Take a walk down the Lane

"Lane writes prose the way Fred Astaire danced; his sentences and paragraphs are a sublime, rhythmic concoction of glide and snap, lightness and sting." -The New York Times Book Review

Oh, there are many things I want in life; a pet unicorn, Mark Wahlberg as my husband, a chocolate fountain in my house and to write like Anthony Lane. Mr Lane is a critic from The New Yorker whose writing literally fizzes off the page. His reviews are so funny, so witty and so insightful everything I have ever written suddenly feels majorly insignificant. The amicable Michael Adams from Empire magazine put me on to the talents of Mr Lane and I was able to ship a book of his writings over from the US. I've spent the last few hours reading said book and am now basking in the afterglow of his brilliance. If I could, I would post the entire book on this site so you too can marvel at his hilarious and magnificent reviews. Instead here a few of my favourite snippets.

Anthony Lane on Pulp Fiction:
"Everybody knows the old E.M Forster distinction between story and plot: 'The king died and then the queen died' is a story. 'The king died and then the queen died of grief' is a plot. Fair enough, but what Forster failed to foresee was the emergence of a third category, the Quentin Tarantino plot, which goes something like this: 'The king died while having sex on the hood of a lime-green Corvette, and the queen died of contaminated crack borrowed from the court jester, with whom she was enjoying a conversation about the relative merits of Tab and Diet Pepsi as they sat and surveyed the bleeding remains of the lords and ladies whom she had just blown away with a stolen .45 in a fit of grief.'" -October 10, 1994

Anthony Lane on American Psycho:
"Such is the fate of satire: however strong you make it, there will always be people who like it spicier still - who barely notice that it was meant to be satire in the first place." - April 17, 2000

Anthony Lane on Mission: Impossible 2:
"The big problem with the new John Woo movie is not what it's about, or whether it adds lustre to epistemological conundrum that is world cinema, but what are we supposed to call the damn thing. In my innocence, I had presumed that any sequel to Brian DePalma's Mission: Impossible would bear the title Mission: Impossible II or Mission: Impossible Just Got a Teeny Bit Harder, but apparently the latest installment would prefer to be known as M: i-2, which looks as ugly as it sounds." - June 5, 2000

Anthony Lane on Pearl Harbour:
"The last Michael Bay film, Armageddon, was a handy guide to what you should do when an asteroid bumps into your planet. At the time, most critics scorned the picture as deafening and dumb; in retrospect, it feels like a mature, even witty, exercise in self-reference, considering that the effect of watching a Michael Bay film is indistinguishable from having a large, pointy lump of rock drop on your head. His new picture, Pearl Harbour, maintains the mood, pulsing fervor as it tells a tale familiar to every child in America: how a great nation was attacked and humbled by the imperious pride of Ben Affleck. He plays Rofe, a dyslexic Tennessee farmboy who has loved to fly ever since he was old enough to crash. At least, I think he's from Tennessee; his accent takes a patriotic tour of several states, as if to indicate that the noble Rafe could have come from just about anywhere." - June 4, 2001

Anthony Lane on the 2001 Oscars:
"Gladiator will presumably slay all tigers, crouching or otherwise, although I for one would welcome a best-director nod for Ang Lee, largely because of a desire to see him run up the wall of the Shrine Auditorium, spin over Russel Crowe, and bounce lightly off Catherine Zeta-Jones." - March 26, 2001

Anthony Lane on Charlie's Angels:
"Who is responsible for Charlie's Angels? According to the credits, it was `directed by McG' thus raising the intriguing prospect of the world's first motion picture to be made by a hamburger . . .After seeing the movie, I have even less grasp of McG than when I went in, although the evidence suggests that we have Thick Shake to thank for the screenplay, and that impressive special effects were by Large Fries." - November 13, 2000

Anthony Lane on Julia Roberts:
". . .if you had knelt behind the screen at the premiere of Pretty Woman and peeked around the edge, you would have seen the menfolk sitting there, slack as puppies, waiting for Roberts to unleash her grin and wondering if they could climb into her mouth." - March 26, 2001

*The above are extracts from the book Nobody's Perfect: writings from The New Yorker by Anthony Lane.