“The acting is awful, of course, in a way that reality television has made us all too familiar with.” 

At The New Yorker’s Page-Turner blog, Christine Smallwood discusses the  Criterion Collection set of Norman Mailer films that we’ve been pretty psyched about for the last few months, but ultimately leads us to believe that maybe the Mailer collection isn’t the best place to spend our hard-earned dollars:

“Being on camera is an excuse for him to do accents—Irish, southern, black, Texan—and make noises, avant-garde experimental vocal performances, like he was the Hugo Ball of the nineteen-sixties. The best that can be said—and who knows, maybe this is saying a lot—is that he’s having a great time.”

And there’s also this:

“but Mailer is always grunting, whether he’s exhorting his fellow-criminals to “stay cool” or issuing repeated demands for “cunt.”

But there is also this…

So who knows? Maybe there will be an evening presented by Vol. 1 Brooklyn full of Mailer’s films and bourbon sometime in the future, and then we can all sit down together to decide whether watching the guy’s film output was time well spent or time lost.

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