Word: pasts
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...ethnic milieu—the setting of Zadie Smith’s amazing first novel “White Teeth”—is rife with fear and uncertainty. A generation on the decline—Archie’s generation—retreats into an imagined past for comfort, while the next struggles with a seemingly divergent identity. With an acute sense of both the pathos and the humor of the modern immigrant’s lot, Smith crafts a narrative that entertains and evokes and succeeds in both superbly...
...Samad, confronted with a hostile, foreign culture and a young, indifferent wife, retreats into what he thinks he knows best: his own culture and religion. Smith makes it clear, however, that the latter—already irrevocably changed by his life in England—is reaching for a past that never existed...
...charming and thought-provoking look into British society, the immigrant experience not seen by the outside world. It reveals the society’s flaws, poking fun at everybody but condemning nobody. Zadie Smith shows the confusion of trying to understand the present in the context of a past that never existed; “The funny thing about getting old in a country is people always want to hear that from you,” Archie muses. “They want to hear it really was once a green and pleasant land. They need...
...dialogue becomes grating, however, when the film’s characters stop following normal conversation patterns, and instead begin to communicate with speeches that sound like contrived publicity blurbs for art shows. “Your work pushes the boundaries of modern thought, thrusting past the limitations of human emotion and cognition to create the ultimate expression of human consciousness,” Madeleine enthuses to an artist during a show. These kinds of inflated, preposterous mini-monologues quickly grow tiresome, and instead of humorously mocking the bourgeoisie art world, they come across as simply an irksome staple...
AMC’s runaway hit “Mad Men” rounded off its third season this past Monday, and once again it is tempting to see creator Matthew Weiner’s depiction of an advertising agency in the early 1960s as a mirror of present times. Praise be to that firey avatar of all things good, St. Joan Holloway, however, that the recent season finale made the more direct of these comparisons seem misguided, irrelevant. Far from a show focused solely on capturing the essence of another time, or even our own time, the season finale...