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Tom Carson

Tom Carson won two National Magazine Awards during his stint as Esquire's "Screen" columnist and has been nominated twice more as GQ's movie reviewer. Formerly a staff writer at LA Weekly and The Village Voice, he is the author of Gilligan's Wake (a New York Times Notable Book of the Year for 2003) and Daisy Buchanan's Daughter.

Recent Articles

Kubrick's Vietnam, 25 Years Later

Full Metal Jacket—as well as the rest of the director's canon—still fails to impress, even after a quarter-century intermission.

Tom CarsonAug 17, 2012
(AP Photo)

When the 25th anniversary Blu-ray of Stanley Kubrick’s 1987 Vietnam War movie, Full Metal Jacket, showed up in the mail last week, I knew what was going to happen. As I glowered at the lavishly packaged thing and it glowered glacially back, my inner Jiminy Critic chirped up with his usual reproach to my anti-Kubrick bias.

“Practically everybody but you knows that Stanley is the greatest thing since sliced eyeballs,” he said, making that tired joke about Bunuel’s Un Chien Andalou for the gazillionth time. “You chump, did you even notice that 2001: A Space Odyssey just vaulted into sixth place in Sight and Sound’s poll of The Greatest Movies Ever Made? And you haven’t seen this one since it came out.”

Ricky Bobby Goes to Washington

Don't watch The Campaign with expectations of high sophistication and deft explanation of political issues.

Tom CarsonAug 10, 2012
(KC PHOTO/Warner Bros./PictureGroup)

 

The Long Arc of Gore Vidal

The prolific man of letters spent the last decades of his life tarnishing his own reputation—but what a reputation it was.

Tom CarsonAug 01, 2012
(AP Photo)

With typical cheek, Gore Vidal, who died yesterday, once reviewed a book about himself by a young academic named Ray Lewis White. This was in 1968, when “in many quarters,” reviewer-Vidal explained, author-Vidal was “still regarded with profound suspicion,” making White’s study a bit of an outlier. Expressing gratitude for what he deemed “a most interesting book” wouldn’t have suited Vidal’s act, to put it mildly. But he came close in his summing-up: “[I]n the declining kingdom of literature,” he wrote, “Mr. White has staked out with some nicety the wild marches of a border lord.”

The Incongruous Olympics

Will the Olympics be a break from Europe and England's problems, or make them more vivid?

Tom CarsonJul 27, 2012
(Photo courtesy of www.london2012.com)

Try as I might—which is, OK, not very hard—I'm having a tough time getting jazzed for the Olympics this year. I get the feeling I'm not the only one. The locals are reportedly grumpy already about the mobs of untrained tourists futzing up London commuters' very own Olympic event, which is predictable enough.  But then Mitt Romney got into the act. Giving us a preview of his smooth idea of international diplomacy—I guess he has been talking to John Bolton—he wondered on his arrival in town whether the Brits really had it in them to properly "celebrate" the games. Being accused of not knowing how to party by Mitt Romney has to sting.

A Dark Knight for Romney?

Don't believe Limbaugh—the most recent Batman movie is an epic for the 1%

Tom CarsonJul 20, 2012
(Courtesy of www.thedarkknightrises.com)

Stop me if you've heard this news flash once or twice before, but Rush Limbaugh got it gloriously wrong. On Tuesday, the Porcine One took to the airwaves to froth about the coincidence—no, wait, there's no such thing in Limbaugh-land—that the villain of The Dark Knight Rises is named Bane, a homophone for "Bain." Plainly, this was a case of Romney-bashing propaganda by a Hollywood nefariously in league with the White House.

"You may think it's ridiculous," Rush said stoutly, locking a barn door through which whole herds of ponies have fled over the years. "I'm just telling you this is the kind of stuff the Obama campaign is lining up. The kind of people who would draw this comparison are the kind of people they are campaigning to."

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