New Yorker magazine alert thread

when was that, exactly

At some point I liked Lane enough to buy his book *twice*, once in hardback and once in paperback when I moved to another country.

Now I just skip him entirely - the jokes are tired and everything is a variation on "i'd rather be watching preston sturges"

yeah, I used to like Lane and bought his book

ideally shaken upside-down from the Brooklyn Bridge

that would require him to be in New York, rather than his actual home of Cambridge, England

here is a collection of Pearson, btw:

Good question @allisonpearson! What did they do in China and Wuhan that has allowed them to get back to normal? pic.twitter.com/oLOtKg1suG

— Sam Bowman (@s8mb) January 1, 2021

Oh right he’s English that explains his lechery and his mawkish turns of phrase

I used to like Lane too, I enjoyed his one-liners. He's a breezy writer. But I feel that shtick wore thin a long time ago, and there's not much beneath it. I've never thought he had very interesting ideas about film as a medium — or really, any particular ideas at all. You can like or dislike Brody, but at least he seems like a serious film guy to me, he has an aesthetic orientation steeped in knowledge of cinema. Lane has always seemed like a dilettante.

can't be worse than denby

I remember really liking a piece where he picked some random year from the early 20th century and read every NYT #1 bestseller from that year and reviewed them all. Probably sometime in the 1990s.

Pearson appears to be having a giant covid-denialism meltdown today because she doesn't want to have to spend any time with their kids?

also having a giant freakout about the pervasive curse of media wokeness, including this assertion about a current TV programme that is part-funded by the BBC and which she is watching on the BBC

#Spiral, arguably one of the best TV cop dramas ever made, could not have come out of the current BBC. It is too truth-telling about tensions in French society, too unvarnished, too dirty, too damn incorrect. That’s what makes it so remarkable.

— Allison Pearson (@allisonpearson) January 3, 2021

Allison Pearson should accept this prompt deletion & public apology as enough to undo any damage to her reputation. Going further is bullying. https://t.co/UoaEolnp2I

— Simon Cox (@SimonFRCox) January 4, 2021

Quite a bit going on:

People today are accusing Allison Pearson of not caring about mental health. I think it is worth pointing out this column for the Daily Mail in April 2010, in which she wrote about her own depression: https://t.co/klwv8OInd8

— Robert Hanks (@RobertHanks) January 4, 2021

Back in the late 90s she was some mild arts commentator. Her journey into the utter monstrosity of today is something else, a lot to map out.

Denby was the worst. Didn't he write a book about porn addiction? Lane is fine with me, I think he's a good, witty writer, even if he doesn't always have anything special to say. Brody ... he reminds me of Rosenbaum or other quirky cineaste contrarians a lot, and because of that I've warned friends to tread carefully when they read a Brody rave.

yeah brody is one of those critics who doesnt really have value as a consumer guide, but is still a good read bc it can be fun and useful to follow along with the mental gymnastics he uses to get to his wacky opinions. as a bunch have pointed out before, even though hes nuts he seems to come by his bizarre opinions honestly. imo lane is fine but boring, i have less & less interest in his tasteful cocktail party wit thing. brody seems like a legit movie-obsessed weirdo which is way more fun for me.

Excellent post, OEO.

one of those critics who doesnt really have value as a consumer guide, but is still a good read bc it can be fun and useful to follow along with the mental gymnastics he uses to get to his wacky opinions

This just kind of makes me want to waltz sideways into an alternate universe where Armond White is a beloved New Yorker movie critic for decades

I wish the magazine would find room for Brody in print, apart from capsule reviews. It's a shame that all of his long reviews are online-only.

1 100 percent agree that Lane is better than Denby. Just kind of a low bar. They've done a good job bringing in younger, diverse writers in other arts/culture realms, it would be great to expand that to film.

I wish the magazine would find room for Brody in print, apart from capsule reviews. It's a shame that all of his long reviews are online-only.

― jaymc, Monday, January 4, 2021 10:40 AM (one hour ago)

yeah it's maddening, he's really their only full-time film critic with anything interesting to say

I remember really liking a piece where he picked some random year from the early 20th century and read every NYT #1 bestseller from that year and reviewed them all. Probably sometime in the 1990s.

― Guayaquil (eephus!),

It's better than Vidal's, after whom he modeled it.

I also dug his essays on Matthew Arnold, Gide, Bunuel.

I had no problem with Denby when he wrote for New York. I still on occasion look for reviews on '80s and '90s stuff of his on Google Books.

It's kind of interesting, there are all sorts of well-known and respected young-ish (let's say, liberally, under 50) music writers, but to my knowledge no equivalent for film writing. For some reason I thought Manohla Dargis was young, but she's almost 60 (same as Lane). AO Scott is in his mid-50s. Brody, fwiw, is 72.

Get @filmcrithulk the New Yorker gig

I love Brody. He’s a reasonably good guide for me, tho has a higher tolerance for twee aesthetics than I do

Same. Our sensibilities align even when we disagree.

A few youngish film writers working for top publications:

K. Austin Collins (Rolling Stone), Richard Lawson (Vanity Fair), Alissa Wilkinson (Vox), Angelica Jade Bastién (Vulture), Alison Willmore (BuzzFeed), Justin Chang (L.A. Times)

Also, Hunter Harris isn't a film critic, but she's a film writer with 100K Twitter followers and a Substack.

david sims at the atlantic

OEO OTM wrt Brody; i find him generally insufferable and tend to find his aesthetics incompatible with mine but at least he's working with an internal logic that mostly stands up even when i completely disagree with it.

i've been getting into old issues of cineaste lately

I don't know how old Vern is, but he's the only film critic whose taste I trust implicitly.

dril has a good letterboxd account

Vern has to have been born between 1971 and 1976.

reïmpeached

Löl

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/01/18/trolling-the-great-outdoors

hope the death threats get acted upon

i made it 4 or 5 grafs before tiring of the prospect that i would ever receive evidence pertaining as to why i should give a shit

"Hey, remember Tucker Max? Well, now he's in the wilderness clothing business!"

i feel like i need to rinse my eyes with bleach after reading about that dude

I really don't know why they bothered publishing that article, I actually read the whole thing and it was a total waste of time.

Yeah, I kept waiting for a turn in the article or some other revelation, but it was just nope, "this dude sucks". Which is true, but it was kind of a pointless read.

Mail delivery is so slow these days that I've been routinely getting the magazine a couple of weeks late. The last one I got was the Jan. 4-11 issue with the long Lawrence Wright feature about COVID. There were also a couple of issues in October and November that I just didn't get at all. Of course, I can read it all online, but I prefer print.

Lane, of all people, did, fairly recently, come up with a nuanced, even fairly deep-focus view of John Berryman's life and works---both quite the handful, but/and got me to check out some of his books (so far, so good).
Somebody else provided intriguing glimpses of Martin Amis's 20th Century books (looks like he might be one who gets better the further back you go?), before cutting a path to steady, measured (devastatingly described and quoted) demolition of the latest novel.
Also appealing presentations of Paul Celan and Alice Oswald. Casey Cep (whose eventually really good book about an abandoned Harper Lee project got initially carried away with tangential riches of research) came up with a multi-d profile of Marilynne Robinson that's gotten me way in the Gilead cycle, with other works to come. Good 'un on Adrienne Rich too.
Really like that all of these pieces *do* deal with life *times* works, not just getting into Behind The Music drama or lecturing us and the author, with backstory as boilerplate (as Judith Thurman did in her stern takedown of Ferrante's latest, also all her post-Neapolitan Novels work---she might be right, for all I know, but seemed more like thunderous stop-the-presses flash than honest frustration with somebody whose best is well worth the time, as many of us found it to be).

People are still trying to get the public to care about a racist alcoholic and mediocre poet like Berryman? Jfc. I really want to punch most mainstream literary critics in the face.

Berryman is accessible and popular -- I'm not an expert on his body of work but I like the hits, and it seems weird to say critics are "trying to get the public to care," it's like saying critics are trying to get the public to care about Frank O'Hara, these are the writers doing big friendly poems that people enjoy without training!

Booze is def. presented as a prob here, and “The Dream Songs” is a hubbub, and some of it is spoken in blackface—or, to be accurate, in what might be described as blackvoice. It deals in unembarrassed minstrelsy, complete with a caricature of verbal tics, all too pointedly transcribed: “Now there you exaggerate, Sah. We hafta die.” To say that Berryman was airing the prejudices of his era is hardly to exonerate him; in any case, he seems to be evoking, in purposeful anachronism, an all but vanished age of vaudeville. Kevin Young, who is Black, prefaces his choice of Berryman’s poetry by arguing, “Much of the force of The Dream Songs comes from its use of race and blackface to express a (white) self unraveling.” Some readers will share Young’s generously inquiring attitude; others will veer away from Berryman and never go back.

For anyone willing to stick around, there’s a new book on the block. “The Selected Letters of John Berryman” weighs in at more than seven hundred pages... Probably too much for me, esp. given JB's range of moods etc., but from the subsequent description, can imagine getting hooked. I'll stick to the Kevin Young-chosen poems for now.

Not that I like them all, but anyway, this is the kind of unexpected opp that The New Yorker can provide these days.

I liked the Judith Thurman piece without recognizing her read at all -- Lying Lives feels totally of a piece with the Neapolitan 4 to me, while she sees it almost as a reaction against them.

I appreciated the Berryman episode as someone who's struggled without any success to like him for 25 years.

Berryman was a great racist alcoholic poet dude