Kristen Stewart: The thinking person’s movie star

Tue, 18 Dec 2012 15:00:00 +0000

I met Kristen Stewart somewhat unexpectedly. And I really liked her! I mean, she’s a cagey, cautious person; you can feel her sizing you up while she decides whether you’re an idiot or a nutjob and discerns how much she should stick to polite, neutral remarks. You might be like that, too, if you were 22 years old and the highest-paid actress in the history of Hollywood, and if you had seen an ordinary domestic spat with your boyfriend – the sort of thing a whole lot of 22-year-olds go through, if I remember correctly – become an international front-page tabloid story.

I did not ask her anything about Robert Pattinson or the current state of her love life. Because it’s not my business, and I really don’t care! So if that’s what you want to read, you might have to look elsewhere. But even in a brief and necessarily superficial conversation, I got a few flashes of real personality: Stewart is a young woman with a mischievous wit and a penchant for murmured, foul-mouthed asides who is enthusiastic about her work and also aware that her rocket-like ascension from the little-known indie ingénue of “Into the Wild” and “Adventureland” to a huge superstar has been an incredibly strange story.

Was Jack Kerouac really a hack?

Tue, 20 Nov 2012 01:00:00 +0000

In December, a film adaption of Jack Kerouac’s "On the Road" will hit theaters — featuring Viggo Mortensen, Kristen Stewart, Garrett Hedlund and Kirsten Dunst — providing two great literary opportunities: introducing Kerouac to a new audience, and reexamining the author's legacy in literature.

When "On the Road" was published by Viking in 1957, Jack Kerouac became an overnight sensation, a literary figure who was met with the kind of polarizing emotions of disdain and love that, today, one would have to look to sports to find the worthy contemporary comparison (i.e., LeBron James or Tim Tebow). His fame came, in part, from a New York Times book review by Gilbert Millstein, which hailed the book's publication as a "historic occasion." Millstein wrote, “in so far as the exposure of an authentic work of art is of any great moment in an age in which the attention is fragmented and the sensibilities are blunted by the superlatives of fashion.” Millstein compared "On the Road" to Ernest Hemingway’s "The Sun Also Rises," because both works introduced cultural movements: the Beat Generation and the Lost Generation.

Salon.com > On the Road

Kristen Stewart: The thinking person’s movie star

Was Jack Kerouac really a hack?