John Lurie, with a 'Fishing With John' screening, hopes to 'reacquaint myself with the world a bit':
John Lurie is hosting a screening of his television show "Fishing With John," and hopes to make a tentative re-entry into the New York cultural scene in which he was once ubiquitous.
Bio: Mark Sussman is a writer and a doctoral candidate at the CUNY Graduate Center. He teaches American literature at Hunter College and lives in Brooklyn.
But Lurie’s unwanted retirement may be over. Tomorrow night he will appear for a screening of “Fishing With John” at Nitehawk Cinema in Williamsburg, participating in a Q&A afterward, moderated by Devon E. Levins, the host of East Village Radio show “Morricone Youth.” I interviewed him over the past week over email (Lurie would not speak on the phone or in person) about the event and his reemergence. “I was thinking if this goes well with ‘Fishing With John,’” he wrote, “I would show them over a bunch of nights and then talk to the audience after, reacquaint myself with the world a bit.” More
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on November 14th, 2012 10:30amAs director Rick Alverson (The Builder, New Jerusalem) writes in his statement about the film, Swanson and his friends are products of the “progressive American exceptionalism” fostered by places like Williamsburg, and so they become icons of both a geographically and socio-culturally specific “type” and a more general national trend. Aging, bloating, they’ve lived so hedonistically that they’ve pleasured themselves into anhedonia, and so the film seems both thematically and formally suspicious of the wounds, privileges, and politics that pleasure masks. More
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on November 1st, 2012 9:23amKushner himself got the biggest laugh of the evening. The three panelists were asked what question they would ask Lincoln if he were alive “’How’d you like the movie?’ and ‘Would you be my friend?’” Kushner responded snappily. Yet even he eventually got serious about craft, discussion his long-held fascination with Lincoln. He reflected specifically on how recent reappraisals of Lincoln’s attitudes toward race and habeas corpus have judged him too harshly. More
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on October 30th, 2012 10:30am“In some ways, my goal in this book was to write a memoir written not by the person who experienced the events.” More
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on September 6th, 2012 3:41pmThere was some talk about the “death of irony” after 9/11, but Bush turned out to be as much a gift to comics and comedy writers as he was a burden to the world at large. Tough times don’t always coincide with waves of great comedies, but the stupidity of politics and politicians at least provides reliable fodder. But if our current political troubles bring about a new wave of satirical brilliance, the middling comedy The Campaign, which opens today, is not a part of it. More
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on August 10th, 2012 1:53pmHonest Abe hates vampires and slavery, Timur Bekmambetov hates trains. They both fight for what they believe in. More
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on June 22nd, 2012 3:48pmAs a prequel (of sorts) to Alien, the film seems just as invested in parricide as the other films, but it's also a mirror of our own very Earth-bound obsession with the origins of life. In that sense, the Scott-directed Prometheus serves as an appropriate origin-story to a franchise that includes everything from Scott’s original sci-fi/horror masterpiece to action figures and key chains. It is almost as though the offspring spawned by Scott’s brainchild, after having passed through the hands of three other directors (James Cameron, David Fincher, and Jean-Pierre Jeunet), have overrun their creator’s intentions. With Prometheus, Scott has both reasserted control and brought the series back to something like its former glory. More
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on June 8th, 2012 5:53pmAs the title screen fades in, the audience will cheer and then laughs at the irony of its own enthusiasm—many people came, after all, to enjoy a fully ironized experience. But something strange will happen around the two-hour mark, about two-thirds of the way through the film: as the ship begins to sink the audience will grow silent, and the laughter will stop. More
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on April 4th, 2012 10:05amThe show follows 20-something Jason Strider (Peter Vack) and his friends through the tribulations particular to their age and neighborhood. The upright and responsible couple Stacey and Eric (Elizabeth Hower and Jordan Carlos) are finishing med school and law school, respectively, while Tina (Kim Shaw) and Jason stumble through hook-ups, failed relationships, and mid-twenties malaise. Superficially, the show seems like another instance of an MTV teen/twenties sex-and-sentiment dramedy (cf. Undressed, Skins, and even the past decade or so of The Real World). In the pilot, Jason commiserates with Tina over his inability to get laid and ends up taking a girl home from the bar, after which she borrows a pair of his pants and leaves him with a fake phone number. His yearning after said pants and the girl who wore them—and all the stymied possibilities and disappointment they represent—constitutes the emotional through line for the show. Neither boyfriend jeans nor ex-girlfriend jeans, they're mere hook-up jeans. More
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on February 3rd, 2012 12:21pmDespite the familiarity of Matt and Mavis’s friendship, Young Adult’s darkness keeps it from simply trudging down the well-worn path of belated teen romance. More
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on December 13th, 2011 4:12pm
