I reviewed Power Ballad at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Film Festival for Slant Magazine:
John Carney’s Power Ballad has most of what it needs to succeed, from a charming pair of leads to a fittingly catchy song. But like the fraught relationship between its two musician characters, Rick (Paul Rudd) and Danny (Nick Jonas), the film never finds the right groove…
It opens June 5. Here’s the trailer:
Read the book, not the summary.
Write the piece, not the prompt.
Suffer like the artist you are. It ain’t easy, but if it were easy, it wouldn’t be worth doing.
Colson Whitehead, ladies and gentlemen.
I reviewed Caroline Bicks’ new book on Stephen King for PopMatters:
An academic by training, Bicks specializes in Shakespeare and has several works on the Bard to her name, e.g., Cognition and Girlhood in Shakespeare’s World (2021). As such, she frames Monsters in the Archives as a literary researcher ready to leverage her training in deep text analysis. Yet her book also has a personal component, given her attachment to King’s work from an early age. You know what she means: that quivery, excited, frightening feeling that comes from reading stories like ‘The Boogeyman’ too young…
One thing writers always want more of is time. We often think that if we only had long stretches of uninterrupted, unencumbered hours stretching out before us like a rapture-worthy landscape, then all of our work could get done. There is some truth to this. It’s hard to knock out a novel while working fourteen-hour days.
But hard is not impossible. Also, as Maggie O’Farrell says, obstacles can actually help:
There is nothing so dangerous to good writing as having too much time, too much liberty. You need the filtration system of being kept from your work. You need to reach the keyboard in a state of hunger, of desperation. You need to sit down at your desk with a desire to unleash all that you have been mulling over, all those solutions and permutations and reframings…
Interruptions are the devil and can break up your flow. But interruptions are also life, which you cannot put on hold just to get more pages done.
According to Oscar Wilde, the formula is very simple:
A writer is someone who has taught his mind to misbehave.
I reviewed Project Hail Mary, Amazon’s new film about Ryan Gosling saving the planet, for PopMatters:
Some may walk out of Phil Lord and Christopher Miller’s goofy and pop-operatic adaptation of Andy Weir’s novel Project Hail Mary trying to string together all the shards of hard science fiction-speak that just burst from the screen at them. They may be able to math all the astrophysics which the film’s scientist hero, Ryland (Ryan Gosling), has to wrangle to save Earth from microscopic alien organisms that are rapidly eating the Sun. While that would be an admirable accomplishment—Drew Goddard’s script does not stint on the science—it would also be beside the point…
Here’s the trailer:
I reviewed Fantasy Life for Slant Magazine:
Writer-director Matthew Shear’s Fantasy Life is an initially familiar-feeling rom-com about urbane yet nerve-rattled characters that eventually, but just barely, transcends expectations. A law school dropout who appears constantly shell-shocked by the concussions of everyday life, Sam (Shear) is first seen getting fired from his impossibly bleak office job before having a panic attack at a bookstore. With seemingly few prospects, he takes on a job as a manny for the children of a wealthy couple, Dianne (Amanda Peet) and David (Alessandro Nivola). Sam almost immediately falls headlong for Dianne, an ex-actor suffering from different but similarly debilitating and career-stifling mental health issues…
Here is the trailer:
One of the must-see documentaries at MoMA’s Doc Fortnight festival was Nova ’78.
My review ran in The Playlist:
Backstage at the Nova Convention, a three-day gathering in late 1978 ostensibly to celebrate the work of William S. Burroughs, an organizer worries that audience members will be upset by the news that Keith Richards has cancelled, as rock stars do. About to mount the stage, Patti Smith agrees to deliver the bad news, saying with the grinning nonchalance of a bohemian gunslinger (or neo-punk Bob Dylan), “if they’re going to give anybody shit, let them try to give me shit.” It’s a barely buffed-up little diamond of a moment in Aaron Brookner and Rodrigo Areias’ “Nova ’78,” a gratifyingly non-exhaustive documentary filled with them…
The late Martin Amis had a simple and attractive philosophy of reading:
I’m very committed to the pleasure principle. You read literature to have a good time. Or why else would people go on doing it?
It’s very easy to get caught up in what you want to say, how to say it, and your larger themes. But no matter how dire the subject or serious the intent, writing can still give pleasure.
In “How ‘Bigger’ Was Born,” Richard Wright laid out how Native Son and its iconic protagonist were constructed. Towards the end, he describes not just the process but the joy of writing:
I don’t know if Native Son is a good book or a bad book. And I don’t know if the book I’m working on now will be a good book or a bad book. And I really don’t care. The mere writing of it will be more fun and deeper satisfaction than any praise or blame from anybody…
Have fun.
I reviewed the new Matt Johnson film Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie for PopMatters:
For those who enjoy or get past Johnson’s clowning, Nirvanna is a deftly intricate mockumentary about friendship, celebrity, and the trap of nostalgia shot like a sci-fi nerd’s YouTube paean to Back to the Future, all wrapped inside a love letter to Toronto. Johnson and co-writer Jay McCarroll play slightly tweaked versions of themselves, much like Rob Brydon and Steve Coogan self-spoofed themselves in The Trip series…
It opens tomorrow. Here’s the trailer:
I wrote for PopMatters about some (certainly not all) of the upcoming films that look particularly worth the wait this year:
As surely as “Dumpuary January” follows the fall awards season, a new year brings a slew of new films to anticipate. If the industry is in trouble, nobody has told these directors…
In “The Art of Fiction,” Henry James gave the example of an English novelist who was asked how she was able to depict the lives of French Protestant youth so vividly and true to life. Her response was that it all boiled down to once looking into a room:
Once, in Paris, as she ascended a staircase, [she] passed an open door where, in the household of a pasteur, some of the young Protestants were seated at table round a finished meal. The glimpse made a picture; it lasted only a moment, but that moment was experience. She had got her impression, and she evolved her type. She knew what youth was, and what Protestantism; she also had the advantage of having seen what it was to be French; so that she converted these ideas into a concrete image and produced a reality…
James uses this example to argue that experience is crucial to writing but that experience can be just about anything. Even a glance. In short:
Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!
In Walt Hunter’s inspiring new essay “Stop Meeting Students Where They Are,” he describes the value of pushing his students in an American literature class to write without the safety net of what they know. He references a line from W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz:
Once a fluent and successful writer, Austerlitz suddenly falls into a crisis of faith about the sentence, which becomes “at best a makeshift expedient, a kind of unhealthy growth issuing from our ignorance, something which we use, in the same way as many sea plants and animals use their tentacles, to grope blindly through the darkness enveloping us.”
Running with that concept of “writing into the darkness,” Hunter challenges his students to knock out a quick essay about their difficulties reading, providing them with prompts:
One was: “Write about a moment in an Emily Dickinson poem that you don’t understand.” Another was: “Write about your morning routine, but in the style of Faulkner.” I didn’t want to create 32 new Faulkners. I wanted the students to experience the moment when their own style broke through the imitation, when the attempt to write like Faulkner failed and revealed, as a kind of photonegative, their own emergent voices. John Keats called this state of being “negative capability,” a condition in which the writer leans to live in a perpetual state of uncertainty. If it was really true that the students couldn’t read, then it was up to me to put the books in their way and make them deal with them…
Try this approach yourself. Think of something that makes no sense to you, that you have failed to understand. Describe that feeling. Write through it.
See what you find.
I reviewed the first episode of Mark Cousins’ new series, The Story of Documentary Film from the Sundance Film Festival for The Playlist:
Excited as we might be about ‘Dune: Messiah’ or ‘Wuthering Heights,’ the cinematic event of 2026 is more likely to be seen on a small screen and is about five times as long as ‘Avatar: Fire and Ash.’ The greatest chronicler of modern film and what it means to the world, Mark Cousins, has followed up his landmark series ‘The Story of Film’ with a new sixteen-parter, ‘The Story of Documentary Film,’ the first episode of which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. If this initial taste is any indication, the next fifteen hours will be something glorious…
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