Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
On the Gatsby renaissance. Why now? "The novel, with its clear sense that money comes and goes, and that detachment from opulence is as empty a gesture as indulgence in it, seems to come to mind whenever we aren't doing so well"
Revolt against Assad is also being fought through satire and cultural resistance. River running through Damascus was dyed red. Sound systems get hidden in ministries and municipal buildings to play revolutionary songs
Remembering Intervision, Soviet Union's version of Eurovision song contest. Concept came from Wladyslaw Szpilman, hero of Polanski's film The Pianist. Aim was "to prove to the West that 'anything you can sing, we can sing better'"
Sex, drugs, violence are old hat. But so far Hollywood still resists childbirth. And sticks with its curious double standards: "Why is it OK to show a man's intestine curling out of his belly, but not a crowning baby?"
Photographing Marilyn Monroe. Lawrence Schiller did it, to great effect. His account of working with the flirtatious, calculating star has shades of a coming-of-age story and makes for surprisingly compulsive reading
Film critic prepares his nominations for the poll organised each decade by "Sight and Sound". Out goes Kieslowski's "Dekalog", on a technicality. In comes Malick's "Tree of Life", just ahead of Kaufman's "Synecdoche, New York"
One hundred films in forty years. $7.4 billion in total takings. This is how a young boy from Chattanooga, Tennessee, became highest-grossing film actor in history. “I was a great alcoholic and drug addict like actors of old"
Writer of The Social Network and Moneyball returns to TV with The Newsroom. Will it generate such a dedicated TV audience as The West Wing? Kaplan goes on set to see how the show's coming along
Discursive but always interesting mediation on Claude Lanzmann's memoir, "Patagonian Hare", and on his epic Holocaust film, "Shoah"—"one of the sternest, strangest, and most important films made in the short history of cinema"
The people who control what gets commissioned for TV shows are generally 40-somethings. Their nostalgia is for the era of and just before their birth. Hence "Mad Men" now. For meanings of the Obama era, tune in in the 2050s
"As women continue to gain power and influence, they will be tested as heroes, and many, no doubt, will fail and turn to corruption, just as their male predecessors have done. But for now, the female superhero may be our last hope"
In most films, classical music is used clumsily for ironic effect: Beautiful sounds for sad and ugly scenes. Prominence of Bach in "Silence of the Lambs" works at a higher level. Lecter is a true Bachian—focused and precise
Billy Wilder, on screenwriting
"If you have a problem with the third act, the real problem is in the first act"
