Writing

My Star Wars

Friday, December 18th, 2015 Movies / Writing

A true Jedi makes his or her own lightsaber—and a true Star Wars fan makes his or her own Star Wars. I never expected to create my own versions of the original trilogy, but in 2010, that’s exactly what I did. For George Lucas, Star Wars has been, over the decades, a moving target, a […]

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It’s Over and You Missed It

Monday, August 17th, 2015 Writing

This weekend I got immersed in an arbitrary grouping of three books, of wildly varying quality: Renata Adler’s stunning After the Tall Timber (2015), a retrospective of nonfiction writing (from The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, The New York Times, Harper’s, and other publications), Ellin Stein’s lively and […]

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True Detective Reinvented the Noir Tradition

Tuesday, August 11th, 2015 Writing

Now that it’s complete, the second season of HBO’s True Detective can be properly judged, and, I think, elevated to its rightful status: a noble experiment at worst and, at best, an erudite and deeply-felt reaffirmation of the ninety-year-old Noir tradition that’s threaded through our literature, movies and myth. At the very least, Season 2 […]

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