I just caught the tail end of movie reviewers AO Scott and David Denby talking about this year's movies on Charlie Rose. And at the end Rose said it was the best conversation about movies he's ever had on the show! So... you better look it up if you're in for movies. I wrote down one line that Scott said, that I loved: (Talking about The Reader) "Titilation with an overlay of Significance." Ouch.
I don't like a lot of movie reviewers. But David Denby's an interesting guy, and I've come to enjoy AO Scott's mini video reviews. Years ago Denby wrote a book called Great Books. It was a book about his time spent taking two "great books" type courses at University (long before The Year I Spent Doing X became a popular genre). I loved his description of reading Kant--family asleep in bed, late at night, no sounds from the street, NOTHING to interrupt his concentration. And then it was like being in Dante's hell, rolling a boulder slowly up a hill, and just when you think you're starting to get what Kant is saying... a dog barks in the distance, and the boulder rolls back down the hill. Heh heh. Uh ya, that was my experience of A Critique of Pure Reason.
His next book was about his marriage breaking up, partly because his wife came out of the closet (author Cathleen Schine--this is reflected in one of her books too); and about his mid life crisis, where he got all excited about the 90's stock market bubble, and then lost all his money. It's called American Sucker. Apparently he has a new book called Snark.
