Link Banana

Two octogenerians talking about movies? It’s like a longer, more crumudgeonly Siskel and Ebert (or whoever the pair is now). I’m unexpectedly delighted by this.

(via Austin Kleon)

That’s what Rachel Dandielo argued is last weekend’s New York Times Book Review:

The year saw the advent of everything from Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode” and Dr. Seuss’ “Yertle the Turtle” to “Doctor Zhivago” by Boris Pasternak, that year’s Nobel laureate in literature; the first American edition of Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita”; Truman Capote’s “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”; John Kenneth Galbraith’s “Affluent Society”; Philip Roth’s story “Goodbye, Columbus”; and Jack Kerouac’s “Dharma Bums” — not to mention Samuel Beckett’s “Krapp’s Last Tape,” Harold Pinter’s “Birthday Party,” Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” and Orson Welles’s “Touch of Evil.” Robert Frank captured the uncertain tenor of the time in his 1958 photography book, “The Americans,” as did Jasper Johns in his 1958 painting “Three Flags,” in which he superimposed three American flags, each smaller than the next, transforming the familiar into the abstract, the iconic into the unsettled.

Tim Goodman, a confessed snob, stoops to reconsider CBS’s plebeian Monday night comedy lineup and finds it rather enjoyable. His consideration of snobbery:

The problem with sophisticated comedy — be it anti-obvious in nature, keenly observed absurdities or ironically dumb by choice — is that it creates its own little laugh ghetto from which you never get out. You don’t want to watch “Two and a Half Men” because, well, it’s “Two and a Half Men” with Charlie Sheen, for God’s sake. What more need be said?

And yet, there’s a smugness - almost a righteousness - to people who can only tolerate “30 Rock” or “Weeds” and sit around lamenting the death of “Arrested Development.” Hey, it takes one to know one.

It’s true that CBS is awash in laugh tracks and anyone unfortunate enough to end up in hell will find pretty much the same sound there. And that tired sitcom pacing - setup, punch line, setup punch line, big bang before the commercial break - is enough to make you really do damage to a free-standing TV set. But it’s also true that funny is funny. It answers to no specific genre or network. From Milton Berle to “Flight of the Conchords,” if you laugh, then it’s funny. It worked.

(via TV Squad)

New York Times film critic A. O. Scott offers a nice goodbye to Roger Ebert as a television personality.

It seems to me that “Sneak Previews” and its descendants, far from advancing the vulgarization of film criticism, extended its reach and strengthened its essentially democratic character. That is not to say that chatting about a movie in front of a camera (actually three cameras), and bouncing from a scripted mini-review to improvised cross-talk, can ever achieve the depth or nuance of a polished piece of writing. (Roger has often admitted as much. When I was at his house, he scribbled a bit of wisdom on the small spiral notebook that is his main conversational vehicle these days: the gist was that when writing, you should avoid cliché, but on television you should embrace it.)

(via kottke)

Speaking of criticism… John Freeman had some useful insight into why one might — and might not — want to read criticism at all.

In a way, pre-judgement is a necessary evil of criticism: there are far more books published than anyone could possibly read, busloads of awarded writers who aren’t actually worth reading. There’s no way to approach this forest gingerly. You need a buzz saw to clear some breathing room, gain a sightline, and criticism has to have enough teeth and ubiquitous availability to be that instrument.

(via Andrew Sullivan)

Andy Baio has some good words on the topic of the FAIL meme (typified by The FAIL Blog).

A few years ago, I wrote an entry about knee-jerk contrarians on the Internet: those delightful people who find fault in anything and everything, dismissing months or years of work with a few words.

This is nothing new. It’s as old as communication itself. I’m sure that the moment man discovered fire, there was some guy nearby saying, “Too smoky. Can burn you. Lame.”

(via Daring Fireball)

I’m surprised by how good and readable Gregory Rodriguez’s column about Stuff White People Like is. A taste:

One irony-deficient reader complained that the blog was less about white people than it was about yuppies. And without knowing it, she was cutting to the heart of the joke. Lander is gently making fun of the many progressive, educated, upper-middle-class whites who think they are beyond ethnicity or collectively shared tastes, styles or outlook. He’s essentially reminding them that they too are part of a group.

(via Fimoculous)

In Vanity Fair, James Walcott has an decisive — which is not to say accurate — analysis of the myriad books about George W. Bush. Reading them primarily as insights into the author’s view of the man, Walcott makes absolutely clear he’s no fan of the president and his leadership methods. He goes all the way to make the unsubstantiated-but-interesting claim that Bush meant to create chaos and to appear out-of-touch and foolish.

But are we deceiving ourselves by projecting our values onto a blank screen? So much of the burgeoning Bush literature, both nonfiction and fiction, is built on the premise that the Bush-Cheney autarchy is a disastrous failure that can be diagnosed as a hulking case of hubris coupled with a righteous dose of blowback. … But perhaps we’re the ones living in Bizarro World, not the Bushies. Maybe from their vantage point inside the mother ship nearly everything’s worked out as intended, if not exactly as planned, and those in the highest circles have no more reason to examine their consciences or re-trace their steps than the perpetrators of a successful heist. For years, a few voices on the radical edges of the blogosphere have contended that sowing chaos in the Middle East, privatizing war to enrich their corporate sponsors, and letting things slide to hell at home were what the lords of misrule wanted—that the bungling and incompetence of the war and Katrina weren’t bugs, but features. After all, the post-Katrina diaspora has redounded to the benefit of the Republicans with the election of Bobby Jindal to the Louisiana governorship, his victory made possible in part by the dispersement of black voters displaced by the floods.

(via Slate)