essays

[Dallas Morning News, December 22, 2004]

In this corner, ladies and gentlemen, we have Leonardo DiCaprio, adorable star of "Titanic," "Catch Me If You Can," and now, "The Aviator." In the other, we have - oh, pick a name. Clark Gable, Cary Grant, even Jimmy Stewart, for cryin' out loud. Notice any difference?

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[National Review Online, December 19, 2004]

When I got home from seeing "Lemony Snicket," I read through "The Bad Beginning," the first in the 11-volume series about the unfortunate Baudelaire children. What with small pages and large print, it took about an hour. There I discovered that thing more precious than gold in publishing circles: a unique authorial voice. Daniel Handler, writing under the pseudonym "Lemony Snicket," narrates in a quietly morose, worried tone, recounting events that go from bad to worse and then worse again. The Baudelaires -- Violet, Klaus, and baby Sunny, who bites -- were left parentless by a fire that destroyed their home, and have been placed in the care of a distant, evil relative, Count Olaf.

If you've never read any of these books, you think you can write it yourself from here. You can't.

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[National Review Online, December 10, 2004]

Director James L. Brooks works hard; in such films as "Terms of Endearment," "Broadcast News," and "As Good as it Gets" he's laboring all the time to tickle your heartstrings and wring a tear from your funnybone. When it all comes together, that's entertainment, buster. But with "Spanglish," you get the feeling a whole other movie was left on the cutting room floor.

It's a shame, because the point this movie is trying to make turns out to be a good one: parents should make sacrifices for their children, noble self-discipline is good, impulsive self-indulgence is bad, and breaking up a marriage, even a desperately unhappy marriage, is very bad.

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[Beliefnet, December 13, 2004]

In this tense post-election climate there's a tendency to look for suspicious messages in everything but the stickers on grocery-store produce. That's the only way I can explain a writing assignment that included these instructions: "I need you to go to a movie and find out whether the shark is gay."

Now, sharks have done some memorable things in American movies, but this would be a first. Granted, they're usually engaged in disrupting social norms, but not in the size-twelve-high-heels way.

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[Touchstone, December 2004]

Recently a friend drew my attention to an exchange of letters between a mid-twentieth-century novelist and a lady. The lady thought the novelist was naughty and proceeded to lecture him about the unseemly content of his books. The novelist - and we can imagine bright, eager eyes over a mischievous grin - replied by thanking the woman profusely for rescuing him from error, and concluded by begging her to send a photo so he could see what true Christian charity looks like. A very satisfying put-down, in my friend's opinion.

It got me thinking, though. For one thing, this wasn't a fair fight.

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[National Review Online, December 3, 2004]

This is about the saddest movie I've ever seen. Everyone in the movie is sad, everybody cries, everybody (at one time or another) looks like they were knocked down by a garbage truck and dragged down an alley. This is also a movie that has a lot of sex-talk in it; not much action, but about as much explicit description of sexual activity that a script can contain. There might be a connection.

The title "Closer" is intended to mean intimacy, I think, as in "Come closer." But it might also mean the closing events that happen in relationships; lovers run into a moment that is a "closer" and they can't go any further.

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