Bilge Ebiri
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When a newspaper reports that a liberal arts college somewhere is teaching a seminar on the hermeneutics of Lady Gaga, do we feel outrage, relief, or both? As the philosophical treatment of pop culture gains currency, it’s easy to be tempted by contradictory reactions: We long for a serious consideration of the seemingly frivolous, yes, but also for the deflation of academic self-seriousness. Inception and Philosophy is the latest entry in Blackwell’s Philosophy and Pop Culture series (previous titles have included The Daily Show and Philosophy and Mad Men and Philosophy, among many more), which apparently shares this slice of -
Music critic Rob Sheffield’s memoir Talking to Girls About Duran Duran appears at first to be founded on a fallacy—that Duran Duran are still huge, and that their ongoing fame speaks to something ineffable about . . . well, not so much the female psyche, but at least something that males want to know about the female psyche. (And which, one hastens to add, they never will: This is the band that sang, “All she wants is, all she wants is,” but, as Sheffield notes, never told us what “she” wanted.) -
Many of the pieces in David Grann’s fine collection of articles, The Devil and Sherlock Holmes, read like detective stories, and it would be tempting to categorize this book, whose subtitle promises us “tales of murder, madness, and obsession,” as a work of true crime, albeit one without the breathless exaggerations of that genre. In his first book, the best-selling The Lost City of Z, the writer offered up a true tale of deadly obsession for the ages: the attempts to find a legendary city in the Amazon, and the explorers who vanished searching for it. If that earlier book -
Neither the seventy-million dollars that Zack Snyder’s adaptation of 300 made on its opening weekend nor the more than two hundred million dollars it has grossed in the United States alone as of this writing can be attributed primarily to the readers of Frank Miller’s original graphic novel. (Miller’s book, while a cult item among comic aficionados, was never much of a crossover success, but even for best sellers, the number of viewers for a hit adaptation is far greater than the number of readers.) And yet within weeks of the film’s release, Hollywood studios green-lit other graphic-novel adaptations, eager -
Daniel Radcliffe as Maps in December Boys, directed by Rod Hardy, 2007. THE STORY OF HOW AUSTRALIAN WRITER Michael Noonan’s 1963 novel December Boys became a feature film begins over four decades ago, in rather surprising fashion. Writer/producer Ronald Kinnoch, fresh off the success of the 1960 cult horror film Village of the Damned, optioned […] -
TRUE, FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA’S YOUTH WITHOUT YOUTH is the legendary director’s first film since an adaptation of John Grisham’s The Rainmaker in 1997, but one would have to reach back even further to find an appropriate comparison in his oeuvre. A remarkably challenging and absorbing film that Coppola paid for himself, Youth Without Youth is a return to the intensely personal work that characterized his early career. (Its portrait of technology and alienation echoes much of 1974’s The Conversation.) So it may come as a shock that Youth Without Youth is also a rather faithful adaptation of Romanian philosopher Mircea -
Gabe Nevins as Alex in Paranoid Park, directed by Gus Van Sant, 2008. The idea of indie auteur Gus Van Sant filming a young-adult novel might seem odd at first, but a closer look suggests more than a little destiny at play in the director’s latest, Paranoid Park, adapted from Blake Nelson’s 2006 novel of […] -
Michael Angarano as Arthur Parkinson and Olivia Thirlby as Lila Raybern in Snow Angels, directed by David Gordon Green, 2008 DAVID GORDON GREEN’S haunting and melancholy drama Snow Angels stands alongside his earlier George Washington (2000) and All the Real Girls (2003) as yet another of the young director’s very personal, uniquely big-hearted portraits of […] -
But much of the time she felt good. . . . It was as if the conflagration of her bouts with Karim had cast a special light on everything, a dawn light after a life lived in twilight. It was as if she had been born deficient and only now been gifted the missing sense. -
He had rarely paused to consider matters of class; as a pervert he was above such vulgar forms of definition. —Peter Jinks, Hallam Foe Making drastic changes to a novel while adapting it for the screen is one thing, but doing so when the novelist is a close friend can induce new levels of anxiety. Scottish director David Mackenzie found himself in that situation when he decided to tackle Peter Jinks’s acclaimed Hallam Foe, an offbeat story about a young Peeping Tom’s decidedly odd journey to self-knowledge. Mackenzie and Jinks had known each other since sharing “a lovely big
