newcritics

I admit it, I am a sucker for previews. You can tell a lot about a movie in a few minutes. Obviously they are edited incredibly well to pull you back to the theater for the whole film but it is a quick glimpse of what is to come.
I saw the preview for [...]

Good movies are rarely made from great books.
There are the rare exceptions (think of Sofia Coppola’s Virgin Brides and Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita) that succeed mainly by trying to be something quite different from the books on which they’re based.
For the most part, however, filmmakers are content to abridge and abbreviate, [...]

Time travel, by its very delicate and potentially destructive nature, can never be a democratic practice. If everyone had access to the space/time continuim, the world would be destroyed within seconds, or at best, our “reality” would be in constant flux, fates instantly changing, lives enhanced, broken down, or wiped out, though none of us [...]

Coming back from Dublin a few weeks ago, I had several books with me, but found myself immersed, virtually the whole trip, in Alan Bennett’s Untold Stories — a smorgasbord of memoir, diaries, lectures and other writings that the playwright published in 2005, and that I have been meaning to read for a while. [...]

The first two chapters of Somerset Maugham’s Cakes and Ale are so bitchily insightful on the hypocrisies of literary culture that, if you’re a writer, your loved ones might want to hide out somewhere else while you’re reading it, lest you follow them around the house, cackling over and orating your favorite parts.
Scandal erupted in [...]

“The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world.”
–F. Scott, Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Has anyone in love with New York City not been enthralled by its bridges–whether from above, below, or speeding across [...]

A pirate walked up to me in the mall this holiday weekend as I was loitering outside of Anthropologie, waiting with only moderatre patience for The Artist. “Hey big man, I’ve got Pirates and Shrek 3 on DVD. Twenty bucks.” I shooed him away with a suave “belay me buck-o, and be about yer business.” [...]

-(husband in bed, trying to kiss and fondle unresponsive wife) Are you angry?
-(wife, just back from the village) No, I’m worried about my aunt.
(Sudden off-screen heavy breathing, the said horny husband masturbating instead)
If you think this is not frank, daring movie imagery, I share your feelings. This is pathetic, particularly as an attempt [...]

(It occurs to me that the “Olney” in the above headline means nothing to non-Philadelphians, and even to some Philadelphians it means little. Perhaps an explanatory note would be in order. Olney is one of those neighborhoods that no one ever really has any need even to go through to get anywhere, and, at least [...]

Every season, if you are lucky, there is one play that stands out in the crowd. Blackbird is a close second but Frost Nixon wins by more than a nose.
After Richard Nixon resigned from office, David Frost was the first person to interview Nixon. Eleven interviews were conducted on the topics of Vietnam, [...]

My friend Tyler introduced me to Apples in Stereo back in the late 90s. I found their jangly, sunny, hook-infested pop quite charming and inspired. If Daniel Johnston had never developed mental illness, he may have started a band like the Apples. After 2002’s disappointing “Ramones on helium” Velocity of Sound, the latest Apples release, [...]

All the attention to the end of The Sopranos may seem extreme, or ridiculous, or both. But I like to think of it as an updating of the crowds who waited on the dock in Victorian New York to get the next installment of The Old Curiosity Shop.
I bet our Victorian antecedents [...]

Funny thing is, I once hated Joni Mitchell. Back in 1974, when Court and Spark was released, and Help Me found its way to the play-lists, I didn’t understand the song. I was 16. Didn’t understand the sax part. Didn’t understand the lyrics, the production, nothing. The first few notes of that song would send [...]

In an opinion piece in the Los Angeles Times, Richard Schickel has jumped into the fray ignited by Motoko Rich’s New York Times article on the reduction in the number of pages devoted to book (and film) reviews in daily newspapers. I’ve already written at some length on this topic on my personal blog, [...]

What’s this? Philip K. Dick has been admitted to the pantheon. Four of his novels will be re-issued by the Library of America, alongside American masters such as Melville, Hawthorne, Roth, et al.

As a longtime fan who for decades has bent people’s ears about the literary merit of Philip K. Dick, I am as proud today as if a good friend were chosen for this honor. With one major misgiving: The Library ignored three of his very best books.

The Library chose four mainstream Dick novels: “The Man in the High Castle”, “The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch”, “Ubik”, and “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”. The latter three are excellent choices. (The first, “Man in the High Castle” is an odd choice, given it was one of Dick’s early novels and not his strongest.) But for some reason, the Library dismissed the trilogy he completed near the end of his life: the so-called VALIS trilogy (VALIS, The Divine Invasion, and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer.

The reason why is probably best summarized in a recent New York Times article, in which Charles McGrath dismissed the VALIS trilogy as Dick’s “Finnegan’s Wake—a book that’s more fun to talk about than to read.”

Tony Alva has this picture prominently displayed on the front page of his blog.
I’ve been thinking of The Glimmer Twins and their whiskey rock period which in my mind spans three records; Let It Bleed, Sticky Fingers, and Exile On Main Street. Whiskey Rock is based in the roots music of the southern US and [...]

Like Dennis, I’m a new contributor to Newcritics, and I’m pleased to be joining an impressive list of authors, although now that I’m writing for a new blog, I’m suddenly confronted with a variation of writer’s block. So maybe I’ll start by acknowledging my double addictions to classical Hollywood films and to viral videos–an [...]

Not content with his career as a political prognosticator and analyst, Mark Steyn makes occasional forays into film criticism. The death of Bernard Gordon, a blacklisted screenwriter of the 1950s, reminded Steyn of an old grievance, and led to his reprinting a 2003 Atlantic Monthly defense of Elia Kazan. “The arts have little time for [...]

There is a scene in The Plague, the relentessly grim post-war novel by existential icon Albert Camus, that still shocks: the hopeless, tortured death struggle of a beloved child - made worse by his father’s plea to the protagonist Dr. Rieux to “save my boy.” It’s a scene (and I say “scene” because I find [...]

Several people of my acquaintance were thrilled to see Jerry Falwell die, spitting out “Good riddance!” and hoping that his passing was a painful one.
While I understand the anger, even hatred, for this dreadful man, I cannot join the celebration, partly for karmic reasons, but also because it’s pointless. Falwell was a tent revivalist clown [...]

Hi New Critics crowd. Some of you may know me, many of you probably not. But Tom Watson apparently does, and he has graciously invited me to ramble and shout at this esteemed site. Thanks, Tom. And hello again, everyone.
Like you, I enjoy all manner of creative expression. By way of introduction, allow me to [...]

Absalom and Achitophel, John Dryden’s satirical allegory, disproves the idea that works of political propaganda can never be literature.
The year was 1681. England’s King Charles had sired children hither and yon but had no legitimate heir. His Catholic brother, James, stood next in line to the throne.
As fear of an alleged “Popish Plot” [...]

It’s not that Holland Cotter is routinely deranged; the Times art critics wrote a wonderful piece debunking the common myths surrounding Islamic art a while back, and maintains a healthy distrust of the invesstment-fueled “art market” as a driver of real taste and value. No, Cotter is solid. He did, however, become conspicuously unhinged and [...]

The Tristan Project at Avery Fisher Hall on May 2 was a triumph of creative vision and the top professionalism of deeply talented artists. Elements one always seeks in live performance of any kind that are too often disappointing.
A concert setting of opera has elegance and purity, with the orchestra onstage and the singers in [...]

There’s a moment midway through Down in Mississippi - the first song on We’ll Never Turn Back - when Mavis Staples begins to testify. Her testimony concerns an incident in her childhood, when she unintentionally led the desegregation of a laundromat in Forrest, MS.

She tells the tale in a preacher’s cadence, the way she must [...]

A friend, knowing my love for jazz, gave me two tickets to the Tribeca Film Festival for Anita O’Day: The Life of a Jazz Singer. Manny and I, already exhausted–it’s only Monday night–dragged each other to the packed theater on 11th Street. Now we are back and jazzed.

What a talent and what a life. From the age of 19, Anita O’Day , until she died Thanksgiving morning, 11/26/2006, sang, swung with big bands, bebopped with Charlie Parker, and proceeded into a solo career in which she matched Ella, Billie, and Sarah in her ability to make songs her own, not to mention her brilliant vocal improvisations. Perhaps the high point in her career–which was very much her life itself–was her performance at the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival. She sang “Sweet Georgia Brown,” starting oh so slowly and then breaking out into a sexy rendition unlike any other. If you want to know why people make a fuss about Anita O’Day, watch the clip.