Yesterday morning I was lucky enough to be invited to Radio New Zealand once again, this time to review the new John le Carré novel, Our Kind of Traitor. It’s a terrific novel, up there with le Carré’s best, and I had about four minutes (and a bit) to persuade Kathryn. Listen here or download […]
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This morning I sloped up to Radio New Zealand to review Richard Boock’s new biography of Bert Sutcliffe: “The Last Everyday Hero”. Kathryn’s a cricket fan so, even though she hadn’t got to reading the book, we had plenty to talk about. Including an unexpected diversion into the subject of Fleetwood Mac. Listen here or […]
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Dave Eggers in The Guardian: “Writing is a deep-sea dive. You need hours just to get into it: down, down, down. If you’re called back to the surface every couple of minutes by an email, you can’t ever get back down. I have a great friend who became a Twitterer and he says he hasn’t […]
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If I could have another life to live, simultaneous with my own, I would probably spend most of it playing Sports Interactive’s Football Manager (aka Championship Manager). While I tend to scoff at those who get excited at Beatles Rock Bands and am baffled but impressed by those who take games seriously, I cannot deny […]
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A strange, awful and yet wonderful paragraph from a New York Times article on the death of an artist I had never heard of: A Hamster’s Nest is what it sounds like, but with humans in the rodent roles: You shred a few hundred phone books, paint the walls, then ingest enough intoxicants so …
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Roger Ebert writing about writing (and speaking) at his blog: The novel [McCarthy’s Suttree] is written entirely with that attention. You haven’t even started it until you’ve started it the second time. After weeks of depression, hopelessness and regret, realizing the operation had failed and I would probably not speak again, after murky medications and no […]
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Dan Slevin is a New Zealand-based writer, broadcaster and consultant. He has reviewed cinema for the Capital Times weekly newspaper since September 2006, seeing and reviewing every film commercially released in Wellington in that time (except, for some reason, Flicka or Beverly Hills Chihuahua).
Dan is a regular contributor to Radio New Zealand National’s Nine to Noon programme and produces and co-hosts the weekly movie podcast, Cinematica.
In addition to being the finest swordsman in all France, he is also the meanest hombre west of the Pecos. He tweets here.
Why Funerals & Snakes? In Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt (Le Mépris; 1963), Fritz Lang said of CinemaScope: “It’s only good for funerals and snakes.”