Charlie Rose

kevf  07/16/2009 08:38 PM Report

Fascinating and penetrating as usual. Mamet's mind is bell clear.

JLee, one wonders why you would feel it necessary, interesting, or relevant to post snarky epithets against Mr. Mamet. It probably is not worth my time to attempt to point out that your absurd reductionism of Mamet's style demonstrates no appreciation for his insights into human nature and his portrayals of the power of language to conceal, trick, wound, or galvanize. And, one assumes, Aristotle, should he arrive by happenstance, would prefer Mr. Mamet's works to your own. (Just guessing here.)

And regarding your factoids, Mamet is making the point that, these little bits of trivia you bandy, they aren't important in the least.... just fan boy stuff. Learning a skill is non trivial and is worth going into hoc for. Everything else is playing, a prolonging of an adolescence that can never be recovered. A con game designed to employ the previous generation of "marks."

Bryan  04/19/2008 03:27 PM Report

I can't even fathom how high his IQ must be.

HGOBBLER  12/20/2007 09:51 PM Report

Ah civilization hasn't fallen as far as you think. He's a good writer, not Mark Twain but he puts out some good stuff. He has an Ick factor that sometimes comes through in his characters but so what. Yep, college is usually a waste of time, it doesn't take Shakespeare to figure that out.

JLee  10/15/2007 01:42 AM Report

Gore Vidal in a blurb compares Mamet to George Bernard Shaw which is less of a complement than a symptom how far our civilization has fallen. Mamet has, in my opinion, one singular talent--a fine ear--that he's milked as far as one pap can be milked. Otherwise he is the most popular writer possessing the least imagination.

A brute with a tuned ear, he seems incapable of writing a single line of dialog approaching an epithet. Instead, we get in his "celebrated style," a character trying to say something without the character really saying anything--a fit of verbal epilepsy he calls "poetry."

I think this newest batch of essays to be poison to the beginning writer. He pushes relentlessly, to knife point, Artistole's Unities and Eisenstein's Montage, and damns anyone who doesn't follow them--and him.

But one wonders whether Mamet understands Aristotle was exposed only to Greek drama, which his "Poetics" dissected, and that the Italian Opera, the Japanese Noah, and the Lyrical French, have crafted all powerful and genuine works of drama that deviates far from Aristotle's maxims--and Mamet's cherished canons.

One also wonders whether Mamet saw Eisenstein's latter and mature films which deviates heavily from Eisenstein's earlier theory of montage--another one of Mamet's cherished canons, never to be broken.

He lambasts higher education--our second oldest institution--as entirely unnecessary, then proceeds to brag a play he wrote "entirely in iambic pentameter--a fact no one has yet perceived." And one concludes Mamet understands neither iambic pentameter nor higher eduction as the iambic was coined to meter pedestrian conversation normal in every day speech--a fact they teach you in college.