Jonathan Franzen’s "Freedom" Is All the Rage (NY Times / AV Club)

“Do I think I should be getting all of the attention that Jonathan ‘Genius’ Franzen gets? Nope. Would I like to be taken at least as seriously as a Jonathan Tropper or a Nick Hornby? Absolutely,” said Ms. Weiner in an interview that the Huffington Post conducted with her and Ms. Picoult. For Ms. Picoult’s part, “I want to make it clear that I have absolutely nothing against Jonathan Franzen,” she said in the interview. “I hope I read ["Freedom"] and love it. None of this was motivated as a critique against him or his work, just that he is someone The Times has chosen to review twice in seven days.”

So many of our films are based on books, I've decided that when something interesting about publishing or a specific book pops up, it's worthy of a spot on the blog. And Franzen's "Freedom" has been popping up everywhere, helped in large part by the controversy alluded to above (which actually has more to do with the NY Times than Franzen, but that's really beside the point now.) The book came out yesterday - any of you pick it up yet?

Read the full article here.
Read the NY Times' two reviews here and here.
You can read an excerpt of the novel here.
Finally, AV Club published a nice interview with Franzen yesterday, which you can find here.

Summer movie wrap-up (The A.V. Club)

No quotes on this one, since it's an audio clip - three of the entertainment folks at A.V. Club chat about the movies big movies they liked best from the summer (Toy Story 3, Inception, Scott Pilgrim) and those they thought were disappointing, or as Tasha Robinson calls one, "a great big ball of suck." They also cover art-house films. A nice little roundtable.
Read the full article here.

Interview: Debra Granik (dir. Winter's Bone) (The AV Club)

What keeps me going is that life has lots of bonbons, a lot of treats. You have your mundane life, and then you go into another neighborhood, another zip code, and you’re all delirious again. You’re all delirious and caught up, and then you want to make stories about it. So it’s a kind of addiction, right?

I'm really looking forward to seeing this film, and this interview provides great insight into what exactly Debra Granik was trying to accomplish.
Read the full interview here.

Are we really in a cultural golden age? (The AV Club)

First, why - other than the natural laziness that informs most nostalgia - do so many people think that the culture is in decline? Why is the belief that things were better in the mysterious “before” so common that it jumps from generation to generation, like baldness or a bad ticker? While the tendency to be politically conservative knows no particular age, cultural conservatism is as predictable as prostate cancer. Why hasn’t this changed since Sallust’s time?

I could give you a list of 1,000 reasons why culture is in decline, but we don't have time for that - instead here's three: most Fox movies (no offense to those of you involved in making them), famous people only famous because they're famous, and the acceptance of the f-bomb as a word to be used in everyday vocabulary.
However! The man does have a point, and so I encourage you to take a look at the article. (And no, I don't know who Sallust is either. See? Case in point!)
Read the full article here.