newcritics

This is the time of year when I get caught up on records I missed and my old new record of the moment is Bright Eyes‘ Cassadaga, released this past spring.
This is an enchanted record. A confessional, grandiose, oratorical, piece of Americana that mixes the pretentious and the personal in the grand, Whitmanesque tradition. It’s [...]

“Certain friendships,” Robert Redford once said about Paul Newman, “are too good and too strong to talk about.” This month, Redford broke his silence to say that the final movie they planned to make together was not to be:
“It’s not happening, sadly. Paul and I were planning to do a film version of Bill Bryson’s [...]

The Shamus confesses: I have a fondness for My So-Called Life. It only lasted a single season, 19 episodes, but its influence can be felt in shows from Buffy The Vampire Slayer to Gilmore Girls, Freaks and Geeks and Veronica Mars. On Tuesday, Shout Factory releases on DVD, My So-Called Life: The Complete Series. [...]

What I was saying the other day?
“Transformers?”
“Awesome.”
I wasn’t kidding.
If you’ve seen it, you know what I’m talking about. If you haven’t, don’t take my word for it. Chew on this. Back in June, when Optimus Prime and his friends hit the cineplexes, I was terrified I’d draw the short straw and wind [...]

After the success of Heroes last year (which I didn’t watch - anyone have the DVD for me?), NBC has re-discovered SciFi as a valuable TV genre. Perhaps it has been sharing DNA with the folks from sister network, the NBC Universal-owned SciFi channel. The first week of NBC’s season looked like “Must Geek TV” [...]

Like Bob Dylan and a few others, Peter Townshend understood the 20th century version of the successful artist, which combined the cultivation of a pop sensibility and the cash it brought with some vein of purity in exploration. As the Who has recycled a long strong of Townshend’s pearls - on TV, in advertising, in [...]

Those who have been watching the “Actors Studio” host interviewing movie stars for years will not be shocked to learn that, in an earlier incarnation, James Lipton worked as a facilitator in the world’s oldest profession.
In a new book, according to ABC, Lipton says that when he was “very very young, living in Paris, penniless, [...]

The woman who died this week was part of an American legend that will live forever in the Hollywood movies of the mid-twentieth century.
From the 1930s on, the studios there manufactured what John Updike has called “those gargantuan, crass contraptions whereby Jewish brains project Gentile stars upon a Gentile nation and out of the immigrant [...]

One of the tasks that has kept me busy over the last few weeks has been teaching a senior-level seminar course on the theme “Documenting Injustice.” The course examines various strategies and debates about the role of documentary practices (written, photographic, and filmic) in depicting various forms of injustice, and one of the issues [...]

In October, 1960 in New York, at the annual Al Smith dinner at the Waldorf - the traditional gathering of politicos and Catholics - Senators Richard Nixon and John Kennedy wore formal white ties and made jokes, as is the custom. Here’s a taste of JFK’s monologue:
Cardinal Spellman is the only man so widely respected [...]

Americans are an optimistic people. Most of us are descended from men and women who came over here because their lives in the old country sucked, and so they uprooted themselves and their families and left everything they knew to come to a country in which they hoped to have a better chance for happiness. [...]

The Siren has seen only a handful of movies recently and two, by pure coincidence, were connected to Vichy France. One was Le Corbeau, Henri-Georges Clouzot’s film about the effect of a poison-pen writer. Made during the occupation for the German-controlled Continental Films, it pinpoints mob psychology and collaboration so effectively that it managed to [...]

Jean Fanchette, a doctor, a poet and a publisher, personally acquainted with Henry Miller, and an intimate of Anaís Nin and Lawrence Durrell, wrote a short treatise on Humour. He quoted Freud and Jung all over the place as his own specialty was neuro-psychiatry, whatever that entails. He sent me an advance copy of his [...]

The world situation is relentlessly grim, the national political scene is discouraging, and the Mets go into the history books as one of the all-time greatest collapses of a team during one season.
To offer some relief from this reality, Newcritics is hosting a comedy blog-a-thon November 6 to 11 to coincide with the New York [...]

Who is Don Draper, besides being Dick Whitman?
On the one hand he is a self-made man who has ably demonstrated Galt’s creed: “I swear by my life, and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.”
Just ask [...]

Is Ayn Rand the most influential female writer of the last fifty years? Lordy, I hope not, but in these days of race-to-the-bottom capitalism, I think she might be.
Atlas Shrugged, the most widely-read of her tracts, first appeared fifty years ago tomorrow. When the New York Times panned the book back in [...]

Ten minutes into last night’s House, one of the famed doctor’s underlings gave their gravely ill patient a couple of pills and said: “Take these, you’ll be better within an hour.”
I turned to my daughter, a major House junkie.
“He’s a dead man,” I said, and so he was, but not for another 48 minutes, a [...]

Shaker Dr. Nick emailed me this weekend to tell me about having inadvertently tuned into and then watched “one of the bizarre shows I’ve ever seen” in which ten former high school cheerleaders, now ranging in age from 25 to 42 and in weight from 136 to 175, go to “cheerleading camp” to be bullied [...]

I took my 13-year-old daughter to see Across The Universe this weekend, and was surprised to find myself in the midst of a teen-heavy cult audience including several repeat viewers. The film came out three weeks ago, and it’s already a cult? Well, it happens the film is good enough to deserve this [...]

A few weeks ago I found a first edition hard-cover of Stuart Dybek’s I Sailed With Magellan in a bin of unwanted books selling for a dollar apiece. A week later, Dybek won the Macarthur Foundation “Genius” award, worth $500,000, and on its heels, the 2007 Rea Award for the Short Story, worth $30,000.
Dybek’s artistic [...]

If you’ve never read Alan Bennett, the famed and very funny British actor, playwright, and novelist, I recommend starting with his delightful new novella, The Uncommon Reader. My review of the book ran in the weekend’s Los Angeles Times Book Review. Here’s an excerpt:
In the introduction to his 2004 play, “The History Boys,” Alan [...]

Beating 50 Cent is not the only feat Kanye West achieved with the release of his third album, Graduation. He also charted as the highest first week sales of the year to date.
West’s and 50’s battle began when 50 claimed that if Graduation outsold his album Curtis, (both released September 11), he would quit rapping. [...]

Last week, I just missed Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad up at Columbia, but I did dodge the motorcades and frozen zones around the United Nations, and undergo the requisite pat-down at the Clinton Global Initiative. What a wild week in New York, and it reminded by a little bit of 1960, the year of our [...]

Against the background of the ongoing hand wringing over bottled versus tap, I fell headlong into Kevin Bone’s Water-Works – The Architecture and Engineering of the New York City Water Supply (The Monacelli Press, 2006), a handsome volume I had purchased for my father – the retired mechanical engineer – last Christmas. Wading through 150 [...]

Not all fall shows are direct rip-offs from past successes; sometimes they are spins on old standby genres, like Life, NBC’s new twist on the police procedural. In Life, Charlie Crews is a police detective who was convicted of a homicide and sentenced to life in prison. Twelve years later he is exonerated [...]

Death Proof was Quentin Tarantino’s half of his and Robert Rodriguez’s homage to trashy double-features, Grindhouse (complete with some fake trailers for imaginary movies directed by some other schlockmeisters). When I saw my first internet ad for this movie I e-mailed it to a friend who shares many of my own louche tastes, saying, “At [...]

Here’s the lead: Bruce Springsteen’s deep and nourishing Magic, released today, isn’t on a par with Born to Run or Darkness on the Edge of Town. But it’s firmly on the next level down, alongside The Wild, the Innocent & the E-Street Shuffle, Nebraska, The River and Tunnel of Love. And that’s saying something for [...]

The Shamus has listened to Bruce Springsteen’s “Magic” a couple of times now (praise be to free streaming at AOL) and I don’t want to write in terms of a review, but just offer a few impressions. All artists (or all worthy ones) go through phases. Springsteen lost me, for the most part, in the [...]