Red-blooded American novelist Hunter retired a year ago or so from his day job as the film critic for the Washington Post, but resurfaced last summer writing an occasional movie column for Commentary.
This is what the world of criticism needs right now: a non-PC classically educated right of center counterweight to prevailing cant....
This links to his predictably acerbic piece about Avatar (which he calls "unbelievium" and the climactic scene of which he describes this way: "To me, blue Indians on flying lizards against helicopter gunships just seemed like a fool’s gold called Unwatchablanium.")
He likes "Hurt Locker" a lot -- also predictable, but a lot of fun: "At times during The Hurt Locker, a remarkable new movie about the war in Iraq, I began to wonder: Who wrote this, Thucydides or Xenophon?"
High praise, indeed.
And finally, many readers of this (Is the word "many" appropriate here?) will cheer his essay "Clyde and Bonnie Died for Nihilism", in which he rants:
...the legendary Penn movie that invented the New Bonnie and Clyde was such a ideological crock that it deserves placement in that list of other leftist crocks mistaken by gullible critics and film lovers as somehow great: Beatty’s own Reds, the appalling JFK, and the toxic oeuvre of Michael Moore and his tribe of screwball clones in the documentary field, as well as the recent spate of angry, misguided Iraq war films. This really is not news; when Bonnie and Clyde was released and soared, following an initial few weeks of failure, the Chicago Daily News columnist Mike Royko launched a mini-crusade to restore Clyde and Bonnie to their actual dimensions, as vicious murderers, no matter that (as the ad copy said) they were young, they were in love, and they robbed banks. The only thing that mattered about them, Royko said, was that they killed, and killed a lot of people. The critic of the New York Times, Bosley Crowther, then the oldest, whitest guy in New York, also dared to denounce the film; he not only felt the lash of social ostracism and contempt, he may have even lost his job as a consequence.
I thought they were both idiots. I know better now.
Read More...
If we consider the three big epic fantasy series of our time as George RR Martin's SONG OF ICE AND FIRE, Steven Erikson's MALAZAN BOOK OF THE FALLEN and Jordan's WHEEL OF TIME, all three have run into significant mid-series timeline/structural problems. The three authors have taken different approaches to overcoming it.
Erikson's solution is to ignore the problems and press on, which means the books continue to be published but on the downside with increasingly prevalent timeline problems and continuity errors that occasionally reduce storylines to total nonsense (particularly in the eighth volume, where young characters conceived in the earlier books are years older than they should be, even in relation to one another). This solution has some merit but also means that there are jarring bumps in the books you have to basically overlook to continue enjoying them.
Martin's solution was to rewrite, rewrite, re-edit, rewrite, delete half the book and rewrite again. This solution is preferable since that when the book is done, the problems are reduced or eliminated entirely, but does add years to the writing time of the affected books (in the case of both A FEAST FOR CROWS and A DANCE WITH DRAGONS, more than doubling the writing time of the third volume, A STORM OF SWORDS, which was written far more straightforwardly), which is extremely problematic when you've just suggested that the next book will be done in a year or two tops.
Jordan's was to introduce some filler storylines for some characters and put other characters on ice for a book or two whilst he brought other characters up to speed. This resulting in approximately the eighth through tenth novels in the series degenerating into chaotic messes before he pulled together all the story threads in the eleventh volume and set things up for the grand finale, which Brandon Sanderson is now executing with fine form (the recent twelfth book being the best in the series for some time).
Of the three solutions, Erikson's is the most economical, Jordan's is the most sprawling and Martin's is the most artistic (assuming it works).