Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
close enough for me..., 7 Jul 2003
Film crit, profiles and journalism from the New Yorker over the last ten years - what the UK has been missing since Tina Browne snaffled Anthony Lane from the Independent. Highly commended for its wit and erudition, (and for propping open doors - it's 800 pages) but be warned that it's a kind of depressing read. I've been wasting my time on all this stuff all my life, but I now realise that I actually know nothing and have not a solitary idea worth the name in my empty head. The guy's just too smart, not just on the cultstuds stuff but on Eliot, Waugh, Shakespeare - the big guys - and maddeningly witty and charming with it. Had this one next to the loo for a couple of days thinking I would spin it out over a year or so - after all how many reviews do you want to read at a stretch ? - but it was soon out and by my bedside, and soon after that seemed to be following me round the house. I finally finished it off over a couple of days solid reading. And laughing. Haven't had this experience since Pauline Kael's mighty 'For Keeps', next to which it now sits, a worthy companion.
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Very funny, 16 Jul 2003
I bought this yesterday - I picked it off the shelf because I vaguely remember seeing it (very positively) reviewed late last year. In the shop I read his review of "The Saint" (with which I agreed) and of "Stealing Beauty" (with which I disagreed largely, I admit, out of lazy sentimentality), but both made me laugh out loud such that other customers started edging away with sidelong looks. So I bought it and spent the evening with my wife, both of us howling with laughter at "Best-Sellers I" which is like a literary tour written by Bill Bryson (in one of his earlier books) - and I mean that as a compliment to both Messrs Lane and Bryson. His re-writing of Robert Frost in the style of Clive Cussler is simply brilliant, as is his Judith Krantz haiku. For any intelligent film- or book-lover, this is a must-buy.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
it's all true (to use a film title as my heading), 28 Jan 2004
Dazzlingly elegant style, wickedly funny, as they say, and fit to stand on the shelf alongside Pauline Kael and Clive James. This book marks a real find for those of us who haven't been managing to read the New Yorker. Moreover, his judgment is crystal clear, in my own view - I found myself nodding assent to what Lane had to said about The New Hollywood, Star Wars, Orson Welles, Guy Ritchie, Ang Lee, and just about everything else. I couldn't help noticing how this British writer (because I had to check he actually was)has perfected a style that is, seemingly effortlessly, both American and British at the same time (a kind of Cary Grant prose) with all the urbanity, all the snappy rhetoric which that suggests.
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