Word: cartwright
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
That Bart is a cartoon character--a sheaf of drawings animated by smart writing and the unique vocal stylings of Nancy Cartwright--makes him both "real" and surreally supple. Cartoon figures can do more things, endure more knocks on the noggin, get away with more cool, naughty stuff than the rest of us who are animated only by a telltale heart. The face-offs of Bugs and Daffy in Chuck Jones' cartoons of the '50s involved many shotgun blasts and rearranged duckbills, but the humor and humiliation, the understanding of failure and resilience were instantly translatable to kids and adults...
Just as Jordan needed his Paxson, Cartwright, Kukoc and Harper; so does Feaster need her Basil, Janowski, Seanor and Miller. Jordan has Rodman, Longley, Buechler and Brown; Feaster has Russell, Sturdy, Kowal and Brandt...
...sign of a civilization's slippage is the ease with which it blurs the line between tragedy and farce. Consider Justin Cartwright's Masai Dreaming (Random House; 287 pages; $23), a novel about the making of a Hollywood adventure movie with a Holocaust hook. The satirical possibilities are unnerving. Spectacular East African scenery, colorful colonials and free-range tribesmen, with the Final Solution worked in. How about Mel Gibson and Julia Roberts...
Spiraling gracefully toward that conclusion, Cartwright, a novelist with film experience, often becomes the target of his own satire. At the center of the story is S.O. Letterman, a movie producer who starts off high-minded and ends with his eye on the box office. Letterman does not give a rat's rump for historical truth. Tim Curtiz, a London-based journalist taking a crack at a lucrative script-writing assignment, does. The subject of the movie, called Masai Dreams, is a striking French anthropologist named Claudia Cohn-Casson, whose work among the Masai, and whose fate at the hands...
...polished, in fact. Cartwright's characters have more than one dimension, and his view of a culturally debased world is properly droll. But he can't resist tarting up his tale with a bit of porn and pretense. He gravely quotes Elie Wiesel on how Auschwitz negates any attempt to fictionalize it, and then includes fictional scenes of the Holocaust. And did Cartwright really have to call his journalist hero Curtiz, which sounds like Joseph Conrad's Kurtz? Can't anybody write about Africa without invoking Heart of Darkness...