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dave eggers

Writing is a deep-sea dive

By Asides, Literature

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 writ­ten any­thing for a year.”

This is a great inter­view. Eggers is a real hero of mine.

Review: Where the Wild Things Are, The Informant!, The Time Traveller’s Wife, Zombieland and The Cake Eaters

By Cinema, Reviews

Is it too early to sug­gest that we might be liv­ing in a golden age of cinema? Think of the film­makers work­ing in the com­mer­cial realm these days who have dis­tinct­ive voices, thrill­ing visu­al sens­ib­il­it­ies, sol­id intel­lec­tu­al (and often mor­al) found­a­tions, a pas­sion for com­bin­ing enter­tain­ment with some­thing more – along with an abid­ing love of cinema in all its strange and won­der­ful forms.

I’m think­ing of the Coens, obvi­ously, but also Peter Jackson (and protégé Neill Blomkamp), Danny Boyle (Slumdog Millionaire), Edgar Wright (Hot Fuzz and the forth­com­ing Scott Pilgrim), Jason Reitman (Juno and January’s Up in the Air), Guillermo Del Toro (work­ing hard on The Hobbit in Miramar), and even Tarantino is still pro­du­cing the goods. This week we are lucky enough to get new work from two oth­ers who should be in that list: Spike Jonze and Steven Soderbergh.

Jonze made his name with oddball stor­ies like Being John Malkovich and Adaptation and the first thing you notice about his inter­pret­a­tion of the beloved Maurice Sendak children’s book, Where the Wild Things Are, is that it simply doesn’t resemble any­thing else you’ve ever seen. With the help of writer Dave Eggers (the nov­el “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius”, Away We Go) he has used the book as a start­ing point for a beau­ti­ful and sens­it­ive med­it­a­tion on what it is like to be a child (a boy child specifically).

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Review: 2012, The Vintner’s Luck, Away We Go and [REC]2

By Cinema, Reviews

After nearly three and a half years of pro­du­cing this cinem­a­goers’ con­sumer guide, per­haps its time for a state­ment of intent. A mani­festo, if you will. Something to place these mus­ings in per­spect­ive as you skim through them over Morning Tea.

I try and find some­thing good and inter­est­ing in everything I see, and I see pretty much everything. Most films have an audi­ence of some descrip­tion wait­ing for them some­where, and that audi­ence may be you, so I try and out­line what might appeal (along with what might not) so that you can make an informed choice.

Plus, I have some sym­pathy for the little bat­tler and will often try and draw your atten­tion in that dir­ec­tion (Don’t for­get Two Lovers, folks) and I try and watch films not meant for me (kids flicks, etc) with half an eye on how the rest of the audi­ence is reacting.

It is extremely rare, as reg­u­lar read­ers will know, for me to warn you off a film entirely, or indeed (in the case of our first film this week) sug­gest that its cre­at­ors should be harshly pun­ished for its per­pet­ra­tion. The films that are really sand under my fore­skin are those that only exist to pad a resumé and a bank bal­ance, cyn­ic­al attempts to sep­ar­ate us from our money, mar­ket­ing cam­paigns crudely dis­guised as art.

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