The professional reputation of a Los Angeles newspaper's movie critic will forever live in this line written about his work:
"He never met a movie he didn't like."
That put-down explained the reviewer's choice to operate as a Hollywood insider, with all the access to power that he desired, rather than as an independent thinker in service to moviegoers.
Which brings me to a delicious sentence in a negative review of a book about the life and career of the singer Ella Fitzgerald. The book's author is Judith Tick, a former professor of music history at Northeastern University in Boston.
New York Times reviewer Dwight Garner wrote:
"Academic language creeps like mold into this biography." Garner goes on: "The verbiage is as impersonal as a rental car agreement."
He does acknowledge that, twice in Tick's 592 pages, she did write well: first, about Fitzgerald's eight record albums that "laid the foundational stones for what would soon be known as the Great American Songbook" (which includes songs by composers and lyricists including Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, George and Ira Gershwin, Jerome Kern, Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart, and Oscar Hammerstein).
Next, Garner appreciates Tick's account of the last days of Fitzgerald's life; he summarized it with this passage:
