Tuesday, May 18, 2010

Huck Finn, D.W. Griffith, and the Re[Birth of a Nation]al Identity



Note: This is the project that more or less earned me my diploma earlier this month. It appeals to a more literature oriented audience, which accounts for "The Birth of a Nation" being summarized while a knowledge of the novel "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" is assumed.

The evaluative debate over a distinctly “American style” in nineteenth century literature was largely reflected in the cinema at the dawn of the twentieth century. This essay will profile D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which is commonly regarded as among the most prevalent literary works to carry the distinction of such a style, as suggested by its lengthy and secure presence in the canon of great American literature.


Tuesday, May 11, 2010

A Serious Man...Is That All There Is?


"Audaciously Funny, Original and Resonant!"
- Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly

"Defiantly Original!"
- Thelma Adams, US Weekly

These are the two critic blurbs on my new copy of Joel and Ethan Coens' "A Serious Man", one of the two or three best movies of last year, which I finally managed to sit down and watch again after seeing it in theaters several months ago.

I don't know. Maybe it's the exclamation points, almost certainly provided by the package distributor (As they always are - Critics don't use exclamation points), and suggesting some kind of superficial, giddy fanboy hyperbole that so thoroughly mis-characterizes the Coens' achievement. "Funny" and "Original"? Is that all there is to "A Serious Man"? Every comedy is "Funny". I know this because the critic blurbs told me so. Do critics think "A Serious Man" is merely "funny", or do the distributors only want us to think so? Why did critics regard as merely funny(!) a film I approach with quiet reverie? Are they not seeing everything there is to see, or am I seeing something that isn't there?