Nicked a copy of The New Yorker from a doctor's office (what, you think I'm going to actually spend money on an issue? Come to think of it, a doctor that reads The New Yorker...?), and it turned out to be their movie issue.
Enjoyed an article on Pauline Kael by a former Paulette--he keeps sounding like a rehab alumnus confessing and ultimately condemning his hidden vice. Enjoyed even more an article on writers wrangling over the writing credit on the Hulk movie--they should have taken their cue from Gore Vidal, who won his suit to have his name added to the credits of "The Sicilian;" when he actually saw the movie, he called his lawyer and said "get my name off this piece of shit!"
Then there was this long, fawning article on Quentin Tarantino. Early on Tarantino acknowledges Jean Luc Godard as one of his early heroes, which is only right and proper; then the article goes on to say "he has now outgrown Godard," which had me howling till I fell off my seat. You don't outgrow Godard; you can only attempt to use what he's developed intelligently, in the hope of not disgracing his name with the association, acknowledging that such is not always the case..
The article continues: "Godard was, in the end, too breezy, too detached, too motiveless, too delicate, too French to serve as a model (for Tarantino)." No, of course not; Tarantino merely borrowed Godard's bags of tricks and instead of investigating the nature of cinema and huiman behavior with them, used them to build a rickety altar of cool over which he can preside, wobblingly. It's no a growing beyond, it's a regressing beneath. It's using high tech weaponry to crack open a walnut.
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