What is Film Forum? Well, with so many film reviews published, and so little time to read them all, I make a note of any review that I find particularly thoughtful, persuasive, or worth wrestling.
Be sure to check back, as I’ve only just begun to read reviews of these films, and I’ll add more interesting excerpts as I come across them. Feel free to submit more reviews, or even your own, in the comments below.
Breaking news: John Updike, 76 died today.
When I posted this link at artsandfaith.com, Paste magazine’s Andy Whitman responded:
John Updike will always be one of my favorite writers. He wrote a dozen or more best-sellers, and could certainly be accused of pandering to the more lascivious tastes of contemporary readers. But in my mind he was the best writer on sex as commodity in American fiction, and he always brought an icy, contemplative chill to his sex scenes. If you got aroused during this stuff, you just weren’t really paying attention.
His lasting legacy will probably be his four Rabbit novels — Rabbit, Run, Rabbit Redux, Rabbit is Rich, and Rabbit at Rest — one published at the end of the ’50s, ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s, respectively. … Rabbit was one of the most fully realized and complex characters in American literature, and I still marvel at the ways Updike was able to communicate the many facets of his personality. Now Updike himself is at rest. I’m thankful for his supremely moral vision and his always sparkling prose. May he rest in peace.
Auralia’s Colors is getting some attention at the Maple Mountain Story Club, and I’m grateful for S.D. Smith’s enthusiasm!
I’ll be reading from The Auralia Thread at Food for Thought next Thursday at 12:30 in the afternoon at Seattle Pacific University’s Library.
I expect I’ll read sections from Auralia’s Colors and Cyndere’s Midnight, along with a few words about where we can expect to see Cal-raven, the ale boy, the beastmen, and Auralia’s colors next. And then I’ll take some questions.
Need directions? Here you go.
Also… free Auralia Thread posters and postcards for anybody who wants them!
You can watch a new clip from Pixar’s Up here.
The Oscar nominations announced this morning are so spectacularly ridiculous that I’m not going to bother covering any Oscar news this year.
Oh, never mind!
The Oscars have always been political, and have often overlooked great things. But this is beyond ridiculous.
So here’s my idea:
Join me in throwing a “BOYCOTT THE OSCARS” party, or host your own!
Round up your friends and join me in spirit, watching WALL-E.
Go even further if you like: Do a double feature of WALL-E and Shotgun Stories, or Rachel Getting Married.
That’s a plan for a much, much more rewarding time than watching the Academy celebrate something less deserving.
(And P.S., if they Academy was willing to nominate an animated film for Best Picture, why pick Benjamin Button over WALL-E?)
1.
A few weeks back I got around to watching Horton Hears a Who. I’ve been putting together a review in bits and pieces since then, and I posted it today. In short, I wanted to turn it off at the halfway point.
And speaking of thumbs-down reviews, what’s going on with reviews for Gran Torino? I haven’t seen it, but the split amongst critics is bewildering. And most of the film critics I know and admire are giving it a good thrashing. Maybe I’ll wait for DVD.
2.
Here’s Andy Whitman, longtime Bruce Springsteen fan, lamenting Springsteen’s new album:
What to say about Bruce Springsteen’s latest product? For starters, I never thought I’d be using the words “Bruce Springsteen” and “product” in the same sentence. But the clichéd title of Springsteen’s new album – Working on a Dream – should have clued me in to the generic framework. Perhaps only Born to Run in the U.S.A. would have been more pandering.
God only knows what led to this New Jersey Transit train wreck. Magic, Bruce’s last album, was as fine a late-period arena shaker as could have been expected. But this time Bruce forgot the tunes, the hooks, and the lyrics, and he mistakes the usual first-rate songs about common men and women for common songs about Bruce.
3.
Razzies!
4.
If you haven’t experienced Shaun Tan‘s extraordinary body of work, from graphic novels to lavishly illustrated children’s books, then you’ve been missing out. His graphic novel The Arrival is a brilliant work of illustration and a moving meditation on immigration. (How many “-tions” can *you* get into one sentence?!)
I’m absolutely thrilled to discover that he has a new book for 2009. (Unfortunately, after teasing us with a “seven-page excerpt”, NY Magazine has failed to provide a link to said excerpt.)
6.
And finally…
… to show their utter lack of appreciation for animation as an art form. Or they can see what film critics across the country saw.
They can decide that cartoons are just for the kids. Or they can get what the L.A. Film Critics, the Chicago Film Critics, the Online Film Critics Society, and it placed third (behind #1 Flight of the Red Balloon and #2 A Christmas Tale) in IndieWire’s survey of 100 film critics.
Check out Rotten Tomatoes.
WALL•E deserves more than a Best Animated Feature nomination. It deserves a Best Picture nomination.
Considering the Academy’s record, I’m not optimistic. But I’d love to be very, very surprised. Go, Andrew Stanton!