Reading this on mobile? Click here to view
If the stories are true, and the experience of death really is twinned with the sensation of life flashing before your eyes, I can only hope my terminal clip reel will be as concise and perfunctory as the average Hollywood biopic. This week, Kill Your Darlings does for Allen Ginsberg and his fellow Beat poets what Lovelace did for Linda, Jobs did for Steve, and The Iron Lady did for the political landscape of the 1980s, condensing their details and nuances down into an easily digestible series of sketches, designed to deliver maximum feeling in minimum time. After all, the real Ginsberg lived for somewhere in the region of 36m minutes; nowadays, you're lucky if an audience will sit still for 90. And so, while Ginsberg and his contemporaries most likely devised their "New Vision" of American poetry over the course of countless days and nights, here the idea comes together during a single whiskey-fuelled conversation in a Harlem jazz club. Where the resistance faced by the group during the 1940s was wide-ranging and defined by a number of conflicting interests, here their sole detractor is a stuffy Columbia professor with an unshakeable hard-on for metre and form. The result is an exhilarating but distinctly silly approximation of a key chapter in the history of American literature.
Continue reading...Source: http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/apr/26/kill-your-darlings-out-on-dvd
No comments:
Post a Comment