David Foster Wallace’s widow, Karen Green, has a new memoir out called Bough Down and it gets a wonderful review from Maggie Nelson over at the LA Review of Books:

The tender things may be painful for Green to remember; due to her crystalline, sincere rendering, they are also painful to read about. Perhaps because this is not the memoir of a couple married for decades — Green and Wallace had been married for but four years at the time of his death — the love here conveyed feels hot, blooming, then disastrously cut short, tragically adumbrated by all the trauma and anger that constitute suicide’s ugly gifts. (“The doctor says if you were so quote perfect for me unquote you’d probably still be around, no offense,” Green writes, struggling with the cruelty of the paradox.) I could quote any number of excruciating passages, but here is one of the most delicate and agonized: “On our wedding night we smiled at the antler chandelier rigged with rope and walls as cold as snow. Sorry, sorry. How on earth.” How on earth did our love come to this; how on earth did we find this love: two sentiments locked together in a Gordian knot — perhaps forever — by the violent abandonment of Wallace’s death.

Here’s a remembrance of Wallace from John Powers.

Painting by Anne Harris

Documentary is nearly always exploitative, and this would be the avant-garde version of newsmen pushing cameras into the faces of grieving parents just to capture their tears.

— John Powers on Shirley Clarke’s 1967 documentary Portrait of Jason.

John Powers on Shirley Clarke’s seminal 1967 film Portrait of Jason that has been recently restored and re-released:

Clarke knew she had a mesmerizing subject in Jason, whose stories are punctuated by a laugh whose mercurial meaning — from delight to pain to impacted fury — could keep a psychology class busy for a semester. Still, she and her colleagues keep goading him to give more, to bare himself more deeply, until he eventually breaks down, offering us the naked truth of his soul — if, that is, you believe we all have a single, secret, unified self hidden by myriad social masks. But is the drunken, weeping Jason really a more authentic Jason than the laughing storyteller?

You can divide famous people into two broad categories. Those who find fame a burden and those who take it like a tonic. Roger Ebert is one of the latter. That rarest of creatures — a film critic everyone knows — he really enjoys being Roger Ebert….”Life Itself” begins with a reference to Ingmar Bergman’s film “Persona,” and ends by quoting Tintin’s dog, Milou. But reading this book I was struck by how deeply he’s inscribed with our national character; the decency and good humor and happy acceptance of other cultures. The recognition that the world has murky depths he’d just as soon not dwell on. Above all, the eagerness to engage with life. You see, unlike a lot of film critics, Roger Ebert knows that there’s more to living than just sitting in the dark.

— John Powers review of Roger Ebert’s memoir, Life Itself 

John Powers on the new documentary Room 237 about obsessive fans of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining:

[F]anatics are the subject of Rodney Ascher’s Room 237, a very enjoyable documentary about five Kubrickeans obsessed with wildly different hidden meanings of his 1980 film, The Shining. Where you may think it’s merely a horror story — remember that blood flooding out of the elevator? — these devotees argue that Kubrick’s movie is really about more than a writer going homicidally bonkers. For one, it’s about the genocide against Native Americans; for another, it’s about the Holocaust; yet another says the film is Kubrick’s admission that he helped fake footage of the Apollo 11 moon-landing.

John Powers on the PBS documentary Philip Roth: Unmasked that premieres next week:

Here’s a writer who specializes in anger, sarcasm, iconoclasm, dirtiness, atheism, comedy and sexual attitudes that smack of misogyny.

While Philip Roth Unmasked doesn’t completely ignore his dark ferocity, it tiptoes around it. We learn little about his personal life, which was messy enough to prompt his ex-wife, actress Claire Bloom, to spend 150 pages of a book excoriating his manipulative narcissism. Nor do we get much insight into what’s obvious from Roth’s work — his ambition, his princely sense of entitlement, his use of fury as fuel, his tendency toward political sanctimony, his way of seeing women as one big perk of fame.

Image courtesy of PBS

In conjunction with his review of the PBS documentary Philip Roth: Unmasked, our critic John Powers offers this list of his Roth favorites with brief commentary on each:

I could easily suggest 20 books that I think well worth anyone’s time, but here are my favorites (in chronological order):

Goodbye, Columbus (1959):   Although less strong than what follows below, here’s where it all began.  Roth hadn’t yet fully found his voice, but even in his mid-20s, the quality of his perceptions was dazzling. 

Portnoy’s Complaint (1969):   Gleefully obscene, this zeitgeist-rocking novel about masturbation, sex, and Jewish family life is one of the funniest books in the language.   

The Ghost Writer (1979):  The opening volume of the great Zuckerman Bound tetralogy, this novel introduces us to Roth’s best and most frequent alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman, who gets involved with a literary lion a la Isaac Bashevis Singer and a girl who might secretly be someone very famous.

The Counterlife (1986):   As intricately crafted as a Faberge music box, this brilliant piece of meta-fiction finds Zuckerman and his dentist brother Henry grappling with huge questions – not just life and death, but the state of Israel.

Patrimony:  A True Story (1991):  The most bleakly touching of his books, this memoir presents the story of the life and death of his father Herman Roth with a gaze that is loving but unsparing.

Operation Shylock:  A Confession (1993):   The real (meaning fictionalized) Philip Roth is haunted by a Philip Roth impersonator who’s traveling around Israel ruining his good name – naturally Roth winds up involved with an intelligence mission.

Sabbath’s Theater (1995)  Perhaps the greatest of his novels (if not the most beloved), this is the riveting story of Mickey Sabbath, an unemployed puppeteer with a libido the size of the Statue of Liberty.  Funny and hard-edged, this radical book is an apache dance between eros and death.

American Pastoral (1997):  The first and best novel of his history cycle (which includes I Married a Communist, The Human Stain and The Plot Against America) this is the moving story of a good man destroyed by what happened in America during the 1960s, from the Vietnam War to the kids driven mad by it.

Portrait of Philip Roth by Oscar Mitt

So Philip Roth (the man, the legend, the controversial character) turns 80 tomorrow. What are your thoughts on his stature in contemporary American letters, eh?

Critic John Powers will wish Mr. Roth a very happy birthday on the show tomorrow by reviewing the upcoming PBS American Masters, Philip Roth Unmasked. In the meantime…

• “Philip Roth On Writing, Aging And ‘Nemesis’

• Philip Roth Discusses ‘Everyman’

(via Literary Caucus: Salman Rushdie, James Franco, and 28 More Notables Assess Philip Roth’s Career)

John Powers on Gael Garcia Bernal’s character in the Oscar-nominated Chilean film, No:

Its unheroic hero is a fictionalized young ad man, Rene Saavedra, well played by the charismatic Mexican actor Gael Garcia Bernal. Soulful yet politically unengaged, Rene comes up with a marketing campaign designed to get ordinary folks to vote “No” — thereby removing Pinochet.

Image courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics

John Powers on the Chilean film No, which takes place during a referendum on Gen. Augusto Pinochet and is nominated for Best Foreign Language Film:

Its unheroic hero is a fictionalized young ad man, René Saavedra, well played by the charismatic Mexican actor Gael Garcia Bernal. Soulful, yet politically unengaged, René comes up with a marketing campaign designed to get ordinary folks to vote “No” — thereby removing Pinochet. His ideas horrify many in the Vote No camp. You see, they want to use their allotted 15 minutes of nightly TV airtime to chronicle the dictator’s many crimes — murders, disappearances, the crushing of unions.

In contrast, René insists on going Lite. Using a rainbow logo and a catchy theme song, he sells funny, upbeat images of a future, democratic Chile in the way we’ve earlier seen him sell soft drinks.

Image of Gael Garcia Bernal courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics

When it was first released back in 1980 Roger Ebert called the western Heaven’s Gate ‘a study in wretched excess …  so smoky, so foggy, so unfocused and so brownish yellow that you want to try to Windex on the screen.” John Powers just gave the film another shot since a director’s cut was recently released on DVD and he finds that, in retrospect, it wasn’t all bad.

Image courtesy of the Criterion Collection.

Fresh Air critic John Powers on why you should be reading Charles Portis:

The grand exception is my favorite American writer, 78-year-old Charles Portis, who could hardly be less hip. This ex-Marine loves cars, knows guns, can’t stand hippies and lives off the media radar in Little Rock, Ark., without being famous for trying not to be famous. If his name rings a bell, it’s because he wrote True Grit, a sneaky-dark Western that inspired two movies and was the closest he ever came to trying to write the Great American Novel. Yet among Portis’ followers — and yes, we’re a cult — that book doesn’t display what makes him special. For us, thinking that True Grit is the best of his five novels is like saying “Hey Jude” is the Beatles at their finest…

What makes his work magical is the deadpan brilliance of his language, which is at once extraordinarily observant — he notices the iridescent rainbow sheen on a slice of roast beef — and yet comically askew, so that we see the world in a way we’ve not quite seen it before. He’s our funniest living writer with a sense of humor so sly that you can read his best book, The Dog of the South, five or 10 times and still find jokes you’ve never noticed before.

Of course, what’s missing from both these visions of Brazil is, well, Brazil. Especially the country that, like China, has been enjoying an economic boom for almost two decades. This modernizing, increasingly prosperous Brazil finally comes to our screens in the sly, funny, unsettling new feature, Neighboring Sounds. Written and directed by Kleber Mendonca Filho, this isn’t merely the best new movie I’ve seen this year, it may well be the best Brazilian movie since the 1970s.

—from John Powers’ review of Neighboring Sounds on Fresh Air

Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry follows the famous artist around the world as he repeatedly irks Chinese authorities with his art and political critiques. Fresh Air’s John Powers says the documentary casts important light on the fight for greater freedom in China.

John Powers takes on Louie:

In this new season, for instance, Louie has a hilarious encounter with a truck-driving businesswoman, played with enormous vim by Melissa Leo, that’s so gleefully dirty that we can’t find even a snippet to share with you.

The same is often true of his standup act, where C.K. has perhaps a tad too much faith in the belief that talking about masturbation is always funny.

Yet what gives C.K.’s comedy its richness is that even the filthy stuff is never there just for its own sake, the way it is in, say, HBO’s Veep, which vaunts its soaring cadenzas of profanity. It has something serious behind it, a sense of urban melancholy, of male fragility, or the mere desire to understand wayward feelings. And C.K.’s humor is conceptual.