Nathan Holic

Author: nholic

  • From Bauhaus to Our House

      Tom Wolfe’s nonfiction works best in essay form, I think. “Hooking Up” was a great collection, and “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby” was a great collection, and even “The Right Stuff” (supposedly a nonfiction novel) felt like a collection of short nonfiction narratives pieced together to tell the story of America’s fascination with the…

  • Funny Games, and Horror as Social Commentary

    Funny Games is a slick and stylish horror film, very moody and atmospheric and tense throughout its entire running time, but it absolutely fails in its director’s mission to create a worthwhile piece of social commentary. Here’s the basic premise: a rich white family is summering at a lake, and suddenly some teenagers (who claim…

  • Fatherland

    I learned about “Fatherland” after reading Philip Roth’s “The Plot Against America” and Michael Chabon’s “The Yiddish Policemen’s Union,” both of which were alternate histories that re-imagined the circumstances (and outcome) of World War II. Before reading either book, I’d never really given much thought to the idea of an “alternate history novel,” but Roth’s…

  • Refresh, Refresh

    I remember reading a couple stories from Benjamin Percy in Esquire awhile back, and each of them was haunting, the type of short story that stayed with you long after you finished reading. For my money, at least, that’s the sort of story that I love: the kind that is not easily dismissed, that kind…

  • Romero’s 2000s-Era Zombies

    Diary of the Dead Though its commentary is sometimes weak (or too obvious), Diary of the Dead uses the camcorder-shot footage to great, frightening effect. There’s a real function behind the form, unlike Cloverfield, Quarantine, and other gimmicky “video-taped” films. Romero goes back to the basics of what made Night of the Living Dead and…

  • The Fourth Kind offers a fresh new approach for a movie, a film where the actors are identified as actors and purposefully break the “fourth wall” in order to speak directly to the audience and give credibility to the supposed documentary/interview footage that is interspersed throughout. The director himself appears in the film, tells us…

  • The Photographer

    “The Photographer” is quite possibly the most inventive book I’ve ever read, and it’s a testament to the author(s) that it stands as an amazing example of a memoir, a piece of literary journalism, a graphic novel, a book of photo journalism, and (most accurately) a piece of “mixed-media literature.” I’ll get back to that…

  • “Indignation,” by Philip Roth

    Philip Roth has made a career out of creating characters who put themselves through absolute hell. Nearly every one of his protagonists, it seems, could lead a fulfilling life, but they all seem to sabotage themselves with their own stubborn decisions and outbursts. In the world of Philip Roth, a happy and satisfying existence seems…

  • The Epic Eminem Analysis: Part III

    The Marshall Mathers LP: The Curse The characters had been introduced, and the world had formed its opinions: critical reception had been recorded in daily newspapers, in the glossy magazines; television personalities had registered disgust or elation at the release of The Slim Shady LP and the subsequent collaborations with Dr. Dre and B.I.G.; other…

  • Friday the 13th Re-Imagined…but still mediocre.

    I never liked the original “Friday the 13th,” and yet I somehow wound up renting and watching every single film in the franchise. The worst, I think, was Part IV, or maybe V, which seemed to have been produced in about ten minutes, and featured only random stock footage of Jason walking quickly through the…