My latest film criticism, “Three Masters: Spielberg, Anderson, Haneke, and Their Audience,” excerpted in the previous post, is recommended reading for the week at RogerEbert.com. If that doesn’t get you to read, I don’t know what to do with you. (But I’ll think of something.) A further excerpt: In Saving Private Ryan, the film’s ultimate sentimentality, […]
Three Film Masters
My latest film criticism is available now at Bright Lights Film Journal. “Three Masters: Spielberg, Anderson, Haneke, and Their Audience” addresses the question, as the tag line has it: “Is the filmmaker tyrant, aesthete, ringmaster, or hermit?“ It is commonly claimed by artists that they create for themselves. Wrote Stanley Fish, to whom I respond,”If […]
Hemingway & Gellhorn’s Follies d’Amour
. Do you do politics, but live for art? Do art, but live for politics? Don’t tell me. Share it with your confessor. Or your bartender. We saw the Kennedy Center & Broadway production of Stephen Sondheim‘s Follies, minus Bernadette Peters, at the Ahmanson on Sunday. Theater tickets were still costing more than an ounce […]