Tag Archive: Barton Fink


What are film critics for?

Filed under: Blogging, Books, Movies — Leave a comment
January 2, 2019

THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE MULTIPLEX. WHAT’S WRONG WITH MODERN MOVIES by Mark Kermode (Random House Books, 2011)

10304270Spare a thought for lonely film critics in the age of streaming. They are an increasingly marginalized and, some would say, dying breed.

It’s not as if we really need them anymore. Often they just ruin our entertainment by over detailed reviews of popular movies. Either that or they wind up smugly enthusing about some obscure art house ‘classic’ that only they and a few of their buddies have seen.

Mark Kermode is one of the smartest and self-aware of this endangered species so is well placed to argue for their preservation. Continue reading →

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GHOST WRITERS OF NYC

Filed under: Books, Fiction — 2 Comments
January 7, 2013

THE NEW YORK TRILOGY by Paul Auster

Do writers have real lives?

This is the implicit question that lies at the heart of these three separate though interconnected stories. They all share the same setting (New York, obviously), the genre (Detective fiction with an existential twist) and each deal with themes of identity, isolation and intrigue.

In The Locked Room, the final part of the trilogy, the author’s voice steps in to highlight the similarities: “These three stories are finally the same story, but each one represents a different stage in my awareness of what it is about”.

In the first story, City Of Glass, Quinn is employed as a private eye and describes his assignment to watch Stillman as a “glorified tail-job” which entails long hours  watching and waiting for something to happen. Nothing does. Continue reading →

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