RaveSlant... an unprecedented collection of film criticism in that it’s written by an actual filmmaker, at a career peak no less ... Tarantino takes Pauline Kael’s great strengths—liveliness, recklessness, humanity, her sheer readability—and weds them with his understanding of Hollywood as a business and his rat-a-tat verbosity as a former video clerk and fashions a singular style ... It’s the sense of freedom that’s most narcotic in Cinema Speculation, especially for those of us who’ve tried to get our personalities across in writing without losing gigs or getting lost in the weeds or having drafts returned awash in colored comments. Tarantino curses up a red storm, speaks in slang, and refuses to hyphen-out forbidden epithets ... Astonishingly few of these indulgences feel crass. And what if they did? Would any readers melt upon encountering them? ... Like the structural shagginess, the language and the unguarded grammar arise as the devices of someone saying what they fucking mean, regardless of trends or potential slaps on the wrists. Such freedom is the benefit of power, and of being grandfathered into pop culture before a potential insensitivity became a possible source of hysteria. Here, this freedom suggests white-guy entitlement, yes, but also a refusal to separate people via the borders of cautious euphemisms and manners that change with the winds anyway ... Tarantino’s willingness to do whatever he wants leads to revelatory places ... becomes a wrenching memoir, elucidating events that were already haunting many of the reviews in between the lines.
Mark Harris
RaveSlantMike Nichols: A Life refreshingly lacks the defensiveness and superiority that can define cinephilia, which tends to regard notable film direction as an act of conjuring performed by a single person ... Much of this seductive biography is devoted to the act of corralling various egos in the service of a project and the tap-dancing such endeavors entail ... Harris understands that film and theater direction is most broadly and immediately management, and so Mike Nichols: A Life often plays as an intense and glamorous workplace comedy ... Harris captures how personalities inform the artistic process, particularly how Nichols’s devotion to reinventing himself from outsider to insider was rechanneled into an ability to hone scripts at a biological level ... Harris’s crisp, funny, empathetic prose essentially glides one through Nichols’s life and career. In fact, this polish is redolent of a Nichols film, which means that you may wonder what else might have been revealed had more space been made for gritty details ... As in many a Nichols film, though, there’s more anguish here than might initially meet the eye. The book has a haunting, beautifully intangible quality. We’re occasionally allowed to feel as if we’re catching true glimmers of Igor, the wounded, lonely Jewish boy who forged himself into a hybrid of Cinderella and Gatsby.
Mark Harris
RaveSlant... refreshingly lacks the defensiveness and superiority that can define cinephilia, which tends to regard notable film direction as an act of conjuring performed by a single person ... Harris understands the machinations of show business on a granular level. Much of this seductive biography is devoted to the act of corralling various egos in the service of a project and the tap-dancing such endeavors entail ... Harris understands that film and theater direction is most broadly and immediately management, and so Mike Nichols: A Life often plays as an intense and glamorous workplace comedy ... Harris captures how personalities inform the artistic process, particularly how Nichols’s devotion to reinventing himself from outsider to insider was rechanneled into an ability to hone scripts at a biological level ... reads much faster than its 600-page length would suggest, as Harris’s crisp, funny, empathetic prose essentially glides one through Nichols’s life and career. In fact, this polish is redolent of a Nichols film, which means that you may wonder what else might have been revealed had more space been made for gritty details ... The book has a haunting, beautifully intangible quality. We’re occasionally allowed to feel as if we’re catching true glimmers of Igor, the wounded, lonely Jewish boy who forged himself into a hybrid of Cinderella and Gatsby ... Harris understands Nichols as a wizard of process, spinning neuroses into art that, at its best, danced on the fault lines between the personal and the commercial.
Adam Nayman
RaveSlant MagazineWhile Nayman clearly reveres one of the most acclaimed and mythologized of contemporary American filmmakers, he’s willing to take the piss out of his subject, sveltely moving between Anderson’s strengths, limitations, and the obsessions that bind them, fashioning an ornate and suggestive system of checks and balances ... Masterworks pushes back against the simplistic, bro-ish language of adulation, and attending backlash, that often obscures a major artist’s achievements. In the process, Nayman achieves one of a critic’s loftiest goals: grappling with a body of work while honoring its mystery ... This structure creates a fascinating temporal zig-zag that mirrors the chaotic, uncertain highs and lows of creative work. Masterworks moves us forward in the timeline of Anderson’s America while the filmmaker himself leaps all over the place in terms of artistic control ... it’s a pure, visceral pleasure simply to read Nayman’s descriptions of imagery ... Nayman understands Anderson to be fashioning a cumulative hall-of-mirror filmography that highlights an America in elusive, surreal, even daringly comic fragments.
Glenn Kenny
RaveSlant... reductions have led to the film’s mischaracterization, in certain circles, as a \'bro\' movie—a masturbatory ode to guy’s behaving badly. Thankfully, critic Glenn Kenny’s extraordinary Made Men: The Story of Goodfellas offers a great deal more nuance than that on the film’s 30th anniversary ... Kenny displays a shrewd grasp of detail here. He doesn’t reduce Scorsese, De Niro, actor Joe Pesci, producer Barbara De Fina, Wiseguy author Nicholas Pileggi, real-life prosecutor Ed McDonald, and the various real-life mobsters that appeared in Goodfellas to the status of legend-hood. Rather, he portrays them as gifted, tormented human beings, centering on their professional processes. Along the way, Kenny foregrounds an oft-neglected element of Goodfellas’s greatness: its microscopic, docudramatic sense of atmosphere and character behavior ... Honoring fact as well as fiction, Kenny mounts an ambitious mixture of cinephilic essay and true-crime exposé ... Made Men has a fluid, intuitive structure that recalls, yes, Goodfellas, as Kenny merges an intricate analysis of the production with off-kilter anecdotes about Hill and the gangsters in his and the film’s orbit ... Kenny’s painstakingly reveals the rich, bottomless precision of Goodfellas ... Kenny doesn’t entirely grapple with...contradiction, though he brings Goodfellas down to Earth with his own unforgettable rendering of Hill as an over-the-hill schemer. No one else has seen this magnificent, agonizing, unmooring movie with such piercing clarity.
Woody Allen
MixedSlantThere’s a witty sentiment on nearly every page of this book, but Allen’s chilly approach to his own story feels alternately humble and crabby ... Apropos of Nothing has several...startling lines, revealing the occasional emotional benefits of Allen’s direct, plain-stated prose. Such writing underscores the book’s pervading and often unexplored sadness, suggesting the fuller autobiography that might’ve been ... Allen has a sense of what you want from him, in terms of the glories and the terrifying still hotly contested nadirs of his life ... Allen’s descriptions of women are generally dated and tasteless, probably to willfully spite the Woke Police ... Even Allen’s anger at Farrow, and modern society’s hypocrisy, isn’t mined as fully as it might’ve been; he essentially shrugs it all off, ending his book with a sigh of \'fuck it.\'
Brian De Palma and Susan Lehman
MixedSlant\"Composed of short, punchy prose and bite-sized chapters, this slim genre novel reads very much like a script for a new De Palma project, one that’s rich in the debauched and rarefied play lands of the rich and famous, aspiring photographers (voyeurs), male predators, and beautiful and imperiled women, with a soupcon of political intrigue on top ... This naughty pulp cocktail goes down deliciously easy ...
Still, Are Snakes Necessary? also illustrates the limitations of attempting to recapture the visceral qualities of cinema via prose. De Palma and Lehman’s writing is confident, but it still only faintly conjures the wrenching, surreal power of a classic De Palma sequence ... the poetry is missing. De Palma is a maestro of juxtaposition, composition, and performance calibration, not of words on a page.\
