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Why "The Paperboy" is a Camp Classic→
I don’t know if there’s an official registry of movies that are so over the top, so deliriously tawdry and nonsensical, that they earn the moniker of camp classic, but if there is I’d like to nominate Lee Daniels’s “The Paperboy.” If you didn’t see the film in theatres last fall, don’t worry—it has just come out on DVD, where it belongs, and where it can be watched late at night, in the company of wisecracking friends. It may well return to the big screen someday, in the midnight-movie tradition of “Caligula,” “Mommie Dearest,” “Xanadu,” and other standbys of the camp canon.
Of course, dozens of movies a year meet the “so bad they’re good” standard of Razzie nominations and ironic Netflixing, but most are forgettable. Pure camp is rarer, and—unless you’re Susan Sontag and have ninety-five theses on the subject—harder to define. One way to tell you’re watching camp is that your mind keeps returning to the same question: What the hell were they thinking? That applies especially to Daniels…
Michael Schulman on why you need to see “The Paperboy”: http://nyr.kr/VMT4U1
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Like Water Made Human
Andrew Boynton on Jodi Melnick’s reworked version of her 2012 piece “Solo, Deluxe Version,” retitled, “Solo, (Re)Deluxe Version”: “Melnick is an intelligent choreographer, with an admirably pared-down aesthetic and a keen sense of how to compose stage pictures.” Continue reading: http://nyr.kr/RSPZmd
Photograph by Ian Douglas/New York Live Arts.
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Richard Brody reviews “Django Unchained,” and considers the riddle of Quentin Tarantino: http://nyr.kr/RWFksa
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"If pressed to describe what happens during “A Civil War Christmas” (at the New York Theatre Workshop), I couldn’t really say. But if asked to relate what the two-and-half-hour production was like, I could go on about the narcotizing effect that playwright Paula Vogel’s political correctness had on at least one audience member…"
—Hilton Als reviews “A Civil War Christmas”: http://nyr.kr/11GjUks
Photograph by Carol Rosegg.
(Source: newyorker.com)
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"Petterson is remarkably gifted at capturing not so much randomness or irrelevance (habitual catchments of the stream of consciousness) as the staggered distances of memory: one detail seems near at hand, while another can be seen only cloudily; one mental picture seems small, while another seems portentous. Yet everything is jumbled in the recollection, because the most proximate memory may be the least important, the portentous detail relatively trivial. Petterson’s interest is pictorial and spatial rather than logical and interrogative. His sentences yearn to fly away into poetry; it is rare to find prose at once so exact and so vague…"
— James Wood reads the novels of Norwegian writer Per Petterson: http://nyr.kr/YfZYG9 -
Liz and Lindsay
Lohan’s performance (not her impersonation) is thrillingly immediate, not a composition of interpretive pieces but an incontrovertible, full-spectrum presence, even if the mirror itself is broken and some shards of character are still missing from view.
Richard Brody reviews “Liz and Dick,” starring Lindsay Lohan: http://nyr.kr/Slr0Hn
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Andrew Boynton on choreographer Monica Bill Barnes’s “Luster,” and dance that tries too hard: http://nyr.kr/UET1H2
Photograph by Christopher Duggan.
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If you say the song is bad, people accuse you of not listening closely to what is obviously skilled work by skilled musicians, of holding them hostage to their own impossibly high past standards. If you say the song is good, people accuse you of being a Stones apologist, of practicing a kind of self-deception in which you pretend that the band is still relevant.
Ben Greenman reviews the Rolling Stones’ new song, “Doom and Gloom”: http://nyr.kr/STAyv5
(Source: newyorker.com)
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John Updike on Mo Yan→
In his 2005 review for The New Yorker of Mo’s novel “Big Breasts and Wide Hips,” John Updike was struck by the unique mix of “brutal incident, magic realism, nature description, and far-flung metaphor” in Mo’s work, and by the wry, freewheeling forthrightness of the prose. “The Chinese novel, perhaps,” he writes, “had no Victorian heyday to teach it decorum,” giving Mo the freedom to craft “indulgent and hyperactive metaphors”…
Joshua Rothman looks back at John Updike’s 2005 review of Mo Yan’s novel: http://nyr.kr/PpXwJ6
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Muscle-Bound
From this week’s issue: James Wood reads Tom Wolfe’s new novel, “Back to Blood”: http://nyr.kr/SzKvxA
Photograph by Henry Leutwyler.
