Anthony Lane
[3] He has written profiles of actors and directors (Alfred Hitchcock,[4] Buster Keaton,[5] Grace Kelly[6]) and authors (Ian Fleming and Patrick Leigh Fermor) and Hergé's Tintin books.[9] A collection of 140 of his The New Yorker reviews, essays, and profiles was published in 2002 under the title Nobody's Perfect — a reference to the final line of the 1959 film Some Like It Hot."[10] His review of Emma and Kingpin imagines the characters from the former movie discussing the latter: "The company was far from disinclined to hear more; and Mr. Elton, whose refinement of expression was complemented by a most unsullied cordiality, spoke to them of bowling with ten pins; of the misfortune that was visited upon Mr. Harrelson in the losing of his arm; and of the ardent and uncouth intentions on the part of Mr. William Murray to impede the happiness that was both prized and merited by the heroes of the piece."[12] His review of The Phantom Menace mentions that "the worst marketing ploy I have seen so far is the Star Wars Learning Fun Book, for kids of kindergarten age."[13] Lane recounts episodes from his life as a filmgoer; he writes that film "has revivified the Proustian principle that memory is not ours to command", adding: "It is generally agreed, for example, that the last Golden Age of cinema occurred in the mid-seventies—the epoch of The Godfather, Chinatown and McCabe and Ms. Miller.I realize that Chinatown is a great picture and that The Towering Inferno is dreck; but the sight of a weary, begrimed Steve McQueen is burned into my mind with a fierceness that Jack Nicholson, with his nicked nostril, can never match.Godard is the mad professor, beloved of his students and nobody else; Howard Hawks is the sly jock with money and girls to burn; Billy Wilder grins like a miniature devil from the margins of a gilded manuscript—the imp who knows too much.Buñuel beats them hollow: that square sawed-off head, the ripe, amusable mouth, the martial breadth of brow and chin."[23] Laura Miller, reviewing that collection in The New York Times, wrote that "Lane writes prose the way Fred Astaire danced; his sentences and paragraphs are a sublime, rhythmic concoction of glide and snap, lightness and sting.