#reviews

Of course, Hollywood is still making some excellent pictures which reflect the great artistry that made Hollywood famous throughout the world, but these films are exceptions, judging from box office returns and press reviews. ↗

— Pola Negri

#box #box office #course #excellent #exceptions

I wanted the syrupy taste of this small rebellion. And this stupid machine was denying that bit of freedom to me . . . just like everyone else. ↗

— Laura Bickle

#freedom #laine-s-fave #freedom

...Love can give you the most exhilarating wonderful highs at times... ...Then there will be dives that will take all you have just to hold on... Quote on the Title Page of "Love TORN Asunder ↗

— Elizabeth Funderbirk

#author #book #contemporary #debut #drama

An oxymoronic combination of the tough and tender, [Of Mice and Men] will appeal to sentimental cynics, cynical sentimentalists...Readers less easily thrown off their trolley will still prefer Hans Andersen. [Time 1937] ↗

— Time-Life-Books

#men

At a conservative estimate, one million dollars will be spent by American readers for this book [For Whom the Bell Tolls]. They will get for their money 34 pages of permanent value. These 34 pages tell of a massacre happening in a little Spanish town in the early days of the Civil War...Mr. Hemingway: please publish the massacre scene separately, and then forget For Whom the Bell Tolls; please leave stories of the Spanish Civil War to Malraux... ↗

— Commonweal

#money

[American Psycho] is ”throughout numbingly boring, and for much of the time deeply and extremely disgusting. Not interesting-disgusting, but disgusting-disgusting: sickening, cheaply sensationalist, pointless except as a way of earning its author some money and notoriety. ↗

— Andrew Motion

#money

Mr. Melville is evidently trying to ascertain how far the public will consent to be imposed upon. He is gauging, at once, our gullibilty and our patience. Having written one or two passable extravagancies, he has considered himself privileged to produce as many more as he pleases, increasingly exaggerated and increasingly dull…. In bombast, in caricature, in rhetorical artifice — generally as clumsy as it is ineffectual — and in low attempts at humor, each one of his volumes has been an advance among its predecessors…. Mr. Melville never writes naturally. His sentiment is forced, his wit is forced, and his enthusiasm is forced. And in his attempts to display to the utmost extent his powers of “fine writing,” he has succeeded, we think, beyond his most sanguine expectations… We have no intention of quoting any passages just now from Moby-Dick. The London journals, we understand, “have bestowed upon the work many flattering notices,” and we should be loth to combat such high authority. But if there are any of our readers who wish to find examples of bad rhetoric, involved syntax, stilted sentiment and incoherent English, we will take the liberty of recommending to them this precious volume of Mr. Melville’s. ↗

— John L. O'Sullivan

#nature

I know that an author must be brave enough to chop away clinging tentacles of good taste for the sake of a great work. But this is no great work, you see. ↗

— Dorothy Parker

#literary-criticism #literary-criticism