Though the toast of the town while alive, John Updike has fallen out of favor since his 2009 death. Perhaps this is because literary styles have changed, and the notoriously prolific writer’s Proustian effusions and adverbial chattiness have no place amid the muscular, subject-verb prose in vogue right now. But Updike’s oeuvre also has the sort of “woman problem” that is less tolerated with every passing year. It’s not that he wasn’t fascinated by women – his work is arguably as awash in female bodily fluids as any male writer’s since James Joyce – but there lurks a hate-love dynamic in it as well. Rooted in his books is the premise that women may be the source of all life but also the source of all trouble – a conflict best exemplified in 1984’s The Witches of Eastwick. Set in a fictional New England town, it focuses on three women whose latent magical powers materialize when a well-heeled stranger rolls into town and beds each of them. Though some hailed the book as a triumph of pagan feminism, others saw it as retrogressive, especially as a man is required to rouse these women into action. Continue Reading →
Archive | Reviews
Always Forward: ‘Luke Cage’
Sadly, I wake with the sun no matter how late I go to bed, and today am both PMS-ing and hungover from Mothers Day. But even if I weren’t a hot mess, the montage of black men flaunting bullet hole-riddled hoodies while cops watch and Method Man spits Bulletproof Love, his homage to Luke Cage, would make me cry and cry. How am I just now watching this Netflix series? It’s a brilliant articulation of race in America starring Alfre Woodard, Mike Colter, and everyone I loved on the The Wire save String. It upholds the tenacity of the African diaspora as our country’s true superhero saga. And in Season 1’s last sequence, the late Sharon Jones brings it all back home in a shimmery sheath and her eternal big voice. Powerful stuff, powerfully shot on every level.
Six Packs & Soft Underbellies: ‘The Outsiders’
Like many growing up in the 1980s, I regarded “The Outsiders,” Frances Ford Coppola’s adaptation of S.E. Hinton’s 1967 young adult novel, as the ultimate babe fest. To date, it may be the greatest shrine to young male beauty ever filmed. Starring Rob Lowe, Matt Dillon, C. Thomas Howell, Ralph Macchio, Patrick Swayze, and Emilio Estevez at the apex of their hotness, a pre-orthodontia Tom Cruise was the ugliest dude in the cast. Turning flips in the air, popping perfect biceps in rolled-up black tees, lolling cigs out of rosy pouts, and batting long lashes beneath expertly combed pompadours, these boys were so appealing that they triggered early puberty in a whole generation of tweens (then called preteens).
Thirty-odd years later, I dig this parade of Aphrodites even more, and for mostly loftier reasons. Howell stars as 14-year-old protagonist Ponyboy Curtis, so named by dead parents who left him in the care of 17-year-old brother Sodapop (Rob Lowe), a dreamboat of a high school dropout, and biggest brother Darrel (Patrick Swayze), who has forfeited his dreams of college to keep his younger siblings out of foster care. Based in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the Curtis boys live on the wrong side of the tracks – we’re reminded of this from the first scene’s lonely train whistle– and they provide a homebase for all the tenderhearted, rough-hewn “greasers” in their gang. Continue Reading →