I shelve my Alan Moore books next to Thomas Pynchon, Umberto Eco, and Jorge Luis Borges, and I am sure all three postmodern masters would get a healthy kick out of this wildly imaginative third book to Moore’s Gentlemen series, which draws on a vast storehouse of influences and blends them into an ecstatic new [...]
Posts Tagged ‘thomas-pynchon’
The Rocketeer
Bill Campbell as all-American hero rocking an art-deco jet-pack, Jennifer Connelly in 30s evening gowns, Timothy Dalton as scenery-chewing Errol-Flynn stand-in onboard burning Nazi zeppelins — The Rocketeer is good old-fashioned serial-style action-adventure full of pulpy twists tempered by a wholesome gee-whiz attitude. Based on the comic book by Dave Stevens, the character also inspired [...]
Against the Day
Genius, pure and simple, and I’m fully aware that the concept hasn’t been in fashion for a good long while. Page by page — apparently it’s twice as long as Ulysses — there are more heartbreaking and/or absurd characters with outrageous names, brazen lies, bouts of bizarro sex, obscure mathematical in-jokes, densely textured descriptions of [...]
The Good German
I fully support all of Steven Soderbergh’s cinematic experiments, whether it’s highly personal weirdness (Schizopolis), big-budget romps (Ocean’s 11), remakes of Russian scifi classics (Solaris), or minimalist melodrama (Bubble). So when he makes a 1940s noir with period technology, I’m very much there. The Good German is set in the heart of what’s called “the [...]
