unqualified ranting

It's been a while. I've been busy.

Stephen Metcalf speaks of Where The Wild Things Are on Slate's Culture Gabfest:

Especially awful in this instance, because Sendak is a genius when it comes to the nature of childhood-its neurosis, its fears and furthermore, he gets into the mental and imaginative world of children brilliantly and... this strikes me as exactly the opposite of the movement of Gen-Y creative people which is this avalanche of forced whimsy under which they bury everything, which utterly sentimentalizing childhood -and for them to now try to score points by reaching out to Maurice Sendac for "cred" on the issue of the dark nature of childhood is utterly repulsive.

Posted on October 18th under movies.

In this week's New Yorker, David Denby sums up the film well:

Very little in "Basterds" is meant to be taken straight, but the movie isn't quite farce, either. It's lodged in an uneasy nowheresville between counterfactual pop wish fulfillment and trashy exploitation, between exuberant nonsense and cinema scholasticism.

and

But, in "Basterds," Tarantino is mucking about with a tragic moment of history. Chaplin and Lubitsch played with the Nazis, too, but they worked as farceurs, using comedy to warn of catastrophe; they didn't carve up Nazis using horror-film flourishes. Tarantino's hyper-violent narrative reveals merely that he still daydreams like a teen-ager.

Posted on August 23rd, 2009 under movies.