Word: cormac
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...formula seems to be working. Nearly 800 fellows as young as 18 and as old as 82 have been christened since 1981. Among their feats: slowing the speed of light (optical physicist Lene Hau, 2001), mapping the human genome (geneticist Eric Lander, 1987), penning acclaimed novels (Cormac McCarthy, 1981; the recently deceased David Foster Wallace, 1997), scheming to save our threatened fisheries (lobsterman Ted Ames, 2005) and solving Fermat's Last Theorem (mathematician Andrew Wiles, 1997). Seven have nabbed the Nobel Prize, including geneticist Barbara McClintock (1981) and former U.S. poet laureate Joseph Brodsky (1981). Others have won Pulitzers, Fields...
That changed last year with No Country for Old Men, their faithful adaptation of the Cormac McCarthy novel about one man who steals $2 million in drug money and another man, or monster, who chases him. Both characters were resourceful in the tradition of Hollywood heroes and villains; neither one blithered. The plot carefully built its tensions right up to a climax that confused a lot of viewers--but that too showed fidelity of the film to its source novel. The Coens' entente with genre conventions earned Oscars for Best Picture, Screenplay and Supporting Actor (for Javier Bardem...
...deceit," says one character of another in Burn After Reading. "It's almost his job." Deceit is very much the job of the new film from Joel and Ethan Coen. It's as if, after winning two fat Oscars (best picture and director) for their fairly straightforward adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men, the brothers needed to reassert their old capricious cunning, their weasily larkishness, their independence from easy acclaim. "Just because you agree with the Academy that we made the best film of 2007," they seem to be warning their fans, "don't think...
...Marie Antoinette used to dress up as a peasant and milk cows. Sebastian Faulks just wrote a James Bond novel; Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union was a noir mystery set in an alternate universe. Some writers find the discipline invigorating: look at The Road, Cormac McCarthy's fling with apocalyptic science fiction. Some don't: Martin Amis' Night Train was an undercooked attempt at hard-boiled detective fiction. It turns out that trashy books are as hard to write as good ones...
...Frankenstein, it's a founding work in what has proved to be a surprisingly durable genre. It's true what the movie poster says: THE LAST MAN ON EARTH IS NOT ALONE. The joint is crawling with last men. Will Smith in I Am Legend. The nameless hero of Cormac McCarthy's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Road, an Oprah pick last year. Yorick from the hit comic book Y: The Last Man (which publishes its 60th and last issue at the end of this month), who survives a plague that kills only men?the women are fine. Even Disney...