Author: Steven Clark

3,096 words

After Donna Tartt’s prize-winning novel The Little Friend, she published The Goldfinch in 2013, a novel that won her a much-deserved Pulitzer. The novel has been described as a latter-day Dickensian work, hailed as “a soaring masterpiece” by the Washington Post and as “a triumph” by Stephen King. Does it soar? Is it a triumph?

The Goldfinch does fly, although there are times when it hovers. It is nevertheless a remarkably beautiful, well-crafted Bildungsroman about Theo Decker, a pre-adolescent youth in New York City who is on the cusp of a new beginning. (more…)

2,194 words

Joanna Rakoff is a writer, and My Salinger Year is Philippe Falardeau’s film of her memoir about 1995, when she is on a visit to New York from Berkeley, fresh from university. The visit becomes permanent, however, because Joanna is a writer; she’s determined to make it, especially to get published in The New Yorker. Joanna, played by Margaret Qualley, is determined, a bit shy, and has a slurred, squeaky voice that hints English major. God knows, I heard enough of them. (more…)

2,373 words

Southern writing may be the last American literature in that it has retained a true Anglo-Saxon base in terms of its authors, themes, and relation to history — specifically, white history.

Donna Tartt’s The Little Friend, published in 2015 and winning a justly-earned Pulitzer Prize for best novel, has a real command of writing, and her prose is a roller coaster dipping and rising from sad to exuberant that keeps you reading. (more…)

1,731 words

In Darren Aronofsky’s new film The Whale, Moby Dick gets referenced a lot, but its subject isn’t an actual whale. Charlie (Brendan Fraser), the protagonist, is rather a monstrous human leviathan whose massiveness can easily disgust others, much like the monstrously-deformed John Merrick, who was depicted in David Lynch’s 1980 film The Elephant Man. Merrick had to live masked and wrapped in canvas so as not to shock people. (more…)

2,687 words

As I was doing my usual TV-watching in 1965, waiting for the Three Stooges to pop up, the screen suddenly erupted with a flashy, peppy ad for The Secret of My Success. Revolution! Suspense! Giant spiders on the loose! Rescue beautiful girls from horrible spiders! Rescue horrible spiders from beautiful girls! It looked like a barrel full of sixties kookiness that I couldn’t wait to see.

But I lived 65 miles south of St. Louis at the time, and the film never made it to our local theater. I longed for it, always recalling that goofy commercial and its promise of nuttiness. (more…)

4,106 words

Gore Vidal once said to Dwight McDonald, “You realize we have nothing more to say; only to add.”

I feel the same way in this review of Todd Field’s Tár, the recent film so artfully described in Trevor Lynch’s review (“The Talented Miss Tarr”), but the film made an immediate impression on me in terms of how it dealt with life and power when applied to art. I recall Lynch’s discomfort with Tár’s opening monologues which could, by virtue of their length and the fact of there being two in sequence, could easily kill a film. (more…)

1,359 words

In Bruges (2008) was a dark, funny, sad, and violent film by Martin McDonagh using Colin Ferrell and Brenden Gleeson’s talents to play two hitmen, a kind of Laurel and Hardy meet Harold Pinter. In his latest film, The Banshees of Inisherin, the two are paired again: a wise, older man and his younger, more immediate partner. But here the pairing has strains of tragedy, commenting upon existential human solitude at war with the need for society and companionship.

Set on Inisherin, an island off the coast of Ireland, in 1923, life is dull and predictable despite pops of gunfire and explosions on the Irish mainland. (more…)

3,127 words

Bardo. Not Bardot. Certainly not Bridget. Bardo is a Buddhist concept referring to a limbo state of existence, and this concept is the theme of Alejandro Inarritu’s latest film, a stream-of-consciousness story where fantasy and reality intermingle in the mind of its protagonist, much like mind and matter did in Birdman, another Inarritu film.

In Birdman, Riggins (Michael Keaton), a superhero movie star, forsook the money and glory of making Birdman IV for the dubious honor of presenting a Raymond Carver story on stage in a New York that seemed to ignore and despise him. (more…)

3,718 words

“I’ve just got a new record of Civil War music,” my brother recently bragged over the telephone.

He wanted some snappy tunes to listen to, and mentioned that the Nazi marches he is so fond of have been banned from YouTube. “I’ve discovered Italian Fascist marches,” he said. “They’re very melodic and . . . so operatic.” He referred to a long-ago record cover. “They’re so warm.” (more…)

1,690 words

It seems ironic that Tom George’s 2022 film See How They Run was released in England a day before Queen Elizabeth’s death. The film, a whodunit that follows the genre’s steps like following footprints in the snow, wants to be funny and breathe life into the old form. But, like recent events with the monarchy, this film is a kind of death watch on England and English culture, especially that middlebrow artifact known as the murder mystery. (more…)

4,125 words

Jesse James was a man
He was known throughout the land
He was bold, he was bad, but he was brave;
But that dirty little coward
That shot down Mr. Howard
Has gone and laid poor Jesse in his grave . . .

T. J. Stiles
Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War
New York: Chelsea House, 1993 (more…)

3,266 words

I first saw Decision Before Dawn on TV in the mid-sixties on Saturday Night at the Movies, seemingly banal filler that offered a surprisingly good row of early fifties movies such as The Big Carnival (previously reviewed by me), The Desert Fox, and others that were gritty, blunt, and full of Cinéma vérité. This one always stuck with me, and I recently saw it again on YouTube.

What sticks? The realistic setting of this 1951 film in a battered Germany during the Second World War holding off the inevitable, and the strong performance of Oskar Werner as Corporal Mauer, a POW who is convinced by the Americans to go back into Germany on a mission that could supposedly end the war (don’t they all?). (more…)