Tuesday, November 5, 2024

The Failure of One Movie, or of a Generation of Filmmakers? David Walsh Discusses Megalopolis

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Seeing that David Walsh had reviewed Megalopolis I wondered whether his judgment would challenge the generally negative judgment of the cri...

David Walsh's Review of Francis Ford Coppola's Megalopolis: Some Reflections

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In recent years film and culture critic David Walsh and his colleagues have attended to fewer and fewer major Hollywood releases, frequently...

Finding Interest in the Quotidian

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It has been the longstanding view in modern times that really serious artistic work is "realistic," with work that conspicuously d...

The Waning of Nostalgia for the Rat Pack

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I remember that in the late '90s there was a resurgence of interest in the old "Rat Pack" and its members and their works. Thu...

The Copyright Nazi Sheds Crocodile Tears for the Struggling Artist

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It is rare that anyone in this society expresses sympathy for the struggling artist. Quite frankly, with very few exceptions, no one cares a...

What Irony is Really About: Superiority Without Responsibility

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The word "irony" is much misused, so much so that reflecting the situation the writers of Teen Titans Go! actually had one episod...

"But He's So Smart!"

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It does not seem uncommon for a certain sort of person to defend a position on the basis of its endorsement by some public figure alleged to...

That Cheerful "Think Again!"

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I have always found the rhetorical device of stating some misapprehension supposedly existing among their audience and then saying or writin...

The Obnoxiousness of Prefacing a Statement with the Word "Look"

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A great many people seem to find a person's starting their statements with the word "Look" off-putting. A significant part o...

How Much Research Do Writers Really Do?

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Considering the matter of writers' writing from fiction--a tendency so extreme that they do so even when they are writing about that pro...

Why Do Writers So Often Write From Other Fiction Instead of Life?

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Where the answer to the question that is this post's title is concerned my thought had long been that it was a matter of plain and simpl...

Of the Term "Useful Idiots"

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The term "useful idiots" to denote a person whom a cynical operative dupes into supporting a political agenda not their own appar...

Of "Writer's Block" in Bad Fiction

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One of the more irritating clichés of the writing life as depicted in pop culture is the ceaseless reference to "writer's block....

Sonya Saraiya on David Fincher's The Social Network

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A decade after its release Sonya Saraiya revisited David Fincher's The Social Network in a lengthy piece in Vanity Fair . As it happene...

Remembering David Fincher's The Social Network

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I remember that when I heard that Aaron Sorkin was writing and David Fincher helming a film about the creation of Facebook my thought was ...