BE Spoiler (if that's possible now)

[Fiona Shnapple]

Why does Maxine send her kids to a school that has a curriculum in
which each grade level is regarded as a different kind of mental
condition and managed accordingly, a loony bin with homework? March
graduated from Kugelblitz. The principal, Bruce Winterslow knows all
his pupils by name and by thumbnail biography. Kind of an odd place to
send the kids given the school choices in the neighborhood. The kids
have friends at the best schools in the city, and they seem bright
enough to pass the entrance exams at any of the elite schools. Tuition
is not an issue. Maxine went to an ordinary high school, though
founded by an extraordinary woman, Julia Richman. The school, now a
Bloomberg Multiplex school connected through Real Estate transactions
to Hunter, where Maxine went to college, and where Heidi teaches Pop
Culture Studies, was in sad shape when Maxine was enrolled, her
attendance was  understandably poor.

Maybe the school, not on any of the streets Law & Order has filmed on,
and therefore, not quite on the Google Map, isn't as reel as it seems.
Or, is as mad as it seems. Unless, of course, it's a school in the
family sitcom that, on one level, is pure fiction, beyond film, or
after film.

One of the world’s most erudite and entertaining film critics on the
state of cinema in the post-digital—and post-9/11—age. This witty and
allusive book, in the style of classic film theorists/critics like
André Bazin and Siegfried Kracauer, includes considerations of global
cinema’s most important figures and films, from Lars von Trier and Zia
Jiangke to WALL-E, Avatar and Inception.

J. Hoberman is the senior film critic for the Village Voice, where he
has worked for more than thirty years. He is the author of Bridge of
Light, The Magic Hour, The Red Atlantis, Vulgar Modernism, and The
Dream Life (The New Press) and the co-author, with Jonathan Rosenbaum,
of Midnight Movies. He has written for Artforum, the London Review of
Books, The Nation, the New York Review of Books, and the New York
Times, among other publications, and has taught cinema history at
Cooper Union since 1990. He lives in New York.
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