rakemag Now that Neal Pollack is past the indignity of being widely suspected to be Dave Eggers’s pseudonym, he’s been able to get down to the business of being his own pseudonym. As fans of his 2002 Neal Pollack Anthology of American Literature and his consistently funny weblog know, in “Neal Pollack,” the real Pollack has … Read more
A very impressive first novel, Sebold’s The Lovely Bones deals with the grief, self-destruction, and eventual healing of a suburban family after daughter Susie is brutally raped and murdered. What saves the book from drowning in its grim premise is her deft choice of narrator—the murdered girl herself, who watches from the afterlife with sadness, … Read more
While the British royal family may have closets full of tantalizing scandal and deceit, the “Royal Family of the Circus” continues to live up to its sterling reputation for perfection in the circus arts. Ah, the bore of the privileged life. Maybe fewer heads would have rolled through history, if the circus had been in … Read more
Georges Lopez teaches. The point of Nicolas Philibert’s documentary, filmed for six months in Lopez’s little one-room schoolhouse in rural France, is to show us exactly what that means. Surrounded by a gaggle of kids ages four to ten, the stern but grandfatherly Lopez clearly lives for his work—and indeed, he literally lives above the … Read more
Why isn’t there an official touring film series that collects each year’s Oscar short-subject nominees, which most people never get a chance to see? It seems like a no-brainer, but maybe that’s why we don’t work in marketing. For now, we’ll happily make do with programs like this, a nifty assemblage of nineteen films from … Read more
Fargo excepted, Joel and Ethan Coen have had their greatest popular success with lighthearted, goofy comedies like Raising Arizona and O Brother, Where Art Thou? And that seems to be where they’re headed for their next couple of films. Due in 2004 is their remake of the Alec Guinness/Peter Sellers heist lampoon The Ladykillers, and … Read more
Nothing against Ken Burns, but this public-TV series looks about a hundred times more interesting than Jazz, which was earnest and informative but lacked that je ne sais quois you get when a documentarian knows and loves his subject long before he makes a movie about it. Here, that’s not a problem. Scorsese has a … Read more
Roman Polanski’s first full-length movie got him so much attention worldwide that he was able to escape the stifling Polish studio system for France and Hollywood, where classics like Rosemary’s Baby and Chinatown still lay in his future. Between Knife’s language barrier and the higher profile of his later work, it’s no wonder that his … Read more
It’s not an uncommon irony in mystery fiction that a detective so brilliantly able to perceive the hidden connections of the world still can’t make sense out of his own personal life—in fact, it’s a difficult cliche to avoid. But Cracker’s criminal psychologist Eddie “Fitz” Fitzgerald—an alcoholic, sarcastic, arrogant gambler—is a surpassing example of the … Read more
Back for their first proper album in three years, Glasgow’s finest exporters of sensitive, bespectacled pop have lost two founding members, switched labels and picked up a superstar producer in Trevor Horn, whose previous credits range from Rod Stewart to Yes to Tatu. None of these events has significantly changed the band’s sound, which is … Read more