A collection of 74 posts
It has been 30 years since a Western last won the Best Picture Oscar at the Academy Awards. That was in 1992 and the film was Unforgiven, directed by Clint Eastwood, who also starred in it alongside Morgan Freeman, Gene Hackman, and Richard Harris. On Sunday, Jane Campion’s The
A review of Authority and Freedom: A Defense of the Arts by Jed Perl. Knopf, 176 pages. (January, 2022) Plug “relevance” into the search field of the website for Artforum, and 16 results pop up from 2021 alone. Relevance is the dominant aesthetic criterion of our time, and lack thereof
Sam Peckinpah’s ‘Straw Dogs’ at 50.
The world of literature has expanded its horizons in recent decades, and the quality of writing from voices that may not have been published in decades past is something for which we should be grateful.
Colorblind casting is precisely what it sounds like—the practice of filling roles in a play or film regardless of skin color.
Jewison, by contrast, had found himself both “curiously moved” and “flooded with exciting visual images” upon first hearing the album.
We were Oscar Wilde’s great-grand-nephews, dandy aesthetes obsessed as much with the curl of our hair as with art or politics.
One of the justifications offered by the cultural-appropriation mob that came after me is that you cannot speak for others unless you are the other.
Fred Willard was a kind of Holy Fool even among fools.
The entire argument was about whether one particular trans ally had become too famous at the expense of more worthy and authentic competitors.
“What’s it about?” is usually the first question we ask when someone recommends a new book, and it’s the wrong question.
A philosophy of optimism was central to the flourishing of the American project. But it’s also useful to consider whether insisting that success and greatness lie around every corner can become a maladaptive response to problems that are complex and brutal.
They believe in the perfectibility of man in their own image: a combination of unscrupulous optimism and narcissism.
I honestly have no idea why any actor would want to appear in a serious play featuring protagonists who are not, in some way, “screwed up.”
It was my job to turn a regressive sow’s ear into a progressive silk purse.