Standing Room Only

A Quarter Century of Film Reviews and Miscellaneous Commentary

by Rex Roberts

The kindest thing said to me during the twenty-five years I wrote about film was this: “Your review was more entertaining than the movie.” My guiding philosophy as a critic was just that, to entertain and inform; if my readers enjoyed the few minutes they spent with me as they scanned my thousand-word write-ups, if they learned something about a director or screenwriter or film movement in the process, then I had done my work well. —from the preface to Standing Room Only 

The Great Gatsby: “Jay-Z meets Jay G in this hyperventilated version of F. Scott’s eloquent novel … the film isn’t for purists, but Baz should generate a buzz with young audiences.”

Whiplash: “One of the most affecting and enjoyable movies of the year. Young director Damien Chazelle turns out to be  a natural-born filmmaker with impressive chops.”

The Brothers Grimsby: “While there are smart lines and amusing sequences, the whole business becomes tiresome, then distasteful and, finally, a tad repugnant.”

Cowboys & Aliens: “Can a Hollywood movie be highly derivative and refreshingly original at the same time? Would Indiana Jones and James Bond make a good buddy flick?”

Killer Joe: “A paean to pulp fiction … a gruesome but thoroughly entertaining Geek tragedy.

Country Strong: “… could do with less cowbell.” 

The Trip: “Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon pair up again, ostensibly for a culinary tour of northern England, but really  to win bragging rights for the best Michael Caine.”

Micmacs: “Another frothy frappé from the ingenious French auteur Jean-Pierre Jeunet, this one pitting his beleaguered Everyman against avaricious arms dealers in a Paris more beguiling than the actual city.”

Assigned Readings

A Half Century of Book Reviews and Literary Musings

by Rex Roberts

Assigned Readings collects the book reviews and literary essays of Rex Roberts, whose work has appeared in American Spectator, Lingua Franca, The Philadelphia Inquirer and numerous other publications. “My guiding ethos as a critic: to entertain and inform,” writes Roberts in the preface. “I offer analysis and judgments, but mostly I hope to make people aware of books they might not have encountered or, when writing about a popular author, to provide context and perspective.… Reviewing a book is like writing a sonnet: you make your point within a prescribed but enabling form: situation, response, qualification, resolution.”

On Tom Wolfe:
He writes prose like a composer scores music, introducing themes, burnishing and embellishing them as he builds toward a crescendo: reading one of his essays or novels is like listening to a sonata or symphony—jazzy, to be sure, but carefully structured and precise. Occasionally, his technique is too transparent and his method becomes mannered, the narrative (or at least the narrative style) predictable. Wolfe also loves to play the contrarian, to embrace the polemical, and he will pursue a proposition beyond reason to fortify a modest proposal.

On Edgar Allan Poe:
Evermore the troubled spirit who married his thirteen-year-old cousin and died of dissipation, Poe haunts us like a specter from his tales, which endure as a kind of haut kitsch, the inspiration for Baudelaire’s aesthetics and Vincent Price’s camp. In reality, Poe was far more complicated than his celebrated eccentricities, at turns tender and spiteful, charismatic and nerdish, brilliant and shoddy, the result of what he called his “innate love of contradiction.”

On Stanley Fish:
He hasn’t a single “searching critique” of American culture. In fact, he loves Los Angeles. He watches television and says “it’s great.” He rarely reads for pleasure. Yet he is, believe it or not, one of the most prominent literary critics in the world. Fish and a handful of colleagues have reversed the direction of literary criticism. If scholars formerly looked for meaning in the content and structure of poetry and fiction, Fish has discovered meaning in the experience of readers. Critics do not explain poems, they create them.

Field Notes

Observations and Ruminations on Places and Events

by Rex Roberts

Field Notes, a companion volume to Standing Room Only and Assigned Readings, collects the feature writing and reportage of Rex Roberts, whose work has appeared in American Spectator, Lingua Franca, The Philadelphia Inquirer and numerous other publications. The volume contains Roberts’s essays on New York’s Carnegie Hall, the Statue of Liberty and Times Square, on dinosaurs and evolution, on the New Deal’s TVA experiment, on Ethiopian restaurants and Kabuki theater … and a psychoanalytic explanation for the anger that pervades modern life.

from “Christians and Criminals”:
Ron Harries is on death row in the Tennessee State Penitentiary. A street kid whose father was a con and whose mother lived on welfare, he was sent to a home for juvenile delinquents in Fort Wayne, Indiana, on a charge of “incorrigibility,” a word he accents with irony, as though “incorrigible” is at once an accurate description of his life but the whole idea of it unfair. “I blame society for what I am now,” he says. Kaki, a Vanderbilt Divinity School student and volunteer with the Southern Prison Ministry, visits him once a week. “It looks like Disneyland,” she says, driving up the entrance road to the men’s prison in West Nashville, a castle with turrets and high walls. By the parking lot, under a green awning set up in front of the main gate, visitors wait to take a number for their turn at one of the two visiting rooms in the maximum-
security compound behind the walls. They look downtrodden, their slacks too short for their legs or their hair unkempt, their babies wailing. Everybody smokes cigarettes down to the filter. “The walls sweat,” Kaki says about the room where she visits with Ron.

from “Dinosaurs Are Forever”:
For geologist Paul Olsen, driving to Nova Scotia on the highways that wind through New England is like time traveling. Were you to ride with him in his 1983 Nissan pickup truck, the camper on back loaded with picks and shovels, gallons of olive oil and spaghetti sauce, and other necessities of paleontologic life, he would point out the road cuts in the soft arkose sandstone that allow Interstate 84 to pass east toward Hartford, and later, as you pass the exit for Buckland Street in Manchester, he might tell you about the brownstone quarry mined there in the last century, where the workers dug up eight dinosaurs.

from “Certified Genuine Early Ozymandial:
John Grazis started off with an oil light and a carbine light on a shelf in his barber shop. Customers assumed he was collecting coal antiques and started bringing him everything from sulfur stones to bootjacks. He has a growler can, which miners could fill with beer for a nickel. They rubbed the sides of the can with bacon fat or butter to keep a head from forming: less foam, more beer. Grazis also collects books on coal mining. His library includes The Annual Report of the Bureau of Mines for the year 1901. Paging idly through the book, I read that the “annual examination for mine foreman’s certificates was held in the courthouse, 5th and 6th June. The following was granted a certificate for mine foreman: David J. Roberts, St. Nicholas.” David Roberts is my late grandfather … such is the serendipity of antiquing.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Rex Roberts, writer, editor, graphic designer and founder of Otter Ink Press, has published extensively—short fiction and poetry, articles and essays, film and book reviews, literary criticism—in venues ranging from The American Spectator to Lingua Franca. Early in his career, he worked at Fisk, Vanderbilt and Columbia universities; then as a freelancer for commercial publications and nonprofits; finally as art director of Film Journal International. He has designed books, magazines,  journals, newsletters, broadsides and posters.

Email inquiries to info@otterink.org