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 [...]
Categories: Art · Books · Movies
Tags: art criticism · John le Carre · Louis Menand
Get the Flash Player to see this content. var params = { ‘allowfullscreen’: ‘true’, ‘allowscriptaccess’: ‘always’, ‘wmode’: ‘transparent’ }; var attributes = { ‘id’: ‘video0′, ‘name’: ‘video0′}; var flashvars = { ‘file’ : ‘http://www.williamlanday.com/Uploads/SPY_COLD_trailer.mp4′, ‘image’ : ‘http://www.williamlanday.com/Uploads/SPY_COLD_image.jpg’, ‘width’ : ’490′, ‘height’ : ’294′, ‘controlbar’ : ‘over’, ‘dock’ : ‘false’, ‘icons’ : ‘false’, ‘logo.hide’ : ‘false’, [...]
Categories: Art · Movies
Tags: John le Carre · video
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 [...]
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 [...]
Categories: Movies · Poetry · Writers
Tags: Jane Campion · John Keats
Recently I wrote a short appreciation for the Rap Sheet of George V. Higgins’s definitive Boston crime novel, The Friends of Eddie Coyle. The piece will run soon as part of the Rap Sheet’s terrific Friday series, Books You Have to Read, which celebrates forgotten (or never properly appreciated) crime novels. [Update: My article on [...]
Categories: Boston · Movies
Tags: featured posts · George V. Higgins · Robert Mitchum · video
I watched “The Commitments” last night for the first time in years, and it holds up remarkably well. Alan Parker’s 1991 film, based on Roddy Doyle’s debut novel, tells the story of a Dublin hustler named Jimmy Rabbitte who puts together a soul band composed mostly of working-class kids who know nothing about soul or [...]
