Friday, August 8, 2008

Hating on Manohla Dargis

Could Manohla Dargis try any harder to show that she has read some Philip Roth novel? (No great accomplishment, really, in itself.) It's bizarrely tasteless, and so insistent that it almost feels high-concept. Roth, after all, is not Shakespeare, and so many films are adapted from novels that this is a strange one to single out for a book report. I'm a bit embarrassed for her.

This is all from a MOVIE review:

The book is fascinating and repellent, more admirable than likable, a fusion of early Roth (sex) and late Roth (death). 

In the novel Kepesh is pathetic and self-loathing, but perversely enthralling because Mr. Roth's prose is. 

...the humiliating revelations that, in the novel, Kepesh ritualistically bathes in. 

 It shares some of the book's dialogue...

 a spiky, claustrophobic, insistently impolite novel...

the book's blunt force, its beautiful sentences, flashes of genius and spleen.

the novel's furious bite.

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