Posts From Author: Month: January 2015
ReadEasy, 12 January 2015
A new feature for 2015, ReadEasy is your regular round-up of literary oddities, reviews, and entertainment from the World Wide Web. You guys, I find that a lot of poetry lately? I don't understand it.(That felt good to get off my chest.)— Elizabeth Gilbert (@GilbertLiz) January 9, 2015 Watch the Golden Globes last night? Check out reviews we wrote of winners Boyhood (Best Motion Picture — Drama; Best Director — Richard Linklater; Best Supporting Actress — Patricia Arquette), Whiplash (Best Supporting Actor — JK Simmons), and Leviathan (Best Foreign Language Film). With more than a faint whiff of WikiLeaks and Anonymous, the Australian writer Peter Carey‘s new novel, Amnesia (Knopf, 2015), is the story of a leftwing journalist investigating a hacker whose computer virus has compromised the security of prisons in Australia and the US. In this interview with NPR, Carey discusses Julian Assange (“[he] really was the reason I started writing the book, but I didn’t want to write about Assange”), Facebook (“the naked playground”), and the attack this week on the Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris (“sickened, afraid, really aware of the nature of the perilous conflicts in the modern world, in big multinational capitals…”). Carey’s other work […]
Read MoreFilms To See In January: Leviathan; Ida; Two Days, One Night
As awards season looms, with its predictable bows to prestige and heritage movies, three reasons to venture down the road less traveled by. Leviathan has been receiving messianic reviews since its premiere at Cannes last year, where it won the Best Screenplay award, and by the end of its two-and-a-half-some hours it’s easy to see why. I have an undeveloped theory that so-called “foreign” films do well in direct proportion to their correspondence with national stereotypes. With a land dispute, a visiting lawyer from Moscow, sublime landscapes, political corruption, and titanic quantities of vodka on display, you could say that Russia’s submission to the 87th Annual Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film ticks all the boxes. But Leviathan, directed by Andrey Zvyagintsev, is also a serious film of grand scope and ambition that deserves to be seen both in and out of the context of Putin’s Russia. At the outset, Kolya (Alexey Serebryakov) is locked in a dense legal battle against local mayor Vadim (Roman Madyanov) over a plot of land his family has lived on for generations. Eventually shanghaied out of the property by corrupt officials, and cuckolded by the lawyer friend (Vladimir Vdovichenkov) he’d called on to […]
Read MoreReadEasy, 5 January 2015
A new feature for 2015, ReadEasy is your regular round-up of literary oddities, reviews, and entertainment from the World Wide Web. Meet the new year, same as the old year. Wouldn't it be nice to go a month or two w/o anything too horrible happening?— Stephen King (@StephenKing) December 31, 2014 Dan Chiasson on Marlon Brando… “Anyone who has tried to recapture the magic of a joke by retelling it has felt, in miniature, what Brando must have felt in his career.” So writes Dan Chiasson in a deft summary of what made Marlon Brando great, and then kinda not so great, in this week’s New York Review of Books. He’s writing about Susan L. Mizruchi‘s new book, Brando’s Smile: His Life, Thought, and Work (Norton, 2014), which excavates some pretty entertaining factoids along the way. Did you know that Brando was the favorite actor of the National Theater for the Deaf? “They always understood exactly what he was expressing,” writes Mizruchi. Her book, Chiasson proclaims, “is a gallant attempt to rescue Brando from the spectacle of his late career[, which was in turn] a test of whether his greatness could survive the most ingenious forms of sabotage he could […]
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