metaculture
I have a subscription to the New Yorker, and as I can never keep up with the relentless weekly onslaught of issues, I often stuff an unread one in my bag when I know I’m going to be standing on a train. Yesterday I was in the subway reading Anthony Lane’s review of the latest Bond film, which is excellent. Attach that clause high: I mean that the review is excellent. About one of the chases which inevitably must appear in a Bond film, Lane writes that it “goes on far longer than expected, like a theological discussion in a Bergman film, with both the fleeing baddie and the pursuant Bond careening off walls and cranes and anything else that juts into their path.” So great, that sentence. I’m fairly certain now that I don’t ever need to see this film; the review was enough. This is cinema not literature, still I felt like the Tom Townsend character in the eminently quotable film Metropolitan: “I don’t read novels. I prefer good literary criticism.”