Fear and Loathing in the Northeastern Suburbs
In the title story of Tom Perrotta’s new collection of short fiction, Nine Inches, a high school teacher chaperones a dance, and his job is to separate any students who might be slow-dancing a little too closely. Because of a school-sponsored event that got out of hand a year before, all students are required to obey the eponymous “nine inch” rule—they have to stay at least that far apart from each other at all times. The teacher is...
Thick as Thieves
*spoilers for more or less every single film mentioned in this article* Last year, when Clint Eastwood showed up at the Republican national Convention and angrily debated America’s future with a chair, I don’t think I was alone in being horror-tained. The segment wouldn’t end, it made little conceptual sense (pretending your rhetorical opponent is there even though he’s not, without any other creative thought going into the bit), and...
Franc-ly Speaking
When Chevy Chase showed up for his Comedy Central Roast in 1995, he expected a traditional Friars’-style night of lighthearted ribbing: a procession of people with whom he’d worked over the years, close friends dishing out tough-love insults with a little side wink to the camera, finishing their sets with a warm congratulatory handshake and hug. They’re supposed to be the culmination of a career in comedy, roasts are, a sort-of...
Two Characters in Search of an Author (Another View on The Spectacular Now)
A lot of people are involved in the production of a film. I’m not surprising anyone by pointing that out. But who is really “responsible” for the success and/or failure of the film? I’m not talking financially (there are obvious people to blame for that); I’m talking creatively. Is it the director, who controls what images we see and what words we hear, and which ones we don’t? Is it the screenwriter, whose story is being told? Is it...
All That Jas
In Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire, Blanche DuBois is an alcoholic, a woman of privilege who’s fallen from grace and refuses to let go of her former lifestyle, who has to shift down a class and as a result has a nervous breakdown. She staves off the nervous breakdown for a spell by staying with her much-lower-down-on-the-economic-food-chain sister Stella, who is married to the thuggish, animalistic (but at least real, and...
Retrospective Review: (100) Minutes of Dishonesty
I can get around the basic complaints that my good-taste friends have of Summer. I can get around, for instance, its annoying too-hip-ness, with its Regina-Spektor-Wolfmother-Smiths-She-and-Him soundtrack, its casting of Zooey Deschanel as the titular Summer, and its parentheses around the number “500” in the title (why?). I’m not a very aesthetic filmgoer anyway, and as long as the story interests me, I can overlook whatever costume...