Essay: "The Western and the Apocalypse"

As a kid and a teenager I wasn't much into Westerns, and neither (it seems) were you, since Unforgiven is probably the only really significant Western film of the 80s and 90s.  But it seems to me that the Western is experiencing a resurgence in popularity, and I have a theory regarding at least one reason why this might be.

Essay: "Comic Books"

I always liked superhero comics as a kid, but I didn't regularly collect them.  They were too expensive, and every time I bought an issue it seemed to take place in the middle of a story I didn't understand.  But when I was in law school I saw an ign.com article on the 25 greatest Batman graphic novels.  They sounded pretty awesome and I wanted to check them out.  I looked on the Toronto Public Library website and found some in the Merril Collection, a pretty neat branch of the library at College and Spadina dedicated to science fiction and graphic novels.  I used to go there on Saturday afternoons to read, since you couldn't take the books out.

Essay: "The Virtues of Misanthropy"

In my younger days I was really into Nine Inch Nails and Rage Against the Machine. As we all know that kind of music is troublesome to adults because it is so loud, angry and despairing (not to mention profane and nihilistic) and it is sometimes blamed, in the media at least, for leading kids astray, into crime or suicide. I've always had a problem with that kind of thinking, and I used to argue (around the time of the Columbine killings) that Britney Spears probably caused more depression than Marilyn Manson, because when kids look at Britney, with her (then) perfect hair and body and peppy attitude, they feel like outsiders and losers. But when they look at Marilyn Manson, with his bizarre appearance and clothing and (allegedly) missing ribs, they think they're not such freaks after all.

Review: "Red Riding Trilogy"

I think we've all been spoiled a little, as far as television goes, by "The Wire."  It did far too many things well to list here (particularly since this is supposed to be a review for something else) but I think it's worth mentioning a couple, both of which have to do with realism.

The first was its lack of exposition.  I liked how in "The Wire" you're dropped right in the middle of the story and just observe, like a fly on the wall, how things work in gangs and in the police and in other locations without feeling like someone was explaining it to you.

The second was its plausibility.  Although, as a writer and a reader, I love complicated plots, philosophical dialogue, and depictions of ultimate evil, I am forced to admit that these things rarely occur in nature.  "The Wire", especially in its earlier seasons, avoided the temptation to follow traditional dramatic conventions.  The show, I think, started to get a little bit away from this in its later seasons (the plot to season five, for instance, was still plausible by the standards of "regular TV" but not very plausible at all by the standards of real life) but it remains one of the great strengths of the series as a whole.

Which brings us to the "Red Riding" trilogy, perhaps the British answer to "The Wire."  The trilogy is made up of three movie-length (90 minute) television episodes that were directed by three different (reasonably)well-known directors, filmed in three different film formats and broadcast in England on Channel 4 within two weeks of one another.

Essay: "The New Needs Friends"

"In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face, is that in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so. But there are times when a critic truly risks something, and that is in the discovery and defense of the new. The world is often unkind to new talent, new creations, the new needs friends."

 

Anton Ego - from Ratatouille

It seems to me that artistic criticism has two purposes.  The first is essentially didactic; to identify the artist's mistakes to help him or her improve.  The second is evaluative; to determine whether the art is "good" or "bad" and how it deserves to be ranked in comparison to other works.  The value of didactic criticism is obvious but the worth of evaluative criticism is less apparent.  Why do we need to classify art as good or bad apart from whether it's popular? 

Essay: "No Real Limits of Any Kind"

For those of you who haven't heard of it, the computer program "Steam" is like a combination between an online video game store and a social networking site. So you buy your games through the program and then when you play them online, you can add people you play with to your friends list and then chat with them and set up games later. A number of extremely unusual people have "friended" me through Steam after a successful round of Team Fortress 2 or Left 4 Dead, but surely the most unusual is a young man who I know as "Turtle."

Essay: "Ian McEwan"

I had high expectations when I read Atonement a couple of years ago.  The movie was receiving rave reviews and the novel had been shortlisted for the Booker and was being named to various "Best Novels in the History of the Universe" lists by prominent magazines.  McEwan had already won a Booker and I felt a kind of confident anticipation when I started to read it.  I felt that not only would I enjoy Atonement, but that I would probably tear through the rest of McEwan's books as well.  I felt as if I was in for a treat.