The Worst Ever

With Friends Like These . . .

I recently came across a high-profile petition addressed to the Swiss courts, asking for the release of Roman Polanski. It was written more than a month ago by the French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy and was signed by Salman Rushdie, Milan Kundera, Mike Nichols, and Paul Auster, among other celebrities. Take a look:

Apprehended like a common terrorist Saturday evening, 26 September, as he came to receive a prize for his entire body of work, Roman Polanski now sleeps in prison.

He risks extradition to the United States for an episode that happened years ago and whose principal plaintiff repeatedly and emphatically declares she has put it behind her and abandoned any wish for legal proceedings.

Seventy-six years old, a survivor of Nazism and of Stalinist persecutions in Poland, Roman Polanski risks spending the rest of his life in jail for deeds which would be beyond the statute of limitations in Europe.

We ask the Swiss courts to free him immediately and not to turn this ingenious film-maker into a martyr of a politico-legal imbroglio that is unworthy of two democracies like Switzerland and the United States. Good sense, as well as honour, require it.

Are artists and intellectuals doomed always to embarrass themselves so thoroughly in matters of this kind? Are smart people really so stupid?

This morally lofty letter can't withstand the smallest bit of moral scrutiny. Forget the idiotic opening line, with its implicit complaint that Polanski was treated commonly and not like the sort of person who is friends with Bernard-Henri Lévy -- and that, by arresting him before an awards ceremony, the police deviated from some gentlemanly code of honor that officers of the law should be obliged to follow when arresting rapists. Forget the trite and simplistic suggestion that the Nazis or the Stalinists caused Polanski to rape that 13-year-old -- or that, in surviving those villains, he accumulated such a stockpile of suffering as to offset any future wrongdoing on his part. Forget even that the subject and the verb disagree in the last sentence. (Seriously?)

The real embarrassment is that phrase in the penultimate sentence: "ingenious film-maker." When I began reading the letter, I was truly hoping Lévy could make it to the end without bringing that up. Yes, Polanski is an ingenious filmmaker, but can someone tell me how that is the least bit relevant?

Everyone who values art knows the frustration of hearing philistines try to discredit a great artist by bringing up unpleasant details of his life (he was a racist, a sexist, an anti-Semite). We know that a novel or poem is good or bad irrespective of the private misdeeds or kindnesses of its author. Indeed, I would venture to guess that every person who signed Lévy's letter knows this. But if a bad life cannot make great art less great, then it follows that great art cannot make a bad life less bad. So when we're talking about Roman Polanski's life, it doesn't matter that Chinatown and Tess were terrific films.

This seems pretty elementary to me, and perhaps not even those who signed this letter would argue against it, but by tossing in that ostensibly casual reference to Polanski's brilliance, Lévy tacitly makes an opposing claim: Roman Polanski is a genius, and that must be considered. He exposes the foolish reason why he and his cosigners are really on the criminal's side. Polanski is an artist, and they like his movies. Who would petition for the release of a garbageman who sodomized a 13-year-old? For a defender of Roman Polanski to have credibility, we must be able to believe that said defender would equally support a talentless, unlikable, uneducated rapist, even if the victim were that defender's own daughter. Who can believe that of a writer who, in his letter, invokes the word "film-maker" but leaves out the word "rape"?

Some commentators have pointed out that, if Polanski were not a famous filmmaker, he would not have been hunted down -- that the United States is just flexing its muscles in a high-profile case. This is correct but, ultimately, also irrelevant. If other people get away with rape, it does not follow that we must lament the one who gets caught; we might instead lament that the others get away. If what Polanski did is wrong, then it is wrong no matter how vainglorious his accuser.

The irony of Lévy's protest is that it's more likely to harm Polanski's cause than to help it. In general, people detest the frivolous moral posturing of the intelligentsia, and it probably has aggravated public anger toward Polanski.

Surely there are better reasons to wish for his freedom than the ones insinuated by Lévy. I, too, would prefer to see Polanski freed -- I suspect that he's not a threat to anyone anymore, and I can't say that he deserves to go to jail for what he did, because I have no idea what he or anybody else deserves. I don't think anyone, even a judge, knows what anyone deserves. To me, the only use of a prison is to restrain those whose crimes suggest that they would otherwise be likely to cause harm -- I do not trust it to be an instrument of "justice."

I discovered Lévy's petition in the London Review of Books, which has published a good article by Jenny Diski, in which she discusses Polanski's case in relation to the rape she suffered as a 14-year-old. She suggests that all of us, even Polanski's fans, should face up honestly to what the director did (I agree) and that we "shouldn't worry too much about Polanski's present sleeping arrangements." I don't know about the last part -- as it happens, I don't spend much time worrying about Polanski's sleeping arrangements or anyone else's except my own, but I think I probably should. Maybe this is too easy for me to say, but just as I can't be sure what fate Polanski deserves, I can't really be sure that he deserves less of our concern than others do. I am sure, however, that he does not deserve more of it for having directed excellent movies.

Comedy and the High High Concept

Last month, I watched The Invention of Lying, which has come and gone and was not particularly good. You probably didn't see it, but surely you remember the premise from TV spots: Ricky Gervais lives in a world much like ours, except everyone tells the truth at all times, even to the point of blurting out non sequiturs simply because they are true.

In the movie, Gervais is in love with Jennifer Garner, but she doesn't want "fat, snub-nosed children." She likes him as a friend, however, and says often that he is "nice" and "funny." I suppose these lines seemed natural to Gervais when he wrote the screenplay: the portly heroes of comedies like this one are always nice and funny, which is why we root for them to get the girl.

But what occurred to me during the movie is that Gervais's character, Mark, is not at all funny. Even compared to the male leads in dismal romantic comedies like You've Got Mail and The Ugly Truth, he is not. That's because Mark never actually tries to tell a joke. Comedy does not exist in his world. At the end of the movie's first act, he invents lying; in the second act, he goes one step further and invents religion; he never makes it as far as humor. So it's a silly line for Garner, but the movie is unique: it may be the only comedy where nobody makes a joke.

That's not to say that the film is entirely unfunny -- it has its moments -- but everything that is funny is funny only to us: we laugh because they say things that no one in normal society can say, and like four-year-olds, they say them as though they were perfectly normal things to say. But to the speakers, this is how society works; this is how people act, and Mark, though less cruel than Rob Lowe's character, essentially is no different from anyone else until his groundbreaking discovery. He doesn't really have a personality, humorous or not. Everyone in the film's universe seems slightly lobotomized, actually, and I've wondered if it's merely because the movie is badly written or if this is, to some extent, how we might be in Gervais's scenario: without fiction, we'd lose imagination, and without imagination, we'd lose ourselves. The movie is badly written, but I think there's some truth to the idea it illustrates, too.

But, regardless of whether personalities could exist in The Invention of Lying, I'm certain that humor could not. With truth omnipresent and unbroken, "truth" becomes an irrelevant concept; without its opposite, it has no meaning and so cannot exist. And without truth, comedy disappears. Jokes are funny when they depart from the truth in unexpected ways, push it by exaggeration into ridiculousness, or else uncover it suddenly where falsehood once cloaked it; all jokes depend upon it. What can trigger laughter when everything is in earnest? There can be no shifts in tone, no outlandish perspectives -- except, of course, the fact-driven perspective of everyone in the movie, which is outlandish only to us liars, who eventually get used to it, and then the movie has nothing to offer. We're like children giggling at the unfamiliar ways of foreigners: once they become familiar, we stop giggling.

I'm not familiar with Gervais's other work, but presumably he can tell jokes, so even if The Invention of Lying sounded like a brilliant idea, I think it was actually a very bad one. It straitjacketed him as a comedian. And the reason I'm posting today -- it's not to review a month-old movie that few liked -- is that I began to think of other comedies in the same mode: the sort of comedy for which, instead of concentrating upon inventing funny characters or lines or situations, the screenwriter came up with a really funny central concept, and the premise itself became the movie's main comic attraction. Often these premises are wildly fantastical and sound as those they were devised to make a studio executive laugh in one sentence or less.

There's one that comes to mind easily if you've watched The Invention of Lying, and that's Liar Liar, whose ha-ha premise -- a wheeling-and-dealing lawyer must tell only the truth for one day -- yielded a lot of the same comedy that its younger cousin did. Later on, Jim Carrey did another one of these with Bruce Almighty, in which a normal guy becomes God. Freaky Friday and Down to Earth fit in here, too, but the category doesn't extend to every fantastical comedy: in Back to the Future, for example, the fun is not implied by the synopsis but is in the later twists and in the characters. Likewise, a comedy needn't be fantastical to belong to the aforementioned group: I didn't see I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry (two straight men must pretend to be a gay couple), but it jumps into my brain here, and I suspect that it would fit in with these other films. In each, an overbearing premise dictates all the humor to follow; everything is about this funny idea.

I am thinking of some of the comedies that I like best, and they're all more various than the junk I named in the preceding paragraph. With a superior film, you're not laughing at just one conceit. Summarize A Christmas Story or Clerks in single sentence and see if the concept is funny. Of course, I don't mean to say that the concept must not be funny: the Marx brothers and Woody Allen invented extremely wacky (though not so calculatedly "clever") starting points for their early romps, but in Duck Soup and Bananas, they were only starting points. Later on, Woody Allen did try the high-concept comedy with Zelig (about a man who blends into every place and group), which was technically brilliant, sly, and highly enjoyable but, after all, amounted to a series of skillful exercises on the same theme. It hadn't the freedom to be as funny in as many ways as Annie Hall, and it wasn't. The restrictiveness of this subgenre is antithetical to comedy's natural anarchy: I never was Jim Carrey's biggest fan, but did he ever seem more thoroughly tied down than in Bruce Almighty?

Perhaps so -- it's just occurred to me that he not long ago did what appeared to be another one of these with Yes Man, which, apparently, was about a man who had to say yes to every question he was asked for a year. Does Carrey seek out these "funny concepts" because he himself is not very funny? Maybe he's wise for it, but if Ricky Gervais is funnier than Jim Carrey, he probably should find a movie that does not limit itself to one joke and its protagonist to none.

But, then, I'm probably silly to try to impose my own limits upon comedy. Here I was about to propose a rule -- this sort of thing works, and that sort of thing doesn't -- and then I thought of two terrific exceptions, each of which begins with an amusing what-if that then directs the entire course of the movie. Neither film is as much a story as it is a single notion toyed with again and again. One is truly is a one-joke performance, and it still seems hilarious and profound. Both, in fact, are hilarious and profound. These movies shouldn't work, but here they are: Groundhog Day and Being There.

So, since exceptions don't prove rules (they only prove that most rules are stupid), I give up. Movies can succeed in any fashion and fail in any fashion; they can do anything and do it poorly or well. That's what's fun about them, really. But I'm still not going to see Yes Man.

'2012' Without Frills

I meant to share this when I saw it a couple weeks ago on I Watch Stuff, and for some reason I thought of it today.

This is the trailer for 2012, the upcoming disaster epic by Roland Emmerich (Independence Day), except all the shots featuring special effects have been removed. As the creator of the video notes, the CGI was "really distracting in the other trailers; this one really focuses on the performances."

It reveals what an embarrassing experience this must have been for John Cusack, for whom I suppose this movie involved just sitting around and screaming and making terrified faces. It's like a series of those shots they take of you midway through roller coaster rides. Inexplicably, it ends with a cat playing the keyboard, which I think may actually be a special effect.

C'est Moi!

This is a photo of me at the William R. Perkins library at Duke University. Quinn took it while I was visiting her. She was too truthful an an artist to Photoshop out the pimple I had on my forehead. I still like the picture.

It's a predictably excellent-seeming library, despite huge, skeletal areas of empty shelves in the stacks. (Digitization?!) It has a huge variety of fiction, which maybe isn't always the case with college libraries, although, annoyingly, as I might have guessed, no Herta Müller was in stock. I convinced Quinn to take out five novels for me: Young Törless by Robert Musil, Jakob von Gunten by Robert Walser, The Ballad of Dingus Magee by David Markson, Miss Wyoming by Douglas Coupland, and Home Land by Sam Lipsyte. I can keep them until the end of her spring semester, but I'm sure I'll finish them long before then. They're all pretty short.

I really wish I lived within walking distance of such a place and had perpetual access to its collection. But, of course, if I were a student, I wouldn't have much time to read novels, and I'd probably visit the library only by necessity. Life is funny like that.

Painkillers

I should probably note that the post below this one was written under the influence of oxycodone, which I am taking because I had my wisdom teeth removed yesterday. This post also is being written under the influence of oxycodone. I hardly notice it, and my jaw still really hurts, but I may as well use it as an excuse in case my writing is incoherent.

The Other Story

Recently I've been thinking a bit about novels that take place, to some extent, inside other novels -- books that borrow stories and characters from other writers and then flip things around, telling the tale from the perspective of a minor character, selecting as major plot points episodes only briefly touched upon in the earlier work, and filling in gaps with new occurrences, new people, and new ideas. Famous examples include Grendel and Wide Sargasso Sea.

These are sometimes called "parallel novels." The idea behind the term must be that this new story is transpiring alongside the old one in the same fictional universe, but I think it's a misnomer: parallel lines do not intersect, but here, intersection is the point. The author meets the events of the earlier story from a different angle, mining them for lost details and hidden implications. In the case of Wide Sargasso Sea, "perpendicular novel" seems more appropriate than "parallel novel."

This is hardly a major genre, but there are plenty of reasons for a novelist to be attracted to it. Some merely wish to enter into a dialogue with a great writer. Others attempt to engage the classics in moral warfare, often objecting on ideological grounds to their treatment of certain characters: in Wide Sargasso Sea, the Dominican novelist Jean Rhys humanizes Jane Eyre's madwoman in the attic, the Caribbean first wife of Mr. Rochester, whose insanity Charlotte Bronte unsympathetically traces, with more than a hint of typical 19th-century racism, to her Creole heritage. Margaret Atwood has confessed that The Penelopiad, a wry novella narrated by Odysseus's wife, was inspired by a small incident in the Odyssey that Homer passes over in only a few lines: the senseless hanging of Penelope's 12 maids, a disturbing moment that snagged Atwood's attention when she was a young reader. In Grendel, John Gardner applies a bleakly modern, existentialist worldview to the ancient epic Beowulf, which casts human history as a heroic narrative, the triumphant battle of good against evil, where "good" and "evil" are distinct and knowable. Here, one of Beowulf's villains becomes the protagonist.

Of this fine trio, Wide Sargasso Sea is probably the best book, but I especially relate to Atwood's impetus for writing. The Penelopiad is frequently (and not incorrectly) called a "feminist take" on the Odyssey, but to me it's less a rewrite than it is an expansion. When I think about it, I think about all the times when, listening to an anecdote, I've gotten hung up on the irrelevant details, hoping for the storyteller to explain these, which to me were more interesting than the main thrust of the tale. Atwood explores the directions Homer didn't take; she focuses on the domestic comedies and tragedies that Odysseus's adventure pushed out of the frame and adopts the voices that Homer's homophonic poem could not accommodate.

These books remind us that every story we read or hear is actually just one version of a million potential stories. The story of one football team's thrilling Super Bowl victory is also the story of another's heartbreaking defeat. For the veteran quarterback, the game is the climax of his career; for the rookie wideout who catches one pass, it is an auspicious beginning. For the ant squished in the stadium concourse, it is a tragedy; for the hot dog vendor, it's just another day at work. For the celebrating fan, it's the cause of his DUI, which in turn causes him to quit drinking. For the TV viewer whose wife has left him that day, it's the background noise of devastation.

One of the purposes of storytelling is to whittle the world down to a pleasing size, to shape it in such a way that events, though they may mean many things, do not mean all things; they are part of a beginning or a middle or an end, part of a coherent unit of life for a specific person or group of people, whom they affect in positive or negative or neutral ways. In a story, we do not get every perspective; if we did, the result would be chaos. It would be not a story but life itself, where everything that happens is crucial and insignificant, familiar and distant, ugly and beautiful, happy and sad, clear and opaque, a start and a midpoint and a finish; in short, everything is everything, instead of being something, as stories require. This makes me think that the "omniscient narrator" is a myth; if he really were omniscient, he wouldn't know what to say -- there would be too much. Have you ever driven on a busy highway and considered that every person in every car you see has a life that is as important to him as yours is to you? It's overwhelming.

Another purpose of storytelling is to help us understand the world, and one thing we must understand is that there are countless ways of understanding it. Every detail is worth getting hung up on. This, too, can seem overwhelming. "Parallel novels" both dramatize the problem and chip away at it; each suggests that we must learn to view stories from multiple perspectives, and then it sketches one perspective we might take. It is both hermeneutic and creative, which is, I think, the right way to approach life: subjecting what we see to vigorous interpretation and using our imagination to conjure as much as we can of that which lies outside our field of view.

There are works that function much like Grendel and The Penelopiad without using prior fiction as their starting point. The first such book I read was a children's story called Ben and Me, which told of the life of Benjamin Franklin from the perspective of a mouse, who, according to the author, was largely responsible for many of Franklin's inventions. The 2006 movie Bobby starts with an historical event with which we all are familiar -- the assassination of Robert Kennedy -- but portrays it obliquely, following a chef, a waitress, a singer, and a beautician around the Ambassador Hotel on the day of the shooting and attempting to figure out what June 6, 1968 meant to them. Many films are self-reflexively hermeneutic, inventing a series of events and then revising it again and again as it moves from one character's interpretation of the events in question to another's; this is the influence of Rashomon and can be seen in Courage Under Fire and One Night at McCool's. None of these movies are really great, but their structure makes them more interesting than they might otherwise be.

Writing about all this has also reminded me of a few classic novels like My Ántonia and The Great Gatsby, narratives that are one degree removed from their titular characters. Gatsby is the tragic hero of Fitzgerald's novel, and Ántonia is the heroine of Cather's, but Fitzgerald and Cather do not tell us of Gatsby or Ántonia directly; instead, we see these characters through a couple of less glamorous intermediaries, Nick Carraway and Jim Burden, their neighbors. Nick and Jim are only minor players in the lives of Gatsby and Ántonia, but their interpretations of the novels' protagonists provide additional layers of meaning to their triumphs and tragedies. Episodes in the lives of Gatsby and Ántonia take on a different significance for the onlookers than they do for the participants. Rather than witnessing only Gatsby's lavish lifestyle and doomed yearnings and Ántonia's rough beauty and free spirit, we also learn what they mean to an unambitious bond salesman and a mild-mannered lawyer, who aggregate and analyze details that their idols would ignore. In the end, these inglorious biographers seem as important as their subjects; we care about the fates of Gatsby and Antonia, but we care just as much about how their fates affect their observers, whose modest lives and profound reflections illuminate as much of the human condition as do the fireworks of their charismatic counterparts. Each novel gives us two stories in one -- the story of the doer and the the story of the watcher. The effect is something like having Homer's Odysseus and Atwood's Penelope in the same volume.

Speaking of which, I've done a little Internet research, which has yielded some more novels featuring characters who, like Atwood's Penelope, have been appropriated from famous stories in they played secondary roles and have been repositioned as protagonists. At some point, I'll certainly check out Updike's Gertrude and Claudius, a sort of prequel to Hamlet. Ursula K. Le Guin's Lavinia apparently gives voice to a silent character from Virgil's Aeneid, and it's supposed to be good, but I never finished reading the Aeneid, and I have no idea who Lavinia is, so maybe Tony would get more out of that one. Geraldine Brooks's March, based on Little Women, won the Pulitzer Prize in 2006, but I'm even more unfamiliar with Louisa May Alcott than I am with Virgil, though I feel considerably less guilty about it. Mary Reilly, Valerie Martin's retelling of The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, looks promising, as does Jon Clinch's Finn, which concerns the deadbeat father of Huckleberry Finn. The most famous work of this kind, however, may be a play, not a novel: Tom Stoppard's delightful Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, which, funnily enough, seems to argue against the theory that the minor personages of fiction can, from an alternate perspective, be heroes, too. Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are helpless and interchangeable pawns trapped inside Shakespeare's plot, compelled by forces they don't understand to perform confusing actions and suffer absurd deaths. It's Hamlet's world, and they're just living in it (for now).

While we're on this subject, it may be worth your time to read Anthony Hecht's poem "The Dover Bitch," provided you already know Matthew Arnold's immortal "Dover Beach." It's a funny send-up, which views Arnold's love through the eyes of a sympathetic friend who understands why her relationship with the plaintive Victorian poet didn't work out.

Can you think of any other works belonging to this genre? Which are your favorites?

Recently Viewed (9/25/09)

Extract (2009) - Mike Judge really likes making fun of stupid people. In 2006, he spent the entirety of Idiocracy doing just that, and though Extract replaces its rather hysterical social commentary with the low-key mode of human observation that Judge employed in Office Space, it's still meaner toward working-class people than any other movie I've seen. None of the employees at Jason Bateman's extract plant is smarter than an infant, and all are more unpleasant. The jokes are a little too easy most of the time, and the epiphanies don't always feel as though they've been earned, but it's funny enough, and it's nice to see a movie so concerned about an ordinary, intelligent, slightly boring, slightly unhappy guy who is not suicidal or homicidal. For all its smug cruelty, a pleasingly modest movie.

Lovers on the Bridge (1991) - Unwatchable. A ridiculous combination of sluggish reticence and outlandish, extravagant spectacle more flamboyant and absurd than the dumbest musical. One of the most idiotic French romance films ever made and one of the longest. If you liked L'Atalante, you'll hate this, and if you hated L'Atalante, you'll really hate this.

Taking Woodstock (2009) - An appealingly mild-mannered protagonist and a nice cast all around but a little too slow for a slender comedy that gets by mostly on airy charm. The LSD scene in particular takes way too long to get going, though it leads to visuals much cooler than the ones in Easy Rider's acid trip. Ang Lee's movies rarely have much urgency about them, but Taking Woodstock still is less dull than it probably would have been if it had been directed by an ex-hippie who actually attended the concert; Lee's film focuses on the people of White Lake, not the stage or those clustered around it. Too gentle to be really funny, yet Local Hero managed to do this sort of thing extraordinarily well; I don't really know how.

Wuthering Heights (1939) - I'd never seen this classic all the way through. Based on Emily Brontë's great novel, it excises chunks of the original story so large that, even if you haven't read the book in years, you'll notice that a great deal -- the whole second half, you might say -- is missing. Wyler tries harder to make Heathcliff "sympathetic" than Brontë did, and he's somewhat less awesome as a result, but Olivier is very impressive; in Merle Oberon's hands, Catherine becomes downright insipid. Slightly stilted but not quite camp, the movie retains some of the power of the book thanks in large part to Gregg Toland's deep-focus photography on the Yorkshire moors (actually Ventura County, California, standing in not so unconvincingly, at least for viewers who have never been to Yorkshire), which he shot two years before Citizen Kane. Gets the author's name wrong (she's Brontë, not Bronté) in the opening credits, astoundingly.

24 Hour Party People (2002) - I wasn't the least bit interested in the Manchester music scene of the '70s and '80s, but this movie is pretty brilliant. As the ridiculous but endearing Tony Wilson (played by Steve Coogan) vividly narrates the rise and fall of Factory Records, director Winterbottom's perpetual digressions veer into Wilson's personal life, his day job as a TV reporter, and his fantasies, putting in and leaving out details and events seemingly at random. Winterbottom provides actual footage from the era, into which clever editing allows him to insert his own actors, and he includes cameos by the real people whom his performers are portraying. His characters constantly break the fourth wall, disputing the accuracy of the film and commenting upon its omissions. It sounds like a big, sprawling mess, and it is, but it's infectiously enthusiastic and fun to watch. All the madness makes it feel like a personal history, more authentic somehow than the official story. Even the grimy digital video works here -- the fanzine aesthetic seems right. Coogan is great, very funny. Probably the only good movie about rock music that I've ever seen.

Black and White (1999) - Completely retarded look at the fascinating sociological phenomenon of white kids imitating black kids. A palpable aura of self-satisfaction stemming from (as director Toback would have it) its in-your-face attitude, cutting-edge reportage, and daring analytical brio. Toback is consumed by his subject in a frenzied, delirious way that is utterly antithetical to actual thought; the result is a series of pointless vignettes in which he hasn't a single thing to say, but he says it loudly. Mike Tyson's performance is the best part; fellow athlete Allan Houston doesn't fare nearly as well.

Inglourious Basterds (2009) - By far Tarantino's best work since Pulp Fiction. That's not saying much, and this doesn't approach his 1994 masterpiece, but it's a surprisingly gripping movie. An extremely silly story based on a totally inane and perhaps even offensive idea (Tarantino was tired of Jews always being the "victims" in Nazi movies and wanted to give them a chance to kick some ass too), it is nevertheless very impressive as a series of discrete set pieces; nearly every scene could play as its own short film and entertain. Inglourious Basterds showcases the same ostentatious mastery of dialogue that characterized Tarantino's early work, but it does so without the filmmaker's customary verbosity; here, the marvelously tense pauses are showier than the cleverest lines. The film moves perhaps even more slowly than Jackie Brown did, yet every shot feels ebullient. Scenes achieve just the right balance of wit, suspense, and violence. Christopher Waltz's performance is chilling and funny and altogether remarkable. A great B-movie; still a B-movie.

A Quick Note

I forgot to mention last night that commenters will once again be required to pass a CAPTCHA test here. I wanted to apologize for the inconvenience. Spambots were attacking me, so I had to reactivate that annoying feature.

Sorry.

o hey. a/s/l?

93 days have passed since I last blogged. It feels like about six.

I tried to use my time off productively. I am currently writing a novel and am making better progress than I thought I would. When I began, I suspected that by the end of the summer I might need to step away from the story for a little while in order to assess the first section and ponder the various paths I might take from there. As it happens, I really don't want to do that.

But I do miss blogging, so I have returned, as promised. I no longer have time to blog on a daily basis, but in fact the only reason I designated The Worst Ever a daily blog was that I wanted a reason to write every day. I've found another reason. So things will become informal here -- when I have a thought that I feel like sharing, I'll post it. When a movie or book interests me, I'll write about it, though perhaps not expansively as I used to do.

I may switch from the essayistic style of my longer entries to a more conversational manner. In the midst of writing a novel, I don't know that I'll want to feel here, too, that I am writing for publication, as I've always pretended while composing film reviews, but I know I'll still want to talk to you guys. I don't have any schedule in mind, but I hope you'll continue to stop by once in a while.

In any case, it would be awful of me to return from my vacation empty-handed, so here's the trailer for Powder 2: Powder 2 the People, which reimagines the touchy-feely melodrama Powder as a 1970s teen flick produced by Roger Corman:

It's not a real movie, but it should be.

Longest Break Yet

I know you'll be devastated, but I've decided not to blog this summer. I'll miss reviewing the summer movies, but I want to do something else for a while.

This time, I'm not going on vacation. There are other projects that I need to work on -- projects that will, I hope, help me become a more serious and more imaginative writer. I need to concentrate on these. And because I'm an unbelievably slow worker, I won't have time to provide even the meager fare that I regularly offer here.

I'll check in on September 8, the Tuesday after Labor Day. Have a great summer.