Anthony Lane

Anthony Lane was the first New Yorker writer I loved. I have read The New Yorker since I was little- my parents have subscribed to it for God knows how long and my father would either read articles to me for "bedtime" stories, or would dog-ear a page of it, hand it to me and tell me to read it. I would always oblige, but would greatly become annoyed reading them- I was a kid, probably 10 or so, and I was most definitely not sophisticated enough to understand pieces from The New Yorker. I liked the cartoons the best as a kid; they were complex too, but the pictures were always nice to look at and I liked the feel they had to them.

It was in 2005 when I started liking The New Yorker and reading it thoroughly, and I remember the year because it was the issue where Anthony Lane, (one of two film critics for The New Yorker- the other being David Denby) reviewed the final installment in the Star Wars franchise, Revenge of the Sith. Prior to this movie, I had never really hated a movie. Despite being the daughter of a critic, I wasn't one, and I would often get frustrated with my father 'ruining' movies for me by explaining everything wrong with them. But I really hated Revenge of the Sith, and when I saw there was a review of it in an old New Yorker, I picked it up, began reading, and began my obsession with Anthony Lane.

To this day, I am highly impressed with some people's talent as a writer. The phrasing and word choice all seems to fit and people who are able to express themselves well have always been my idols, Anthony Lane being the first. Like with any criticism, it's more fun to read a scathing review of something than something laudatory, and Anthony Lane is unabashedly harsh on the film (justifiably so, in my opinion), saying:

The general opinion of “Revenge of the Sith” seems to be that it marks a distinct improvement on the last two episodes, “The Phantom Menace” and “Attack of the Clones.” True, but only in the same way that dying from natural causes is preferable to crucifixion. So much here is guaranteed to cause either offense or pain, starting with the nineteen-twenties leather football helmet that Natalie Portman suddenly dons for no reason, and rising to the continual horror of Ewan McGregor’s accent. “Another happy landing”—or, to be precise, “anothah heppy lending”—he remarks, as Anakin parks the front half of a burning starcruiser on a convenient airstrip. The young Obi-Wan Kenobi is not, I hasten to add, the most nauseating figure onscreen; nor is R2-D2 or even C-3PO, although I still fail to understand why I should have been expected to waste twenty-five years of my life following the progress of a beeping trash can and a gay, gold-plated Jeeves. 

 I believe that was the paragraph that made me realize how awesome Anthony Lane is, and from that point forward, I always read the film reviews in The New Yorker. About a year later, I became hooked on the rest of the magazine itself, and I still read it cover-to-cover each week. 


Anthony Lane published a book of his reviews titled Nobody's Perfect, (the title being a nod to Some Like it Hot) and I bought it for my father for Christmas two years ago. It's oddly enough become a family book, for my mom found it one day and began reading it as well, and now it rotates between being at my father's house to my mother's. I would highly recommend the book to anyone who enjoys reading extremely well written essays. Probably my favorite one in there is when he goes through the bestseller lists of the 90s and tees off against The Bridges of Madison County, among others. Or just go to the newyorker.com website and look through any of his most recent reviews. (The Clash of the Titans review was particularly hysterical.) And I shouldn't be completely ignoring the other film critic for The New Yorker, David Denby. He's just as good, although I still hold Anthony Lane in higher regard just for the fact that Denby wrote a positive review about Avatar. In this week's New Yorker, Denby has a particularly good review of the film The Social Network and a profile of David Fincher. (I saw The Social Network last night and was blown away. It's rare for me to be thinking about a movie so much the day after I've seen it, and it's all I've been thinking about today.)


A lot of his reviews cannot be accessed online unless you have a subscription to the magazine, but the New Yorker website is another alternative to reading Anthony Lane's stuff if not by buying his book. Here's some of his best, in my opinion, that can be found and read online for free:

Revenge of the Sith:

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/05/23/050523crci_cinema

Clash of the Titans and Everyone Else:

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/cinema/2010/04/12/100412crci_cinema_lane

Mamma Mia! and Journey to the Center of the Earth:

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/cinema/2008/07/28/080728crci_cinema_lane

Frightening Literature

I'm almost done with Zombie. I thought it would be a quicker read than it has been, it's a pretty short book, but I'm working through about 3 books at once; I've also started the Haruki Murakami book The Wind Up Bird Chronicle. Plus, since it is my rule to not read Zombie at night to not get freaked out, and night is usually the time I have to read, I've been getting behind. 

The scariest book I've ever read was probably I Am The Cheese by Robert Cormier, which I read when I was in 6th grade as per (like always) my dad's recommendation. The book is narrated by a kid called Adam, who's story is told in two different formats: first person, as he accounts about his life and his family/girlfriend before everything horrible happened and his bike journey to visit his father, and the third person, which is written in a transcript form and is his interviews with a psychiatrist. Adam's family have joined the Witness Protection Program, and his family is being targeted and are eventually caught. The book's ending is probably the bleakest ending I've ever read, and I remember feeling very freaked out by that book. It was actually worse in that due to the odd formatting of the book, I wasn't totally sure what the ending was, and thought it was more optimistic than what it actually was. (It has a twist ending that's not exactly out there; you have to be a somewhat savvy reader to catch it which I wasn't.) 

It also doesn't help that I Am The Cheese's title is obviously taken from "The Farmer in the Dell," a rhyme that has always been creepy to me. Adam sings it throughout the book, and the book ends with the last few lines of it:

The cheese stands alone
The cheese stands alone
Hi-ho, the merry-o
The cheese stands alone

Creepy.

I used to think that books and stories could never be as scary as scary movies, but reading Zombie and I Am The Cheese are two books that I find just as frightening as any horror flick out there. However, I do think that the mindset you're in has a lot to do with how scary whatever book/movie you're reading/watching- I always find films and books the scariest when I'm home alone at night and it's dark out. I watched Silence of the Lambs twice- the first time, in broad daylight, I thought it wasn't scary at all- the second time at night freaked me out so much I had nightmares. 

A couple of years ago, my dad told me about a story that had always scared him, even though his details of it are quite fuzzy. He heard it when he was a kid, probably 11 or 12, and he always insists to me that he's probably not remembering it right, but the gist of it was there was this young man who is really violent and harming all these innocent people, and he goes to his doctor/psychiatrist, who asks him why he's doing all these horrible things. The man explains that it isn't him, that it's the voices in his head that are telling him to do so, and that he cannot control it. The doctor of course thinks he's insane, and sort of kiddingly tells the man that if it's the voices telling him to do so, that he should just tell the voices to go into his (the doctor's) head instead, which they then do. I know there's more to the story than that, probably something about the doctor going insane, but my dad can never remember it, and even that little bit of the story always sounds scary to me. Zombies, ghosts, vampires, whatever- those things can be scary, but it's always farfetched, whereas people losing their minds is not something fake or imaginary. That, to me, is incredibly more frightening, and it's the main plot of both I Am The Cheese and Zombie. 

Manipulation

For a while now I've been curious about the memoir Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man by Bill Clegg, and I finally was able to get a copy of it. I was curious about it after reading a write up of it in The New York Times a couple of months ago, despite the fact that it was a genre I don't exactly love: the memoir, followed by something I dislike even more: the addiction memoir.

I read A Million Little Pieces a couple of months after everyone hated James Frey, mainly to spite Oprah. Her public humiliation of him really unnerved me, as did her systematic way of turning all of her viewers and basically everyone against him because of the fact that she's basically a deity at this point. I don't know if this is a controversial viewpoint, but I really do not care if memoir's are complete fact or not. David Sedaris, one of my favorite writers, was questioned in an interview about fabrication after the Frey  scandal, and how a reporter had determined that some of the elements in his stories weren't true. (They were unbelievably superficial details and more exaggerations than lies; Sedaris has said many times that the fact-checkers at the New Yorker are pretty thorough.) He admitted straight away that he exaggerated, and said that he equated people getting all upset about lies in memoirs to that one person who, after another has told a joke, ruins it by saying "oh, that's not true; it didn't happen like that." If the joke was funny and served its intended purpose by providing humor, who cares if it's fact or fiction? Well, a lot of people do, but I'm not one of them. A Million Little Pieces was nothing particularly groundbreaking, but it was quite interesting and well-written, and I still feel that way knowing that he fabricated a good deal of it. 

I don't like memoirs, and my love of David Sedaris is one of the rare exceptions to this rule. Angela's Ashes, which I read this year, was unbelievably tedious, and more than that, joyless. I have a lot of trouble feeling sympathy for characters in books in general, and by the end of Angela's Ashes, I was so annoyed and fed up with the continual "My family is poor/ My father drinks away all of our money" reprise that I wished for all of the character's deaths by the end of the book. Same with a short story titled "Under the Influence" about a man's father's addiction to alcohol- by the end of it, I felt nothing close to sympathy for the protagonist. 

I could just be heartless, but I think I was really more turned off by both of these stories because they were something I cannot stand- manipulative. In "Under the Influence" moreso than in Angela's Ashes, there was a clear message at hand: do not drink, this is what happens. "Message" pieces are something I cannot stand, and try to stay away from in general. The movie Avatar that opened last year and was all the rage completely frustrated me, making me a member of a handful of people who really hated it. There were many things wrong with Avatar: the acting was sub-par, the villains were 2D, the whole thing was a copy of Pocohontas, the element that the villains wanted the land for was actually called "unobtanium"- but my biggest issue with it by far was it's message that we have to protect the environment and be green and save the planet. The go-green movement is something I think is a great thing, and really love, but even agreeing with the movie makers position, I was annoyed at it being shoved in the audience's faces for the duration of the picture. Mixing movies with politics is a tricky thing, and the audience should be aware of it. People going to see a Michael Moore or Citizens United film are going to know that there's a political bent to it, but if you're putting out a movie like Avatar, and then putting in a strong political message in- there is a great deal of manipulation going on. The preservation of our environment and Earth should not have to be a political movement or message, but it is.

Manipulative books do this all the time, and I saw it with "Under the Influence"- the man's father drank, the man himself ends up emotionally wrecked and resents his father, his father dies an early death, etc. All while sending an obvious message- you shouldn't drink. Again, a message I mostly agree with, but it's presented in such a way that it almost seems like a cause and effect: if you drink, ever, you will become an alcoholic who abuses your kids and dies young. It's a tactic that seems so disingenuous to me:  getting your audience to become fearful. It also seems like a tactic that helps you isolate yourself from criticism: granted, critics are great and still do it, but for the everyday person, people are judgmental, and when I said I hated Angela's Ashes and "Under the Influence" many people I talked to looked horrified that I would find such a sad book about alcoholism and poverty to be "tedious." 

More than that, there is something sort of... unnerving to me about using your personal tragedy to sell books. I feel that way anytime I see a People Magazine article about some horrible family tragedy. There was one where this father was interviewed about losing all of his children and his wife in a car accident caused by a drunk driver. It was about a year or so after it happened, and the article was just about how his tragedy and how he was coping with this unimaginable loss. I of course felt overwhelming sympathy for this man, but I also couldn't help but feeling uncomfortable about him selling his tragedy and personal grief to a national magazine, for everyone to see. Grief is a personal thing, and reading that article left me with a bitter taste in my mouth.

Manipulation is hard to avoid, and I'm liking Portrait of an Addict so far in that it doesn't seem to be doing that just yet. I like stories that are more like "this is what happened, make of it what you will," rather than a book that feels like it was written solely to send a message.