Movies
Jun. 3, 2011
“And then I saw her…”
When I’m stuck — as I have been for some time now, trying to crack the plot of my next book, to “break” the story, as screenwriters say — I always look for older stories to use as templates. The writer David Lodge has a great term for this sort of literary model: “precursor texts” [...]
Tags: bookfour · film noir · Out of the Past · Robert Mitchum · video
Jan. 6, 2011
Chinatown
Dec. 8, 2010
In the wry
A note from J.D. Salinger to aspiring movie director Hubert Cornfield declining an offer to turn “The Catcher in the Rye” into a movie.
Tags: Hubert Cornfield · J.D. Salinger
Oct. 25, 2010
Happy St. Crispin’s Day
Happy St. Crispin’s Day, which *shall ne’er go by, / From this day to the ending of the world, / But we in it shall be remember’d* [video]
Tags: Henry V · Kenneth Branagh · Shakespeare · speeches · St. Crispin's Day · video
Oct. 2, 2010
The origin of “I coulda been a contender”
A note from screenwriter Budd Schulberg to a fan, jotted on the back of an index card, explains the origin of the famous line from “On the Waterfront.”
Tags: Budd Schulberg · correspondence · On the Waterfront
Sep. 1, 2010
The High-Low Problem
The problem [Pauline] Kael undertook to address when she began writing for The New Yorker was the problem of making popular entertainment respectable to people whose education told them that popular entertainment is not art. This is usually thought of as the high-low problem — the problem that arises when a critic equipped with a highbrow [...]
Tags: art criticism · John le Carre · Louis Menand
Aug. 10, 2010
Vita Brevis, Ars Brevior
A good but not great movie from 1965 is a reminder how short-lived most art is.
Tags: featured posts · John le Carre · video · writing life
Nov. 29, 2009
As if they had been around all along
The best new movies carry intimations of permanence along with their novelty and very quickly start to seem as if they had been around all along. — A. O. Scott, “Screen Memories” in last week’s Times Magazine That odd feeling you get when you first run into great artworks — they “very quickly start to [...]
Tags: art criticism
Oct. 15, 2009
How to Make a Movie About a Writer
Yesterday I saw Jane Campion’s movie “Bright Star,” about the doomed romance between the poet John Keats and Fanny Brawne, and I liked it very much. How could I not like it? The romantic hero is a writer. You don’t see that very often. Writers make bad film protagonists because the real work of writing [...]
Tags: Jane Campion · John Keats
Jul. 16, 2009
Best Boston Movie Ever: “The Friends of Eddie Coyle”
A forgotten classic from 1973 is the best movie about Boston ever.
Tags: featured posts · George V. Higgins · Robert Mitchum · The Friends of Eddie Coyle · video
