The Worst Ever

My Best Friend's Wedding

Editor's note: This is another guest entry. Sorry. This time I'm really breaking up with her.

The lights in the movie theater dimmed. It was 11:59pm on a Thursday night and I was surrounded by several hundred peers, almost all my gender and age range, many of them dressed like the characters in the movie we were about to see. An excited hush fell over us all and there was a universal quieting. Just before the first preview started, a loud male voice yelled out “Our wait is over!” in a most excited voice. The theater erupted in yells and cheers, smiles and laughs. I turned to my friend and grinned; our wait was over. We were finally going to see Carrie, Charlotte, Miranda, and Samantha again. That’s right! This is Shelly, and you’re about to read a review of Sex and the City: The Movie.

SATC was my first midnight movie and it did not disappoint. Unlike most of you readers, I did not excitedly wait in line for Star Wars or Lord of the Rings at any point and I haven’t recently been inspired to go with Brett to see Iron Man or Live Free or Die Hard. But as the SATC opening date grew closer and closer and was talked about more and more among my friends, I knew it would be a great experience. I planned to see with my very good friend Christa. Neither of us are girly girls; as we were sitting the theater marveling at the people around us, she whispered to me that she thought she would hate 98% of people sitting in that theater. I argued against it, saying that we were there and not like all those other girls, and we had already seen some friends there. But I kept what she said in mind as the previews ended and the crowd, not for the first or last time, broke into giddy applause.

I realized, while watching the adventures of the girls for two and a half hours, that many of us were watching SATC for the same reasons, despite how different we may think we are from each other. Sure, there are some girls out there who went to see SATC to ogle Carrie’s clothes, pick up fashion tips, and listen to Fergie’s abominable “Labels or Love” (which, thankfully, did not play until the closing credits). But for most of us, we are truly in love with the characters. We’ve spent hours and hours with Carrie, watching her analyze her relationship with Big. We’ve watched rerun after rerun of Samantha having sex with a new guy – we can even tell where the nude scenes are cut out on TBS. We’ve cringed at Miranda for her boldness and laughed at her sarcasm dozens of time. We all love Charlotte, with her adorable giddiness always overtaking her WASP tendencies.

Things that I read about SATC suggest that we – and I suppose I’m mostly speaking about women, from around fifteen to forty – like to watch it to see the friendship. We all want friends like our four heroines, no one quite has this near-perfect group of friends, we all think everyone else does. Perhaps, mostly, this is true. I can admit I’ve watched Miranda make a comment and thought, “That’s exactly what Christa would say,” or compared my friend Keally’s wholesomeness to Charlotte’s. But I think the characters speak to us more as aspects of ourselves. I want to be just like Carrie, of course, but I want to be like Samantha, Miranda, and Charlotte as well. So do all the girls I know, who, without exception, are looking forward to this movie. We all see ourselves in our four fictional friends.

Other people I know, particularly men, want to simplify my four fabulous friends. They want to say Carrie is the normal one, Charlotte is the happy one, Samantha is the slutty one, Miranda is the cynical one. But true SATC fans – ones who can cringe at episodes of season one but still cheer when they find them on TBS late at night – see deeper into each of the girls. We know Charlotte has problems, Samantha falls in love, Miranda finds happiness. We watch them try for the things they want and fail. We watch them cry, laugh, grow old, and, in the movie, poop their pants. We don’t want everything that happens to them to happen to us, but we feel as though, if it did, we would be prepared – whether or not we have three distinct friends to help us through.

I hate to reduce SATC to a formula, but if it is one, it works damn well (as do other great formulaic programs like House). In TV episodes, in general, Carrie has a big problem having to do with love and the episode revolves around her narration. Each of her friends deals with something smaller, likely having to do with a man or a big life decision. They all meet several times over the course of the episode, either at a meal or at a night out, to hash out their problems and make witty remarks to each other. New York is prominently featured. By the end of the episode, Carrie is narrating a happy end or a continuation of problems, but always with insights about the bigger picture that she later weaves into the column she writes for an imaginary newspaper. The episodes are sequential but, as we all know from watching late-night TV, it is satisfying to catch a random show and feel like you’ve caught up with your old friends.

The SATC movie did not mess with the formula too much. The movie began with a brief introduction by Carrie, who, over some short and funny montages, summarized the lives of her and her friends throughout the series and in the five years since the series ended, when the movie takes place. This serves two purposes: delightfully letting fans reminisce about funny lines and situations while filling in the occasional newbie or dragged-by-his-girlfriend male viewer. Carrie’s narration throughout the film is in short spurts, and never seems forced, as some episodes of SATC were.

The rest of the movie follows along just as we want it to, without feeling predictable or fake. There were no truly surprised gasps in the crowd, but for this we are glad; we did not come to see this movie to be surprised or to watch any one of our longtime friends do anything too out of character. I feel like I knew what each scene would bring just moments before it happened, but then I was delighted when it did. Not all the lines in the movie were as funny as the director wanted them to be, but most of them made us laugh anyway. Without giving too much away, I can say that the plot does indeed revolve around Carrie and Big’s ever-dramatic relationship. Samantha, Charlotte, and Miranda are still with Smith, Harry, and Steve, respectively, and their dramas unfold nicely, always having something to do with Carrie but, again, not feeling forced.

Carrie spends part of the movie being too depressed even to cry and, in the movie theater, you could almost hear everyone thinking peppy thoughts, trying to cheer her up. We all were devastated for her and felt sadness in our own hearts. Almost every time Charlotte talked, we all laughed and cheered for her. Her character, which had always seemed a bit extreme and too perfect to me during the show, was incredibly fun to watch during the movie. During the movie, Christa leaned over and said “I love Charlotte!” to me at least twice. Each time I felt the exact same way. That being said, I think her plotline was the only one that felt a little too neatly wrapped up, that was pulled together so easily and quickly. Yet she is just too damn cute for us to care. As for Miranda, we feel her emotions with her as the movie rides along: she feels guiltier and guiltier as the movie progresses and she keeps her first-ever secret from Carrie. We feel guilty just watching, as though we could scream it out to Carrie and change the course of the movie. When Miranda does confess, we manage to feel Carrie's emotions as well. It’s a lovely rollercoaster. Finally, I was impressed by Samantha’s plotline. Oftentimes in the television show, Samantha was reduced to being the slutty one: she scorns love when Carrie moans about it; she is shown having fabulous sex when a laugh or happy part is needed. In the movie, Samantha had much more of an interesting plot than most of her sitcom time. As we saw her morph into someone she wasn’t, we were sad for her; we understood when she did what she had to do.

There was also the added character, played by Jennifer Hudson, of Carrie’s assistant. Louise (who, being from St. Louis and into Louis Vuitton, was the subject of endless puns) came into Carrie’s life briefly and was a low point in the movie, both in character and plot. A text after the movie from Christa asked why Carrie bothered to have an assistant after years of success; the only true answer the movie gave was to help her unpack and move boxes. The scene when Carrie interviews potential assistants was the most clichéd of the film, and no one was really happy for Louise when she found love – we were mostly glad that she was leaving and we could focus back on our girls. The other peripheral characters were all well-played and just as we remembered them: easygoing Smith, wishy-washy Big, dependable Harry, well-meaning Steve.

The movie does a great job creating scenes that are memorable, fun, and seem realistic as well. Early on, Carrie gathers the girls in her old apartment to help her pack up her closet. In a scene that seemed like it could belong in a Saved by the Bell episode – if SBTB characters grew up, got rich, and were obsessed with labels – Carrie plays “Walk This Way” by Run-DMC and models some of her older fashions, much to the joy of her friends and her viewers. Perhaps we don’t own quite the array of clothes Carrie does, but we’ve all tried on extreme outfits in the dressing room with a friend or two, giggling and inadvertently torturing salespeople. In another scene, Carrie and Big fight. It’s extremely realistic, making viewers feel uncomfortable, as though they are watching their parents hash it out over a late credit card bill. Even the scenes in Mexico, where the girls are somewhat in mourning and our familiar New York does not offer its backdrop, the scenes are lush and the characters are versions of the ones we know.

There is an inevitable water-breaking/birth/hospital scene, as there seems to be in most movies I’ve seen lately, but it neatly furthers the action and does not show the birthing process or make us sweat through any kind of nervous hospital waiting. As the end of the movie approaches, it is just what we, the dedicated viewers, want. When the series aired its final episode, there were two false endings: first, a Carrie and Big romantic reunion and then Carrie reuniting with and surprising the girls straight from Paris. The series ended, however, with Carrie walking down the street alone, reflecting on relationships, and deciding that her relationship with herself was most important. While I won’t say just how the movie ends, I did find it more satisfying than seeing Carrie all alone in the streets of the city.

Overall, seeing the movie at midnight was a fun, exciting way to fill some hours that had, in the past, been filled by watching SATC on the small screen, episode after episode on DVD when insomnia struck. The atmosphere of that showing, with hundreds of dedicated and exuberant fans willing to burst into applause multiple times and laugh without holding back, only added to the experience. I would recommend a midnight release of this kind to any twentysomething female who’s never been to such a showing; I would recommend Sex and the City: The Movie to anyone who’s a fan of the show.

Classic '80s Movie Clip of the Day

I know you've already seen the "Send Me an Angel" scene from Rad, but I never tire of it.



Bicycle-dancing is so much cooler than regular dancing.

Slow Day

∙ It looks like Brett Ratner will direct Eddie Murphy in Beverly Hills Cop 4. Really, hasn't just about everything that Brett Ratner has ever done been leading up to this? Can Judge Reinhold play an Asian kung-fu expert?

∙ Ian McEwan is giving people another reason not to go to the opera.

∙ If you liked the Spider-Man movies, you'll love this.

Fergie Attempts to Seduce 7-Year-Olds

Well, I'm not sure seduce is the right word, but she does slither around on the ground in front of them in a distinctly inappropriate manner during this clip from a "Today Show" performance that took place last week. It's pretty funny to watch, but I feel sort of bad for her as well. The show begins at the 2:50 mark.



Not everyone wants to feel your hump, Fergie.

She also does a couple one-handed cartwheels at 3:11, which surprised me because, for a pop star, she's unusually graceless elsewhere. In addition, I think she may be simulating fellatio on the guitarist at about 2:13

The song sucks too.

Goodbye, Sydney Pollack

Filmmaker Sydney Pollack died yesterday. The cause was cancer. He was 73.

I am sorry to see him go. He was a good director, responsible for a number of good movies, including They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, Three Days of the Condor, and Tootsie. Out of Africa is better than I expected it to be, and The Firm better than it ought to be; Pollack probably is responsible in each case.

When he chose to appear on screen, I was always pleased. I enjoyed him as an actor in Tootsie, Husbands and Wives, and, more recently, Michael Clayton.

I hope he will forgive me if I skip what has turned out to be his final performance, in Made of Honor.

Happy Memorial Day!

Before Memorial Day became officially recognized as a celebration of barbecue, the beach, and children's soccer tournaments, it had something to do with commemorating Americans who died in military service. Joyce Kilmer, who wasn't a great poet but did hail from my neck of the woods, composed a rhyme about it.

"Memorial Day"

The bugle echoes shrill and sweet,
 But not of war it sings to-day.
The road is rhythmic with the feet
 Of men-at-arms who come to pray.

The roses blossom white and red
 On tombs where weary soldiers lie;
Flags wave above the honored dead
 And martial music cleaves the sky.

Above their wreath-strewn graves we kneel,
 They kept the faith and fought the fight.
Through flying lead and crimson steel
 They plunged for Freedom and the Right.

May we, their grateful children, learn
 Their strength, who lie beneath this sod,
Who went through fire and death to earn
 At last the accolade of God.

In shining rank on rank arrayed
 They march, the legions of the Lord;
He is their Captain unafraid,
 The Prince of Peace . . . Who brought a sword.

OK, that wasn't so painful. Have fun out there!

Remembering Raymond

Today is the 70th birthday of Raymond Carver.

Carver, who wrote plainspoken stories about blue-collar workers and alcoholics, died in 1988. He was perhaps the best short story writer of his time, and because his writing seemed so simple -- straightforward sentences, using words we all know, addressing subjects we all know -- he inspired more imitators than any other short story writer of his time. Writers' workshops all across America have produced millions of them. I only hope that the would-be Carvers do not make anyone forget about the real Carver. Their stories need not exist; his seem as though they must have existed even before he wrote them. It appears to me that, no matter how many ape his style, the style will, in his hands, always remain fresh and original. In his stories, it is not an affectation; it is the sadness of life, speaking. Where his followers' prose is lifeless, his surges with desperation and longing. Similarly, Carver's work stands above that of his contemporaries. He is termed a dirty realist, but he is better than Richard Ford. He is termed a minimalist, but he is better than Amy Hempel.

When I reread What We Talk About When We Talk About Love or Cathedral, the epigones don't cross my mind. Nor does Ford or Hempel. In fact, not even Gordon Lish does. The stories are too absorbing, too good to think about anything else.

Myth-ing Robert Asprin

I've just learned that fantasy/sci-fi author Robert Asprin passed away on Thursday. He was 61 years old.

When I was a kid, from roughly fourth grade to seventh grade, Asprin was my favorite novelist. His picaresque Myth saga, about an apprentice magician named Skeeve and his scaly mentor Aahz, was a delight; I devoured every book. I also enjoyed the Phule series, a sort of futuristic M*A*S*H.

I was never a sci-fi or fantasy fanatic; Asprin's works appealed to me as comedies. He specialized in wacky, slapstick adventures involving larger-than-life personalities and amusing alternate dimensions, and, to me, they were very funny. I have no idea how well his writing would hold up if I went back and looked at it today, but I know regardless that he had a talent for creating affable characters whom one eventually regards more as friends than as fictional creations. As I recall, his later MythAdventures -- he returned to the books in 2001 after an eight-year hiatus -- lacked the lively imagination of the first novels, but he was still writing them at the time of his death, and perhaps he regained the spark at some point during the past couple years. I wouldn't know. But I'm sure I'll always think very fondly of his early books, particularly Another Fine Myth and Myth Conceptions.

Rest in peace.

Only You Can Prevent Forest Fires

A couple months after its publication in 2007, Denis Johnson's Vietnam epic Tree of Smoke won November's National Book Award for fiction. I have only just recently read it. I do not regret waiting. I regret putting an end to my waiting.

With this book, you know you're probably in for an unpleasant time when you see the cryptic dedication: "Again for H.P. and Those Who." That's not a typo -- at least not on my end. Readers more acquainted with Johnson have suggested that H.P. stands for "Higher Power." Uh-oh. Well, now that I've read the novel, I don't doubt it. Johnson doesn't seem like a big Lovecraft fan. No one, as far as I know, has tried to decode "Those Who."

Tree of Smoke manages to have a pretty complex plot and, at the same time, almost no plot at all. A lot of things happen without adding up to much. Johnson barrels through the 1960s like a clumsy fullback, butting heads with big events and small lives, moving from character to character and country to country, accumulating philosophical and psychological debris, creating ugly scenes, piling detail upon detail, without really telling a coherent story. Like a social novel, his book is long and chases the spirit of the times in which it's set -- by typically inane techniques such as naming the popular musicians of the day (I spotted the Beatles, the Kinks, the Rolling Stones, Nancy Sinatra, Stan Getz, and Peter, Paul and Mary) -- but it's kookier and less analytical. Mostly, Tree of Smoke is about William "Skip" Sands, a young CIA operative, and his uncle, Colonel Francis Xavier Sands, an iconoclastic Übermensch and CIA legend. It's also about brothers Bill and James Houston and their wartime experiences. In addition, it features a Seventh-Day Adventist named Kathy Jones and a few Vietnamese characters who never quite take shape. In her rave review, Michiko Kakutani writes, "[Skip] is drawn willy-nilly into a complicated plot involving a double agent -- a Vietcong sympathizer, who apparently agrees to carry out a mission for the Americans -- and finds himself increasingly unable to distinguish between the good guys and the bad guys, the earnest and the duplicitous, the idealistic and the mercenary." By this, Kakutani means that she doesn't really know what's going on during this segment of the book. Either she lacked interest in figuring it out, or Johnson was too ambiguous. For me, I think it was a little of both.

I read a lot of reviews of Tree of Smoke. One was a pan; most were panegyrics. Not one of them convinced me that the critic praising the book really loved it. Nearly every review included an "I'm as sick of Vietnam books as you are" admission, followed by an injunction that we pull ourselves together and wave such feelings aside for what must be the most important novel of the past half decade: I mean, just look at the size of this thing! Among the most common words in the reviews was ambitious: A quick glance on the web locates it in the New York Times, The New York Review of Books, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and TIME. Ambitious is generally intended as a compliment but, to me, is actually a warning: We think of the largeness of a book's ambitions mostly when the book has failed to achieve them. And Johnson does fail. He tries to be Conrad and fails. He tries to be Whitman and fails. He tries to be Melville and fails. He tries to be Tim O'Brien and fails. He tries to be Robert Stone and succeeds, if you can call such a feat a success.

If we are speaking of comparable artists and works, we must, in addition to Robert Stone, mention Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now, which I also did not like. Yet, although Johnson evokes that movie, as well as The Deer Hunter and Who'll Stop the Rain, more than he does Platoon, much of Tree of Smoke is really like Oliver Stone at his worst: self-important, boorish, bombastic, feverish with cocaine energy. "Its prose has been put on steroids and fed a diet of red meat," says John Freeman, who apparently thinks this is a good thing, in the Philadelphia Inquirer. I'd prefer not to bring the critics into this, but, since Johnson wrote a novel for critics rather than sane readers, what else can I do?

There is a kind of critic who craves nothing more than a novel that spans decades and addresses world-changing episodes of history, who worries not whether America has any really good writers but whether America has any really important writers. This critic needed Denis Johnson to write Tree of Smoke. Aside from DeLillo, we have in our nation very few writers who give some thought to literary style and attempt to write expansive, epoch-defining novels without resorting to cartoonish comedy or postmodern hijinks to sustain them. I am OK with this. I could probably name twenty novelists, including dead ones, whose intelligence, in my view, justifies their writing 600-page novels, and Denis Johnson, whose Tree of Smoke clocks in at 614, is not one of them. Yet, with Norman Mailer dead and Jonathan Franzen in hibernation, someone must appease the big-novel addicts, and I suppose they'll take what they can get. Johnson has stepped up to the plate. Even Mailer required two books to examine Vietnam and the CIA; Johnson does it in one wallop of a novel. He used to write short stories.

When I indicated in the previous paragraph that Johnson gives "some thought to literary style," I did not mean to indicate that his style is, consequently, good. It isn't. But he thinks about it; he likes oddly placed words and unconventionally structured sentences. Take this, for example: "[Kathy] went quickly through the entry and out, slapping her hands on the bicycle she'd parked out there and kicking at its kickstand, a black bicycle." I do not know why the color of the bicycle is significant, but, if it is, why didn't Johnson modify the first bicycle with black instead of tacking the whole phrase onto the end of the sentence, as if it were in apposition with kickstand? I'm not sure, however, that this is worse than the opening sentence: "Last night at 3:00 a.m. President Kennedy had been killed." The trouble is that he had been killed at 4:00 a.m. and at 5:00 a.m., too. Twenty years later, he still had been killed. What Johnson means, I suppose, is that, at 3:00 a.m., the news of Kennedy's death reached the Philippines, where the novel begins, but, if he were to say that, he would lose all that edgy, terse immediacy in his version.

In the sections set in the dreary part of Arizona where the Houston brothers grew up, Johnson affects a desolate tone, lending his pen to guys who use the word feller and the phrase Ain't that the shits? and to "their happy, whorish girlfriends." The Houstons' mother, who drives a pickup and works on a ranch, "fling[s] herself at the Bible like a bug at a window." In his review, Jim Lewis quotes this line with admiration: "She had nothing in this world but her two hands and her crazy love for Jesus, who seemed, for his part, never to have heard of her." Johnson would like to convey a bleak, sweeping vision of a forlorn white-trash America, full of drunkards, dropouts, and jailbirds; instead, he sounds like a bad country song.

In Vietnam, we meet a number of characters roughly as unappealing as the ones in the United States, including soldiers with phony, "colorful" monikers like "Screwy Loot" and "Black Man." The servicemen are crude and inarticulate; they describe Vietnam as a "God-fucked shit-hole" and have long, dull, "realistic" conversations. One of their favorite topics is penis size:

I always thought you were a little-dick sonafabitch. (page 12)
His girl said, "I like tiny-tiny. I don't like big dick." (page 208)
I'm a black man with a black dick. But it ain't that big. (page 234)

To some people, this is terrifically accurate account of the way men talk; to others, it's juvenile and boring. I am of the latter opinion.

Skip, for his part, is a blank slate, and Colonel Sands is too blustery to endure for long:

"[Kennedy] was a beautiful man," the colonel said. "That's why we killed him."
"We?"
"The dividing line between light and dark goes through every heart. Every soul. There isn't one of us who isn't guilty of his death."
"This is sounding--" Skip didn't want to say it. Religious. But he said it. "This is sounding religious."
The colonel said, "I'm religious about my cigars. Otherwise . . . religion? No. It's more than religion. It's the goddamn truth. Whatever's good, whatever's beautiful, we pounch, and whap! See those poor critters?" He pointed at the wires of the bug-killing device, where insects crashed and flared briefly. "The Buddhists would never waste electricity like that. Do you know what 'karma' is?
"Now you're getting religious again."
"By God, I am. I'm saying it's all inside us, the whole war. It is religion, isn't it?
"What war are you talking about? The Cold War?"
"This isn't a Cold War, Skip. It's World War Three."

Colonel Sands (it has an unfortunate KFC echo, doesn't it?) cannot avoid making a few grandiose pronouncements in every conversation. Eventually, one can regard him only as a joke.

Johnson, however, is deadly serious all the time. The characters' dick references notwithstanding, Tree of Smoke is the most humorless novel I've read in months. On the back of the book jacket, Franzen, eager to humiliate himself, states, "The God I want to believe in has a voice and a sense of humor like Denis Johnson's," but there's not a funny line in this tome. Johnson has the stupid, intense earnestness of his character James Houston when the latter says, "I want to see it, the real deal, the real shit." Perhaps Johnson has his heavy-handed view of life as a grave spiritual war between light and dark because he's an ex-junkie; he's about as jocular as a support group. But he isn't just asking for our support; with a novel like this, he's asking for our reverence. He writes, in messianic tones, of sin, sacrifice, and salvation. There isn't much combat in Tree of Smoke, but Johnson is on the front lines in the spiritual war, in the real shit, and he's far beyond kidding.

What can we do with a novelist of such thick-skulled seriousness and such weighty ambitions? We can submit to his gravitas and offer him a few more awards, or else we can refuse to take him seriously at all, which is the best way I know to deal with people whose worldview is devoid of comedy. As Colonel Sands becomes risible, so does Denis Johnson. The best clown is the stone-faced clown, and the best response to Tree of Smoke and its admirers is laughter. It's unfortunate that some dumb kids get their hands on Heart of Darkness and are badly affected by it, but what can we do about it except laugh? Of course, it'll never reach Denis Johnson's ears; his attention is directed elsewhere. That's all right. If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, it still makes a sound.

Indiana Who?

If you think I care that Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was released today, you're sorely mistaken, pal.