newcritics

So much to read, so little time. Welcome to the occasional newcritics linkfest (or blog-whoring as the estimable Shakespeare’s Sister would call it). It’s three-dot time, friends. Jim Wolcott pans Woody Allen’s Scoop (”There’s a lot that doesn’t seem to have reached Mr. Magoo.”), a flick that was panned here by Lance Mannion, who gives [...]

Something remarkable happened at the conclusion of this year’s Celebrity Big Brother (the one with the exciting race and class theme that I’ve been going on about). Shilpa won. Britain voted, and Britain voted — by a substantial margin — for an Indian actress never heard of outside the subcontinent. In fact, to count off [...]

Was there a time when who wins the Oscar mattered to people outside Hollywood?
The Academy Awards show has always mattered. Watching the movie stars is fun, and not just in an OH MY GOD! Whatever possessed her to make her wear THAT? way, and not just in a Who’s that with Jack this year and [...]

I had an argument with a friend yesterday about why I like Jane Austen. I think he was goading me because I had admitted my excitement about getting home in time to watch the new Masterpiece Theatre’s Jane Eyre. Because he has no use for books of that nature he was curious why [...]

It is often asked “why do they hate us?” or “why do they hate freedom?” when speaking of the gut level antipathy that many downtrodden foreigners have toward America. Countries where Levis and rock and roll are prized above most things are just as likely to harbor radical militant hatred of America and Americans. Pick [...]

Senator James Webb invoked Andrew Jackson in his response to President Bush on Tuesday, he used a classic bit of the novelist’s art put the weight of Ole Hickory’s plain political talk at the service of criticism of modern corporate greed. It fit, but the edges were knocked off. Such is also the case with [...]

It’s been quite the day for the Scots: January 25 is Rabbie Burns’s birthday. St. Andrew’s Societies all over the world have been serving haggis in his honor. Steed and I had a Scottish adventure once - it was a great excuse to see him in a kilt.
I don’t know much about Robert Burns, beyond [...]

Lizzie invited me to last night’s screening of Jesus Camp. I went, with some trepidation. “It’s okay,” she told me, as the opening credits started. “You’re sitting next to a Jew.”
I tend to shrink from reimmersion in the whacked-out, storefront-church world of my childhood. Also, I worried that the tone of the film [...]

As with any artform, the history of modern humor hopscotches from one cataclysmic breakthrough to another. The periods between these explosions are relatively stable; humorists and their students pick up and minutely examine the shards left by the blast, and strategize small new variations, insignificant new wrinkles, on their freshly detonated craft.
But what we [...]

My husband brought two movies home from the video store last Saturday evening. The Last Kiss, a twenty-something, angst-ridden romantic drama where all the characters are on the verge of having nervous breakdowns, in the middle of having nervous breakdowns, or too clueless to know they actually should be having nervous breakdowns, and Joyeux [...]

So Britain did the right thing. Celebrity Big Brother viewers voted by an 82% majority to evict racist bully Jade Goody. Endorsement contracts have been cancelled, Jade’s successful perfume line has been pulled from department store shelves, the tabloids have universally dumped their favourite reality TV celebrity and her lucrative TV career is over.
Opportunist politicians [...]

Lance Mannion, who graces newcritics with his presence, runs one of those wonderfully just-because online events that attracts the right crowd: I refer to his weekly live-blogging fest of Aaron Sorkin’s much-maligned Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. Lance’s commentpalooza has been on hiatus with the show, but it returns to tonight and we urge [...]

Josh, our 11-year-old son, came home from school the other day singing the classic Who song, My Generation. He turned to me and shouted:

Why Don’t You All FFFFade Away
And Don’t Try To Dig What We All SSSay
I laughed. That song wasn’t even the rallying cry of my generation. But I sang it that way [...]

Watched Woody Allen’s Scoop the other night.
Me, last week, with emphasis added today:
In the end, I think [Edward] Burns will be content to be judged on the body of his work rather than on the excellence of individual movies and he appears confident that the judgment will tell in his favor. Woody Allen is doing [...]

When you see Ace in the Hole (and the Siren does hope that is “when”), you will immediately understand why, upon its first release, the movie stiffed colder than Harry Cohn’s heart. Austrian-born Billy Wilder always claimed affection for his adopted country, but you would never know it from this very great movie and its [...]

Britain’s having a nasty allergic reaction… to a reality TV show called Celebrity Big Brother. Here’s what’s happened (this is a big international story so you’ll know the basics). Once or twice a year commercial terrestrial TV station Channel 4 stuffs a bunch of B-list (C-list I guess) celebrities into a big house lined with [...]

There’s a distinct darkness on the edge of the old towns along the coast of southern Sweden in the dangerous world created by Henning Mankell and inhabited by his brilliant and reluctant police inspector Kurt Wallander.
I’ve ploughed through nearly all of the ten or so Wallander books in translation over the past few months, set [...]

Nobody talks much about James Thurber, anymore. I wonder why that is. When you look back at most of the great short-form literary humorists of the early/mid 20th century – from S. J. Perelman to Woody Allen – their stuff is almost impossible to read now. I remember laughing out loud when I first read [...]

Televised executions are all the rage these days, but the long drops in Iraq brought to mind two made-for-television movies that I saw decades ago, but remain fairly vivid for their imagery and their unshaking lens. They were seen as anti-death penalty arguments on the small screen, but as I remember, both The Execution of [...]

There are strange things done in the midnight sun
By the men who moil for gold…
Today is the birthday of Robert Service, the first of two Scottish poets whose birthdays I’ll celebrate this month. Well, I didn’t really celebrate Service’s birthday, but I called my mother to tell her. My Uncle Paul gave my [...]

Bob Dylan is a master of many things, perhaps chief among them is the craft of cultural appropriation. It’s a trickster’s craft - an art best practiced by a thief and a changeling, someone who can walk out of the Louvre with the Mona Lisa on his student’s easel with no one raising an eyebrow [...]

I write this post at great risk of sounding much older than my 42 years, but my lack of diction and eloquence coupled with the fact that I regrettably paid exactly zero attention during any writing class throughout high school and college leaves me with this handicap that I alone am accountable for.
The fact that [...]

In our house (here in London’s outer suburbs) we have an annual post-Xmas tradition. In the weeks after the dust has settled and a small truckload of packaging and wrapping has been disposed of, I review the stuff that the kids actually seem to like (and sometimes the obvious rubbish that’ll never see daylight again [...]

Much critical ink has been spilled, and deservedly so, on the merits of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. as a writer. King was a master of the language, and indeed his use of the written and spoken word created the center of his power as a leader, and preserved his image as an icon. [I [...]

New Criticism was a movement among early 20th century writers and critics of English that argued a strict adherence to a series of absolute truths, the most important of which was that everything that can be known about a work of literature can be found in its published text. Almost a century later, technology and [...]

Technology marches on, Moore’s law becomes MoreMoreMore’s Law, and drooling consumers fight it out on Christmas Eve for the last latest and greatest mind-numbing electronic socially isolating plastic and silicon unvention.
These devices become smaller/faster/cheaper feature-packed future junk, and I ask myself why do we need this stuff?
I think of the iPhone as the guy next [...]

A fortnight after I finished it, Richard Ford’s trilogy-ending novel The Lay of the Land was still with me. And yet, I cannot tell you what happens in the book, what plot developments drive the last chapter in the saga of Frank Bascombe, what the story really is. There are some bits about a funeral, [...]

The domestic sitcom may be the signature American narrative form of the second half of the 20th century. Certainly it is the most dileberately reflexive - casting back to its audience an image of itself sometimes idealized, sometimes realistic.
The domestic sitcom functions as a catalog American life in the postwar years -most obviously in [...]

Blue Girl’s 2007 Resolutions: #1: If I start to read a book, especially if I bought the book, I will finish reading that book!
I got up early this morning and everyone else was sleeping. I made coffee and lit a fire, grabbed my favorite afghan and cuddled up on the couch [...]

Five minutes into Sidewalks of New York, screenwriter-director Edward Burns has made better use of Dennis Farina and gotten more out of him than Law and Order managed in two seasons.
Eighty minutes in, Burns has made better use and gotten more out of most of his cast than any director who worked with them before [...]

James Wolcott beat me to a post I’ve been meaning to write for a while: praise for a wonderful BBC radio program that I’ve enjoyed as a podcast on many a train ride:
I also want to direct attention to the excellent trove of replayable broadcasts of Melvyn Bragg’s superb In Our Time series on BBC [...]

Shakespeare’s Sister writes a brief and heartfelt homage to Iwao Takamoto, who created Scooby Doo, and died at age 81:
I can’t begin to explain how much I adored Scooby-Doo as a kid. For my birthday one year, all I wanted was a Scooby-Doo record player. Never mind that they didn’t make Scooby-Doo record players. Mama [...]

Elderly rock stars have this gift for introspection and analysis; they look back with a clarity not present during the drug binges, and there’s a received wisdom that comes with the long-term attainment of stardom - a been there, done that shrug. Two of ‘em - roughly half a rock generation apart - write a [...]

Among the people in the world that I truly idolize are David Simon and Edward Burns. Simon had a 22 year career covering the police beat for the Baltimore Sun before writing a book length piece of journalism Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets that inspired the NBC cop show, Homicide.
Burns spent 20 [...]

Twenty years ago, a friend of mine pointed to the rusted and abandoned elevated railway bed in Chelsea, which I’d barely noticed before, and proclaimed: “There are a couple of real estate bigshots fighting for that - it’s gonna be valauble some day.” That day has come, but not in the developer-oriented vision my friend [...]