Category: Film

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Film

New Documentary on J.D. Salinger

Like many people I first read J.D. Salinger‘s novel The Catcher in the Rye as an adolescent and was immediately smitten with Holden Caufield and the spirit of the book. Yet it wasn’t until I was older, and a much more experienced reader, that I read Franny and Zooey and his collection of short stories titled Nine Stories (“A Perfect Day for Bananafish” is a personal favorite) that I became a true devotee of Salinger.

The stories in Nine Stories may be as perfectly crafted as any American short stories since those in Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time or, more recently, the stories of Raymond Carver. Salinger was in complete control of his craft and could seemingly do whatever he wanted on the page…And then, of course, he famously disappeared from the public scene and stopped publishing entirely.

A new documentary due out this September titled “Finding Salinger,” documents one man’s search for Salinger during the last years’s of his life. Here is the trailer:

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Film

Trailer for New ‘Anna Karenina’ Film

Fans of both Russian literature and actress Keira Knightley are rejoicing that the two will be joined together on the big screen in an upcoming film version of Leo Tolstoy’s classic novel Anna Karenina. I recently blogged about the famed translation of Tolstoy’s novel War And Peace by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky who also translated Anna Karenina.

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Film

Send Up of Literary Hipsters

Here is a funny promo clip for the IFC series Portlandia titled “Did You Read?” that pokes fun at literary hipsters trying to outdo each with references to articles in Mcsweeney’s, The New Yorker, Mother Jones, etc.

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Film

What is a Real Work of Art?

“The creation of beauty is art,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1836 in a slim volume called Nature. The Emerson quote provides the perfect introduction to the subject of Roger Scruton’s BBC documentary “Why Beauty Matters.”

Scruton is a well-known British philosopher and author most recently of Beauty: A Very Short Introduction.

In the film Scruton tells us, “there is all the difference in the world between a real work of art, which makes ugliness beatiful, and the fake work of art which shares the uggliness it shows.” Please watch the video below:

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Film

Where Soldiers Come From

When I was a young boy I saw the movie The Deer Hunter on television for the first time. Although I didn’t have the emotional maturity or the historical knowledge to put it all in perspective, I was deeply moved by the film and the actors (Robert De Niro, Meryl Streep, Christopher Walken). It spawned an enduring interest in the Vietnam War for me and also gave me a stellar template to judge films and acting against ever since.

The very idea of a group of friends from a small Pennsylvania coal town joining the Army together, fighting in the jungles of Vietnam, and then returning home to their friends and family as vastly different human beings is riveting drama. Yet It turns out that the story in The Deer Hunter is not too far from what is happening right now in Michigan.

A new documentary titled Where Soldiers Come From is now in limited release across the country and it tells the story of 9 boys (men) from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan—a rural area along the Canadian border— who joined the Army National Guard as a group and ultimately served in Afghanistan together. What intrigues me about the film is that the director was able to spend four years following the men, including being with them before they joined the Army so we can see into what one critic called “the enclosed world of youth.”

Here is the trailer: