Search Results for: Tom Wolfe

The latest Wolf of Wall Street complication is that despite the feverish, super-ecstatic, Marty-firing-on-all-cylinders quality, the soft-minded farts are going to go “no, no…too cold, too vulgar…the new Casino…doesn’t make us feel good.” Every year Academy deadwood types pooh-pooh brilliance and vote for the soft consensus alternative. A filmmaker friend saw it Monday evening and … Read more

I’ve long regaded Tom Wolfe as a political conservative, but I’ve never thought of him as an old-line racist. This is nonetheless the view of New Yorker critic David Denby in a new hardback essay he’s written called Snark. Here’s an excerpt from a review/summary/critque by reasononline’s Michael C. Moynihan. “Denby identifies Wolfe’s Radical Chic … Read more

There’s a piece in the N.Y. Times Sunday Magazine by Daniel B. Smith titled “What Is Art For?” If you ask me art’s only function is to be. But if you’re asking what purpose it serves, I’ve always believed the Tom Wolfe proclamation that its primary raison d’etre is to allow the art world’s benefactors … Read more

You have to kind of melt into it, or wade into it like it’s the Gulf of Mexico from the Quintana Roo side. A salty lake with gently lapping mini-waves. Either way you have to merge without the help (or really the hindrance) of all your acquired mental tools and skills and disciplines. You need … Read more

The odious implications of modern advertising were explored in Adam Curtis’s The Century of the Self (‘02), a landmark doc with laser-like insights into a few bizarre corners of the human psyche. This reminds me of a certain legendary ad copy line for Clairol hair coloring…a line that came from the contours and tendencies of … Read more

Last night I excerpted portions of a 1.10.26 N.Y. Times Ezra Klein Show podcast — an exacting discussion by Klein and M.Gessen that identifies and describes in depth the ongoing Donald Trump spectacle barrage. Here’s what I wrote this morning in the comment thread: Klein and Gessen have seriously nailed and bull’s-eyed it with their … Read more

HE to Suttercane: You’ve “done both acid and mushrooms several times”, fine, but you evidently haven’t been called. I recognize or accept that most LSD trippers have never gotten past the “elevator in the brain hotel” stage. But after all the jacks are in their boxes, and the clowns have all gone to bed… Jimi … Read more

I’m thinking about writing a Hollywood book about the deranged and hysterical media war against Peter Farrelly’s Green Book (‘18), but also about something bigger and broader — how the Green Book maelstrom launched the not-fully-concluded era of the woke baddie-waddies —- the censorious, ultra-sensitive identity fanatics who all but suffocated the film business during the … Read more

Posted last night (Saturday, 11.23) in response to the famous Terry Valentine / Peter Fonda / Lem Dobbs line from The Limey…a revelatory line that said the proverbial ‘60s thing was “‘66 and early ‘67…that’s all it was.” HE response, tapped out early this morning… The most radiant or abundant part of any social-spiritual-musical movement … Read more

I’m of the firm opinion that Maestro is audacious and brilliant and frequently soaring, but that 68% approval rating from Joe and Jane Popcorn obviously spells trouble. We may as well face facts. If Joe and Jane are cool to a film, you can bet that a sizable portion of Academy members feel the same … Read more

Herewith are the final choices of the New York Film Critics Circle, which were voted on earlier today. HE strongly agrees with one judgment — the Best Supporting Actress prize going to The Holdovers‘ Da’Vine Joy Randolph. And Oppenheimer‘s Chris Nolan winning the Best Director award…fine. And some of the minor category awards were acceptable. … Read more