Word: macdonaldization
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...thriller, set in the isles of Greece. "The taxi," Jones' first sentence begins in A Touch of Danger, "roared around the last cloverleaf of a new road and slid in against the high curb like a scared baserunner with his cleats bared." California's Ross Macdonald, who was crowned with olives by New York critics for The Underground Man (1971), has obligingly written his usual highly polished existential mystery once more. This time the title is Sleeping Beauty, and naturally the book hinges on a 25-year-old murder, witnessed by a child. Also from beyond the grave...
Spirit. This is revisionist history carried to the most amiable extreme. It bears a distant relationship to George MacDonald Eraser's superb Flashman memoirs. But while Eraser has produced some remarkable light entertainment, Sobel has manufactured an obsessive parlor game. He is a master pedant who, without cracking a smile, plods through heavily footnoted mock details of North America's internal and external struggles from 1775 to the present. Indeed, there is so much beady-eyed detail that a reader can argue as well about the C.N.A.'s 1966 election (Carter Monaghan, of the People...
...part of "feminine sensibility" simply gives them more credit than they deserve. They are, in general, mediocre work, self-indulgent, one-dimensional, or just badly written. There are a few exceptions: Sadie Stern's long first-person story called "The Saddest Young Woman" is stylistically promising if immature. Cynthia MacDonald's "Another Attempt at the Trick" is a deft and chatty poem symbolizing art as a fantastic tight-rope walk. The visuals are of a quality that tends to embarrass the verbals: there is an excellent photo essay on Hell's Angels by Barbara Boatner, a portfolio of portraits...
...Lawless, 1950 Joseph Losey-directed tale of bigotry and conflict between whites and Chicanos in a California border town. MacDonald Carey, Gail Russell...
Many film critics have quit writing regularly on film after stints much shorter than Andrew's (which has continued, in one form or another, since 1956). Macdonald, Morgenstern. Sheed and Kanfer come swiftly (and recently) to mind. But these men then moved into the different fields to which they were committed even while they handled their film chores. Sadly, Sarris hasn't dealt with anything but movies, most of the time in a tone of directorial hero-worship. That he has made a business on the basis of pop culture dreams and apologia is a phenomenon that only a youthful...