Criticultura em Portugal

What is The Great American Novel? It probably should be epic, cover at least one important era critical to our history, feature characters reflective of the American experience, and somehow leave the reader with a feeling that only an American could really have written or truly appreciated the experience. My recent reading has allowed me to sample several candidates for The Great American Novel. Do any make the grade?  Philip Roth's The Great American Novel  (1987) begins: "They call me Smitty"--like Moby Dick  (a candidate), the prelude introduces us to the narrator, here an early 1900s sportswriter named Smitty who is fond of alliteration and extravagant language, and who seeks to write a great novel about baseball (hence the tongue-in-cheek title). The novel is an amusing yarn about the demise of the fictional Patriot League, an early competitor of the American and National leagues. Roth uses ample sarcastic humor to parody modern sports foibles (the players dope on ...

Modern comedy has a certain sameness. It's speech-reliant, a bit cynical, often too smug, and uniformly criticizes someone or something. Sometimes its actually funny. Small Mouth Sounds , a fine new play by Bess Wohl, directed by Rachel Chavkin, and produced by NYC's Ars Nova, revives an older tradition of physical comedy. Just how funny can you be when silent? The play puts five diverse campers in the woods at a Zen retreat, committed to silence for two days, while regaled from on high (off stage) by a wonderfully neurotic and often testy master/facilitator/counselor/cult leader to find their inner chi, or something. Much hilarity ensues, some predictable (cellphones, skinny dipping, bears), and some not. The uniformly fine casts revived the old vaudeville and film traditions of wordless comedy by such luminaries as Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton ( see the hilarious The Playhouse , especially the first 5 minutes, where he surrealistically plays all the roles, including musi...

Shuffle Along  is a much-anticipated musical, paying homage to one of the first Broadway shows to feature and all-black cast yet successfully market to a mainstream (largely white) audience. The historical importance is recounted in this fascinating New York Times article . The current show opened in April, with a powerhouse group of performers, directors, choreographers, and historians all involved. Audra McDonald, possibly the most awarded Broadway performer these days, signed on. Yet it is closing soon, earlier than anyone anticipated. Why? I really wanted to like all this, but now I am reminded of my response to Twelve Years a Slave : important, critical for our coming to terms with our slavery past, yet not all that great a movie. Same with Shuffle Along . The first thing to know is that this is not a revival of the original, even though that is a categorization the producers would have liked for this year's Tony Awards (so it wouldn't have to compete with Hamilton ). Th...

Embrace of the Serpent, a 2015 film by Colombian director Ciro Guerra, was featured at Cannes and nominated for Best Foreign Film at the Oscars last year. It tells the story of an Amazonian shaman, who is followed over 40 years as he interacts with western anthropologists and society, striving to maintain his isolation, authenticity, and traditions. I enjoyed its locale (filmed on site), attempts at authenticity, non-exploitative tone and pace, and balanced view of cultural interactions. It was more earnest than compelling, though, and made me think about how the Amazon (and the remote tropics) have been depicted over the years. Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness  (1899) and the Francis Ford Coppola film adaptation Apocalypse Now (1979) both use the jungle as both a metaphor for darkness in western society and as a backdrop for Kurtz, the white protagonist. In both, Kurtz is transformed and driven mad in and by his jungle journey. While both authors strive to depict the jungle deniz...

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time , the marvelous multiple Olivier- and Tony- winning whodunnit play adapted by Simon Stephens from the novel by Mark Haddon, continues a very long run (two years, ages for a non musical) on Broadway. I saw it again last week with a colleague who is raising a child with autism-spectrum disorder, as does the play's 15 year old protagonist Christopher (currently played by the terrific Tyler Lea). While the play was certainly a more personal experience for my friend, mixing the humor, anger, and sine-wave emotional state that accompanies living with such a family member, I concurred with him that the play is an honest, funny, moving experience regardless of one's personal connection to the disorder. I have seen a number of movies and plays that attempt to portray a psychiatric disorder (e.g. One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, The Butcher Boy, A Woman on the Verge ), but somehow this one manages to make me really empathize, not just...