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"
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"
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"
"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
"Erwin started typing. He posted his answer in a series of comments. Within an hour, he was an online celebrity. Within three hours, a film producer had reached out to him. Within two weeks, he was offered a deal to write a movie"
Indie filmmaker of Metropolitan fame returns. "What Stillman captures best are people who aren’t quite adults but are no longer children: Fledglings with a mostly abstract grasp of suffering" and preposterous self-belief
On the writings of Roger Ebert and Pauline Kael, leading American film critics of the late 1960s and 1970s, golden age of New Hollywood (though Ebert is still going strong), when cinema was a medium for cultural innovation
Revised, updated. Read it if only to avoid quoting from it. And please do add to it. So far it's only 131 entries long, which scarcely does justice to the prefabricated quality of most scripted—and unscripted—conversation
Billy Wilder, on screenwriting
"If you have a problem with the third act, the real problem is in the first act"
