About Damn Time: Edelstein Joins Blogosphere

By S.T. VanAirsdale

Someone's gotta pick up the slack around town while I slump into all-day New York Film Festival coverage mode, and it pleases me greatly that none other than David Edelstein has finally leapt back online with his new blog The Projectionist over at New York Magazine. And as you might expect, it's brilliant, snappy and inquisitive:

I welcome you to my occasional blog, the Projectionist, a place for second thoughts, third thoughts, musings both important and self-indulgent, and -- I hope -- a fluid exchange with readers.

I’ve missed that here at New York. In my nine and a half years at the online magazine Slate, I got thousands of e-mails from readers. That last one I got here was two months ago. It’s not, I’m convinced, that I’m that much less read. It’s that the distance, literal and existential, between a glossy weekly print mag and cyberspace is vast. I send e-mails to bloggers and online writers often but can’t remember the last time I mailed someone at a glossy, even when I’ve read an article online. My fingers aren’t poised over the keyboard in the same way.

Better yet is the blanket correspondence Edelstein passed along advising friends and colleagues of his latest endeavor:

It will be more self-indulgent than most film blogs, insofar as it's an adjunct to my wise and thoughtful magazine columns -- but I hope to be quoting and/or attacking many of you, so be sure to check in regularly.

I'm ready! For starters, David, you got The Brave One totally, totally wrong. I can't believe you'd be so quick to dismiss Neil Jordan out of hand, as if his best hasn't always been about the psychic costs of violence -- their impact on sexuality and gender, the ambiguity of victimhood, etc. Can you really think the film is anything but a fantastic surge of payback colliding post-9/11 paranoia with pre-9/11 complacency? The futility of law (e.g. Terrence Howard's Det. Mercer) and corruption of discourse (e.g. NPR acceding to extremes)? Those Taxi Driver / Death Wish / Ms. 45 allusions? Remember: Those films are about survivors. The Brave One isn't about a survivor at all -- I sincerely believe Erica Bain dies in her attack; her vengeance is cosmic, supernatural. There's no other explanation, is there? Neil Jordan didn't just start sucking, did he? Let's hear those second thoughts!

Posted at September 17, 2007 5:10 PM