As you may have heard from our own Bill Morris, The Canyons, the new movie starring James Deen and Lindsey Lohan, is a bad film that somehow manages to be worth watching anyway. At the LARB, Naomi Fry agrees with this assessment, arguing that the film is important because it “identifies how desperately many of us still want to believe that the larger-than-life, commodified good life is still available to us.”
Bad Yet Vital
Hotel Reviews Reviewed
Year in Reading Alum Alexander Chee reviews Rick Moody’s latest release, Hotels of North America. “The present is too cruel for him, and yet he cannot change it, so there is this instead, sentence by sentence, a nod to the past that is really a nod to his own past. A conflation of his nostalgia for the days of his sexual attractiveness and the unencumbered power of white men, all of it dressed up as a love for old words.” To hear more from Moody, check out our recent interview with him.
●
●
“Unhappy in Their Own Ways”
This week in book-related infographics: A look at the Russian novelists, “Unhappy in Their Own Ways,” from The New York Times.
Google Poetics
“There is, however, more to these poems than just the occasional chuckle. The Google autocomplete suggestions are based on previous searches by actual people all around the world. In the cold blue glow of their computer screens, they ask ‘why am I alone’ and ‘why do fat girls have high standards’. They wonder how to roll a joint and whether it is too early to say ‘I love you’. They seek information on ninjas, cannibals, and Rihanna, and sometimes they just ask ‘am I better off dead?’”
●
●
That’s What She Said
“It is so chic to be an author. To be known for one’s writing is to be truly known, do you not think?” Mindy Kaling states in the beginning of B.J. Novak’s French New Wave satire book trailer. Novak isn’t just Ryan from The Office, he also writes fiction. His short story collection, One More Thing: Stories and Other Stories, will be out February 4th, but in the meantime, you can read an excerpt at NPR.
One comment:
Add Your Comment: Cancel reply
This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
Let Us Praise James Agee
“Every sense cleared about three hundred percent and stood up on its hind legs waving its feelers.” Eighty years ago, James Agee got an assignment that entered him into history, though not during his lifetime. Let us now celebrate Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. See also: our essay on famous artist-writer collaborations, like Agee’s with Walker Evans.
●
●
Crime and Punishment
Johnny Depp’s latest film, Black Mass, which casts the star as Whitey Bulger, hit theaters on September 18th. At Publishers Weekly, author T. J. English argues that Where the Bodies Were Buried: Whitey Bulger and the World That Made Him is necessary to the canon of literature on Bulger, even if it’s the 16th book about the mobster.
●
●
Anything the critics are getting out of this movie is something they had already brought with them, and the move is giving them a chance to present their ideas as if it’s an organic part of the experience of watching the movie. The Canyons isa pitch-perfect example of incompetence and devoid of any significant meaning beyond what it gives you, which is nothing. The movie is literally empty. The acting is horrible, the script is sub-telenovela, the camera work is film schoolish, and Schrader seems to have forgetten how to edit. Some of these quasi-positive reviews are acting as if this movie, despite itself, is the skeleton key to understanding the current zeitgeist. I’m more interested in way some critics are so intent on giving trash like this a pass, why they want it to be something it so clearly is not.