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• Bookbooks

  in Books: book review: eats, shoots & leaves: the zero tolerance approach to punctuation by lynne truss Lynn Truss’s “Eats, Shoots and Leaves” turned out to be an utterly delightful discovery. It was a journey into a land I love — punctuation. The lady is endearingly nutty: she once picketed the movie Two Weeks Notice with an apostrophe on a stick, wanting to bring the apostrophe back into the title, after Weeks. But it is full of deep insights and Truss moves with unerring instinct through treacherous territory. Her comments on why we need punctuation at all; how the Internet has damaged language (“it’s not writing, or even typing; it’s just sending”) and how punctuation is actually critical not just to reading and writing but to basic communication, are sharp and accurate. She takes a good, hard swipe at the modern trend of self-publishing, so easy with the Internet (bloggers, beware!) and she’s right. Some of the comments and customer reviews at Amazon, for instance, are truly hideous, full of typos, badly punctuated and not proofed at all. » more

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• Coming Through Slaughter

  in Books: book review: coming through slaughter by michael ondaatje Geoff Dyer, in his astonishing “But Beautiful” says that Michael Ondaatje’s “Coming Through Slaughter” is arguably the greatest novel about jazz ever written. Dyer’s book is itself a masterful exposition of the nature and essence of jazz, played through the saxophone of literary fiction and it’s quickly clear that Dyer’s reference to Ondaatje’s novel is itself a reflection of another jazz tradition: acknowledging the influences that shape the present artist’s work. » more

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• Embers

  in Books: book review: embers by sándor márai After a gap of 41 years, two friends meet. One, a retired General, Henrik, lives alone, a widower, in a Hungarian castle with only his faithful retainers. There’s a history in the walls of the place. And, tonight, after a 41 years, there is a guest to dinner. Everything is arranged just as it once was, so many years ago. » more

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• Gods, Mongrels And Demons

  in Books: book review: gods, mongrels, and demons : 101 brief but essential lives by angus calder Angus Calder’s thesis, summarized on the dust jacket flap, is that the weird deserve centre-stage because these creatures are the zeitgeist of our world and, quite independently, are inherently interesting. He argues that they may even be more telling than better-known entities. » more

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• Just Awful

  in Books: book review: the best awful: a novel by carrie fisher Carrie Fisher’s The Best Awful is an elliptical work. That’s not a compliment. I mean it literally. She uses ellipses with something bordering on a pathological condition … and it does … nothing … for an already doomed book. That’s not as bad as her use of the em dash. Now that’s really something. Everywhere you go, the em dash lurks, ready to — pounce. » more

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• Kill Bill

  in Film: film review: kill bill - volume one directed by quentin tarantino Evidently there are degrees of violence. There is the sleep-wrecking, mind-numbing, stomach-churning, vomit-inducing violence of In Hell (Van Damme and other specimens) or Con Air. And there is the Tarantino brand of violence. Tarantino does extreme violence, but he does it with unparalleled élan and a singularity of beyond-the-box-office purpose. The result is magnificent: at one level, a beast under the hood with enormous raw power and wildly exaggerated style — a Bugatti. But there’s a whole lot more if you only care to look. The CCs (“carping critics”) who find the film ‘hollow’ and ‘shallow’ have of course totally missed the point. They also say much the same about Robert Rodriguez, and they’re wrong there too. » more

• Kitabkhana

  in Bookplaces: Sometimes you really can’t have too much of a good thing. Amrita and Samir Somaiya have done the city an enormous service with their new bookshop, Kitabkhana. Of all the bookshops in the city, it’s this one that has the most marvellous space—high ceilings in an old building, lovingly restored, the wrought-iron work retained and the woodwork polished and gleaming. It reminds you of the great bookshops in university towns like Harvard, and that shouldn’t be surprising since Samir Somaiya is an alumnus of both Cornell (where he will be teaching this summer) and Harvard. » more

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• Mind Games with Dennis Lehane

  in Books: book review: shutter island by dennis lehane With Mystic River Lehane catapulted himself to the top of the thriller psychological and mind-games genre. It must have been a very hard act to follow. With Shutter Island, Lehane almost pulls off the ultimate writer’s coup of going one better. Almost, but not quite; but it is still an extraordinary thriller, well above the median in the genre. » more

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• Not So Curious

  in Books: book review: the curious incident of the dog in the night-time by mark haddon Jay McInerney wrote a ravereview in the New York Times of Mark Haddon’s “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time”. Haddon’s book is nowhere as great as McInerney makes out. He reads far too much into a book so slight. Is it politically incorrect to dislike a book with an autistic child at its centre? » more

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• Thank you John Frankenheimer: Path To War

  in Film: film review: path to war directed by john frankenheimer The peculiar thing about John Frankenheimer’s work is that it is consistently good. That’s not something one can say about most directors working today. I hope this isn’t a completely odious comparison, but take John Woo. He made the astonishing The Killer in 1989 in Hong Kong, his last before he migrated to what is now Schwarzennegeria where he made what is possibly the only watchable Van Damme movie^*, Hard Target and then the breathtakingly conceived and brilliantly executed Face Off. Pretty much everything else in between and after has been disappointing, including Broken Arrow and the heavily flawed Windtalkers, though Mission Impossible: II was superbly staged. » more

• The Blind Man of Seville

  in Books: book review: the blind man of seville by robert wilson I so thoroughly enjoyed Robert Wilson’s A Small Death in Lisbon and The Company of Strangers that I couldn’t wait to get into this one. To call it a disppointment is not just putting it mildly, it’s giving the book far more credit than it possibly deserves. This is a mean-spirited, small-hearted, oppressive book from start to finish. » more

• The King in the Tree

  in Books: book review: the king in the tree : three novellas by steven millhauser Stephen Millhauser’s The King In the Tree is, without question, a tour-de-force. These are three novellas and each one is blindingly brilliant, dazzling. Millhauser writes like an angel: the language is taut, superbly controlled. There is nothing of the bludgeon in this writing — Millhauser is like a surgeon at the peak of his profession and he wields the scalpel of his writing with breathtaking virtuosity and skill as he dissects that most basic — and, in his conceptualisation, the most base — of all human emotions: love. » more

• The Life of David Gale

  in Film: film review: the life of david gale (widescreen edition) directed by Alan Parker’s “The Life of David Gale” is a really, really stupid film about a really, really vital subject. Is the Death Penalty justifiable, defensible? When? How does it square with fundamental human rights? » more

• The Stuff Of Dreams

  in Film: film review: inception directed by christopher nolan A favourite ploy of film critics out to trash a movie is to attack those who like it, usually by calling them feeble-minded, brainless, immature and so on. Then there are those for whom no film is ever quite good enough, even though they’re fundamentally incapable of writing or conceiving or making one themselves. A third category locks itself into a quaint past, holding up some cinematic relic that is wholly unwatchable today and finding the film under review wanting in comparison. And there’s the fourth, a critic or reviewer who just has to hate the film only because so many people love it — it’s so chic, so über-cool to hate it; this is the kind of reviewer who out-Kaels Pauline. » more

• Two Bad

  in Books: book review: deception point by dan brown Perhaps I ought to have paid more attention to The Da Vinci Code. It was such an irresistibly delightful lark that I didn’t look very closely at the language. Certainly, nothing dreadful jumped out and whacked you in the face. This isn’t true, however, of “Deception Point” or “Digital Fortress”. Like “Da Vinci Code”, they’re silly and slight, the kind of thing you carry on a long plane journey, but at least “The Da Vinci Code” was clever, even though it’s theories are nothing but a well-known con, as an excellent article in the New York Times shows. » more

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• Web usability

  in Books: book review: designing web usability by jakob nielsen A great blog. The blogcritics.org site, said to be a “sinister cabal of superior bloggers on music, books, film, popular culture and technology”, is becoming a favourite haunt. One of its more prolific contributors is bookofjoe, who authored the terrific blog review of Jacob Nielsen’s “Homepage Usability”. » more

• Wilde At Heart

  in Books: book review: the real trial of oscar wilde by merlin holland Holland is Oscar Wilde’s grandson and, with John Mortimer, in this astonishing book he shows us the enfant terrible (or perhaps by then the eminence grise) of London’s literary circle battling, albeit unwittingly, for his very life. The book contains the entire, unexpurgated tanscript — previous versions were heavily censored. » more