Lane's Maxims
In his introduction to Nobody's Perfect: Writings from The New Yorker, Lane mentions five maxims that should be obeyed by anyone who, having tried and failed to gain respectable employment, has decided to throw in the sponge and become a movie critic instead:
- 1) Never read the publicity material.
- 2) Whenever possible, see a film in the company of ordinary human beings.
- 3) Try to keep up with documentaries about Swabian transsexuals {or, see everything regardless of budget and hype}.
- 4) Whenever possible, pass sentence on a movie the day after it comes out. Otherwise, wait fifty years.
- 5) Try to avoid the Lane technique of summer moviegoing.
The explanation for the 5th maxim is a good example of Lane's style:
- On a broiling day, I ran to a screening of Contact, the Jodie Foster flick about messages from another galaxy. I made it for the opening credits, and, panting heavily — which, with all due respect, is not something that I find myself doing that often in Jodie Foster films — I started taking notes. These went "v. gloomy," "odd noir look for sci-fi," "creepy shadows in outdoor scene," and so on. Only after three-quarters of an hour did I remember to remove my dark glasses.
Read more about this topic: Anthony Lane
Famous quotes containing the words lane and/or maxims:
“We joined long wagon trains moving south; we met hundreds of wagons going north; the roads east and west were crawling lines of families traveling under canvas, looking for work, for another foothold somewhere on the land.... The country was ruined, the whole world was ruined; nothing like this had ever happened before. There was no hope, but everyone felt the courage of despair.”
—Rose Wilder Lane (1886–1968)
“No people require maxims so much as the American. The reason is obvious: the country is so vast, the people always going somewhere, from Oregon apple valley to boreal New England, that we do not know whether to be temperate orchards or sterile climate.”
—Edward Dahlberg (1900–1977)