Rufus Wainwright’s music has a casual twang that’s deceptive. In Poses, his second album, this seemingly careless drawl reveals itself as the foundation of a complicated artifice. Before his first, self-titled album was released in 1998, Wainwright was already a cult figure, though many of his fans preferred the extemporized passion of his live sets, […]
James Morrison
Posted inArt
Dialect-ical
Readers of Michael Parker’s previous fiction will not need to be told that his new novel, Towns Without Rivers, is sensitive and emotionally compelling. It is constructed with a fine sense of proportion, formally and thematically, and it builds carefully and vigorously to a fully earned climax. After this, his third book, Parker must be […]
Posted inFilm & Television
A Taste of Culture
A Taste of Others, said the ads. I smacked my lips and girded my loins for one of those barbed, witty essays on cannibalism that the devilish French do so devilishly well. Alas, it turned out to be a misprint. The film is really called The Taste of Others. My heart sank. I pursed my […]
Posted inFilm & Television
Bowl-dlerized
Henry James had a mind so fine, said T.S. Eliot, that no idea could violate it. Strange as it may seem, Eliot meant this as a compliment, a tribute to the qualities of refinement that became more and more pronounced over the course of James’s work. By the last decade of James’s career, this refinement […]
Posted inArt
Scenes in a Mall
“The door is imperceptibly ajar,” reads a stage direction in a Samuel Beckett play. In a famous anecdote, a director labored over this stage direction, painstakingly experimenting with degrees of ajarness, hoping to honor the playwright’s meaning to the letter. Beckett himself, watching in disgust, strode onto the stage and slammed the door shut. “But,” […]
Posted inFilm & Television
Beyond the Envelope
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences: The name wreaks of genteel respectability. In 1927, at a time when movies weren’t taken very seriously, either as art or as science, this august body instituted an annual awards ceremony as a bid for greater legitimacy. And it worked. Millions who enjoy watching Hollywood’s finest slosh […]
Posted inFilm & Television
Ishtar Regained
Whose dimples are cuter, Brad Pitt’s or Julia Roberts’? This is only one of many conundrums–conundra?–raised by The Mexican, their new film. And there is another: Just what is the plural of “conundrum”? It’s worth asking because, surrounding The Mexican, there are many. They never stop. As any devotee of E! channel knows, The Mexican […]
Posted inNews
Compassionate fascism
I can’t write a review of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. I walked out on it. For all I know, it went on for a few more hours after I left, as it seemed to have every intention of doing. And for all I know, somewhere along the line, maybe it redeemed itself. After all, its […]
Posted inFilm & Television
Minxed Emotions
Catharsis, said Aristotle, is the goal of drama. You’d never know it from The House of Mirth, an adaptation of Edith Wharton’s 1905 novel by the great British filmmaker Terence Davies. Its intensity is distilled in its uncompromising restraint, and though there are passing moments of anger in the film, and rare, sudden swellings of […]
Posted inFilm & Television
Moguls and Mobs
At the start of Dancer in the Dark, Lars Von Trier’s recent art-house success, there is a musical interlude lasting several minutes. Densely orchestrated and emotionally full, this overture resonates with echoes of movie musicals like The Sound of Music. Poised, like the whole film, between pastoral and pastiche, its audacity lies in the fact […]
