Screening Room
May 17, 2013
Judging Luhrmann’s Gatsby: Five English Scholars Weigh In 14
by Kevin Hartnett
You might think that the people who know Fitzgerald’s novel best would have the most disapproving view of the movie. To test that hypothesis, we asked five English professors who specialize in American literature to take in an early showing and share their thoughts. And to our surprise, they liked it.
May 15, 2013
You Can’t Repeat the Past, Old Sport: On Leo, Baz, Gatsby, and Me 3
by Lydia Kiesling
When I read Chronicle critic Mick LaSalle opine recently that Romeo + Juliet was ‘too contemptible even to be called a desecration,’ I know that he never lay in virginal bed with headphones and discman, listened to Thom Yorke utter the eternal invitation, “I’ll be waiting, with a gun and a pack of sandwiches,” and just felt so much.
May 3, 2013
Herblock Loved the Little Guy and Hated Nixon’s Guts 6
by Bill Morris
Herblock drew McCarthy and Nixon with swarthy mugs, sweating, frequently crawling out of mud puddles or open sewer holes. Herblock hated Nixon’s guts and wasn’t shy about saying so. In our watered-down, fair-minded times, such venom is bracing.
April 19, 2013
Lessons of Hollywood: On the Fate of “Middle Class” Art 3
by Matthew Specktor
If there were no more “middle class” movies, then in what other arenas would an ostensible middle class suffer? Publishing, for sure. But what about . . . everything else?
April 4, 2013
The Rapist Next Door: On Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers 7
by Francey Russell
If Spring Breakers can have any place in our culture, if it can be something worth seeing, its worth must be located in its frightening capacity to capture a world we dismiss as “just fun,” to capture the seductions of a world we refuse to understand.
February 21, 2013
Stages of Television Grief: On the Decline of Downton Abbey 15
by Elizabeth Minkel
There is something notable about the backlash when a television character is killed: fans take the opportunity to tear apart the writers’ choices beyond the decision to bump off an individual: across the show, all the indignities they’d have suffered through if everyone had been permitted to live.