Garrett Zecker's Blog, page 2

This is one of those films that just happens to be on the Criterion Collection’s list, but not on the 1001. That comes as somewhat of a surprise as the film is a remarkable low-budget achievement but was also a contender among a year of incredible films that are all on the list that I am constantly revisiting. Ghostbusters, The Terminator, Amadeus, Beverly Hills Cop, Paris Texas, I mean, the competition was over before it began. But Alex Cox’s introduction to the world, presenting Emilio Estevez...

What an incredible film. I picked up Nicholas Roeg’s Walkabout (1971, Criterion Spine #10) after doing a recent binge on David Bowie media that brought me to The Man Who Fell To Earth – another of Roeg’s films. I decided to watch some of the other pieces he directed that I hadn’t seen. Walkabout was one of the most notable appearing as a Criterion, the 1001 list, the BFI’s top films to see before fourteen, and a variety of others. I watched Walkabout with my two oldest sons; if there is one reco...

Dave Barry has always been an absolute powerhouse in my life as a reader and writer. By the time I turned nineteen or twenty, I had read all of his books, owned most of them, met Barry several times, and was grateful for the handful of times I could share personal correspondence with him. As I gained more and more of a postsecondary education in literature and as a writer, it became apparent how he could straddle the thin black line of humor, style, populism, and his audience’s expectations to c...

Over the past few months, after being given a new novel about Bowie’s life to review for The Collidescope (at which a portion of this post was published a few weeks ago, “Freedom in the Realms of Eccentricity“), I dove headfirst back into the world of one of my favorite artists of all time. David Bowie left us seven years ago, leaving us with Blackstar and Lazarus – two works of art that were clearly meant to be his swan song. His memory is as fresh as it’s always been, however. In the few thous...

Kevin Wilson’s Now is Not the Time To Panic is a beautifully nostalgic trip back to when I was a teen and tried to do the same things our protagonists succeeded in, yet decidedly didn’t want to. The story is about two kids in a will they/won’t they relationship and a small town tormented by confusing folk-art grunge garage-made photocopied posters that could mean anything from the community being infiltrated by a satanic cult right under the noses of the guardians of decency, to perhaps buzz mar...

“Freedom in the Realms of Eccentricity,” Garrett’s review of Lance Olsen’s recently published novel about the final month’s of David Bowie’s life Always Crashing in the Same Car was published today at The Collidescope.

The last eighteen months of David Bowie’s life were an enigma to his fans, his death and hidden diagnosis coming to us just as shockingly as they did to his closest friends, family, and collaborators. As he was aware of his terminal end, he continued to quietly work on his swan...

Shallman’s The Tyrrany of Desire is a laugh-out-loud riot that seemed to come out of nowhere. It tells the story of grade-A loser Puchy Mushkin. He has a lot going wrong every day. His jobs, lovers, and even daily routines scream dead-end Coen Brothers schlimazel. But he has one thing going for him that no one seems to believe, even himself – a truly, horrifying giant… er… personal endowment. In fact, if there was some way to describe the opposite of an Achilles heel, in its most literal sense, ...

I am a huge fan of certain narratives from countries that tend to tell different stories than the tired tropes and structures of our western sensibilities. When artists can experiment with new structures and forms, I find that I gain a lot of insight as a writer into how to add new scope and sequence to my own work. Murakami is a master at this, engaging and fun with a splash of pop culture and a structure that sometimes makes no sense until the end when it becomes clear what his goals were in t...

Garrett’s newest off-site review of Jen Craig’s Panthers and the Museum of Fire was published today at The Collidescope.

Jen Craig’s Panthers and the Museum of Fire is a quiet, introspective work of autofiction that explores the internal emotional fallout surrounding the death of those closest to us. Our narrator learns of the death of Sarah, a friend from her younger school days, by receiving the manuscript of her unpublished novel. The narrator reflects that Sarah’s work is “a feast of word...

I want to start this with a dream that plagued me for most of my marriage. I never talked about it with my spouse, but in hindsight, and the fact that I haven’t had it since my divorce close to five years ago, it is so obvious as a metaphor – a metaphor that is so beautifully spelled out in Miller’s Death of a Salesman. 

In my dream, I would be home alone in the house, usually in the basement. It was one place in the home that was relegated to being my space, however, it was unfinished and co...