by Richard Schickel ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 23, 2015
Schickel found writing this collection “a rather playful business”; readers will find it infused with his joy.
A noted critic celebrates the pleasure of movies.
By his own count, film critic Schickel (Conversations with Scorsese, 2011, etc.) has seen 22,590 movies. After a 40-year career as “a professional moviegoer,” he admits that he prefers popular movies to “art” films, although his eclectic list of keepers includes some decidedly arty directors, such as Wim Wenders and German expressionist F.W. Murnau. Beginning with the first two decades of the talkies, Schickel praises the exemplary Charlie Chaplin in a movie not well regarded by others, The Circus (1928). To the author, the climax, which “features Chaplin doing a high-wire act while beset by a troop of monkeys,” is “breathtaking in its intricacy, and its thrills.” Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) seems to him “the greatest of the Dracula movies,” but he believes Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) and M (1931) to be overrated. Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) was “a great act of modernism”; William Wellman’s The Public Enemy (1931), an iconic gangster picture. The author remarks on virtually every director, from D.W. Griffith to Rouben Mamoulian (a “half-forgotten genius”), Clint Eastwood to Steven Spielberg. He thinks Woody Allen is “trapped by his gift” of creating comedy. Annie Hall (1977), though a huge hit, is only a “charming movie, but scarcely an overpowering one,” and Radio Days (1987) seems to Schickel “one of Woody’s most accomplished films.” Although he concedes that Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972) “is not everyone’s dish of tea,” he deems it “an important film because there were not many before it that were essays in pure insanity.” A great admirer of Martin Scorsese, Schickel thought Mean Streets (1973) was clumsy, but Raging Bull (1980) and Taxi Driver (1976) were masterpieces.
Schickel found writing this collection “a rather playful business”; readers will find it infused with his joy.Pub Date: June 23, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-375-42459-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Feb. 23, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2015
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by Ludwig Bemelmans ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 23, 1955
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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developed by Ludwig Bemelmans ; illustrated by Steven Salerno
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by Ludwig Bemelmans ; illustrated by Steven Salerno
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by Charlayne Hunter-Gault ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1992
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
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