Category: race

Doctoring the Story
Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese. Vintage. 667 pp. $15.95. The one time I formally studied creative writing, in a class with Reynolds Price my freshman year at Duke University, he encouraged us to pay special attention to openings. “It doesn’t have to be ‘Rape!’ screamed the Duchess’ every time,” he said, “but you want to ...
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Two in the Bush
Hunt for the Wilderpeople a film by Taika Waititi. With Sam Neill, Julian Dennison, Rima Te Wiata Why should we watch yet another movie about a grouchy old white guy who takes up with a minority youth and teaches him how to survive in a difficult world? For one thing, the old white guy is Sam ...
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The Story We Need
Free State of Jones a film by Gary Ross. With Matthew McConaughey, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Mahershala Ali There are major disputes about what actually happened in the events that make up Free State of Jones, but any story is just a story—it’s not reality—and we seem to get the stories we want, or that we need. This ...
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Stop Me Before I See More Movies!
Full Frame Documentary Film Festival 2016 Thursday The Jazz Loft According to W. Eugene Smith *** Forever, Chinatown **1/2 The 100 Years Show **** The Many Sad Faces of Mr. Toledano **** By Sydney Lumet ***1/2 Weiner **1/2 Friday The Black Belt *** Trapped **** Dancing for You ***** Dixieland ** Tarikat ***** Horizons **** Two Trains Runnin’ **** Saturday Following Seas ***** Life, Animated **** Raising Bertie ** Hours spent standing in line, sometimes ...
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Only the Dead Know It
Brooklyn A film by John Crowley Brooklyn is like a dream. Like Bridge of Spies it takes place in 1950’s America (apparently the year is 1952, because our young couple sees Singin’ in the Rain), and like that earlier movie it gets the look of the era right. But while Bridge of Spies focused on a ...
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Save Me a Spot in the Caboose
Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ‘N’ Roll Music by Greil Marcus. A Plume Book. 424 pp. $17.00 I read this book because Dwight Garner—my favorite reviewer at the New York Times—named it as the book he’d most like to read again for the first time. Greil Marcus is a rough contemporary of mine, just ...
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White Like Me
The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem. Vintage. 509 pp. $14.95 In reviewing the fourth of the Jonathan Lethem novels that I’ve read in the past couple of months, I’m thinking two things. I’m somehow glad I waited to read this one last. It feels like a culmination, the most deeply personal work in Lethem’s oeuvre, ...
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The Real Fifty Shades of Gray
Loving Day by Mat Johnson. Spiegel & Grau. 287 pp $26.00 The issue of race is so fraught these days that I’m almost afraid to write about it. I am afraid to write about it. Anything I say will offend somebody. Of course, there’s something liberating about that. I know I can’t do it right, so ...
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Tea & Pearls & the Flying Squirrel
Me and Earl and the Dying Girl. A film by Alfonso Gomez Rejon. Some forty years ago, long before Netflix and movies on demand, I had a friend named Rob who was obsessed with movies in general and Robert DeNiro in particular. One evening we had Rob over with a married couple of our acquaintance, and ...
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Just Say Nope
Dope (2015) A film by Rick Famuyiwa. The first thing to say about the three protagonists in Rick Famuyiwa’s new film “Dope”—Malcolm (Shameik Moore), Jib (Tony Revolori), and Diggy (Kiersey Clemons)—is that they’re adorable! (I sound like my wife here.) As three geeks at a ghetto high school in Los Angeles, where guys routinely rob you ...
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