An American tradition: Ye olde epic gun fail.- What, you say you want to know which chemicals we’re poisoning your groundwater with? Absurd!
- So what does the One Percent want us to spend our money on?
- Also, here’s how much more you will have been earning over the past few decades; unless of course you’re one of the Oligarch Percent.
- Why Israel and Turkey are (sort of) friends again.
- The garish and looted cocaine mansions of Mali.
- So what’s the looniest theory about marriage equality to be tossed out into the Internets this week?
- The no- (or at least fewer) frills Vatican digs for Pope Francis.
- The Coen brothers are producing a TV version of Fargo for FX.
- Watch and vote: Does science refute God?
- Barry’s imperial presidency.
- Poor, poor Antonin Scalia.
- It’s about time: The Game of Thrones Death Generator.
- Print and read (then shower): the sad, sad world of Buzz Bissinger’s Gucci thing.
Tag Archives: United States
Department of Weekend Reading: March 29, 2013
Filed under Omnium Gatherum
New in Books: ‘The Dinner’
Herman Koch’s nasty surprise novel The Dinner was first published in his native Netherlands back in 2009. Since then, it’s been published in about twenty-five countries and been compared to everything from Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl to Yasmin Reza’s God of Carnage. The American edition hit shelves this month.
You can read my review at PopMatters:
It begins with blank effect, as though listening to your none-too-interesting friend relate a perfectly ordinary evening filled with ordinary grievances. The narrator, Paul, grouses about this and that, with a chipper flatness that suggests one of those quiet, empty books about ennui and social conventions. Before it’s all over, though, Herman Koch’s serenely malicious little mousetrap of a novel, The Dinner, will have revealed some deadly shadows behind the bright-mannered griping of its opening pages…
New on DVD: ‘Heaven’s Gate’
In the history of legendary cinematic disasters, there are flops and then there is Heaven’s Gate:
In his interview on the Criterion Collection release of the 1980 Michael Cimino film Heaven’s Gate, a craggy-looking Kris Kristofferson makes a strong appeal for the roundly maligned Western as being a potent work of political cinema. Kristofferson sticks up for Cimino’s indictment of Manifest Destiny and robber baron greed at the end of the 19th century. Of course, he did star in the thing. But still, this is the iconoclast’s take, and an unpopular coming after more than two decades of popular film history telling us that not only was Heaven’s Gate one of the greatest disasters in film history (it took in less than ten percent of the $40 million budget at the box office) but that it single-handedly ended the free-wheeling era of American filmmaking…
The Criterion Collection now offers Heaven’s Gate on DVD and Blu-ray, with plenty of the usual extras. My full review of the DVD edition is at PopMatters.
You can see the trailer for the original film release here:
Filed under DVD - Film
Department of Cinematic Complaints: Perceived Biases Edition
It was bad enough that the semi-scholar Dinesh D’Souza put his efforts behind a particularly seamy piece of Andrew Breitbart-ish video propaganda disguised as a documentary about Barack Obama. (This still from 2016: Obama’s America shows Dinesh intrepidly scouring the globe for clues to the president’s ignominy.)
Then came this:
…the makers of the documentary 2016: Obama’s America were peeved that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ shortlist of Oscar-contending documentaries didn’t include their film. The articles notes that 2016 was a surprise hit that pulled in over $33 million, a staggering amount for a nonfiction film and more than the 15 documentaries have made combined.
My post about this “controversy” is at Short Ends & Leader.
Filed under Film - New, Omnicultural
New in Books: ‘The Story of America’
Those truisms quoted today from Ben Franklin? Not meant to be taken seriously. Voting anonymously with paper ballots at polling places free of violence? Unheard of in America until 1890. This and more discussed in Jill Lepore’s new book The Story of America:
When in doubt about your thesis, cover the spread and present everything as a variegated tapestry of humanity. Sometimes this can serve as a neat dodge for a potentially failed project, better than trying to shoehorn everything into an explanation that doesn’t quite hold water. Depending on the richness of your material, this can be either a rag-and-bone shop of leavings (usually subtitled “sketches” or “impressions”), or a rich panoply of story that rattles and bursts with humanity. Even though it should fall in the former category, being mostly a collection of New Yorker articles, Jill Lepore’s wonderful The Story of America fits snugly into the latter…
The Story of America is on sale now at finer (and not so fine) bookstores everywhere; my review is at PopMatters.
Filed under Books
Music Break: Rodriguez
The story of Sixto Rodriguez—the Detroit singer-songwriter with the Phil Spector soar to his music and the dark Dylan grit to his lyrics—and how he was rediscovered by a world that was shocked to find out somebody of his talents had lived in the shadows for so long, is one of those rare tales that’s astonishing not just for its oddity but its beauty.
Malik Bendejelloul shot an incredible documentary about Rodriguez, Searching for Sugar Man (much of it using an iPhone with a $1 Super 8 app), that’s well worth seeking out—check out the trailer here.
Ebert was not far off when he wrote:
I hope you’re able to see this film. You deserve to. And yes, it exists because we need for it to.
60 Minutes did a segment on Rodriguez recently (“The Rock Icon Who Didn’t Know It“) that gives you the bare bones of the story.
If you listen to him sing “Sugar Man,” you get some idea of what the fuss is all about and how unfathomable it is that we haven’t been listening to this song on classic-rock radio for the past four decades:
Filed under Film - New, Omnicultural, World
Sight & Sound: Remembering the Lost
For years now, the nearly perfect organization StoryCorps has been traveling the country and giving people the opportunity to just sit down and tell a story about themselves, a friend, family member, or just life. The recordings (which run the gamut from the quotidian to the heartbreaking) are then stored at the Library of Congress, some 40,000 interviews since 2003. It’s an incomparable trove of oral history that will leave future researchers bowing in gratitude.
Their newest project involves putting some of their stories to animation. The result has a This American Life bounciness to them (mostly due to the music), but with a gutsy level of emotion that’s difficult to explain. John and Joe, about one father’s horrendous loss on 9/11 (StoryCorps aims to record at least one interview for each person killed that day), is one of the more memorable short films not just from this program, but from anywhere in recent memory.
You can watch John and Joe here:
One of the other incredibly heartwrenching shorts from StoryCorps’ 9/11 project is Always a Family, watch it here:
Filed under Film - New, Omnicultural, World
New in Theaters: ‘The Master’
The Master makes what should have been long obvious now utterly clear: Paul Thomas Anderson can lay claim to being one of the era’s few American writer/directors afflicted with greatness. It is hard to think of another home-grown filmmaker who so consistently brings such psychologically astute scripting, and ability to coax nakedly revelatory performances from actors—that classically trained eye for widescreen framing—to each film he makes. The Master may not match the level of artistry or thematic intensity seen in There Will Be Blood, but it is Anderson’s most approachable film in years, not to mention his most vividly realized characters to date. There won’t be much else like it on screens this year…
The Master opens Friday in limited release and expands wider over the next few weeks. My full review is at Film Journal International.
The trailer is here:
Filed under Film - New
New in Theaters: ‘Detropia’
“We are here at a critical time!” shouts a tent-revival preacher somewhere in the gloom of a rapidly downsizing Detroit. His is one of the many frightened, brave, saddened, still-fighting voices that Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady include as a chorus of the forgotten in their tragedy-tinted but clear-eyed look at what happens when a city’s reason for being up and leaves. Unfortunately, though the city is inarguably at a crisis point—in 1930, Detroit was the fastest-growing city in the world, and it’s shrunk by over 25 percent in the last decade alone—Detropia doesn’t show any evidence of a consensus on the solution…
Detropia opens this week in limited release and goes wider around the country over the next few weeks. My full review is at Film Journal International.
Filed under Film - New
Dept. of Literary Expatriates: Henry James
Although Henry James remains today one of America’s most celebrated novelists, and his most famous characters were usually American, he was never precisely enamored of his home country. Much like how T. S. Eliot decamped from St. Louis quickly as he could for the more rarefied airs of London intellectual life, James didn’t see much of value in his home country—though, unlike Eliot, he would frequently write as an American abroad in the wider world.
Novelist Colm Toibin, in reviewing Michael Gorra’s new book Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece, pulls out this interesting bit from a piece James wrote about Nathaniel Hawthorne just before The Portrait of a Lady. In it, a sweepingly dismissive James lists the things he sees as missing from American life that he sees as necessary for the novelist:
…no sovereign, no court, no personal loyalty, no aristocracy, no church . . . no palaces, no castles, nor manors, nor old country-houses . . . nor thatched cottages nor ivied ruins; no cathedrals . . . no Oxford . . . no novels, no museums, no pictures, no political society, no sporting class . . . no Epsom nor Ascot.
To a baroque and class-obsessed stylist like James, the country’s comparative lack of history makes for a thin existence. To a degree, James is right, without that weight of civilization which he lists, it is difficult to create a certain kind of literary figure: i.e., those like himself. America did ultimately export the likes of Twain, Hemingway, Kerouac, Bradbury, and Bellow, who all did just fine without thatched cottages or cathedrals—but never could have written The Portrait of a Lady (whether or not that’s a good thing depends on your taste).
