Criticism

The Reverse Shot’s review by Julien Allen of A Matter of Life & Death does the movie justice. Some 75 years after the movie was made in part apparently to bolster post-war morale and Anglo-American relations, its dive into the relative merits of the USA and the UK is a surprising delight. The visual effects too are wonderfully crafted ⁠— it must have opened the minds of viewers such as Stanley Kubrick to the standards possible if you care enough.

In light of the boundless inanity and affection demonstrated for James Bond at the relentless Twitter feed “The Bubbles Tickle My Tchaikovsky”, I think I know how Eon can, should, must and will deal with the curdling disaster Mr Craig presumably brought upon them with the end of To Die Please Today at What Time or whatever it was called.

And that is to studiously, sumptuously, flagrantly forget what we just saw, with no more acknowledgement of it than a throwaway line like “This weather happened to the other guy” say when some villain gets fried by lightning.

James Bond movies are novel, happily standing alone ⁠— unlike the other big movie franchises today they are not interwoven arcs. Any nod of fan service to a predecessor must be judicious and throwaway. The producers seem to have not understood this; perhaps they were seduced into thinking it okay when they brought back the Aston in the opening scene of Goldeneye and it was fine. But that was enough. And as we all know, they went thoroughly the other way, trying to shoehorn everything into Blofeld’s revenge arc, spoiling the dignity of each of the individual movies.

What dotty old aunts.

Fun fun fun, Sacha Baron Cohen, Jim Carrey, Don Cheadle, Henry Winkler & Timothy Simons talk shop.

Mike and Rich of Red Letter Media do a re:View of Star Trek: Picard. I hadn’t articulated to myself why I chose not to watch beyond the first episode ⁠— they explain it. One criticism though: they mock the term positronic, seeming not to know it comes from Asimov’s robots.

Other glories: on Norman Mailer’s Of A Fire on the Moon.

“The Moment” is an occasional column/blog by novelist Amit Chaudhuri in The Paris Review.

Vincent Gallo Sings by one Vincent Gallo. “I know what I look like. It’s certainly not how I would have made myself look. Don’t blame me.”

Tyler Cowen has a modest proposal: polarized shopping. “You get better deals from the companies you patronize regularly, most of all from airlines and hotels. It requires only some stretch of the imagination to think that more of those programs could be organized around ideology.”

Guilty, very guilty as charged. This study says those who call out grammatical errors are in fact scientifically ‘jerks’.

Star Wars 7 New Yorker review: …awestruck, warmhearted, good-humored ⁠— and conspicuously prefabricated, without a jolt of spontaneity or reckless impulse anywhere….

A romp through the current state of thespian-American affairs with fear and loathing of the English invasion, particular emphasis on Joseph Gordon-Levitt and a conclusory celebration of Jake Gyllenhaal.

Once they see it they say, Oh is that the thing? And I say, Yes it is the thing. And they ask, Has it changed your life? And I shrug. And they are so disappointed.

A sharply written discussion of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina in Commentary Magazine: “It is not exactly that Stiva has a bad memory. Rather he has an excellent forgettory.”

0n the 70s forty years later: “The depression can seem not like confinement but a kind of freedom; the aimlessness can seem like spaciousness, a shambling kind of grace.”

Andrew O’Hagan on Norman Mailer rather than on A Double Life by J. Michael Lennon, the book he’s supposed to be reviewing. “They had Ancient Evenings, his vast Egyptian tome (I read the first ninety pages) and The Naked and the Dead, which was filled with the word ‘fug’ and seemed both plain and good.”

From the comments section: “I feel sad that a supposedly respectable publication would allow a disturbed person to humiliate themselves by publishing a rant as perverse as this.” ‘Breaking Bad Karma: How the cancer victim at the center of the AMC series justifies my skepticism of Holocaust survivors’ by Anna Breslaw. [via Commentary]

Van Gogh’s strange afterlife.

An insightful day at the museum.

Cool, Tel Aviv.