite their vast overrating as works of art, truly epic. Hence they were called epopee. A long novel like Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick is epic, both for its length and plunge into human existence. A far longer work like Marcel Proust’s Remembrance Of Things Past, however, is not epic, for despite its length, it really only skims the surface of cosmic depths. An even more obvious example is Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With The Wind. Yes, it is about the American Civil War, in a broad sense, but its soap operatic melodrama and characterizations prevent it from even going as deeply as Proust’s work....
Excellent.
653) Crown Of The Continent/DVD Review/Jessica Schneider There are a variety of ways one can approach a nature documentary. There are those that serve to be more informative and functionary in their relaying of information, as they document the differences and similarities among our planet in a learned and insightful way, and then there are the more artful documentaries that serve to transport one to a specific place to witness a time that everyday eyes would not otherwise earn the chance to witness....
Excellent.
654) Critical Mass Interview/Dan Schneider This week’s edition of Critical Mass is especially thrilling, as I welcome critic Dan Schneider to the ‘ol hot seat. Dan is, first and foremost, a poet, essayist, critic, and writer of fiction. He’s also the founder of Cosmoetica, a widely-read site devoted to poetry and fiction, as well as Cinemension, an equally compelling site centered around film....
The interviewer interviewed.
655) Fires On The Plain/DVD Review/Dan Schneider For the Japanese film fan used to the complex films of Akira Kurosawa, the family depths of Yasujiro Ozu, or the mystical wonders of Kenji Mizoguchi, Kon Ichikawa’s 104 minute long, 1959 black-and-white war film Fires On The Plain (Nobi) is as jarring as its indelible opening scene, in which a tubercular Japanese soldier gets slapped in the face, then mercilessly berated, by his commanding officer for stupidity. The film is thoroughly modern, from its opening scene, followed by credits, to its harrowing denouement....
Excellent.
656) Bloom/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Bloom is an Irish film of the James Joyce novel Ulysses by director Sean Walsh. Let me be up front- I think Ulysses is a vastly overrated book, with moments of superbness and many more moments of wretchedness. It was Joyce, Woolf, and their ilk that started a good deal of art down the road to narcissistic hermeticism. That all said, while the film Bloom is not a great film, in and of itself, it is a good film, with moments of brilliance, and does a far better job at explicating the events of the first Bloomsday, June 16th, 1904, than the book ever has, despite what pretentious critics say....
Solid.
657) A Drinking Life/Book Review/Jessica Schneider There is a funny story that accompanies the review of this book. As I recently went to get a pedicure, the man (yes, man) who was rubbing my feet asked me, “Do you like to drink?” I paused from my book and thought how the night before I had had a glass of red wine. Was it obvious? Then the man pointed to the book I was reading: A Drinking Life, by Pete Hamill. “Oh,” I said, feeling relief. “No, this is not that kind of book,” I said. “I mean, it’s about the author growing up in Brooklyn during the Great Depression and World War II, and like, how he started drinking, sort of…” I prattled. Then I finally added the point about it not being a self-help book....
Good stuff.
658) The Easter Parade/Book Review/Dan Schneider The critical consensus among the so-called literati is that Richard Yates’ best novel, by far, was his first book, Revolutionary Road; but this is pure bunkum, and an example of the worst sort of critical cribbing, wherein a meme about the quality of a work of art takes hold and then, despite obvious debunkings of it, remains entrenched. The result is that subsequent critics fail to form their own opinions, instead relying on information that is demonstrably wrong, but which will get them acceptance as a critic in the eyes of others....
Good book.
659) Raven/Book Review/Jessica Schneider This is one of those books where you know the ending to the story: Pastor Jim Jones transports 1,200 of his Peoples Temple followers into the jungles of Guyana. The rest becomes history:...
Jonestown. You need more?
660) Big Bend: A Homesteader's Story/Book Review/Jessica Schneider Following a recent visit to Big Bend National Park, I located a number of books in the Visitor’s Center on Big Bend, one of which was Big Bend: A Homesteader's Story (University of Texas Press) by J.O. Langford and Fred Gipson. The book offers a historical perspective about the park, detailing the lives of J.O. Langford and his family in 1909 as they search for a new home near the Rio Grande....
Solid.
661) Pioneers In Ingolstadt/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Prior to watching German film director Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 87-minute long 1970 film, Pioneers In Ingolstadt, I’d only been subjected to one of his films, the execrable Whity. Okay, at least Whity had some outrageous, unintended perverse sexual humor going for it. Pioneers In Ingolstadt lacks even that. In fact, it’s really not so much a film as a series of extended blackout sketches....
Utter dreck.
662) Cassandra's Dream/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Most published critics are idiots. Yet again this verity was reinforced to me whilst popping in and watching one of the latest films by Woody Allen to hit DVD. Cassandra’s Dream was almost wholly ignored in this country, lasting only a couple of weeks in the theaters. Yet, it is one of the two best films that Allen has made this decade, along with his other, earlier British murder drama, Match Point. While that film was lauded by critics as a return to top form by Allen, this film has been derided as a mere copycat of that film, which was, in many ways, a reworking of the serious half of Allen’s monumental 1989 film Crimes And Misdemeanors....
Classic overlooked film.
663) A Guide To Recognizing Your Saints/DVD Review/Dan Schneider If one has never directed a film before one should not, I repeat (with even greater emphasis), should NEVER direct an adaptation of one’s work. This is because one will have enough problems trying to learn the new medium that those problems born out of adaptation will only bog one down, especially if the work adapted, itself, has problems. That said, let me introduce you to Dito Montiel, director of the 98 minute long 2006 independent film, A Guide To Recognizing Your Saints, adapted from his similarly titled nonfiction work. Some have labeled the book a memoir, but if the film is anything like the book, it is a hagiography, not a memoir, which would be appropriate, given its title....
Rehashed crapola.
664) The Story Of Big Bend National Park/Book Review/Dan Schneider A recent visit to Big Bend National Park prompted my interest in this book, which can be found in any souvenir shop within range of the park. Published by University of Texas Press, John Jameson’s book offers a detailed and comprehensive look into the history behind the park, as well as much of the minutiae that went into its establishment. “Minutiae” is not to imply these details are unimportant or should go overlooked, but rather, the book offers glimpses into the drone like mentality that many citizens had before Big Bend became a National Park....
Wild.
665) The War Game/DVD Review/Dan Schneider For anyone who thinks that those 50-pack mega-DVD sets of public domain films put out by several different video companies are worthless, I would argue that the amount of films you get for the money is worth it, even if all were mediocre, and that the truth is: each DVD package will come with at least 8-10 enjoyable films, a few true classics like Carnival of Souls or Night of the Living Dead, and every so often a great little film will pop up that makes the package a total steal....
Terrific documentary.
666) Silence/Book Review/Jessica Schneider This is my first experience reading Shusaku Endo, and given his lofty reputation and the fact that he is non-American and thus has not had his mind chiseled by cookie-cutter MFA programs, I was expecting much. Unfortunately, Silence didn’t deliver like I had hoped. Many compare Endo with the British writer Graham Greene, notably because of their similar subject matter involving religious themes and the conversion of cultures to Christian religion. But really the two writers aren’t anything alike. At all. Similar subject matter in and of itself does not equal two artists in quality or even in kind. Because if it were, then one could lump Kubrick’s masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey with any lesser sci-fi genre film simply because they have astronauts in them....
Ok.
667) Ribbon Of Sand/DVD Review/Jessica Schneider Look no further to find the story of the earth than in John Grabowska’s twenty-five minute documentary Ribbon Sand, which is about Cape Lookout—one of the few natural barrier islands still remaining on earth. Located off the shores of North Carolina, the sixty miles of terrain consists of sand uninhabited by humans, but lush with life. Following his earlier work, Crown of the Continent, Grabowska once again teams up with photographer Steve Ruth and composer Todd Boekelheide to deliver another poetic experience and offer up the earth’s ecosystem as examples of our planet’s larger canvas....
Classic.
668) Cruising Paradise/Book Review/Jessica Schneider Few writers only ever stick within the genre they excel. Many, in other words, will test out another form, either for practice or just to try on. But even fewer are those writers who excel in more than one form equally. Eugene O’Neill offers far more music and poetry within the lines of his plays than in his actual poetry itself. The same can be said for Tennessee Williams....
Ok.
668669) Up Shit Creek/Book Review/Jessica Schneider With a title like that, how can anyone pass over this book, authored by river guide Joe Lindsay? I spotted this little gem while shopping in Gruene, Texas, and despite being a slim volume, Up Sh*t Creek is an equally humorous and disgusting collection of toilet troubles. Just to give a bit of background, the book details some of the messes that have occurred when dealing with “groovers,” while on backpack adventures. A groover is nothing more than a portable toilet—there are different types, and the book offers illustrations of each kind. As for why it is called a groover—the name specifically refers to the lines, or “grooves” one gets after sitting/sh*tting upon the seat (though now many come with toilet seats, so that is comforting to know)....
Good shit.
670) 670) Vicky Cristina Barcelona/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Woody Allen’s 2008 film Vicky Cristina Barcelona is a film with a moral: people do not change. No, let me rephrase that: people cannot change. Films of great depth have been made with premises as simple as that. Vicky Cristina Barcelona is not a film of great depth. Great style? Yes. But not depth. Not that it’s a bad film, but especially compared to some of the masterworks on the human condition that Allen crafted in his 1977-1992 Golden Age (Interiors, Manhattan, Stardust Memories, Another Woman, Crimes And Misdemeanors, to name a few) this film simply is out of its depths....
Solid.
671) 671) Unit 731 Testimony/Book Review/Jessica Schneider One has to wonder why so many are unaware of what went on in Unit 731, much less what, exactly, it was. The reason for this, as explained in Hal Gold's Unit 731 Testimony, is due to the extensive covering up by the Japanese government, for unlike the stupid Nazis who filmed most of their crimes, the Imperial Japanese Army was much better at hiding it. Another reason many do not know could be due to the pardoning of punishment by the U.S. government in exchange for Japanese medical information. Unit 731 was nothing more than a medical unit run by the Imperial Japanese Army designed to perform the most horrific experiments on people, including the Chinese, Korean, Russian, British and American....
Horrors.
672) 672) The Sea And Poison/Book Review/Jessica Schneider I open this review on a pleasant note, in that, after having recently read one of Endo’s well known and acclaimed works that proved to be quite mediocre, I am happy to say that The Sea and Poison is an excellent book. After having previously read Silence, and losing count of the number of clichés throughout the text, I was reluctant to believe this poor wording could be due to Endo, rather than the work of the mediocre translator, William Johnston. The Sea and Poison is translated by Michael Gallagher, and Gallagher reveals Endo’s prose to be something fresh and void of clichés throughout. This says that Gallagher’s translation likely bears a closer resemblance to how Endo’s prose is in his native language....
Good.
673) Remembered Earth/DVD Review/Jessica Schneider It is here on this cold December day just a little less than three weeks shy of Christmas that I felt the warmth of New Mexico’s High Desert in my living room, after having watched John Grabowska’s documentary film, Remembered Earth: New Mexico’s High Desert. This half hour feature will allow one to witness the American West against time and timelessness and marvel at the beauty one sees, but also to feel a part of it in knowing that having lived it, one ultimately becomes it....
Good stuff.
674) Vera Drake/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Vera Drake was a highly praised 2004 film, written and directed by Mike Leigh, that detailed the cruelties and hypocrisies of England’s anti-abortion laws back in post-World War Two 1950. It won the Best Film Award at the Venice Film Festival and from the British Independent Film Awards, and deservedly so. Yet, despite its ‘large’ backdrop, the film is one of the most intimate character studies ever put to celluloid. Drake (Imelda Staunton) is an aging London housewife, with a husband, Stan (Phil Davis), and two grown children, Ethel and Sid (Alex Kelly and Daniel Mays), who goes out of her way to help girls who are pregnant have homemade abortions. She charges no money for her services, and is sent on the sly, by acquaintances who do charge money to be recommended to her, although Drake does not know this. She is a prim lady who calls and holds everyone and everything ‘dear’....
Good film.
675) Growth Of The Soil/Book Review/Jessica Schneider It is not uncommon for a writer to become more known for his reputation than actual work. Not that the work isn’t of quality, just that it is easier for the public to cling to one’s outrageous political beliefs or one’s tragic life than for the very work that writer should be known. Sylvia Plath is a perfect example, since many non-readers of poetry are aware of her having suicided herself in the oven, yet are unfamiliar with her great poetry — the very thing for which she is deservedly famous....
Good.
676) Shakespeare Behind Bars/DVD Review/Dan Schneider There are documentaries that gain their stature not in their innovatory or revelatory power, but simply in the fact that they tell important things in a straightforward manner. Such is the case with the 2006 BBC documentary Shakespeare Behind Bars, written and directed by Hank Rogerson, and produced by Jilann Spitzmiller, a married documentary team. Unlike such documentaries as Scared Straight, this one does not so obviously buy into its subjects’ mission. One of the major flaws of Scared Straight, as much of a landmark documentary as it was, was that the film overstated the case for the program which showed lifers at Rahway State Prison trying to intimidate young thugs into going straight. This film, however, does not quite buy into the premise that the program that helps produce a Shakespeare play once a year is a cure-all for the varied ills that have driven the prisoners behind bars, despite what its detractors claim....
Good doc.
677) Art, Life And UFOs/Book Review/Dan Schneider I recently received a copy of painter and UFOlogist Budd Hopkins’ memoir Art, Life And UFOs to review. I was of a mixed opinion as to whether to review it. The reason is a possible conflict of interest. More than 20 years ago I wrote a lengthy letter, replete with illustrations, of some of the more mystic/supernatural/paranormal/weird events that had taken place in my life until that point because many of my experiences were reminiscent of those described in Hopkins’ two best-selling 1980s books. Missing Time and Intruders -- both of which helped popularize the whole claimed UFO abduction phenomenon which, along with the Satanic Cult craze, swept the country at the time....
Mediocre memoir.
678) 678) It's A Wonderful Life/Film Review/Jessica Schneider If the mere image of Jimmy Stewart and Christmas makes you want to skip over this review-don't. You are just the person I want to read this. Up until the age of 29, I had never watched the Frank Capra Classic It's A Wonderful Life, simply because it had the reputation of being 'sentimental hogwash' to quote the film's villain, Henry Potter....
Classic.
679) One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich/Book Review/Jessica Schneider Just reading about the Soviet Gulags will make anyone feel relieved not to have lived in Russia during the early to mid part of the Twentieth Century, where individuals would be imprisoned, punished, and then penalized with an extra ten years for doing hardly anything at all. Alexander Solzhenitsyn discusses in detail the Soviet Gulag system, the politics behind it, as well as the philosophical complexities involved when one loses freedom in his great and masterful work for which he is most well known: The Gulag Archipelago. A thick and thorough work, I recommend it highly. Yet One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is a bit different — in some sense, it is a light work in comparison to The Gulag Archipelago, if such a thing is possible....
Good.
680) Beneath The Wheel/Book Review/Jessica Schneider To this day I have yet to read a bad novel by Hermann Hesse. His works range from if not great, then to merely excellent, very good to good-solid. Beneath the Wheel falls into the good-solid category, for while the book is blessed with Hesse’s impeccable prose style, Beneath the Wheel is comparatively a minor work. Part of the reason for this is due to one of his later and greater works: Demian, which carries some similar plot elements to Beneath the Wheel, but Demian is ultimately a far more philosophical and complex work. In fact, Hesse has told this story a number of times in his books (think The Prodigy and Peter Camenzind): involving the frustrated and gifted student fed up with formulaic institution and thought, though Demian is where this idea is best expressed. It seems Hesse kept writing until he finally mastered it....
Good.
681) Brazil/DVD Review/Dan Schneider When I set out to review *The Criterion Collection*’s 3 disk version of Terry Gilliam’s 1985 film *Brazil*, I decided to watch the bowdlerized 94 minute studio cut of the film- the *Love Conquers All* version- first; then
watch the longer 142 minute *Director’s Cut* by Gilliam. I did so that I would have a base to evaluate the ‘additions’ to the film, rather than watch the pair of films in reverse, then have to evaluate the impact of the losses. And I’m glad I did because, while the bowdlerized version was good (in fact, much better than Gilliam or its detractors claim), the *Final Cut*by Gilliam is definitively superior, and also a great film....
Classic.
682) Nocturnes/Book Review/Jessica Schneider It is always depressing to see a great writer coast on his fame, whether it be from lack of trying, or just having lost it. Kazuo Ishiguro is the author of two great novels: The Remains of the Day and An Artist of the Floating World. Some of his earlier and later works show some potential, and contain some great moments in them, but he has not quite captured the consistent greatness of those two works in any of his other books. And that goes for this collection of stories titled Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall, which would not have gotten published were it not for his built-in fame....
Mediocre.
683) Deep River/Book Review/Jessica Schneider This is now the third book by Shusaku Endo I’ve read. Of my selections, one was mediocre (likely due to poor translation) and one was excellent (The Sea and Poison). Yet Deep River ranks somewhat in the middle — that is, falling closer the very good mark, and maybe only a notch below The Sea and Poison. Why his novel The Silence is regarded as his “masterpiece” I haven’t a clue, but again, now after reading Deep River, I am even more convinced the version of The Silence I read had a terrible translator. Deep River, translated by Van C. Gessel, is written in a spare, quiet and poetic style of writing that, while not intensely lyrical, contains poetic moments that are notable once the reader pulls back to view the larger canvas....
Good.
684) Enchanted Rock/Book Review/Jessica Schneider Most natives to Central Texas have at one time visited Enchanted Rock State Natural Area. The park offers a great place to climb, hike, camp, and plenty of scenery to soak in. Located just past Llano and on one’s way to Fredericksburg, Enchanted Rock is not only a must stop, but it is also a place larded in geographical and historical significance....
Good stuff.
685) Midnight Cowboy/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Midnight Cowboy (the name was then contemporaneous slang for a male prostitute) is one of those solid, well-made films from the 1960s that’s best recalled than watched. This is not to say it’s a bad film. It’s not. It’s a good, occasionally very good film — especially in terms of editing, cutting, and realism. But in many ways it’s an interesting short subject film of 25-30 minutes’ length, blown up to four or five times its optimum running time....
Overrated.
686) If..../DVD Review/Dan Schneider If...., the 1968 black and white and color film by British director Lindsay Anderson, is a good and interesting film, and one that certainly has moments of candor and depth. But it’s simply not a great film. It lacks daring and innovative technical aspects, even as it does very daring things with its screenplay and the often random back and forth switching between color and black and white film, which, according to the DVD features, came about due to the technical limitations of lighting a shot in a cathedral. Anderson so liked the look that he reputedly told his cinematographer that he’d use black and white hell mell, whenever he felt the desire. The net result is that the random switching implies a meaning, and, had Anderson never stated his real reason for doing so, there would have been reams of words written over the deeply symbolic meaning of why scenes A, C, and E were in color, while B and D were in black and white. In his admission, Anderson therefore mocked the very criticism of intent that has plagued film criticism for decades. Of course, according to those who knew Anderson, like the film’s star, Malcolm McDowell, it was right in keeping with Anderson’s persona to so tweak the critics....
Good.
687) The Suspended Step Of The Stork/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Greek filmmaker Theo Angelopoulos is so great an artist that he can achieve a high level in his art through many assorted means. Having just watched his great 1991 film, The Suspended Step Of The Stork, I am still amazed. He has hit greatness in other films, but this film reaches it by taking ordinary life moments, slightly displacing them from the norm, then stepping back to take in how it all unfolds to build narrative and character in a film almost entirely devoid of facial close-ups. It’s a remarkable achievement, on par with the use of still images in Chris Marker’s La Jetee, and the use of ultra-extended takes in Bela Tarr’s Satantango, because, like those films, it does not lack a narrative, as so many poor critics claim, it simply builds a strong narrative in a totally different way than most film does. This obliquity of moment, to coin a phrase, is used ceaselessly in this film- in fact, more so than in any of Angelopoulos’s other films that I’ve seen....
Masterpiece.
688) Mongol/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Oftentimes critics use words as shorthand to convey one thing when they really mean another. The term epic, as example, is often used to describe films that are merely long. This is an incorrect usage, for epic also implies bigness in other areas- the film may be on a grand subject- a war, the conquest of space, the life of a very important and influential leader in human affairs, etc. But, merely long films, like Bela Tarr’s Satantango, do not qualify. On another level, terms like epic are also wielded to imply not only hugeness of theme, but also to imply that the film or art or thing is also good, in terms of its quality. After all, why use a superlative on something that is not superlative in all senses? This, too, is not so. And a good example of a film that can be called an epic, rightfully, in many cinematic aspects, yet also be panned as, at best, a mediocre film, is the 2007 film from Russian filmmaker Sergei Bodrov, Mongol: The Rise Of Genghis Khan. In short, no one will be comparing this film to any of the films Andrei Tarkovsky wrought. It has far less in common with a real cinematic artist like Tarkovsky, and far more in common with the dreck Hollywood produces, from men like Ridley Scott (his recent films) or Michael Bay....
So-so.
689) A Plague Upon Humanity/Book Review/Jessica Schneider My husband Dan has a fantastic imagination. He always likes to tell stories, especially those involving his days growing up in New York City. One of the people he’s told me about is a Chinese woman he calls “Grandma Chin.” He’s even written a poem about her, and one of the main points he relayed was that Grandma Chin always used to speak of how much she hated the Japanese. It seemed that even to her grandson and his friend, youth was no boundary when it came to telling how much she despised “the damn Japs,” as she called them. And while I am in no position to condone any kind of racism, Daniel Barenblatt’s book, titled A Plague upon Humanity: The Hidden History of Japan's Biological Warfare Program, offers some insights into why Grandma Chin might have felt the way she did....
Good.
690) El Cid/DVD Review/Dan Schneider El Cid is one of those Hollywood-European mega co-productions of the 1950s and 1960s that were crafted to combat the growing influence of television. The film industry wanted sheer size and spectacle to be able to battle the threat it sensed from the little screen. Westerns, Sword and Sandal epics, and historical films of all stripes were in vogue. Most were overblown fare like Cleopatra, while very few were intelligent films, like Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus, or Anthony Mann’s El Cid. Mann, in fact, was the original director of Spartacus, whom star and producer Kirk Douglas replaced with Kubrick. He was also an accomplished director of standards in the Western genre, like The Tin Star, and even Hollywood classics like The Glenn Miller Story. Yet, he was never the auteur director that Kubrick was. there was never a signature Mann style. His films are well crafted, well acted, well written, and nothing more. Granted, in this day of Hollywood schlock in all forms, such should not be so lightly dismissed. Nonetheless, El Cid both benefits and suffers from these very qualities....
Epic.
691) Ran/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Critical cribbing is a term I coined re: the tendency of critics, in all fields, to not engage a work of art directly, but rather to fall back on lazily repeating claims that have been made by others about the thing they are reviewing. Sometimes, these are positive blurbs; other times, these are bits of misinformation repeated endlessly — such as the characters’ names in films like Last Year in Marienbad or Blowup....
Good.
692) The Rules Of The Game/DVD Review/Dan Schneider French filmmaker Jean Renoir’s 1939 black and white classic, The Rules Of The Game (La Règle Du Jeu), routinely shows up on Top Five lists for best films ever, along with classics like Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane, Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, and Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story. But, it’s not in a league with any of that tercet. In fact, while it’s a good film, and a quite enjoyable one, it’s not even close to being a great film. There are two basic reasons why: first is that, despite some kudos given by technical experts, the film is not nearly as visually compelling nor stunning as the Welles film, and its oft-claimed camera innovations and cinematography are not anything that wows a viewer. Of course, there are some interesting moments, and some of the nature photography is first rate, but anyone expecting to see the 1930s equivalent of The Matrix or 2001: A Space Odyssey, will be disappointed....
Good.
693) The Ship Of Fools/Book Review/Jessica Schneider I first stumbled upon Uruguayan writer Cristina Peri Rossi in a used book store a number of years ago, saw she was a writer I was unfamiliar with, and thus purchased her book The Ship of Fools. What persuaded me to purchase her novel over another was the fact that she seemed to tackle larger themes in her book, themes like identity, freedom, responsibility, power as it relates to sex, as well as other various components of the human condition. I also found it interesting that she didn’t write the way one thinks of a woman writing. While that might sound sexist, I admittedly tire of reading “sentimental women’s novels” (you know, crap like The Lovely Bones and The Time Traveler’s Wife) and at times, I have avoided books because of the feminine (note: sappy) nature of the subject matter....
Solid.
694) Why Evolution Is True/Book Review/Dan Schneider A parable, I think….I have a friend. A good friend. I love him like a brother; but sometimes I just do not understand what motivates him — at least I cannot connect with it on an emotional level. Intellectually, I get it. That’s because it bears out his weakness re: needing to have his intellectual ego stroked. Like me, he is not religious, and does not believe in God (the Christian God nor any others). But, while I am content to let others flail about and try to prove to me that there is such a thing as an all-powerful deity, my friend is not so secure in his reality....
Yawn.
695) Revolutionary Road/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Herein the primary definition of tragedy: A dramatic composition, often in verse, dealing with a serious or somber theme, typically that of a great person destined through a flaw of character or conflict with some overpowering force, as fate or society, to downfall or destruction. In many colloquial settings, the word is overused to describe anything bad that happens to anyone. An old man gets cancer and dies: a tragedy. A baby is struck ill with an incurable disease: a tragedy. A plumber is accidentally killed in an auto accident: a tragedy....
No improvement on the book.
696) For All Mankind/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Knowledge for all should never take a backseat to the problems of the few. This ideal kept buzzing in my head as I watched Al Reinert’s 1989 Academy Award nominated documentary, on the Apollo space missions to the moon, For All Mankind. At a crisp 79 minutes, it’s a short documentary, and in it Reinert culled over 6000 hours of film taken about all the Apollo missions from Apollo 1 through Apollo 17. But, unlike other documentaries I’ve seen on the subject of space exploration, Reinert - a newspaper man, not a film expert nor director before this, does something great - he mixes and matches footage from all the flights that made it into space, even the ill fated Apollo 13 (as well as some from the Mercury and Gemini missions). This has the effect of truly making the whole effort of reaching and exploring the moon seem one continuous thing (which it was) rather than discreet missions. The astronauts, thus, become ‘astronauts’- undifferentiated and interchangeable, which was NASA’s goal - that any of them could handle any facet of any mission....
Classic.
697) Rebecca/Book Review/Dan Schneider Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca is a 20th Century version of what the Brontë sisters may have written. It is not a deep nor great novel in the way A Tree Grows In Brooklyn nor The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter are, but it is a good novel, in the Gothic tradition, and a very good read....
Good read.
698) Pitfall/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Sometimes less is more. Such is the case when comparing the first two excellent films of Hiroshi Teshigahara that I’ve seen. I watched his third film, The Face Of Another, first, and the only thing that prevented that film from greatness was the gilding of the lily by adding in a subplot that made no sense and actually took away from the crispness of the film. Having now watched the filmmaker’s debut feature (his claimed masterpiece, Woman In The Dunes, is next on my agenda), Pitfall (The Pitfall or Kashi To Kodomo or Otoshiana or ???? ), a 97 minute long, black and white existential gem from 1962, it’s nice to see that he did not make that error with this film which, while in many ways as visually daring, is narratively cleaner and dramatically more powerful. It has only one minor flaw, which I will touch upon....
Great existential crime drama.
699) The Black Dahlia/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Pitch to Hollywood studio stooge: “You see, I’ve got this idea to do a film about a real life event, except the film will only feature about ten minutes of the real life event, as a sort of ‘in’ to get the suckers to come and drop ten bucks. Meanwhile, what we’ll do is make a trite and pale copy of a 1940s film noir with a bunch of B-level actors uttering the most clichéd phrases left out of Edward G. Robinson film.”....
Awful.
700) The Face Of Another/Book Review/Jessica Schneider Kobo Abe is a writer I came to learn of after having watched a trilogy of films by Japanese director Hiroshi Teshigahara, all of which were adaptations of Kobo Abe’s works. The first film I watched was The Face of Another, based on Abe’s novel with the same title. And because the film is both excellent and philosophical (putting both Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni stylistically in mind) I immediately sought out a number of Abe’s works....
Good.
701) The Woman In The Dunes/Book Review/Jessica Schneider What greater metaphor for the existential crisis than Kobo Abe’s novel The Woman in the Dunes? After having watched a number of films by Hiroshi Teshigahara (each of which were adopted from Abe’s novels — the most recent one being The Face of Another) I sought out a number of Abe’s books. I thought that the film The Face of Another was better than the book, though The Woman in the Dunes is not only an excellent film, but it happens to be an excellent novel as well. In fact, one of the best I’ve read....
Great book.
702) Woman In The Dunes/DVD Review/Dan Schneider 1964’s Woman In The Dunes (aka Woman Of The Dunes, Suna No Onna, ???) is the third film of director Hiroshi Teshigahara’s that I’ve seen, and of the de facto trilogy put out by The Criterion Collection, Three Films By Hiroshi Teshigahara, it and a great film, and the best of the lot for as very simple reason: it has the least flaws. The earlier Pitfall and later The Face Of Another both are films that can dazzle, and both can stake claims to greatness (I’d accept the first film’s claim and reject the third film’s), but only this 147 minute long, black and white, film maintains itself in almost every scene. Granted, of the tercet, it is the least diverse film, in terms of tale and characters, but that is a minor quibble with a major work of art....
Very worthy.
703) Five By Endo/Book Review/Jessica Schneider I always love the little gems I am able to find in a Half Price Books. Even more so, are those books that I can’t believe anyone would wish to sell back, and so how lucky I was to stumble upon this little find: Five by Endo by Shusaku Endo. This slim collection of tales offers a taste of Endo’s writing, and Endo is a writer definitely worth dipping into....
Good stuff.
704) The Burmese Harp/DVD Review/Dan Schneider There are many paths to greatness for a film, and Kon Ichikawa’s 1956 black and white The Burmese Harp (aka Harp Of Burma, and Biruma No Tategoto), which runs just under two hours long, chooses the simplest path. It is not a film that is a dazzling cinematic experience, nor is it suffused with symbolism (although great shots and symbolism can be found within),; it is a film that takes a great and unique story idea and eloquently lets it play out. It also makes an interesting choice in its mix of oddly unreal situations (the breaking out into song by assorted armies in the midst of war) and scorchingly real images of death. The screenplay, by Ichikawa’s wife Natto Wada, wisely remakes the children’s novel, by Takeyama Michio, as a more realistic take on the lead characters of the novel....
Great.
705) The Box Man/Book Review/Jessica Schneider I detest using the word “experimental” to describe any given work that is a bit unusual or not what is considered a conventional form of storytelling. Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting: experimental. Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut: experimental. Sandor Marai’s Embers: experimental. Well, I wouldn’t classify any of these works as “experimental” (at least not in the sense that publicists cling to), for the word lazily implies that the artist is just yanking his or her audience around, and furthermore, the word does carry some burden with it, in that, much of the works considered “experimental” nowadays are actually just a code word for crap. After all, one could have surely labeled Whitman’s free verse poetry as such back in his day, but would anyone do so now?....
Ok.
706) The Mirror/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Of all the films I’ve watched, from the Godzilla and black and white sci fi films of my youth, to the silent films of my teen years, to the Hollywood schlock of, well, always, to the foreign films of the last few years, only three that I have seen have seriously made fundamentally radical usage of time and memory: Chris Marker’s La Jetee, Bela Tarr’s Satantango, and Louis Malle’s My Dinner With Andre. Marker’s film is 99% still photographs with narration, but, in recall, the mind animates the scenes. Marker thus achieves empathy in a profound manner, by literally altering the remembered reality in the viewer. Tarr’s film does a similar thing. His film focuses so relentlessly on the tiniest moments for the longest time that, again, in recall, the mind compresses the seven hour film into a recalled film of about the same length as a typical new release. The mind is forced to filter out things, as it does in real life, and thus we are empathizing with characters in a more ‘real’ sense. Malle’s film is basically all conversation, yet, again, in recall, there are scenes the viewer will swear he witnessed, even though they were never actually filmed. To this list I can now add Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1974 black and white and sepia and color film, The Mirror (Zerkalo or Mirror)....
Excellent.
707) King Of New York/DVD Review/Dan Schneider King Of New York is independent film schlockmeister Abel Ferrara’s so-called masterpiece. I guess, given his Paul Naschy level output, it is. But, in the real world, it’s a campy film with self-conscious silly quote-ready posing masquing as acting. That said, the performance of Christopher Walken, as Frank White, is really the only reason to watch this Scarface-wannabe film. He brings a faux gravitas to the role of modern Robin Hood gangster Frank White that is, well, interesting. One can take all of the other over the top performances and toss them away. Larry (not Laurence) Fishburne, Wesley Snipes, David Caruso, and others, are not acting, but posturing. Only Walken seems to realize that, despite Ferrara’s best attempts, the film is a parody- a comic opera, a comic strip....
Aces, eh.
708) The Face Of Another/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Every so often one pops in a DVD into a player and gets a hell of a nice surprise via the images that start pouring out from the boob tube. Such was the case when I decided to watch a film of Hiroshi Teshigahara’s, from a trilogy pack, released by The Criterion Collection, a few years ago. I had seen the collection at a good price, so bought it, knowing that some time in the future, when looking for a film to watch, I would come across the three disk set and be taken. Well, I was right. The film of his I chose as my initial foray was his third film, 1966’s 124 minute long The Face Of Another (Tanin No Kao or ????). It’s a terrific film about reality, the self, ego, identity, duplication, and a few other classic themes in psychology, and one that just misses greatness because of a few minor flaws: a bit too show-offy and obvious in terms of its psychology and symbolism, a failed side story, and a few moments where the narrative fell into predictability. But, these flaws are only enough to keep it from flat-out greatness. Otherwise, the film is intelligent, well-written, well-acted, and brilliantly directed....
Good.
709) Confessions Of A Mask/Book Review/Jessica Schneider Yukio Mishima is one of those writers who, like Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun, is likely more known for his outrageous political beliefs than for his work itself. This is not to say that Mishima’s work is not well known among certain literary circles, but as he came recommended, I was told not only of his cult like following, but also of his suicide, where he committed the ritual act of seppuku at the age of forty-five....
Solid.
710) My Life As A Dog/DVD Review/Dan Schneider *October Sky*. *My Dog Skip*. These were the first two films that came me as I watched Swedish director Lasse Hallström’s classic 1985 film *My Life As A Dog* (*Mitt Liv Som Hund*). While none of this trio is a film that can be matched against the greatest films of all time: *2001: A Space Odyssey*, *The Wages Of Fear*, *La Dolce Vita*, etc., all three are very similar to each other in setting up the minds of young male characters in response to the maturation process, and all three come close to true greatness on their own....
Good.
711) This So-Called Disaster/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Sometimes a work of art is not even that artistic, it’s just merely interesting. Interesting enough, however, to be recommended, if not because it has depth but because it simply offers a bit more insight into other works of art by an artist. Such is the case with the 90 minute long 2004 documentary by director Michael Almereyda: This So-Called Disaster. The behind the scenes documentary offers a glimpse into the final few weeks of preparation that went into the 2000 premier of actor and playwright Sam Shepard’s play, The Late Henry Moss at San Francisco’s Magic Theater. Having read many of Shepard’s plays, I greatly respect the man as an artist. He is a good actor and a good playwright. No one will ever mistake his best dramas for the best that was offered by Eugene O’Neill, Henrik Ibsen, nor Tennessee Williams. However, his best work is very good, if occasionally repetitive....
Ok.
712) Eternity And A Day/DVD Review/Dan Schneider The 1998 film by Greek director Theo Angelopoulos, Eternity And A Day (Mia Aioniotita Kai Mia Mera or Μια αιωνιότητα και μια μέρα), is not merely another film about a supposed poet wherein the art of poetry and the act of poesizing are never on display. Yes, it’s true that, technically, neither are onscreen, but it is a superior film about a supposed poet wherein the art of poetry and the act of poesizing are never on display, for the film does capture the dead cliché of ‘a soul of a poet’ as well as just about any I’ve ever seen. It does it with imagery, and Angelopoulos’s patented long takes, but it does capture it, and exceedingly well. The film was not only directed by Angelopoulos, but he wrote the screenplay. That it won that year’s Cannes Film Festival’s coveted Palm D’Or shows that, sometimes, quality still counts....
Great.
713) The Key/Book Review/Jessica Schneider Junichiro Tanizaki’s The Key is a short novel involving a husband and wife who both keep diaries yet are unsure if the other party has been reading each of their diaries. As result, a game of manipulation and deception begins. The husband is more than a decade older than his wife and has a strong sex drive, as well as being a bit of a foot fetishist. The wife is not interested in her husband sexually, yet they find they can get along if these disagreements are avoided....
Ok.
714) Vernon, Florida/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Errol Morris’s 1982 documentary Vernon, Florida, is rife with a great backstory; one that is interesting as the quirky townsfolk it portrays, This was Morris’s second stab at the documentary form- after his earlier Gates Of Heaven, and it detailed the ramblings of a number of wacky folk from the town. Initially, the legend goes, Morris was drawn to Vernon- a Panhandle town, because, over the prior quarter century dozens of residents had taken up the bizarre practice of cutting off assorted limbs of theirs to collect large insurance payments. The working title of the film was Nub City, but Morris changed the title and focus once several people threatened his life. Morris is said to have chimed in....
Funny.
715) A Personal Matter/Book Review/Jessica Schneider In my recent reading of Japanese fiction, one of the things I am delighted to discover is that the Japanese write fiction for grownups. What does that mean? Much like the great filmmakers Kurosawa, Ozu, Mizoguchi, and Teshigahara, (just to name a few) they work with ideas; they do not water their tales down with sentiment and PC; and they’re not afraid to take narrative chances. They also write according to their own vision, rather than subscribing to the subjectivity of their version of MFA programs back in their day....
Great read.
716) Mommie Dearest/DVD Review/Dan Schneider If a thing is so over the top in real life can the thing that is merely derived from that outrageousness be called over the top? Yes. But, is it fair to blame the reflection for the sins of the original thing? I think not. This is not to say that Frank Perry's 1981 Mommie Dearest, which chronicled the life and times of movie superstar Joan Crawford and her adopted daughter, Christina, is a great film. It certainly is not. But it’s not a bad film, either, despite its reputation. In fact, it’s quite a good film....
Better than given credit for.
717) Gates Of The Arctic/DVD Review/Dan Schneider A number of months back I had done a review on the short film by nature filmmaker John Grabowska called Crown of the Continent, which explores Wrangell-St. Elias National Park, in Alaska. I noted how it was a highly poetic film, offering viewers more of a visual essay (coupled with voice over narration and stunning photography). Gates of the Arctic: Alaska’s Brooks Range is an hour-long film directed by Rory Banyard, and as a film, is much more instructional and traditional when thinking of nature documentaries, yet while not as poetic, it is enjoyable and educational nonetheless....
Good.
718) The Samurai/Book Review/Jessica Schneider The Samurai is not the first time that Shusaku Endo has written about the persecution of Christians during the 17th century. He also did it in The Silence, which is considered to be the more popular and richer of the two works, even though I found The Samurai to be a better work overall. Part adventure tale, part historical novel, and part internal, The Samurai put me in mind of two other works, notably the most famous book involving men on a ship: Melville’s Moby Dick, and also Charles Johnson’s 1990 novel, Middle Passage....
Good.
719) The James Dean Story/DVD Review/Dan Schneider One of the best aspects of the DVD revolution has been the rescuing of films (especially documentaries) that would long ago have fallen into deterioration. My wife recently purchased a GoodTimes DVD of the 79-minute long 1957 documentary film The James Dean Story, directed by George W. George and Robert Altman, who, long before his fictive film breakthrough with M*A*S*H, was a documentary and commercial television director....
Solid.
720) Crimes And Misdemeanors/DVD Review/Dan Schneider He’s out there. Yes he is. And he’s far scarier than Hannibal Lecter, Freddy Krueger, Anton Chigurh, or any of the other cartoonish murderers served up by American cinema over the last three decades or so since slasher and serial killer films came into vogue. The reason is because he is far realer. There are more of him out there, in real life. He is not some freakish killer who hides in the corner of society, doing ghoulish things and masturbating over it. No. He is in the mainstream, and for every person, in real life, that is killed in the Hollywood style depicted in films that star the above named ghouls, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of human beings killed in the very way that he killed. They are murdered, as a way of doing business, as a seeming necessity for someone to retain their privilege. There is no indulgence in the passions and perversions that the gory monster sort of killers in cinema indulge in. No, they are strictly business-like. Efficient, emotionless. Professional. They are all embodied in perhaps the most realistic embodiment of murderous evil put on to the silver screen. That character is Judah Rosenthal, as portrayed by Martin Landau, in Woody Allen’s masterful 1989 film, Crimes And Misdemeanors- a work that far supersedes the work of art it is almost always compared to, Fyodor Dostoevesky’s Crime And Punishment, and provides a glorious capstone to Allen’s greatest decade in film, one which opened with his phenomenal 1980 masterpiece, Stardust Memories....
Great.
721) Taxi Driver/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Is there an American film more wrongly and regularly misinterpreted than Martin Scorsese’s 1976 masterpiece, Taxi Driver? Not even 2001: A Space Odyssey, by Stanley Kubrick, nor Apocalypse Now, by Francis Ford Coppola, have been intellectually, politically, and critically twisted and turned away from what they really are- and this all aside and apart from the silly debates over art influencing real world violence after John W. Hinckley attempted to assassinate President Ronald Reagan, in 1981, due to his own obsession with actress Jodie Foster. The film has been deconstructed and reconstructed (see references to Death Wish and The Searchers) according to prevailing political and artistic whims more than several times, and matters have been further complicated by the many claims of the film’s protagonists, from screenwriter Paul Schrader (is there a better example of a filmic one hit wonder?), to director Scorsese, to star Robert De Niro, the claims and counterclaims about the film have devolved into legendry....
Great.
722) Teach Us To Outgrow Our Madness/Book Review/Jessica Schneider I recently finished reviewing Oe’s well-known novel A Personal Matter, and was impressed by the way he handled an otherwise PC situation with maturity and not drenching the reader in sentimentality. This collection, titled Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness: Four Short Novels, offers a good overview of Oe’s work, even if all the tales are not at the same levels of quality. While the book claims these to be four short novels, they are really novellas or long short stories, with exception for the first (and longest) story The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away, which is probably the weakest tale in the collection. It is not a bad story, but next to some of the others, especially the best tale in the book, Prize Stock, it fades by comparison....
Solid.
723) Three Monkeys/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan is one of the current Big Three film giants of Europe, in that he is a throwback to the days of visionary directors like Stanley Kubrick, Michelangelo Antonioni, Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, and Andrei Tarkovskiy. Along with Greece’s Theo Angelopoulos and Hungary’s Bela Tarr, Ceylan has grown into a rarefied stratosphere, and his last film, 2006’s Climates, was a masterpiece. His latest film, Three Monkeys (Turkish title: Üç Maymun), continues Ceylan’s progression as a superb visual stylist, as the film’s every shot is bathed in either natural light or sepia tones that make rundown Turkish neighborhoods seem majestic. Cinematographer Gőkhan Tiryaki shows he is one of the top cameramen in the business with this film, especially in scenes where overcast weather takes on Gotterdammerung-like tones. But, unfortunately, while this film is Ceylan’s greatest visual achievement, it represents a decisive step back in terms of screenwriting....
Hit and miss.
724) Mouchette/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Right on the heels of his great 1966 film, Au Hasard Balthazar, French film director Robert Bresson embarked on another exploration of the indignity of life, this time focusing on the life of a troubled teenage French girl from the country, one whose life was sort of a melding of the main female character from the prior film, and its titular donkey. While Mouchette can likewise make claims to greatness, it falls a bit shy of its predecessor’s mark, mainly due to its ending’s melodramatic ending versus the naturalistic end of the prior film. Granted, while both films end in their titular character’s deaths, and teen girls are wont to melodrama that donkeys are not, the ending is still relatively weak. Also, the fact that the earlier film takes place over the course of many years, whereas Mouchette takes place over, perhaps, a few weeks or months, allows the latter film a little bit more leeway to try and milk a bit of forced drama from its premise; just not enough to make its ending work....
Great.
725) Kokoro/Book Review/Dan Schneider Published in 1914, Kokoro is considered to be Natsume Soseki’s finest novel, and as is, it is a very good book, albeit perhaps not as perfect from start to finish as some of the works by the more recent Japanese writers I’ve read. In fairness, Soseki came before them, so they had his work to play off of, but having said that, Kokoro is still a very good book, one well worth the read. Told in three parts, the first two parts are a bit more complex and interesting than the last third of the book, which is a bit of a disappointment only by comparison....
Solid.
726) There Will Be Blood/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Thirteen years and 14½ minutes of silence open Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2007 film, There Will Be Blood. It runs for just under 155 minutes. Thus the remaining 140 minutes of the film is where the film goes awry....
Vastly overrated pap.
727) No Country For Old Men/DVD Review/Dan Schneider There are some works of art and artists that are better in excerption. For example, I’ve yet to have time to read Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy books, but picked up a cheap set at a used bookstore for that time in the future when I will have opportunity to read it. I did so mostly on the prodding of friends, and because of the man’s reputation. When I have had time to skim through books, at a bookstore, for example, and I look for strong chapter ends or memorable paragraphs, I find little in McCarthy to recommend. In some ways, he reminds me of Faulkner, with the occasional high end paragraph, but much prosaic and aimless writing in between. I got this feeling from looking through major sections of two of his latest novels, The Road and No Country For Old Men (the title taken from W.B. Yeats’ great poem Sailing To Byzantium). If one chances upon a good section, McCarthy can suck a novice reader in. But, land in 95% of the rest of the book, and one wonders, where’s the editor?....
Laughably mediocre.
728) The Temple Of The Golden Pavilion/Book Review/Jessica Schneider Shakespeare was a Master when it came to crafting great melodrama. Just look at some of his tragedies, ones like Hamlet where everyone literally ends up dead. And with that bad ass sword fight at the end, how could anyone accuse old Willy of being floral and frilly? He was, like many male writers, charged with the testosterone that played out ever so well in his best work....
Good.
729) I Am Legend/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Richard Matheson’s classic 1953 sci fi novel I Am Legend deserves its reputation as a great read, and it is surely the best thing the man ever produced; as others of his novels and short stories are rather generic (save for a few The Twilight Zone television adaptations). That book is the granddaddy of modern undead cinema and literature- from vampires to Carnival Of Souls and the George Romero Dead films, to their parodies and updates, like 28 Days Later. It also was a successor to Daniel DeFoe’s Robinson Crusoe, in its handling of human loneliness, and precursor to Pierre Boulle’s Planet Of The Apes novel and films, in its post-apocalyptic tones. Twice before the 2007 Will Smith take on the film it was released as a Vincent Price vehicle, in 1964, and titled The Last Man On Earth. Seven years later Charlton Heston, that Apes film franchise alum, essayed the role in The Omega Man....
Yawn.
730) Patriotism/Book Review/Jessica Schneider This is one of those books that would have been better if expressed within a larger tale, because although the writing is technically good, the story is not particularly complex and it is, well…dour. Here’s the summary: a young couple marries. He is 31 and she is 23. Both are physically in their prime: attractive, sexual and full of vigor. Then the husband is sent away on tour of duty for the Imperial Army. Meanwhile, the wife prepares to kill herself if he does not return, as all dutiful wives should do. But then, surprise! He returns, albeit despondent because he knows he will be forced out the next day, instructed to perform an attack on his colleagues who have been labeled “Insurgents.” He is unable to perform this task so he has no choice but to perform seppuku. His wife agrees to die with him, though he trusts her enough to be a “witness” to his death, knowing that following his, she will suicide herself....
Interesting.
731) The Izu Dancer/Book Review/Jessica Schneider This is a rather unusual collection of tales and I was a bit disappointed. First of all, when I purchased this book, I thought this was a collection of Yasumari Kawabata’s short stories, but it actually only contains one of his stories, “The Izu Dancer” while the "other stories" are all byYasushi Inoue, a writer I still need to familiarize myself with. Obviously, one short story is not enough to get a good enough sampling of Kawabata’s oeuvre, and I would have liked to have seen more than just one. “The Izu Dancer” is a good story involving a young man hiking though the Izu Peninsula. While meditating on his own loneliness, he bonds with a group of traveling entertainers who among them have a young dancer he feels an affinity for. His prose is crisp, as he uses much of the geographical setting to emotionally evoke the narrator’s state of mind....
Solid.
732) Snow Country/Book Review/Jessica Schneider Kawabata’s Snow Country is one of those works that readers seem to “warn” other readers about with regard to the level of “patience” required to get through this book. In other words, scenes unfold at their own accord and not everything is explained. One will have to think. If one finds thinking hard, then yes, one will also need patience. But Snow Country isn’t really slow-moving. It is a relatively short work (finishing less than 200 pages) that shares the complexity of human relationships, isolation, loneliness, and even worse — when there are two people attempting to connect but ultimately cannot, whether realizing or not....
Good.
733) Cassandra's Dream/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Most published critics are idiots. Yet again this verity was reinforced to me whilst popping in and watching one of the latest films by Woody Allen to hit DVD. Cassandra’s Dream was almost wholly ignored in this country, lasting only a couple of weeks in the theaters. Yet, it is one of the two best films that Allen has made this decade, along with his other, earlier British murder drama, Match Point. While that film was lauded by critics as a return to top form by Allen, this film has been derided as a mere copycat of that film, which was, in many ways, a reworking of the serious half of Allen’s monumental 1989 film Crimes And Misdemeanors. Both claims are, essentially, true, but Cassandra’s Dream takes elements from both those movies and reworks them in novel ways. While it is not an indisputably great film like the first film in this ‘murder trilogy,’ it is, in a different way, a film that hits near greatness, like Match Point....
Better than claimed.
734) 2001: A Space Odyssey/DVD Review/Dan Schneider There have been film directors that were as great, in their own way, as Stanley Kubrick- think Orson Welles, who made great films on a shoe string budget. There have been filmmakers as obsessively controlling- think of the visual compositions of Yasujiro Ozu. There have been film directors who have wrought as many great films, and more, in many genres- think of Akira Kurosawa. And there have been filmmakers who have as intensely explored the human condition as microscopically- think Ingmar Bergman. But, no filmmaker had all of those qualities together, the way Kubrick did. And this is not to state that he is the greatest of his profession, merely that, from his earliest glimmers of greatness in Killer’s Kiss and The Killing, through his final masterpiece in Eyes Wide Shut, Kubrick was singular. There simply will never be any more remotely Kubrickian films. It’s not as if there are Kubrickian films the way there are Petrarchan or Shakespearean sonnets....
Great.
735) Ride With The Devil/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Director Ang Lee’s 1999 film Ride With The Devil is very much in aesthetic tune with many of the man’s other decidedly lightweight films, like The Ice Storm, The Hulk, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and the atrocious Brokeback Mountain. It basically drapes a melodramatic soap operatic plot over what could be fodder for a great filmic drama. Instead, we get, at best, a hit and miss film that has moments that are as bad as those in Brokeback Mountain, and a few as good as any ever filmed, which points out that Lee simply has no vision as a director. On the negative side is the stunt casting of then-hot singer Jewel (Kilcher) as war widow Sue Lee Shelley, an anomic screenplay that tosses loads of characters at the viewer in the first 10 or 15 minutes, expecting one to sympathize with them, and simply letting the 148-minute film (The Director’s Cut in the new The Criterion Collection edition) go on about 30-40 minutes too long to hold interest....
Mediocre.
736) The Trip To Bountiful/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Greatness in one medium does not assure greatness in another. One need only look at Peter Masterson’s 1985 drama The Trip to Bountiful to realize this. Yes, there are great elements in the film – the acting, the writing (Horton Foote’s screenplay is outstanding in the way it suggests surfaces barely lifted up, as it did in films like Tender Mercies and To Kill a Mockingbird), and the direction....
Good film.
737) Spring Snow/Book Review/Jessica Schneider Spring Snow is the first book in Yukio Mishima’s The Sea of Fertility tetralogy, and it begins at the end of the Meiji Era in 1912, when Japan is faced with new Western influence. Among the characters are two young men named Kiyoaki Matsugae and Shigekuni Honda....
Solid.
738) The Travelling Players/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Watching the 1975 Greek film, The Travelling Players (O Thiasos), directed by Theo Angelopoulos, is one of the most unique experiences a filmgoer can have. First, at 222 minutes, it’s a long film, but it works in a totally different way than some of the classic epics by David Lean, which were as long or longer than it. First, where Lean’s films have poetic moments, they are definitely novels on film; and by that I do not mean that they were merely screenplays adapted from novels, but their narrative thrust is very prosaic. They unfold in fairly straightforward ways, and achieve character development in ways that reveal bits and pieces of the characters through little moments- usually heightened, if not veering into melodrama. This is not to suggest that the Lean classics are not great films, merely to define their greatness....
Great.
739) The Departed/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Martin Scorsese’s film, The Departed- based upon a 2002 Hong Kong action flick, Internal Affairs, is his best film in over a decade, and a vast improvement over his last two bloated films: Gangs Of New York and The Aviator. That said, it is, in comparison to such classics as Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, and The King Of Comedy, second rate Scorsese- or in the range of what Casino was compared to Goodfellas, a good, solid, second tier work with flaws, except that, in this comparison, The Departed is Casino to Casino’s Goodfellas. There are several reasons for this. The first is one of the oldest reasons movies tank- the unnecessary love story element. In this film it is a bloated couch potato of an albatross from around whose neck The Departed sags badly in the middle. The moment the female character made contact with the second of the two male leads, I- and any astute filmgoer, knew exactly what would happen between them and how the film would play out, emotionally. The second is that the ending is bad, I mean really bad- a complete deus ex machina, and a narratively factitious one, at that; one which shows old Marty doesn’t trust his viewers that much any longer, and is then compounded by one of the worst closing shots in memory. The third is a recurring problem in recent Scorsese films: Leonardo DiCaprio. Despite all the hoohah, the man simply cannot act. Ok, to be fair, he can memorize lines, but he has no subtlety, no grace, and the fact that Scorsese puts the jailbait ready young blond into roles as tough guys is odd, to say the least, guffaw-inducing, to the point of causing severe bodily injury, in the extreme. One thing in the favor of DiCaprio in this film, however, is an early scene of a hairless bodied, prepubescent looking, DiCaprio stripped to his underwear while standing in a jailhouse line. The scene is likely to have middle-aged homosexual men creaming in their pants for years to come (I couldn’t resist the pun)....
Solid.
740) The Setting Sun/Book Review/Jessica Schneider After reading Osamu Dazai’s The Setting Sun, I don’t know who annoys me more: the whiny author’s self-indulgence, his whiny characters, or the reviewers who give five stars to this mediocrity. Of all the Japanese novels I’ve read thus far, this is by far the dullest and most clichéd. In fact, after reading, I just might have to rethink some of the things I said about Mishima’s otherwise excellent Spring Snow, where I spoke about the lead character being a pill and not particularly likable. But at least he had backbone. Compared to the flimsy characters in The Setting Sun, though, the depressives in Mishima’s books appear like happily dancing Smurfs. Okay, not really, but The Setting Sun, while not a terrible book, is definitely a mediocre one. The characters are whiny, vapid and have no insight. The prose is flat and void of any lyricism. Littered with clichés, the deepest you’re gonna get from this book is....
So-so.
741) Design And Truth/Book Review/Dan Schneider Design And Truth is a soon-to-be released book by philosopher Robert Grudin, from Yale University Press. Best known for his seminal 1982 book, Time And The Art Of Living, Grudin has continued to publish books every few years, and each work has both expanded and expounded upon ground he has staked out. This latest offering is no exception to that trend....
Good.
742) Fires On The Plain/Book Review/Jessica Schneider In a recent conversation with a friend, he remarked what a shame it was that more Westerners did not read, much less know the works of many of the great Japanese writers. After all, you say the words Tolstoy and Proust and many know who you are speaking about. But say the names Kawabata and Ooka and you will receive blank stares. I say what a shame because Fires on the Plain by Shohei Ooka is a terrific novel that should be on everyone’s list of Classics. It is a novel that puts me in mind of Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, not just because of the obvious subject matter, but also in the spare yet poetic way in which the stories are told. Remarque’s novel details the life of a German soldier during World War I. Ooka’s novel details a Japanese soldier while in the Philippines, during World War II. Both countries lost their wars, yet one is able to empathize with these “enemy” soldiers....
Good.
743) Rashomon/Book Review/Jessica Schneider The name Ryunosuke Akutagawa is a big one in Japanese literature, especially to Kurosawa fans. Akutagawa’s story “Rashomon” was used as the setting for the famed 1950 film, even though it is his story “In a Grove” that provides the direct template for the film. Dying by suicide at the age of thirty-five in 1927, Akutagawa wrote well over one hundred short stories, many of which are praised for their “lyricism.”....
Solid.
744) My Dinner With Andre/DVD Review/Dan Schneider I have long claimed that film, as an art form, is more an extension of literature than it is photography. By that I mean that, as John Huston, Orson Welles, Ingmar Bergman, and other great film directors believed, one simply cannot make a great film without a great screenplay. But, one can make a great film without great visuals. Never has there been a better exemplar of that reality than Louis Malle’s 111 minute long, 1981 drama My Dinner With Andre. It is a perfect example of what I have dubbed cinemature. There are some nicely composed shots, and some well-framed close-ups, but the film simply does little to play with the visuals; and the truth is that most films simply do not need such, if there is a good screenplay from which to feed off of. Of course, a great visual style, or visual flourishes, can add to a great screenplay, but, lacking that great bit of writing, no amount of visual wonderment can make a film that one will not yawn to after the third or fourth time watched. This is why so much of recent cinema, especially from Hollywood, is so forgettable. Video game level stories, paper-thin characters, and computer graphics simply do not add up to art. Individually, one of them can contribute to art, if done well, but done poorly, they are detractions. And, sans a good underlying screenplay, driven by character and not plot, nothing can save that sort of film from instant forgettability....
Great.
745) Our Undiscovered Universe/Book Review/Dan Schneider Every so often I encounter a work that has greater possibilities, but is limited, in some form, by the creator’s inabilities. Usually this occurs in the arts, but recently I decided to cave in, after several years of resisting his ubiquitous ads in science magazines, and bought (very cheaply) Terence Witt’s self-published book on cosmogony and cosmology, Our Undiscovered Universe: Introducing Null Physics, The Science Of Uniform And Unconditional Reality. It’s the sort of book that most people, ensconced in publishing, sneer at. When poets or writers self-publish their works, even if as mediocre as that put forth by big houses, there is always a taint of vanity. Similarly, because Witt self-published his book, without submitting it to the rigors and politics of peer review, most scientific types scoff at it. But, they do so at their own peril. This is not to say that Witt’s hypotheses and predictions are all wrong, although I suspect many are and some are not, but because the book does detail, very well and vividly, the manifest flaws in the current Big Bang Theory of universal origins. Now, Witt is not the first person to do so. In fact, Fred Hoyle, proponent of the Steady State Theory of universal origin, was the first to deride the current dominant model by derisively calling it the Big Bang....
Ok.
746) The 3 Worlds Of Gulliver/DVD Review/Dan Schneider In recently rewatching the classic Ray Harryhausen film (although technically directed by Jack Sher, who co-wrote the screenplay withArthur Ross) The 3 Worlds Of Gulliver (1960), based upon the classic novel Gulliver’s Travels, by Jonathan Swift, I was transported back to my youth. Most people, of course, might recall reading the book, and wondering why only the first two episodes in the book were filmed, when some of the more biting satire came later in Swift’s novel. Naturally, time considerations were at hand, and even long before this film’s release, the Gulliver mythos consisted primarily of the Lilliput portion of the book, with the Brobdingnag portion perhaps the only other part of the book explored....
Solid.
747) I Am A Cat/Book Review/Jessica Schneider Soseki Natsume’s I Am a Cat is many things. Told in three volumes via way of a pompous, humorous, intelligent cat without a name, I Am a Cat is a work of great satire, it is a work of true pathos, and it is a work of insightful literature. Written during 1904-1906, if there is one thing that the book reveals, it is that human nature does not change much over the generations. While the tale is told through a cat’s lens, the story is more about the humans than the cat, albeit there are passages that, for more or less, are believable within the universe Soseki has created. Given that one must accept that cats are more intelligent and knowledgeable than their human owners, the cat’s observations are spot on, and despite the era in which it was written, I Am a Cat is both fresh and Modern, as if it had been penned yesterday....
Good.
748) Zabriskie Point/Book Review/Dan Schneider Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1970 film Zabriskie Point, his second of three English language films for producer Carlo Ponti, and the MGM studio (the first being 1966’s Blowup, and the third being 1975’s The Passenger) is not the masterpiece its champions claim, nor is it the piece of schlock that its greatest detractors, especially those at its release, claim. At first glance, one might easily assign it the all style, no substance label. Yet, it’s the sort of film whose images grow upon the mind. Seeing something a second or a third time, in a film like this, enhances the impact, and allows for one to piece together seemingly loose threads that are missed in a single viewing....
Ok.
749) Stroszek/DVD Review/Dan Schneider There has never been a filmmaker remotely like Werner Herzog. This is not a qualitative judgment, just a reiteration of his filmography. He blends fiction and nonfiction in ways no filmmaker before nor since has, and almost always it works, and works exceedingly well. Who else could craft memorable films with the psychotic actor Klaus Kinski? Make a “science fiction” documentary about the burning oil wells of Gulf War One? Craft an oddly moving, if undefinable film using a cast comprised solely of midgets and dwarves? Make Count Dracula seem pathetic? Make a man obsessed with moving a boat over a mountain into one of film’s great achievements? Or make a film about an idiot who is so dumb he gets eaten alive by the grizzly bears he seeks to “protect” actually work? No one....
Good.
750) Botchan/Book Review/Dan Schneider Soseki Natsume is a great writer to have in anyone’s collection. At his best, his prose is lush and rife with human observation and insight. He is capable of genuine pathos as seen in his novels such as Kokoro and I Am a Cat, but he is also capable of great humor and satire, as in the case of both Cat and Botchan. Soseki is also a writer that works well to balance against the more intense Yukio Mishima, in that, Mishima seems to have little with regard to a sense of humor, while Soseki can playfully poke fun at his culture, himself, and humorously illuminate human ignorance so well. I’ve wondered what Soseki might have thought of Mishima, though he died before even knowing what a Yukio Mishima was, or even that World War II occurred. Soseki’s novels, many of which were written around or about one hundred years ago, are just as fresh and relevant now as they were at their creation....
Good
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