Picador £9.99, pp752 Nobody's perfect but Anthony Lane comes pretty close without ever seeming to make much of an effort. Perhaps that's the trick. This 'hunk of old journalism', as he puts it, contains a selection of his reviews and essays for the New Yorker from the last 10 years. It opens with a review of Indecent Proposal ('How much ...
Sunday 2004-07-25, The Observer (English)
Some Like it Hot
Dan Neill on Nobody's Perfect | Words of Mercury | Anne Widdecombe
Sunday July 25, 2004
Nobody's Perfect
by Anthony Lane
Picador £9.99, pp752
Nobody's perfect but Anthony Lane comes pretty close without ever seeming to make much of an effort. Perhaps that's the trick. This 'hunk of old journalism', as he puts it, contains a selection of his reviews and essays for the New Yorker from the last 10 years.
It opens with a review of Indecent Proposal ('How much would you pay for an evening with Demi Moore's mind?') and closes with a profile of Billy Wilder ('the man who has told more cold truths than many of us would care to hear').
Crammed in between there are more than 700 pages of erudite and witty prose, including a hilarious review of Showgirls ('the title is not so much a noun as an imperative') as well as pieces on Nabokov and Bresson. To paraphrase Lane's review of Un Coeur en Hiver: 'You realise how long it's been since a critic actually taught you anything.'
