- Terry Teachout fell hard for San Francisco.
- Still believe that comics are trivial? PW reports that graphic novel sales increased 12% from 2006 to 2005. Comics aren’t going away anytime soon. And if you haven’t embraced them, or at least investigated them, by now, you may as well be using a Telex instead of a fax machine.
- Several early Hitchcock films have been released to DVD.
- RIP Fons Rademakers.
- RIP Lothar-Guenther Buchheim.
- RIP Sham Lal.
- In a recent “state of the union” address, Random House CEO Gail Rebuck declares just how hard the market is for all publishers. Talk of digitization and e-books is now in the air.
- Is Martin Amis Britain’s greatest living author? (via Bookninja)
- The Gray Lady has opened its wedding pages to user-generated videos. Of course, the only way to make these even remotely interesting is to open the floodgates for honeymoon night footage.
- Apparently, Ohio is good for something.
- Goodness, you people need to get laid more.
- David Denby: “‘Syriana’ made sense in the end, but you practically needed a database to sort out the story elements; the movie became a weird formal experiment, testing the audience’s endurance and patience.” Speak for yourself, Denby. If Denby is advocating an end to nontraditional cinematic narratives (and I suspect that he is), I don’t know why this man continues to review movies. Denby’s hostility towards multilayered narratives seems less predicated upon aesthetics and more rooted in intellectual indolence. The New Yorker editors should demand better, posthaste.
- Ron Silliman: “The Departed is a more complex, more compelling film than either Babel or The Queen, even if it lacks the social importance of the former or the challenge of making a film where so little happens on the surface of things.”
- DFW name-checked on The Office. (Thanks also to Tito for alerting me to this, but the damn East Coasters beat us to the punch.)
© 2007, Edward Champion. All rights reserved.
Man, John Krasinski is obsessed with DFW!
someone needs to send an office spec script by DFW to mcsweeny’s. It might be even funnier than the Mamet thing from yesterday.
The secret to understanding Syriana is picking up the name of Tim Blake Nelson’s character (for the record: Danny Dalton). He’s name-checked several times before he’s actually introduced, and that name is key to linking together all the various story threads.
The first time I saw the film, I missed his name for some reason, and shared Denby’s confusion. The second time I caught it and everything fell beautifully into place.
Ed darling, Ohio not only has Cleveland Vibrator, it has