He Lost It at the Movies

The film critic A.S. Hamrah came to widespread attention in the late 2000s with a new form, a knockabout variant of the capsule reviews familiar to readers of Cahiers du cinéma and Halliwell’s Film Guide. As he explains in “Remember Me on this Computer,” the introduction to his first collection The Earth Dies Streaming, he was asked by Keith Gessen, an editor at the Brooklyn-based magazine n+1, to write a column on the films nominated for the 2008 Oscars. Hamrah, about forty at the time, declined the commission, explaining that he was too busy with his work as a brand analyst. So Gessen proposed that Hamrah just watch the films and share his thoughts over the phone. “Oscar Preview” started with three sentences on driving in Michael Clayton. The entry devoted to the Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men, read, in its entirety, “Whenever Javier Bardem took out that pressure hose and put it to someone’s head, I kept waiting for his victim to go, ‘Ouch! Stop it! Why are you doing that? That hurts! Cut it out.’”