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Quentin Tarantino
Rave The New York Times Book Review A filmmaker, reviewing his own film, compares his technique to that of one of his own filmmaking idols. Behind the endearing braggadocio — hey Ma, I’m doing it just like Brian! — lies an observation that also happens to be completely accurate. Any film critic would give her left arm to have made that connection ... As much a filmgoing memoir as a work of criticism ... Tarantino is an unabashed celebrant of cinema’s dirtier pleasures, writing about the \'liquid ballet\' of Sam Peckinpah, or the \'consequences-be-damned moxie\' of Cybill Shepherd in Bogdanovich’s Daisy Miller, with a precision and gusto that cannot help recalling the mixture of violence and tenderness in his own films ... That Tarantino’s film reviews should turn out to be every bit as punchy, smart and surprising as his films should come as no surprise: In a sense he’s been writing both for years. His screenplays are also muscular acts of film criticism and revisionist history ... Occasionally, he cannot quite get outside himself ... Tarantino’s critical intelligence both refracts and reflects: He reveals himself in his opinion of others, just as surely as he illuminates their influence in his own work. What unites the various threads and themes of this book is the broad autobiographical truth that he was a filmgoer before he was a filmmaker, and will remain so for far longer.
Bret Easton Ellis
Mixed The Times First, the faint praise: White, a new collection of essays from Bret Easton Ellis, is the best thing the author has published in years. That’s not hard ... That’s the signature Ellis manoeuvre, of course: to give off all the signs of a man in acute psychological distress, and then, when you extend a helping hand, to bite your fingers off ... But here’s the real shocker: they’re good, particularly the earlier ones evoking his youth as a rich, unsupervised latchkey kid ... \'I now know that I was never happier than I was in the summer of 1991.\' And on that stunning note he ends the essay ... had Ellis left it there it would have been the greatest mic drop of his career. Sadly, he doesn’t. His resentment over his vilification upon that book’s publication colours all that follows.
Hanif Kureishi
Pan The New York Times Book Review The book is a little like one of those fake knots that, once pulled, turn out to be just a piece of string … Even paranoiacs can be plotted against, of course, but there’s a word for the kind of writing in which too neat a sense of reality is made to line up with loamy sexual fantasy: pornography. I suspect Kureishi knows this. That pre-emptive shrug of a title almost defies us to take his book seriously … Whether you enjoy this book is very much down to how much of a jolt you can get from its epigrams, most of them loitering in the 25-watt range...All of which have the requisite cynical snarl but collapse at the gentlest inquiry.
David Thomson
Positive The New York Times Book Review This is a fascinating idea — that the creative forces behind large portions of classical Hollywood might be not the writers or the directors but those misunderstood vulgarians, the studio heads themselves — but it is not new to Thomson. Warner Bros owes a debt to Neal Gabler’s 1988 book, An Empire of Their Own, one of the great works of film scholarship in the last 30 years...The question hovering over Thomson’s book is thus: Does the thesis gain strength for being narrower in focus?...Thomson is a British critic whose powers of thumbnail portraiture and plush, velveteen critical judgment are on vivid display as he brings the brothers to life ... How much credit for these films lies with Jack Warner is unquantifiable; at times the implicit thesis of the book — interpreting the entirety of a studio’s output as the creative oeuvre of its owner — courts tendentiousness. There are large sections in which the brothers are either absent or stitched in as an afterthought ...For those wanting a more thorough unpacking of the Warners’ complex relationship with their Jewish heritage, Gabler’s is the more impressive achievement. But if you want to toast a scoundrel, this book’s portrait of Jack Warner is as vividly inked as one of the studio’s cartoons.
Ian McEwan
Rave The New York Times Here is McEwan, at the helm of what looks suspiciously like the sort of English novel – irises in full bloom, young lovers following suit – that English novelists stopped writing more than 30 years ago. Gradually, though, a familiar disquiet begins to settle over the novel like dust … McEwan seems instinctively to have found a perfect fictional equivalent for the ways and workings of trauma – for its blind spots and sneaky obliquities … If it's plot, suspense and a Bergsonian sensitivity to the intricacies of individual consciousnesses you want, then McEwan is your man and Atonement your novel.
Jason Diamond
Mixed The New York Times Book Review Diamond never gets far enough into his John Hughes obsession to explain it, or why his alienation doesn’t express itself in angrier pop-cultural form ... I’m not sure Diamond gets enough about Hughes into the book — for long swaths, the title rings literally true — but he has successfully negotiated the writer’s most important rite of passage: He makes himself matter, first to himself and then to us.
Peter Ackroyd
Rave The New York Times Book Review Ackroyd’s volume is slim but insightful, no more than a character portrait but guided by a novelist’s skills of characterization and texture ... Ackroyd does a lovely job of bringing a blush to the cheek of his early infatuation with Ingrid Bergman ... [Ackroyd] is thrillingly alive to what he calls 'the true music' of Hitchcock.