The Criterion Collection
They completely redesigned their site, and I must say it looks pretty cool. I’m most excited about their promise to make their films available online. Watch the video on their homepage to get a feel for all the new stuff.
Cahiers du cinéma’s latest list of the greatest films ever made doesn’t contain many surprises, I don’t think, but it’s interesting to see something like Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter (1955) ranked second when it didn’t even make the American Film Institute’s top 100.
"I couldn’t count the number of times I heard the words ‘transformational’ or ‘inspirational,’ or heard the 1960s evoked by people with no apparent memory that what drove the social revolution of the 1960s was not babies in cute T-shirts but the kind of resistance to that decade’s war that in the case of our current wars, unmotivated by a draft, we have yet to see. It became increasingly clear that we were gearing up for another close encounter with militant idealism—by which I mean the convenient but dangerous redefinition of political or pragmatic questions as moral questions—’convenient’ because such redefinition makes those questions seem easier to answer, ‘dangerous’ because this was a time when the nation was least prepared to afford easy answers."
Joan Didion, “Obama: In the Irony-Free Zone”
Finally got around to seeing Jacques Demy’s marvelous 1964 Palme d’Or winner The Umbrellas of Cherborug again after what I’m guessing has been more than two years. I’m happy to report that it’s as magical as ever, and if anything, the sadness of the story—and, needless to say, of the songs—resonated much more on this viewing. Yes, I still think Demy’s next musical, 1967’s The Young Girls of Rochefort, is ultimately the better film, but there few that I cherish as much as this one.
This week’s issue of the New York Times Magazine is deemed the Screen Issue, and I will venture to say that they could have done a lot better than a photograph of Jennifer Anniston (who I assume nobody really cares about) for its cover. In any case, there’s an interview with her of no particular interest, and also a far superior one with David Lynch, the legendary director. A.O. Scott, the Times film critic, writes about the effect of the new media—iPods, DVRs, BitTorrent, etc.—on cinema as a whole. Elsewhere, William Safire makes his choice for word of the year: frugalista, which is apparently defined as “a person who lives a frugal lifestyle but stays fashionable and healthy by swapping clothes, buying secondhand, growing own produce, etc.”
Penguin released Walter Bejamin’s landmark essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” earlier this year and I absolutely love the cover, and hopefully I can find it somewhere.
Pictured above is, of course, William Faulkner, in one of the “millions of historic photos” from Life magazine that Google is hosting here. A real treat.
After two unsuccessful tries at winning the National Book Critics Circle/Paris Review contest, I finally came in before anybody else. Needless to say, I’m pretty happy.
How Failing at Exeter Made a Success of George Plimpton
This isn’t exactly new, I know, but I just recently got around to reading it. It’s a speech given by George Plimpton, author and founder of the Paris Review, regarding his time at Phillips Exeter Academy, from which he was expelled during his senior year. As with anything else ever written by Plimpton, it’s fascinating.
The Black Album
John Leonard, the recently departed American critic, on Joan Didion’s 2005 book The Year of Magical Thinking in the New York Review of Books.
