Will be back after this short ad break . . .

So, tomorrow morning I'm off and away to search for the holy grail in Sydney for a month. I'm not sure how frequently I'm going to be able to update my beloved blog, hence, I'm taking a brief hiatus. Oh sure, there will be the occasional post but, my dear readers, my mind will be focused on terribly exciting, semi-associated things for the next few weeks.

In the meantime, I thought I'd leave you with more incredible extracts from Anthony Lane's book Nobody's Perfect: writings from The New Yorker. After all, nothing serves as a catalyst for your dream than revising the work of the film critic to whom you aspire.

Anthony Lane on Before Sunrise:

". . .a foolish, not to say tragic, plan since it involves never seeing Celine again. True, he has only just met her, but already he has spotted her copy of George Bataille, and if there is one rule that governs the life of a seasoned traveller it is: Once you find a French blonde reading George Bataille of her own free will, don't let her out of your sight. Hang in there like a limpet." -January 30, 1995

Anthony Lane on Indecent Proposal:

"Gage then makes his big offer: a million bucks for a night with Diana - no aftermath, no strings. 'It's just my body,' Diana explains. 'It's not my mind.' I was glad to have that cleared up, though it does raise an interesting question: How much would you pay for an evening with Demi Moore's mind?" April 26, 1993

Anthony Lane on Poetic Justice:

"Think of the worst possible reason that John Singleton might have had for calling his new movie Poetic Justice. Now make it worse. And again. You still won't be close to the truth, so here goes: the main character is named Justice, and she writes poetry. Get it?" June 7, 1993

Anthony Lane on The Fugitive:

"The Fugitive represents quite a jump for Andrew Davis; until now his most successful work has starred Steven Segal and Chuck Norris, both of whom look as if they only just discovered fire last week."

"Most damaging of all is the soundtrack, which was composed by James Newton Howard, and is even more mindless than the one he wrote for Prince of Tides. It appears to be based on the principle that nothing is as scary as hitting a drum apart from hitting it harder." -August 16, 1993

Anthony Lane on Dazed and Confused:

"You might expect this level of precision from a tense international thriller, but hardly from a meandering memoir of dope-fogged teenage laziness. That's the first of many good jokes littering the movie, which keeps a cool head while all around it are losing theirs. Written and directed by Richard Linklater, it has scarcely any plot and no perceptible moral, apart from the injunction to `Eat More Pussy' scrawled on a high school wall. Even that is disregarded; sex may be in the air, but it sounds like hard work once you knuckle down to it, and who wants to work?" - October 3, 1993

Anthony Lane on The Thin Red Line:

"It has been twenty years since Terrence Malick last honoured us, or beguiled us, with a movie. Badlands came out in 1973 and, Days of Heaven in 1978, and that was it: Malick went to ground, and the rumour industry, which loves a no-show, went to town. Now the man is back, bringing neither a masterpiece nor a catastrophe but something so ravishingly strange that only he could have made it." -December 28, 1998

To read more extracts from Lane's bible of film criticism, and writing in general, check out my previous post HERE.

Don't miss me too much *insert eye roll here*

xo