The new media revolution has massacred the book review sections at many national newspapers, but it’s been just as unkind to movie reviewers. At his Salt Lake Tribune blog, Movie Cricket, SLT film critic Sean P. Means keeps a list of all of the movie reviewers who’ve gotten the axe.
Film Critics, A Dying Breed
Get Inspired
Cristine Brache curated a great list of web-poetry videos for last month’s O, Miami Poetry Festival, and she was awesome enough to post the entire playlist online for all to see.
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Softcore No More
“Pornography has changed unrecognizably from its so-called golden age—the period, in the sixties and seventies, when adult movies had theatrical releases and seemed in step with the wider moment of sexual liberation, and before V.H.S. drove down production quality, in the eighties. Today’s films are often short and nearly always hard-core; that is, they show penetrative sex. Among the most popular search terms in 2015 were ‘anal,’ ‘amateur,’ ‘teen,’ and—one that would surely have made Freud smile—’mom and son.'” The New Yorker attempts to make some sense of modern pornography.
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David Simon to Adapt MLK Biography for HBO Miniseries
The Wire and Treme creator David Simon tells The Baltimore Sun that he’s going to work on an HBO miniseries about the life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The project will be based on Taylor Branch’s multi–part biographies of the civil rights leader.
Do Books Make Friendships?
Do friendships form because of shared interests, or do those interests develop due to the friendship? Facebook reveals that music and film make friendships; books, not so much.
New Takes on Proust
Add this to the roster of great literary takedowns. Apparently Evelyn Waugh once wrote the following about Proust: “Nobody told me he was a mental defective. He had no sense of time.” (This stands in stark contrast with the views of Aleksandar Hemon, who wrote in a recent Year in Reading piece that Swann’s Way is “one of those miraculous books that gets better with every re-reading.”)
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Refusing the Rest
“My father’s life intersected with a century of conflict, horror and invention. He deciphered these histories for me, making me his scribe in a new century. My successes were his successes, and his stories thrum in every word I write. He taught me to see like a writer, to be attentive to the stories that spring up everywhere … It’s an attentiveness to the world, to ordinary suffering, to the love that persists in its midst. My sense of the world, of history and humanity flows from this awareness — and the attendant grim humor — my father used as his guiding lamp in the darkness cast by racism and poverty.” Over at The New York Times, Walter Mosley recalls the lessons taught to him by his father, Leroy.