Stephanie Zacharek

• 

  print December 2003

  Stephanie Zacharek

  STEPHANIE ZACHEREK

  1. Lost in Translation (Sofia Coppola) A sustained mood of rapturous melancholy infuses this exquisite jet-lag romance.

  2. To Be and To Have (Nicolas Philibert) A documentary about a French country school that cuts to the heart of the anxieties and joys of childhood and the vocation of teaching, sentimentalizing neither.

  3. Spellbound (Jeffrey Blitz) Blitz’s wonderful documentary about the National Spelling Bee features the screen’s most suspenseful moments since Al Pacino’s restaurant scene in The Godfather.

  4. A Mighty Wind (Christopher Guest) Guest’s multilayered mockumentary

• 

  print April 2002

  PAINTER OF PICTURES: MANNY FARBER, A ROUNDTABLE

  GREIL MARCUS

  IN HIS 1957 ESSAY “Hard-Sell Cinema,” Manny Farber talks about “the business-man-artist”: someone who “has the drive, patience, conceit, and daring to become a successful non-conforming artist without having the talent or idealism for rebellious creation.” Farber names Dave Brubeck and Stan Getz in jazz, Larry Rivers and Franz Kline in painting, Salinger, Bellow, and Cheever in the novel, Paddy Chayefsky, Delbert Mann, and Elia Kazan in movies. It's one of many pieces in Negative Space where you get the idea Farber was in a bad mood pretty much from the beginning of the '50s to the