Warm but wooden.
In his memoir-cum-career-retrospective, Time film critic Schickel (Matinee Idylls, 1999, etc.) compares his feelings about war movies he saw as a boy with his take on those flicks today.
The author has re-seen most of those works he first viewed while growing up in small, WASPy, spankingly American Wauwatosa, a city bordering Milwaukee, and his general sense is that war movies lied to him and to the country. Even the most lauded WWII film, Robert E. Sherwood’s and William Wyler’s postwar The Best Years of Our Lives, he finds fake and intractably apolitical. Granted, it showed the trials of three servicemen returning home and adjusting to a bad marriage, a bad job, and a physical disability, but it avoided all ideological thought or discussion and belied its air of reality by timidly resolving into a fantasia of good feelings. The least lie-filled war flicks, in Schickel’s judgment, are Howard Hawks’s Air Force and William A. Wellman’s The Story of G.I. Joe. Diluting the cinema addict’s prime interest, he also surveys other forms of entertainment from his boyhood years and is quite good about the Lux Radio Theater, although his tone here is like Woody Allen’s Radio Days without the jokes. That highlights Schickel’s main failing: he informs, but he does not lift. There’s not a page here one would care to go back to for its wild humors or the pleasures of its language. And when he states that he retains his childhood preference for the service comedies of Abbott and Costello over Chaplin’s films, film buffs can only wince. Schickel was once told by a jaundiced John Gregory Dunne, “Movie reviewing is not something you aim for; it’s a place you end up.” Indeed, the critic asks himself, “Who cares what anyone thinks about old movies? Or, for that matter, last week’s movies?” Readers won’t get any answers here.
Warm but wooden.Pub Date: April 4, 2003
ISBN: 1-56663-491-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Ivan Dee/Rowman & Littlefield
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2003
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An extravaganza in Bemelmans' inimitable vein, but written almost dead pan, with sly, amusing, sometimes biting undertones, breaking through. For Bemelmans was "the man who came to cocktails". And his hostess was Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolfe), arbiter of American decorating taste over a generation. Lady Mendl was an incredible person,- self-made in proper American tradition on the one hand, for she had been haunted by the poverty of her childhood, and the years of struggle up from its ugliness,- until she became synonymous with the exotic, exquisite, worshipper at beauty's whrine. Bemelmans draws a portrait in extremes, through apt descriptions, through hilarious anecdote, through surprisingly sympathetic and understanding bits of appreciation. The scene shifts from Hollywood to the home she loved the best in Versailles. One meets in passing a vast roster of famous figures of the international and artistic set. And always one feels Bemelmans, slightly offstage, observing, recording, commenting, illustrated.
Pub Date: Feb. 23, 1955
ISBN: 0670717797
Page Count: -
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1955
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