Bylines Essays! Raise Your Standards!

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	Bylines Essays: Title/Subject/Author
	251) Bloom/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Bloom is an Irish film of the James Joyce novel Ulysses by director Sean Walsh. Let me be up front- I think Ulysses is a vastly overrated book, with moments of superbness and many more moments of wretchedness. It was Joyce, Woolf, and their ilk that started a good deal of art down the road to narcissistic hermeticism. That all said, while the film Bloom is not a great film, in and of itself, it is a good film, with moments of brilliance, and does a far better job at explicating the events of the first Bloomsday, June 16^th, 1904, than the book ever had, despite what pretentious critics say.... Re-Joyce? 252) Godzilla On My Mind/A Fan's Delight/Dan Schneider I have always been a fan of the Godzilla movie series, so when I heard that there was finally going to be a book that dealt with the series in a bit more depth than websites do, but with none of the ridiculous pseudo-intellectualism that has infected such subject matter as the homoerotic sexual dynamics The Three Stooges or capitalist theory’s relevance to Gilligan’s Island, I was pleased.... Yea! 253) Labyrinths/Jorge Luis Borges/Dan Schneider Reading Jorge Luis Borges is like trying to build a brick wall or house without any bricks. He is an eminently quotable, but ultimately forgettable and puerile, writer. This is not to state that there are not some brilliant metaphors, nor outstanding paragraphs, but there is no real intellectual nor philosophical depths to his work, however fanciful and/or fantastic its de-narrative. It is all a surface sheen designed to reflect the biases and imbuements of typical readers.... Going in circles.... 254) Ernest Hemingway/Short Stories/Dan Schneider One of the problems with Ernest Hemingway’s novels- and I’ll admit it’s been years since I’ve read the classics, is that he was like a tomcat constantly needing to piss his masculinity over every page, resulting in my need to turn away from the page. He was capable of soaring poetry in his clipped style, later adapted by such writers as Mickey Spillane, to good effect, yet not a one of the books, save for the novella The Old Man And The Sea, could be termed truly great.... Concise. 255) Monster/DVD Review/Dan Schneider It was about five years after its release that a good friend of mine finally talked me into coming over to his place to watch the film Schindler’s List. His wife was away on business, and he offered free pizza, so I relented. I had resisted the urge to see Steven Spielberg’s schlocksterpiece because I knew, from both Spielberg’s intellectually thin corpus and the reviews I read, that the film was gonna be a disaster of a PC screed.... Theron isn't the only thing that's a mess! 256) Anton Chekhov/Review/Dan Schneider I’d long heard that Russian writer Anton Chekhov had written short stories, but like most people it was on the strength of his plays, those intense little mood pieces, that I knew him best. Granted, I thought the plays uniformly strong, and considered him of a stature near that of a Tennessee Williams or George Bernard Shaw. So revered for decades, was Chekhov, for his dramatic works, that he even had an apothegm called Chekhov’s Gun named after him.... A master. 257) The Aviator/DVD Review/Dan Schneider The problem that almost all biopics have is that they tell far too much of their subjects’ life facts that most of the drama is drained. They never seem to find the important nor key moments in a life in which to imbue the tale, rather they cram a life with minutia, and miss out on any real insight. Such it is with Martin Scorsese’s latest film, now out on DVD. The Aviator spans twenty or so years in the life of Howard Hughes.... Biopics suck! 258) John Cheever/Review/Dan Schneider Of all the archetypal New Yorker short story writers of the Twentieth Century- John O’Hara, John Updike, Alice Adams, J.D. Salinger- perhaps the best of them was John Cheever- and he was certainly the best of the three big Johns. That said, I do not particularly like John Cheever’s stories. Of the over sixty tales in this collection a good thee quarters involved characters that do not personally interest me- mid-Twentieth Century upper crust whites, martini-totaling who seem as stranded on the island of Manhattan.... Necessary medicine. 259) Jersey Girl/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Ben Affleck can act? Strike the question mark- Ben Affleck can act! In the first film I ever saw him in, Chasing Amy, by Kevin Smith, I had no doubt. Then, I saw every film he’s made since, and I assumed that Chasing Amy was the exception. Having heard the reviews, last year, of the latest Smith-Affleck film.... Affleck can act! 260) Alexander/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Late last year Alexander, director Oliver Stone’s film version of the life of Alexander the Great, came out to dismal reviews and worse box office. There were controversies over its portrayal of the bisexuality of its protagonist, as well as the poor screenplay, stilted dialogue, and many other things. Apparently, for the DVD version, Stone insisted on issuing only the Director’s Cut, not the theatrical version, for he claimed the theatrical version had been bowdlerized, and made more linear.... Stone's senescence shows. 261) Kundera/Lightman/Dan Schneider I recently read Alan Lightman’s Reunion and Milan Kundera’s Ignorance, and much similar in the two books, unfortunately in the most negative light. Both involve reunions of former lovers. The former takes place all in the mind of a professor going to his thirtieth college reunion, and the later takes place in the Czech Republic.... Turn out the lights. 262) Close Range/Annie Proulx/Dan Schneider Annie Proulx is one of those writers who is not far from being a great writer, but is not really a good writer either. Or so I can state, at least in reference to this collection of short stories, Close Range: Wyoming Stories. Yet, this is no paradox, because any writer whose been to a writing group encounters mostly bad writers, some polished writers, who have nothing to say, and no real talent.... Stereotypes by the dozens! 263) Sixty Stories/Donald Barthelme/Dan Schneider To start this essay and review I need to tell you what Donald Barthelme was- a fantasist; and a really bad one, at that. I will explain this in the bulk of this piece. But first, I need to briefly tell you the many things he was not, despite the many claims to the contrary by disciples, sycophants, and bad critics.... The point at which garbage becomes shit, or vice-versa! 264) Foundation/Isaac Asimov/Dan Schneider A couple of months ago I picked up a leather-bound book that had six Isaac Asimov novels in it. It contains the Foundation and Robot trilogies, consisting of Foundation, Foundation And Empire, Second Foundation, The Stars, Like Dust, The Naked Sun, and I, Robot. The Foundation trilogy won a Hugo Award in 1965.... A masterpiece. 265) Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Interestingly, as the film scripts of Charlie Kaufman have gotten praised through the roof over the last several years, with comparisons ranging to Herman Mankiewicz, Robert Towne, Paul Schrader, and Paddy Chayefsky- at least in terms of recognizability, most writers I have known have been far less impressed with his solipsistically obsessed screenplays than the general public.... Weird, not wild Jim Carrey. 266) The Ladykillers/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Despite his two Academy awards for the dreadful Philadelphia and Forrest Gump Tom Hanks has never, not once, ever sold me on his dramatic acting abilities. I remember him from that lame 1980s transvestite sitcom with the little blond dweeb who later starred on Newhart. Whenever he tries to emote Hanks just looks silly and cannot help but have a goofy grin on his face. As pallid as his dramatic ability is he is, and has always been, a gifted comedian.... Tom Hanks returns to his roots. 267) Alien Vs. Predator/DVD Review/Dan Schneider First off, despite what you’ve heard, Alien Vs. Predator is not a terrible film. Is it a good film? No. It’s just mediocre- about on par with 2003’s Freddy Vs. Jason, another monster meets monster flick. In short, it’s a B film with A film pedigree, and written at a comic book level- which is where the two species first met.... Better than dogshit! 268) Life Is Elsewhere/Milan Kundera/Dan Schneider The more I read of Milan Kundera the more I am convinced that he is the John Ashbery of prose. Not in the similarities of the former’s prose to the latter’s poetry, although one could see some similarities, but rather that both men seemed to hit their heights years ago.... Know when to fold'em! 269) The Camera My Mother Gave Me/Susanna Kaysen/Dan Schneider Susanna Kaysen is not a bilious feminazi, although she is a feminist. This is good, and manifests itself the most in the humorous bent of her writing. I was positively surprised that her famed 1993 memoir Girl, Interrupted, was not only a good book, but a daring one in its use of form. recently, I read her 2001 memoir about her middle-aged sexual dysfunction, The Camera My Mother Gave Me, and while not as daring as the earlier book it still made for a quick and rather delightful read.... Better'n expected. 270) Short Cuts/Raymond Carver/Dan Schneider Raymond Carver is a very frustrating writer because he is capable of brilliance, and also capable of really bad writing. Worse, he can accomplish all in between. This is not so bad, except for the fact that I should have started my first sentence this way: Raymond Carver is a very frustrating writer because he is capable of brilliance, and also capable of publishing really bad writing.... Not his best.... 271) Work And Other Sins/Charlie LeDuff/Dan Schneider The name Charlie LeDuff was, a couple years ago, associated with another of those scandalous incidents of a newspaper reporter’s malfeasance. There had been reporters accused of making up details to ‘liven up’ their reportage, and some even won Pulitzer Prizes for it, but LeDuff was accused of plagiarizing some parts of a book.... Another Royko? 272) Stealing Borders/Eliot Rais/Dan Schneider While trolling through a local discount bookseller a month or so ago I came across a small 1994 paperback book called Stealing The Borders, by Elliot Rais. It was blue in color, and boasted two front cover blurbs that caught my eye. No, they were not of the usual fellatric variety from another writer.... Not stealing....borrowing.... 273) Hurricane Katrina/Racism/Dan Schneider As I begin this addendum on the 1^st of October, 2005, little over two months after completing the final draft of Show & Tell: A White Man’s Antiphonal Primer On Race, I am saddened to report that much of what I expounded upon in the book has born some of the strange fruit (albeit in newer forms) that Billie Holiday first song about nearly seventy years ago. The fury of Hurricane Katrina devastated much of Louisiana and Mississippi’s Gulf Coast, but it was not the worst disaster that occurred during those several weeks of late August and early September. No, far more pain and suffering was caused by human incompetence and indifference than that the storm caused.... An unfortunate addendum. 274) Big Fish/Daniel Wallace/Dan Schneider There is little doubt that all of the major arts in this nation are converging in a nadir that is not pretty. Think of it: in literature, the poetry is stale, formless, filled with the rantings of hipster wannabes or bloated Academics or PC Elitists, and the fiction and memoirs are dominated by lite crap as Chick Lit or the gaseous eructations known as Postmodernism.... Pretty good. 275) Foundation And Empire/Isaac Asimov/Dan Schneider Foundation And Empire, by Isaac Asimov is the second book in the original Foundation trilogy, which won a Hugo Award in 1965 for Best All-Time Series. It follows much the same narrative structure as the first book, Foundation, save that the book has only two ‘books’, to the original’s five.... Great! 276) Coffee And Cigarettes/Jim Jarmusch/Dan Schneider If John Sayles is the Stanley Kubrick of the American Independent film scene, able to get his sundry, tightly wrought, but distinct films to reach a sizable market, then Jim Jarmusch is its Martin Scorsese- whose restive films ever seem to probe the boundaries of form.... Enigmas. 277) 13 Going On 30/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Jennifer Garner is an actress I’ve seen alot of, publicity-wise, but the only other thing I’d ever seen her in was the mediocre comic book film Daredevil, with her now husband Ben Affleck. There she was merely leather-clad eye candy.... Jennifer Garner can act! 278) Napoleon Dynamite/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Jared Hess’s cult classic from 2004, Napoleon Dynamite, immediately drew me back to such films as Rushmore, Election, and Welcome To The Dollhouse- films that deal with high school life in comic ways. Yet, of those films, Napoleon Dynamite is probably the most off the wall.... Idiots, redux! 279) Deep River/Shusaku Endo/Dan Schneider A friend of mine, who was doing some housecleaning, passed on to me some books of his he no longer wanted. Included in them was the last novel by famed Japanese novelist Shusaku Endo, author of the world renowned Silence. Endo’s also known for being Japan’s leading intellectual light on spiritual matters, especially those concerning Christianity.... It keeps on rollin'. 280) The Middle Mind/Book Review/Dan Schneider In a word, Curtis White’s 2003 HarperCollins book The Middle Mind, which is an extrapolation upon a Harper’s article of the same name published a year earlier, is bad. But, the attempted discursions in the book, while bad, are not nearly as bad as the book’s biggest detractors would have you believe.... Oy! 281) Capote/Film Review/Dan Schneider The only reason to make a film about someone as controversially repugnant as Truman Capote would be to illuminate his greatest quality- his superb prose writing. At his best, Capote was one of last century’s greatest wordsmiths. Instead, the current film, Capote, focuses on the lesser things the man was known for.... Hissyfit warning! 282) Shopgirl/Film Review/Dan Schneider Shopgirl is one of those very good films that somehow leaves you wanting it to have been something better, something great, which it is not. It indeed had a chance to be a truly great film, save for a few glitches, most of them having to do with the screenplay, but opted for the true Lowest Common Denominator Hollywood flaw of ‘playing it safe’.... Claire Danes: The Thinking Man's Sex Symbol! 283) The Collected Stories/Reynolds Price/Dan Schneider While reading Reynolds Price’s The Collected Stories (culled from his two prior collections- The Names and Faces of Heroes and Permanent Errors- as well as new tales) it occurred to me that he was chiefly a proponent of the idea that it is better to have an ambition to excel rather than an ambition to acquire.... Prosist? Yes. Poet? No. 284) The Weather Underground/DVD Review/Dan Schneider It was about a year and a half ago that I first saw the film The Weather Underground on PBS’s American Experience show. I was struck by how idiotic supposedly intelligent people were, and even more so that many of these convicted and/or admitted felons who have found tenured positions in Academia.... More shame on Academia- who'd'a thunk it? 285) Million Dollar Baby/DVD Review/Dan Schneider The DVD of Million Dollar Baby recapitulates the film it contains- a whole lot of nothing done way too long. The DVD has two discs, yet almost no extras of note. Disc One has the film (sans any commentaries), and a meager single trailer.... Terrible. 286) Snowball Earth/Book Review/Dan Schneider I picked up Snowball Earth, by Gabrielle Walker, for 99¢ at a book discounter, simply because I was aware of the scientific theory of that name, and it seemed interesting to read of the particulars of the debate. What I did not expect was that Walker, a cute, perky, blond British lady, would be the first excellent science writer to emerge in the new millennium.... A warmth in science? 287) Barry Lopez/Vintage Lopez/Dan Schneider Art Durkee recommended Barry Lopez’s prose writing to me and I was wary. Why? I had read his poetry. You know what I mean. A prose writer with name clout elbows his way into publishing a book or so of poetry- think Beckett, O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, LeGuin, Updike- and the result is a mockery of poetry. The same held true for Lopez.... Words and things. 288) Thomas Steinbeck/Crimes Against Literature/Dan Schneider Yes, that’s right. And I’m not apologizing for the title of this review, for this book of so-called ‘short stories’ about the Monterey coastline of California is about one of the most egregious examples of the ignoble tradition of abusing and cashing in on a family’s literary reputation that I have ever come across.... The prosecution rests. 289) King Kong/Film Review/Dan Schneider I grew up with King Kong. King Kong was a friend of mine. Peter Jackson’s nominal ape is no King Kong! When I was a child in New York, Thanksgiving Days would not have been the same without WOR-TV’s King Kong marathons, which included the original 1933 film.... PC kills: Not enough Beast for the Beauty! 290) Prozac Nation/DVD Review/Dan Schneider In the real world of art Elizabeth Wurtzel is the sexy drama queen every guy wants to fuck, but no guy wants to wake up next to. Her on-screen portrayer, Christina Ricci, is the ugly artsy wannabe girl that desperately wants every and any guy, but no guy will touch her.... Fetushead? 291) The Motorcycle Diaries/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Imagine a film purporting to depict the youth of Adolf Hitler that never dealt with an instance of his Anti-Semitism and you will about have what The Motorcycle Diaries represents for Latin American Communism. The film, based upon the book of the same name, culled from the diaries of Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara (Gael García Bernal), the mass murdering top henchman of Fidel Castro.... Can you say whitewash? 292) Ocean's Twelve/DVD Review/Dan Schneider A lack of pretension can cover a multitude of sins- even the lack of a plausible script. Such is the premise that Ocean’s Twelve, the sequel to Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s Eleven remake of the Rat pack classic 1960s caper film, must have been pitched at studio executives with. Simply put, never has a film about less, with less characterization and more smug mugging for the camera ever worked better.... Style trumps substance, this time. 293) Willa Cather/Short Stories/Dan Schneider In reading through the Great Short Works Of Willa Cather I was taken not by any of the individuated works, but by the cadences of the writings, and their themes and mileux. That’s not to say that any of the individual tales had no traits to booster, but the truth of it is, as I am writing this review about three to four weeks after I read the book, not a single narrative sticks in my mind.... A little dry? 294) Leo Tostoy/Two Classics/Dan Schneider I was not aware that Random House still even issued editions of its Modern Library series until my wife came home with, a few weeks back, an edition of The Death Of Ivan Ilyich & Master And Man, by Leo Tolstoy.... Still not Chekhov! 295) It's A Wonderful Life/The Defense Rests!/Dan Schneider I’ve never commented upon a book nor a writer that I have not read before, even if I’ve gotten bad word of mouth from others, simply because I usually just trust my own instincts more. I also try to practice the same in regards to other art forms, as well, although sometimes, in the lesser arts (compared to writing) I admit that I’ve not always been a hundred percent faithful to that credo.... One of the all-time greats! 296) A Forbidden Passion/Book Review/Dan Schneider Uruguayan expatriate Cristina Peri Rossi’s short stories in A Forbidden Passion are, in a sense, typical of Latin American writers, in that they are political and try to dabble in magical realism. They are parables rather than modern narratives of realistic characters. Yet, although I am nor enamored of the writing of either Gabriel Garcia Marquez nor Jorge Luis Borges, her writing does not even really attempt the indulgent effusiveness of their styles. Instead, her work is rather gloomy and dull. Its saving grace, as it is, is that her writing is pithy- real short. I doubt id the twenty ‘stories’ within span thirty thousand words.... Oy! 297) Howard's End/E.M. Forster/Dan Schneider Sometimes one is spoiled by a brief glimpse into heaven. By that I mean that one can have experienced wondrous hills and dales, gorgeous Mediterranean beaches, and Arctic splendors, only to feel they are somehow inadequate after that rare glimpse of heaven. I got this same feeling after reading Howard’s End by E.M. Forster. The book is a solid commentary on late Victorian, early Edwardian British society, and in some ways a comedy of errors. It’s by no means a great book, but is certainly not a bad book.... Not quite Wilde. 298) On Jesse James/Book Review/Dan Schneider I have long fancied criminology as a hobby because of its similarity to poetry, in that both fields are based in large part upon the recognition of patterns. I’ve written many poems on serial killers, gangsters, and Old West outlaws. In doing so I’ve become, if not an expert, a good student of these deviant types. Thus, I feel especially qualified to opine about any book regarding Ted Bundy, Al Capone, or Jesse James. Which leads me into this book, Jesse James: Last Rebel Of The Civil War, from 2002.... History warps. 299) On Theodore Roosevelt/Book Review/Dan Schneider Of all the What Ifs? in American History none has been so explored as the Civil War. Not far behind it is what if World war Twp had had a different outcome? yet, to me, while these can intrigue, I find the subtler queries more engaging and compelling. For example. What if Teddy Roosevelt’s view of Republicanism had not banished with the man himself? I have long been of the opinion that TR was the last good, if not true, Republican this nation has produced, before that party’s long, sad slide into corporate cronyism, then picking off the worst dregs of the old Southern Democrats.... Still lofty. 300) Killing Monsters/Gerard Jones/Dan Schneider I recently came across Gerard Jones’ 2002 book Killing Monsters: Why Children Need Fantasy, Super Heroes, And Make-Believe Violence, wherein the author basically argues that all the nonsense that you hear about media violence warping children is overdone, and merely part of the general hysteria of the age, wherein the personal responsibilities of parents to guide their kids has been shriveled to nonexistence... Some checks on reality. 301) The Chronicles Of Narnia/Film Review/Dan Schneider Answer 1: a more literate and less Byzantine Lord Of The Rings Answer 2: a deeper and more realistic Harry Potter Answer 3: a more mature Oz Question: what is The Chronicles Of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe? .... Good for kids and adults. 302) Miles Gone By/William F. Buckley/Dan Schneider I have long lambasted the kiss ass critics of other works who are blatantly currying favor to get their own mediocre (at best) works published, and rightfully so. That said, I shall not do the same, so I will begin this book review by admitting a bias- more accurately, a set of biases I have regarding William F. Buckley, Jr. He is the godfather of the modern American Conservative movement.... The Master. 303) The Up Series/DVD Review/Dan Schneider It is a rare synchronicity that finds me in agreement with American pop film critic Roger Ebert. Usually, he shows no real understanding of the role good writing plays in filmmaking, and routinely praises the use of clichés, such as the tripe of Steven Spielberg and other Hollywood fare. However, when he declared The Up Series of documentary films, by Michael Apted, now out on DVD, ‘an inspired, almost noble use of the film medium, Apted penetrates to the central mystery of life’, I not only concur, but almost forgive him for recommending Saving Private Ryan. I said almost, now.... Masterful. 304) Wallace Stegner/Collected Stories/Dan Schneider Wallace Stegner is primarily known for his novel Angle Of Repose, and as a ‘Western writer’, but this is a misnomer, for that implies that the setting for his stories is also the subject of his stories. It is not, and he does not have much truck with the Larry McMurtrys nor Zane Greys of literature.... High in the saddle. 305) Siddhartha/Herman Hesse/Dan Schneider Siddhartha, a bildungsroman by Herman Hesse, first published in 1922, is simply one of the greatest books ever written. I say that not because I agree with its essential philosophy (which is problematic in some of its over-simplicity), a predisposition that far too often accounts for why critics recommend or do not recommend a work of art, but because it is the embodiment of one of the oldest maxims that defines great literature: saying the most in the least amount of words.... Masterpiece. 306) A Separate Peace/Book Review/Dan Schneider A Separate Peace is a 1959 novel by John Fowles that is reputedly considered a classic. Why this is must have little to do with the actual novel and more to do with the fact that it is in the Lord Of The Flies/Catcher In The Rye mold of taking vapid young white bread males and making them seem interesting. In a sense this is anti-PC before the concept of PC arose, and by anti- I mean that in the sense of opposite, not against.... Mensa-mense. 307) Chelkash And Other Stories/Maxim Gorky/Dan Schneider I recently picked up a Dover Thrift Edition of Maxim Gorky’s Chelkash And Other Stories. This slim book only contains three tales- the title tale, Makar Chudra, and Twenty-Six Men And A Girl. What struck me was that Gorky’s style was quite different from the pre-Chekhovians like Leo Tostoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Nikolai Gogol.... Good stuff. 308) From Dawn To Decadence/Jacques Barzun/Dan Schneider From Dawn To Decadence, by Jacques Barzun, a cultural critic, historian, and former Columbia College provost and professor, was published at the height of the pre-millennial Y2K fever and purported to be a detailed analysis of the last five hundred years of civilization, or at least Western Civilization. Its subtitle is 1500 To The Present, 500 Years Of Western Cultural Life. It is, however, nothing of the sort. It is a shapeless, formless hodgepodge of ideas and incidents.... Old man rants- News at 11! 309) My Remembers/Eddie Stimpson/Dan Schneider One of my goals in doing Cosmoetica is to help rescue good writers and works from oblivion. In the past I have championed many Neglected Poets, as well as prose writers like naturalist Loren Eiseley, poets James Emanuel, Weldon Kees, and John G. Neihardt, as well as little known works like Dick Proenneke’s Alaska journals, One Man’s Wilderness, and Elliot Rais’s memoir Stealing The Borders. In that same vein I want to review another memoir that, like Rais’s book, was written by a non-professional writer, yet has much merit, far more merit than many of the self-consciously sensationalized memoirs by such dregs as Elizabeth Wurtzel and Dave Eggers.... A sharecropper remembers. 310) The God Who Wasn't There/DVD Review/Dan Schneider What separates a good critic from a hack is the ability to move beyond one’s own biases. Longtime readers of Cosmoetica know that I am not a religious person and find religion to be silly and wasteful, as well as clinically psychotic. That said, I am not an atheist, but an agnostic, because one cannot logically be an atheist, in denying the existence of a deity, for a negative can never be proven. I often argue this same sensible position with anti-death penalty advocates who claim that the death penalty is not a deterrent.... Good arguments, ok art. 311) Guy Du Maupassant/Review/Dan Schneider I recently purchased a number of the Dover Thrift Editions of classic works by well-known writers whose work has now lapsed into public domain. One of the most noteworthy is a collection of nine tales by the acclaimed French short story master Guy de Mauppasant.... Pretty Good.... 312) John Gardner/The Art Of Living/Dan Schneider John Gardner is best known for his reinterpretation of the Beowulf myth with his novel Grendel. It was during the late 1970s and early 1980s that his name recognition and reputation were at a zenith. Then, he died in a motorcycle accident, and his lesser contemporaries buried him critically, because they were now free to do so. In his life he had buried the inferior writing of many of his contemporaries, and like the cowards they were, payback was a bitch to a man six feet under.... Neglected prosist. 313) Ambrose Bierce/Assessment/Dan Schneider Today, if known at all, Ambrose Bierce is recalled as that guy who wrote that funny book The Devil’s Dictionary. He was seen, and still is seen, as a sort of poor man’s Mark Twain. This is quite unfair, as he was a marvelous writer in his own right, although not with the depth nor wit that Twain possessed. Part of the problem is that his personal life, strong opinions, and bitter biases.... Twain's pal.... 314) Second Foundation/Isaac Asimov/Dan Schneider Second Foundation (despite its title) is the third part of the original Foundation trilogy by Isaac Asimov, and it’s a hell of a good book, as well as an extremely bleak book in its portrayal of the human future. The first part, Search By The Mule, published as Now You See It... in the January, 1948 edition of Astounding Science Fiction, concerns the search for the Second Foundation of Hari Seldon by the mutant who has conquered almost the whole of the galaxy within a few years, including the First Foundation.... The end. 315) Crime And Punishment/Fyodor Dostoevsky/Dan Schneider There are perhaps no more valuable publishing houses on the planet than Great Britain’s Wordsworth Editions and America’s Dover Thrift Editions. In an era where literature is at a low ebb, these two houses have released great works of public domain classic literature at very affordable prices- usually at anywhere from 10-50% off the prices that the same titles can be gotten at larger publishing houses. Among the great titles that I was to get from Dover was Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime And Punishment, the definitive 1914 Constance Garnett translation. So much has been written about this book that I find it difficult to comprehend how so much of it is wrong.... Not quite great.... 316) The Machinist/DVD Review/Dan Schneider The Machinist is the sort of film Hollywood does not dare to make- risky, taut, and smart. While not a great film it certainly is loads better than the usual bilge Hollywood feeds the public. That director Brad Anderson (who directed Session 9) had to go to Barcelona, Spain to finance and film the picture says it all..... Good indy stuff. 317) Mean Creek/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Mean Creek is a very Stand By Me-like film, also set in Oregon, that deals with young people’s reactions to death. Unlike that earlier film, set in the 1950s, this contemporary 2004 film by first time filmmaker Jacob Estes is quite a bit darker, almost a teen Deliverance. It follows the machinations by four boys to get revenge on a fat kid.... Kids go wild. 318) To The Lighthouse/Virginia Woolf/Dan Schneider I recently finished reading Sanctuary, the third book I’ve read by William Faulkner, and was astounded by how bad a book it is, especially since it was written by an ‘immortal’. Could it get any worse? Yes, unfortunately. I just finished reading my third book by Virginia Woolf. The first was her self-indulgent and puerile essay A Room Of One’s Own, the next was her Collected Short Stories, which was really her Collected Mind Farts, and have now finished her novel To The Lighthouse. Of course, calling it a novel is a stretch. At least Faulkner’s Sanctuary, atrocious as it was, was a very bad novel. To The Lighthouse is a literary hoax, at best, and at worst, a rambling piece of vomitus.... Keep on going, please! 319) Rick Moody/Demonology/Dan Schneider Rick Moody should work for Ross and Norris McWhirter, the founders of the Guinness Book Of World Records, for the only thing one can absolutely say about his writing is that he loves to make lists- he lists brand names, celebrities, quotidian details, and sometimes the same words over and again.... Really bad, wrapping aside. 320) Lucky Girls/Nell Freudenberger/Dan Schneider Nell Freudenberger is a perfect example of style over substance. She is what the damnable publishing industry has sunk to- attempting to take a mediocre workshop writer’s pedestrian prose and make a ‘hot’ writer out of her by publishing her obscenely long fluff tales in outlets like the Paris Review, Granta, and the The New Yorker, where she interned, having her pose sexily for magazines like Elle and Vogue, then offering her a half million dollar advance for a book of stories she hadn’t even written yet.... Nell bends over? 321) Match Point/Woody Allen/Dan Schneider The critical buzz about Woody Allen’s latest film, Match Point, is that it’s his best since (fill in the blank), and, to a degree, that’s true. The last of his films to attain even a limited greatness was 1999’s Sweet And Lowdown, with the magnificent performances of Sean Penn and Samantha Morton, and the last flat out great Allen film was 1992’s Husbands And Wives.... The return of drama. 322) Lowest Common Denominator/Revenge & Deliteracy/Dan Schneider As I start this essay, on 1/26/06, I have just witnessed one of the most disgusting things I’ve ever seen on television: Oprah Winfrey in sermonizing overdrive. This woman is the worst piece of bilge in the history of American television.... Oprah, James Frey, Bloggers, Wikipedia, Academia, and other disgraces! 323) William Trevor/Collected Stories/Dan Schneider Reading William Trevor’s The Collected Stories, which clocks in at eighty-five tales and 1261 pages, is a chore. And not because it is such a hefty tome, which it is, nor because the pages are large and the type small, but because of the very deliberate writing style of the man.... Overrated. 324) Frank O'Connor/Collected Stories/Dan Schneider In a word- *overrated. Or, perhaps disappointing, dull, bad, or tedious might be more suited. My quandary is in having to relate how profoundly disappointing the Collected Stories* of an acclaimed master like Frank O’Connor are.... Way overrated. 325) American Psycho/Book Review/Dan Schneider By now it should not startle me that readers and critics in America, if not worldwide, are bad. I mean, really, really bad- to the point of wretchedness. Just yesternight I saw a major network newscast decrying the fact that over 20% of college graduates in this country are functionally illiterate. Add in those people who are deliterate- i.e.- can read and understand grammar, but are clueless as to the deeper things inside a narrative.... The film's better. 326) Infinite Jest/Book Review/Dan Schneider Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace, is the worst science fiction novel ever written. The truth is it might be the worst novel ever written, or at least published, but given the fact that Wallace has stiff competition from the burgeoning spawn of PC Elitist writers, not to mention his own PoMo kith, such as Rick Moody, Dave Eggers, and that ilk.... Garbage, pure. 327) Last Call/KL Cook/Dan Schneider Some years ago when I used to attend readings around the Twin Cities there was a noted ‘storyteller’ name Loren Niemi who used to give readings all the time. The quotation marks around his profession is because Niemi was not a writer, per se, as much as an old fashioned storyteller.... Missed call? 328) Once Upon A Time In The West/DVD Review/Dan Schneider I had never seen the uncut version of Sergio Leone’s famed Once Upon A Time In The West, before stumbling across the DVD at a bargain price. I had seen major portions of it, chopped up by censors, studio heads, and the nitwits who need to run commercials for local television stations.... Spaghetti anyone? 329) Naked/David Sedaris/Dan Schneider I have listened to some of David Sedaris’s work on public radio, seen him on several occasions on PBS, and once saw him in person at a Twin Cities outlet for comedians. And one thing always ran through my mind..... Clothed would be better, really. 330) I Have Landed/Stephen Jay Gould/Dan Schneider In the five years that Cosmoetica has been online one of the most popular, lauded, and requested essays is my elegy for biologist Stephen Jay Gould, posted 6/1/02, called Peaches, Tarpaper, & Stephen Jay Gould. It has been so popular due to a) its subject matter and b) the depth of the writing.... The last gasps. 331) Les Miserables/In-Depth/Dan Schneider Les Miserables, by Victor Hugo, is the type of work that is almost beyond the measure of excellence or not. Hugo so indulgent, so excessive, that the book becomes almost otherworldly, an edifice out in an ether of its own, subject to its own literary rules. It is simple in narrative construction, but byzantinely complex in the curlicues of detail. It is such a diverse work that it is almost a cosmos unto itself, apart from the time and reality of mortal men and writers. If there was ever an over-the-top work of prose that was the equivalent of a Walt Whitman song it is this work.... Sort of like what Jupiter is to planets. 332) Henry Miller/Tropics/Dan Schneider There is truth to the claim that sometimes a bad writer can be closer to greatness than a good writer, because the bad writer may just be slightly off in all the areas he or she needs to be great in, while the good writer is merely solid in all areas, but never comes close to greatness in any area.... Ugh! 333) Evan S. Connell/Collected Stories/Dan Schneider Evan S. Connell is best known for his novels Mrs. Bridge, Mr. Bridge, and his non-fiction account of General George Armstrong Custer, Son Of The Morning Star, as well as two book-length ‘poems’, Notes From A Bottle Found On The Beach At Carmel, and Points For A Compass Rose, yet he also has written a number of short stories, fifty-six of which are collected in The Collected Stories Of Evan S. Connell.... Hit & miss! 334) Mrs. Bridge/Mr. Bridge/Dan Schneider Immediately after reading the two Tropics novels of Henry Miller I turned to read the paired Bridge novels of Evan S. Connell, Mrs. Bridge and Mr. Bridge. I was suspicious of their value for several reasons. First, after having read Miller one would think that all good literature was dead.... Great literature. 335) Mr. & Mrs. Bridge/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Having recently read the masterful separate books Mrs. Bridge and Mr. Bridge, by Evan S. Connell, I was anxious to see the 1990 Merchant/Ivory film that combined the two books into one.... Mensa-mense. 336) AWP/A Pilgrimage/Dan Schneider I just spent three days at a convention that came to town, in Austin, Texas. I was not looking forward to it, for the writerly types that attend these events are usually the dross of Academia, with a few annoying hipster wannabes tossed in. It was the annual conference of the Association Of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP), and it was basically an event designed to let small presses and publishers network.... Oy vey! 337) James Emanuel/The Poetry/Dan Schneider When thinking of overlooked contemporary books, I think of the novels of William Kennedy and Charles Johnson; but, on reflection, since they write prose and have won Pulitzer Prizes and National Book Awards, how neglected can they be?.... A Master. 338) The New World/Film Review/Dan Schneider Terrence Malick is simply the greatest living American filmmaker. Only Stanley Kubrick was his equal or superior. That’s not to say that Martin Scorsese nor Woody Allen have not made great films, but they’ve both made stinkers in their careers, and neither has had a great film in over a decade.... The real best film of 2005! 339) Joyce Carol Oates/Essays Review/Dan Schneider Before picking up this 1999 Joyce Carol Oates book of nonfiction pieces, called Where I’ve Been, And Where I’m Going, I’d only read a handful of her ‘poems’ and stories in assorted magazines.... Ugh! 340) Irwin Shaw/Short Stories/Dan Schneider I was a young boy when Rich Man, Poor Man became the first big miniseries that dominated network television in the mid-1970s, and it was that work, and book, written by Irwin Shaw (né Irwin Gilbert Shamforoff, February 27, 1913-May 16, 1984), that set off the miniseries craze of adapting popular works of fiction and nonfiction that dominated television for another decade, not Alex Haley’s Roots, as is popularly misperceived.... A neglected master of the form! 341) The Left Hand Of Darkness/Ursula LeGuin/Dan Schneider This is the third book by Ursula LeGuin that I’ve read. The first was the novel The Lathe Of Heaven, which is a great book. The next was a collection of short stories called Changing Planes. It was horrid.... Could be better. 342) Suspect Zero/DVD Review/Dan Schneider In the DVD of the film Suspect Zero director E. Elias Merhige (who also directed Shadow Of The Vampire) proves that a) he can direct better than average film thrillers, but b) he’s one wacky guy. I’ll elaborate later.... Ben Kingsley plagiarizes his own acting. 343) Pauly Shore Is Dead/DVD Review/Dan Schneider I’d never seen anything that comedian Pauly Shore has ever done. I know the name, the way I do other comics like Adam Sandler, Bobcat Goldthwaite, or Andrew Dice Clay, in one of those offhanded ways that the detritus of celebrity gossip filters through the mind. Similarly, I know blond bombshell singer Jessica Simpson is now a hot-to-trot divorcee, or Jennifer Aniston is fuming over Brad Pitt’s dumping her for Angelina Jolie.... Why? 344) MLB/2006 Predictions/Dan Schneider While it seems that the last few years have been a down time for baseball, after the late 1990s Yankees dynasty, what with a run of one year wonders, and highly suspect World Series champions (2001-Arizona, 2002-Anaheim, 2003-Florida, 2004- Boston, and 2005- Chicago White Sox, with the middle three all wildcard teams), I think that this year will see the two best teams over the last few years, that have not won the World Series, the St. Louis Cardinals and New York Yankees battling for the crown.... Who will win? 345) The Elephant Vanishes/Haruki Murakami/Brent Peterson I first encountered Haruki Murakami through his Norwegian Wood, the novel that made him a household name in Japan. I found that book to be memorably well-written: subtle and precise, affecting without drifting into sentimentality. There was a kind of strangeness to certain scenes, but it wasn't overdone.... Skewering a pachyderm. 346) Between Strangers/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Between Strangers is the sort of film that never gets made in America- not in Hollywood big budget films nor in independent films, because it is a film that takes its own sweet time in conveying its ideas to the viewer. That’s not to say that it’s a great film, nor even a pretty good one, but watching this 2003 Canadian-Italian film on DVD, shot in Toronto, gives a viewer an insight into how other people enjoy the same basic forms of art.... Sophia's last stand? 347) Cinderella Man/DVD Review/Dan Schneider As a boy, I recall watching with my dad an old sports show, perhaps on PBS, in which the participants of a certain event, years later, commented the events as they were shown on film. I believe it was a Bud Greenspan show.... Ron Howard- ho-hum. 348) Sin City/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Gratuitous violence works in films only if the non-gratuitous moments are good. This cardinal lesson of filmmaking was apparently lost on style over substance filmmaker Robert Rodriguez, who tried adapting the black and white comic books (or graphic novels as geeks call them) of the Sin City series by Frank Miller (billed as co-director).... Crapola, Inc. 349) Sky Captain And The World Of Tomorrow/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Sky Captain And The World Of Tomorrow is perhaps the first film whose computer special effects wizardry was trotted out as a reason to see it that I can honestly say is a good film, a very good film. Are there films that bowl one over more impressively? Yes. But this film is virtually all special effects.... Good stuff. 350) Noam Chomsky/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Despite having known people who are either great fans of Noam Chomsky, or think he’s a tired relic from the 1960s, I really had no opinion of the man, save that I knew he gained fame as a linguist, although I could not elucidate any of his theories, and that he was a liberal socialist with Marxist leanings. So, stumbling across the DVD of the 2003 documentary Noam Chomsky: Rebel Without A Pause, in a used video store, a film which followed him on a 2002 book tour for his book 9-11, I decided to get it, just so I could have a little bit of knowledge about the man the next time a person, pro or con, spoke of him.... What's the dealio? 351) A Very Long Engagement/DVD Review/Dan Schneider With the possible exception of America’s Claire Danes, the French actress Audrey Tautou is probably the most interesting actress alive to simply watch onscreen. It’s not that Danes and Tautou are not beautiful, they are. But they are not gorgeous screen sirens.... A very good movie! 352) Grizzly Man/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Why is glorifying the insane and stupid an American obsession over the last couple of decades? The documentary Grizzly Man does not attempt to answer this query, yet it does its best to bring this tendency to its odd apogee, and is literally unlike any other documentary film I’ve ever seen.... A very sick man! 353) Disgrace/Book Review/Dan Schneider J.M. Coetzee’s 1999 novel Disgrace won the Booker Prize that year (the second time he won it, which is the U.K. equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize or National Book Award in the United States). This is a chagrining fact, not because the book is so bad, but so eminently mediocre. On a 1-100 scale it’s a 65-70, tops.... With a title like that it just is too easy! 354) Waiting/Book Review/Dan Schneider Late in Ha Jin’s 1999 National Book Award winning Politically Correct novel Waiting the main character Doctor Lin Kong bemoans the fact that he is a ‘superfluous man’. This recapitulates the fact that the tale, itself, is superfluous; mainly because of its PC nature. One of the worst things that PC does is that it one dimensionalizes stories and characters by focusing on exoticism over depth and substituting clichés for insight.... The titles are just getting too tempting, eh? 355) Kinsey/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Kinsey, the 2004 biopic from director Bill Condon, was not nearly as bad a film as I thought it might be. That said, it’s not a particularly good film, either. This is the follow up film to Condon’s Gods And Monsters, and where that film, about Frankenstein director James Whale.... A perv? 356) De-Lovely/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Let me state my bias up front. I loathe musicals. There are very few I like- especially from the so-called Golden Era of Hollywood. That’s because the whole convention of people breaking into song at a difficult moment always strikes me as forced and phony.... De-great! 357) Land Of The Dead/DVD Review/Dan Schneider While speed zombies have become the rage, in such films as the recent remake of Dawn Of The Dead and 28 Days, in Land Of The Dead- the fourth of what is now a tetralogy of original Dead films by George Romero- we are back to the slow moving ghouls of old, although they are showing signs of evolving intelligence, if not fleetness.... Killing another film franchise slowly. 358) Dawn Of The Dead/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Ok, so the 2004 Zack Snyder remake of George Romero’s Dawn Of The Dead is better than his own fourth Dead movie, Land Of The Dead, but it’s still not nearly as good as the original 1978 Dawn Of The Dead. The basic problem is that the film violates its own universe’s rules so many times that the film falls apart narratively. One can get away with things that are illogical in real life, but not according to the film’s own precepts. In contrast to the Romero canon, zombies in this film can run like Olympic sprinters.... Ho-hum. 359) Batman Begins/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Christian Bale is, bar none, the best actor to ever portray Batman onscreen, and only Guy Pearce, I believe, could have come as close to being as good. Batman Begins, by director Christopher Nolan, who made the classic Memento (starring Pearce) and the good American version of Insomnia, shows that he understands what has made Batman the most popular superhero in comic book history- yes, surpassing both Superman and Spider-Man. That said, as good a comic book film as Batman Begins is.... Redux reflux? 360) Alice Adams/Short Stories/Dan Schneider As my wife and I were browsing in a discount overstock bookstore I came upon a $4.99 edition of The Stories Of Alice Adams. Her name was familiar as a staple of the New Yorker-Harper’s-Atlantic axis of late 20^th Century literature. Yet, I need not have known that fact.... So-so. 361) Dhalgren/Samuel Delany/Dan Schneider Samuel Delany’s Dhalgren is generally considered a science fiction novel, but, in a real sense, it’s more of a fantasy than science fiction- hard or not, and it is not a particularly good piece of sci fi, set in the then-near future of the late 1970s. Instead, it is a weird amalgam of the worst of High Modernism and proto-Post-Modernism. No, Delany’s a bit better of a wordsmith than the dregs.... Pornorama? 362) Lafcadio Hearn/Book Review/Dan Schneider Lafcadio Hearn is one of those writers I knew the name of for years- who could forget Lafcadio Hearn?- yet could not exactly place with any book, movement, style, nor philosophy. Then, a while back, I stumbled upon his Selected Writings at a used bookstore and snapped it up. Amazingly, after years of having his name on my list of writers to acquire, for I had never come across him in a bookstore, and only had one brief tale or report of his that I had read decades earlier, there was actually a second copy of Hearn’s Selected Writings. I took the book in better shape.... Neglected Master! 363) I Am Serpico/The Film/Dan Schneider I am Serpico. Over thirty years ago I remember going in to a movie theater with my father. It was just me and him. Usually, I would go with both my parents, or along with them and my sister, or even just sneak in with a friend to the old Ridgewood Theater, off of Myrtle Avenue- usually to see the latest James Bond or Godzilla flick. But, this time it was just the men.... An American Hero! 364) Marcel Proust/Book Review/Dan Schneider A la recherche du temps perdu, by Marcel Proust is not really a novel, by any stretch of the imagination, for it violates the precepts of novel writing- plot, characterization, etc., to an even greater degree than Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick does, and it is not considered an autobiography, because it twists facts, and uses fictive techniques for its nonfiction. In that sense it predates Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood by half a century.... Long gone.... 365) Casa De Los Babys/DVD Review/Dan Schneider There’s a moment in Johns Sayles’ latest film, Casa De Los Babys, that is among the most poignant ever filmed. A young maid in an unnamed Latin American country’s main baby mill is engaged in a conversation with an Irish woman down to adopt. The Irish woman, Eileen.... Sayles again! 366) Silver City/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Lost in the glare of Michael Moore’s 2004 pseudo-documentary Fahrenheit 911 was independent filmmaker John Sayles’ far more incisive filmic take on politics called Silver City. While Moore’s film was a frontal assault on the George W. Bush administration, Sayles’ film was less a jab at Right Wing politics.... Sayles rocks! 367) Richard Ford/A Multitude Of Sins/Dan Schneider This is a writer, and possibly a great one. I had heard of Richard Ford before, as he is a Pulitzer Prize winner for Independence Day, but- so what? Many Pulitzer and National Book Award winners reek. Even Nobelists have sucked big time. But, Richard Ford is a writer, at least if this book, A Multitude Of Sins, is any indication. Two comparisons leapt to mind. The first was with poet Wallace Stevens.... Great? 368) Truman Capote/Complete Stories/Dan Schneider Of the twenty stories that comprise the surprisingly slim (for a writer of his renown) The Complete Stories Of Truman Capote, only two can be classified as great, or at least excellent, while only two others can be called good. The rest are not even passable, despite the occasional memorable image or well-crafted sentence, for the narratives are weak, trite, and transparent.... Not great. 369) Gabriel Garcia Marquez/Collected Stories/Dan Schneider I have never thought that Gabriel Garcia Marquez deserved his 1982 Nobel Prize for literature. I think that it was manifestly an award given because of the politicized nature of the author’s work. The three novels of his that I’ve read- Love In A Time Of Cholera, The General In His Labyrinth, and One Hundred Years Of Solitude- are examples of occasionally poetic phrases and images trying to tidy up nonexistent narratives, cardboard caricatures, and a puerile imagination and understanding of the world. In short, they are vapid interminable wordstreams with little deeper meaning. While no great fan of the also overrated Jorge Luis Borges there is little doubt that Borges was the more original and creative of the two writers.... Overrated. 370) The 40 Year Old Virgin/DVD Review/Dan Schneider The 40-Year-Old Virgin is one of those independent films that comes along, every so often, and becomes a hit. A few years ago it was My Big Fat Greek Wedding that was a surprise hit, and a few years before that it was The Blair Witch Project. This film is superior to both of those earlier films.... Sleeper hit. 371) Enron: The Smartest Guys In The Room/DVD Review/Dan Schneider For those who think they know what the Enron scandal was about, they’ll have to admit they didn’t know a tenth of it after they’ve watched this documentary, Enron: The Smartest Guys In The Room, directed by Alex Gibney, narrated by Peter Coyote, based upon the bestselling exposé by Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind. That said, I disagree with some of the premises the film is based upon- that being McLean’s claim that the story is about people, not numbers.... Evil lives! 372) Walk The Line/DVD Review/Dan Schneider James Mangold, the director who brought us such flawed but interesting films as Copland and Girl, Interrupted, has done it again. He has crafted another flawed but interesting film, Walk The Line, named after one of Cash’s biggest musical hits; this one on the life of Johnny Cash. Actress Reese Witherspoon won an Oscar for Best Actress for her portrayal of Cash’s wife June Carter Cash.... Standard Issue.... 373) Crash/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Just when I think that the Right Wing mullahs that run this nation could not possibly be smarter than any other sort of human beings, I am proved wrong. The *Los Angeles Guilty White Liberal* has got to be the dumbest form of humanity going, even moreso than the inbred hillbilly. You know who I mean: the latte sipping crowd that brought you such critically lauded trash as The Hours, which plumbed every arts cliché imaginable; Monster, which revealed Feminazism’s worst side (i.e.- murdering men is ok if the murderer disingenuously claims all men are bad rapists); or Million Dollar Baby, which proved that white trash are probably the only social group still open for out and out mockery.... A horrorshow. 374) Brokeback Mountain/DVD Review/Dan Schneider It is incumbent upon all good critics to be honest about possible biases, so here goes. When I first read E. Annie Proulx’s short story collection Close Range, I knew Brokeback Mountain was, by far, the worst of the stories in her very erratic collection, and a really bad story, period. Not because it had gay characters, but because the whole book is a long string of Western stereotypes and caricatures. Reading the tale, it was quite obvious that Proulx has probably never met a gay person, much less a gay cowboy, in her entire life.... Worse than Crash? 375) Them/Jon Ronson/Dan Schneider Them, by Jon Ronson, was apparently a 2001 bestseller in the UK, by one of their top television personalities and comedians (http://www.jonronson.com/). Except that the book is not that funny. That’s not to say that poor Ronson does not strive for wit- he does. There’s just not much to laugh about in this book about pre-9/11 extremists.... Klansmen and worse. 376) George Washington/David Gordon Green/Dan Schneider George Washington was the first feature film ever made by indy wunderkind director David Gordon Green. It was released in 2000, to generally favorable reviews, and it truly deserved them. It has been recently released on an invaluable Criterion Collection DVD which I recently purchased. Most critics erred and went in for a facile comparison to filmmaker Terrence Malick.... Simple and sublime? 377) Why We Fight/Frank Capra/Dan Schneider There has been a political documentary, of recent vintage, called Why We Fight, which tries to examine the infamous Military Industrial Complex and its grip on this nation. It is considered both polemical and incisive in making its case against both that complex and the war fiasco we are currently involved in in Iraq. Yet, a far more famous series of films, with the same name, was made during World War Two, by Hollywood director Frank Capra. Although considered documentaries, and having won Oscars in that category, this series of seven films is really and truly mere agitprop, more in the vein of Leni Reifenstal’s Triumph Of The Will, scenes of which Capra recycles for his own purposes.... The real deal or the reel deal? 378) Stories/Doris Lessing/Dan Schneider One of the troubling aspects of contemporary literature is that people do not think for themselves. This is true on both ends of the spectrum, with writers, and especially readers. Like the American electorate, that constantly bitches about the poverty of good candidates to vote for, yet never steps outside the Democratic-Republican axis, contemporary readers are either part of the small subset of deliterate PC Elitists that delude themselves into feeling that we are living in a Golden Age of poetry and prose.... The babe bests the boys. 379) Freaks/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Tod Browning’s 1932 cult classic film Freaks is not what most people seem to think it is. It is neither a blatantly exploitative film nor a film of profound compassion. Of all of his films, silent or not, it is in many ways both his most artlessly produced yet also his most indelible- even more so than Dracula, which came out a year before. Most of all, though, it is not a horror film. Yes, it is horrifying to look at the poor freaks that are onscreen, and the film has the exterior trappings of a horror film, in terms of mood and sets, but the film is really about the human desire for love, and the often impotent pursuit of it. Even the normal sized people in the film are not able to achieve real love.... Misunderstood? 380) Osama/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Osama is touted as the first film made in Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban, and it was shot in Kabul. That should be a warning. Works of art that are touted as the first this or that tend to be bad, their only distinction being their chronological primacy. Such was the case with the atrocious Eskimo film of a few years back called Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner. In a sense, Osama is merely an Afghani Atanarjuat.... Agitprop- and bad, too! 381) Good Night, And Good Luck/DVD Review/Dan Schneider George Clooney has to be, if not the most talented guy in Hollywood, certainly the luckiest. A former Sexiest Man Alive, according to People magazine, scion of a wealthy show business clan, a tv star, a movie star, and now a successful director. His first film, Confessions Of A Dangerous Mind, on wacky tv game show host Chuck Barris’s fantasies, was a sober look at a mentally disturbed man, much better than highly lauded screenwriter and director Paul Schrader’s similar Auto Focus, on tv star Bob Crane’s descent into pornography. But, we’ve all seen this before- a big star thinks he can make films, makes a first film that is lauded- think Kevin Costner, Mel Gibson, Clint Eastwood, and on and on, and then starts pumping out sheer dreck.... Oscar winner? 382) American Idol/Season 5/Dan Schneider The fifth season of American Idol ended last night, with Taylor Hicks defeating Katherine McPhee for the title. In my years of watching the show, it’s the first time that the better singer in the finals actually won. I only saw the last two weeks of season one, and while Kelly Clarkson seemed better than Justin Guarini, neither singer impressed me, and, despite her sales figures, I’m still not sure Clarkson will make a career of it. In the next three seasons the more deserving singers- Clay Aiken, Diana DeGarmo, and Bo Bice- lost to palpably inferior singers- Ruben Studdard, Fantasia Barrino, and Carrie Underwood.... The best season yet! 383) Yasunari Kawabata/Palm Of The Hand Stories/Brent Peterson 'Affectless' prose is an interesting thing. Despite its supposed merits of subtlety and concision through absence of emphasis, it isn't always the case that 'spare' prose results in anything more believable or affecting than more ornate writing. Indeed, the reverse is often the case. Supposedly minimalist, understated lines become monumental and bloated by dint of their sheer purposefulness; the affected intention shines through the alleged clarity. Think of many Bukowski poems, where every line slams home with a clunk; or the ponderous thud of Hemingway's 'simple' sentences.... Nobelist does good? 384) The Seventh Seal/DVD Review/Dan Schneider One of the things that separates a great artist from a lesser one is his ability to switch forms, themes, and the like, yet still imprint that unmistakable essence that lets a viewer know which artist they are dealing with immediately. Rarely has there been a greater and more vivid example of this reality than in comparing the two films Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman released in 1957: The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries.... Greatness defined. 385) Rashomon/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Akira Kurosawa had been a filmmaker for almost a decade, since his 1943 debut film Sugata Sanshiro, and had some renown in his native Japan, when, in 1950, his film Rashomon rocketed him to international acclaim, including the Academy Award For Best Foreign Film, after winning the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival brought the film and its director, and Japanese cinema, a Western audience. He deserved every plaudit he received for it, as well as every ticket sold, because it is an excellent film.... From the Master. 386) The Assassination Of Richard Nixon/DVD Review/Dan Schneider I picked up a cheap used version of The Assassination Of Richard Nixon simply because I spent much of my youth listening to my dad yell at the 37^th President during the years of the Watergate scandal, and figured that there might be some posthumous vicarious thrill that he could glean from my watching such a film with such a title. To my surprise, the film was not a cheesy exploitative film.... Underrated. 387) The Five Obstructions/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Imagine making a stylish sexy film about a Plain Jane. That’s the feeling I got watching the 90 minute, 2004 film The Five Obstructions, jointly made and produced by Danish filmmakers Jørgen Leth and Lars Von Trier. Ostensibly, the film is about Trier’s challenge to noted documentarian Leth, who seems to have been Trier’s mentor, if not idol, in film school, to somehow remake a twelve minute film of his from 1967 in five new ways.... Interesting. 388) Tales Of The Night/Peter Høeg/Dan Schneider Peter Høeg’s Tales Of The Night, translated by Barbara Haveland, is not a difficult book to read because of the nature of the tales, but because of the dense and clunky style his prose wields. I have not read his much lauded novel Smilla’s Sense Of Snow, published in 1992, two years after this book was released in Denmark.... Overrated. 389) Cane/Jean Toomer/Dan Schneider I’d long known Jean Toomer as a famed poet from the 1920s Harlem Renaissance era, and found his poetry to be interesting, at best. He did not have the musical flair of Langston Hughes, nor the formal excellence of Countee Cullen, the two other titans of that scene, but his 1923 book Cane was his magnum opus, however slim. I say book because the work is not a novel, as it’s often classified, nor is it a work of pure poetry, or prose poetry, as it has alternately been classified.... Masterpiece? 390) Dorothy Parker/Complete Stories/Dan Schneider Dorothy Parker (1893-1967) was cute, sexy, witty, vivacious, delightfully vicious, and the only member of the infamously bad Algonquin Round Table that had even a modicum of real writing talent, and it’s on full display in this collection of her finest short fictions. However, that all being said, Parker’s short fictions are just that- fictions.... Oo-la-la. 391) Slan/A.E. Van Vogt/Dan Schneider Slan is one of those Golden Age sci fi novels that while being dated, in terms of scientific jargon and ideas, is far more relevant than much of the hamhanded writing published in science fiction, or even literary fiction, these days. Given the civil rights issues involved in the ceaseless War On Terror, and things such as gay rights, the right to die, etc., Slan is as relevant as it was in the days leading up to World War Two, given its many and manifest Nazi parallels.... Relevant....unfortunately. 392) The Bicycle Thief/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Vittorio De Sica’s The Bicycle Thief (Ladri Di Biciclette), made in 1948, in black and white, is one of the all time great films, and, in its Neo-realistic cinema verité simplicity, it shows how utterly creatively bankrupt most filmmaking these days is. And by that I mean worldwide, not just the obvious flaws of the Hollywood crap factory. Lean, spare, poetic- it tells one story, but tells it very well, and that story becomes universal, and is applicable to all people who have ever suffered, or been driven to do desperate things.... Simple pleasures. 393) Aguirre: The Wrath Of God/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Werner Herzog may just be the best film director of the last forty years. Period. And I mean worldwide. While some directors of film rely primarily on precision- think Alfred Hitchcock, intellect- think Ingmar Bergman and Stanley Kubrick, visual poesy-think Terrence Malick, or visceral reaction- think Akira Kurosawa, there is no other major filmmaker that I can think of who combines all of these things so skillfully, as well as having a mastery of music, outside of Herzog. From musical scoring to narrative pacing to visual imagery, he reigns supreme.... Forerunner to many greats.... 394) Virtue/Reward/SuZi "It is a sin to write this": Thus begins the first sentence of the simplest of prose works, a speculatively post-apocalyptic novella written in the mid-1930s and called Anthem. Now, some eighty years later, one might expect-especially given certain situations in current events-that such the resonance of this phrase would place it into someone's list of famous quotations (or, at least, an email signature). One might also suspect that the author of the phrase, of the novella and other works, would have a securely bronzed position in the American Literary Canon.... Ripping phonies. 395) Die Mommie Die!/DVD Review Why is it that the most banal and straightforward films get lauded by the Motion Picture Academy, while films that push boundaries and take risks, especially if comedies, get ignored? And why is it that there is no separate category for comedies and musicals for the Oscars? In watching the DVD of the 2003 Sundance channel film Die Mommie Die! I could not help but have these thoughts. It’s a truly brilliant film.... Minor Classic. 396) Everything Is Illuminated/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Everything Is Illuminated was a surprise 2002 hit novel by Jonathan Safran Foer, which was a thinly veiled fictional account of his 1999 trip to Ukraine to research his Jewish roots during World War Two. The young author, only twenty-five at the book’s release, elicits a widely divergent critical range of opinion- from hyperbolic praise by established hack writers like Joyce Carol Oates, to outright condemnation by young, unpublished hacks who resent his two book, half a million dollar publishing deal.... Minor masterpiece. 397) Nine Lives/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Need the sins of the father be visited upon the son? Not if the terrific- nay, *great, little 2005 film, Nine Lives, written and directed by Rodrigo Garcia, is Exhibit A. Garcia is the son of famed Nobel Prize winning magical realist fictionist Gabriel Garcia Marquez, of Love In A Time Of Cholera* and One Hundred Years Of Solitude fame. Yet, despite that fame, the father’s work, in novels and short fictions, is usually baroque and anomic in narrative.... Major masterpiece. 398) Russell Banks/Short Stories/Dan Schneider I started reading The Angel On The Roof: The Stories Of Russell Banks, his de facto Collected Stories- thirty-one of them, twenty-two old tales and nine new ones, right after I had finished David Foster Wallace’s Girl With Curious Hair. Thank God! Banks is everything that is claimed about Wallace- he’s a terrific writer who challenges the form of short story writing, has depth and insight.... Major writer. 399) Joseph Heller/Short Fiction/Dan Schneider If there’s ever been a greater example of a single author milking a single bit of work more than Joseph Heller I don’t want to read him. It’s been years since I read his classic Catch-22 satire of the Army during World War Two- although I aim to read it again within the year- and it was a good book, to my best recollection. But, my word, give it a rest.... Oy! 400) Sam Fuller/A Third Face/Dan Schneider Samuel Fuller (1912-1997), better known to mensches as Sam Fuller, is best known as the maverick filmmaker of war films, like The Steel Helmet, from the 1950s, through his 1980 epic The Big Red One (which was only recently fully restored on DVD). Yet, his 2002 memoir, from Alfred A. Knopf, A Third Face: My Tale Of Writing, Fighting, And Filmmaking, shows that he was alot more than that.... A man's man. 401) Arts/Piecing Apart/Jessica Schneider People would understand things better if they understood them more deeply. And by deeply I don’t mean relentless quoting of so and so said such and such, but if people in the arts understood more of how and why things worked, they would be able to apply that knowledge to greater application. We are able to see it in science, but why not in the arts? One of the biggest fallacies that I tire of is this whole ‘art is subjective’ crap. No, not really- your tastes are subjective, but not whether or not something is of quality. I’ve found that the only people who claim that art is subjective are those who don’t understand the laws for how things work, i.e. bad artists and lazy thinkers.... Bit by bit. 402) The World At War/DVD Review/Dan Schneider It was not long after my family moved into the very first home we had ever owned, in our line’s history, that I recall watching, with my dad, a really good television show called The World At War, which recounted the history of the Second World War. For my dad, born in 1916, it was a bittersweet look back at his early adulthood, for after having served for several years with distinction in President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps. My dad was amongst the first men to volunteer to serve in the military after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, but was rejected as 4F because of a childhood broken ankle that never fully healed, and left him a gimp.... A classic with a bias. 403) The Idiot/Fyodor Dostoevsky/Dan Schneider In his lifetime, Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote four famed novels that secured his literary place in history. Chronologically they were Crime And Punishment, The Idiot, The Possessed (or Devils), and The Brothers Karamazov. The last named book I read many years ago, in my youth, and found it quite boring, although I will reread it in the future. Crime And Punishment I read last year, and, while it had some good things to offer, it was too bogged down in stereotypes, and had a dreadfully weak end. I have recently read The Idiot, which leaves only Devils to go.... Neglected classic. 404) Chosen By A Horse/Review/SuZi To have horses in our lives is to open ourselves to realms of awareness increasingly endangered by the current of our times. We live in an increasingly urban social mindset: one of concrete, ever more restricted spaces, rapacious consumption, frenzy and disrespect. Horses can not exist in such a realm.... The beasts that run.... 405) Scoop/Film Review/Dan Schneider To read many of the current reviews of Woody Allen’s latest film, Scoop, his second straight set in England, after last year’s successful comeback with Match Point, which harkened back to his Golden Era, one would believe that the film was on par with some of his decidedly lesser post-Golden era films, like The Curse Of The Jade Scorpion or Say Anything. It’s not.... Not bad at all. 406) Oscar Wilde/BBC Collection/Dan Schneider While comic and filmmaker Woody Allen once said that writing drama was like ‘sitting at the grown ups table’ vis-à-vis writing comedy, there is little doubt that writing good or even great comedy is an art form that few have done well with, much less mastered. There is as wide a gulf between great comedy and great drama as there is between even greater genres of art.... The Master! 407) 52 McGs/Book Review/Dan Schneider Certainly more wasteful books (in terms of unrecycled paper and deforestation, as well as intellectual inertia) have been published than 52 McGs, edited by Chris Calhoun, which is a collection of fifty-two of the supposedly most interesting, and well-written, of seven hundred or so obituaries published by a New York Times writer named Robert McGill Thomas, Jr..... Oy vey! 408) Wild Strawberries/Film Review/Dan Schneider Watching Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries for the first time was an interesting experience because of three reasons. One, the film itself is terrific. Two, I watched it the same night as the 2006 Academy Awards, and was struck by how Bergman’s film never condescends to its viewer, unlike the major nominated Politically Correct films Hollywood churns out and rewards.... Masterful. 409) Shadows/Film Review/Dan Schneider In many ways, the filmic career of independent filmmaking legend John Cassavetes is the polar opposite of someone like Alfred Hitchcock, the consummate studio director. Where Hitchcock infamously treated his actors as cattle, Cassavetes sought to work with them improvisationally.... Precursor to better things. 410) March Of The Penguins/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Last year’s biggest surprise box office hit was not a horror film like The Blair Witch Project, nor was it a comedy like My Big Fat Greek Wedding. Rather, it was a National Geographic film that was not released as a television special first. March Of The Penguins, filmed by Luc Jacquet, was a French production, which followed a year in the life of the Emperor penguins of Antarctica, through their mating cycle, but it is not in a class, scientifically, nor visually, with the breakthrough French documentary of a few years back, Winged Migration.... Colder than warm. 411) The Legend Of Zorro/DVD Review/Dan Schneider The Mask Of Zorro was a 1998 sleeper hit, directed by Martin Campbell, that saw Antonio Banderas in the role he was born to play, that of the 19^th Century Mexican-American superhero Zorro, aka Don Alejandro de la Vega. The film was notable for two other reasons- first, it was a very good film, even considering it was in the action-superhero vein, and two, it was America’s introduction to the almost flawlessly gorgeous Catherine Zeta-Jones.... Catherine Zeta-Jones: need one say more? 412) Rent/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Let me state that I have never been a fan of musicals. I loathed most of the Golden Age Hollywood musicals that my parents loved, and those from my youth, the 1960s and 1970s (Hair, Jesus Christ, Superstar, Godspell, etc.), did not move me, either- at least dramatically, even if the songs were great. There’s something about people breaking out into song that is just so forced that, dramatically, is too much to overcome.... Overcoming biases. 413) Interpreter Of Maladies/Jhumpa Lahiri/Dan Schneider Were Jhumpa Lahiri in a writing group I ran I would tell her the stories that comprise Interpreter Of Maladies, winner of the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, make for good first drafts, generally, but that, of the nine short stories, six of them exist simply because the characters are Indian, and Lahiri feels this makes them a compelling enough subject. It’s for this reason, including her prolixity, which includes mainly a need to overdescribe everything from Indian food stuffs to toe nail polish, that I felt that reading the book was like being an attendee at a zoo.... Can you say all-spice is nice? 414) Sideways/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Sideways was a 2004 sleeper comedy hit by director Alexander Payne that really deserved its plaudits. He previously made the funny Reese Witherspoon comedy Election and the so-so Jack Nicholson film About Schmidt. The film’s title comes from the proper way to store a bottle of wine, as well the angle a drunk sees the world from when he’s recovering from passing out on the floor.... Pretty funny. 415) Gorgon/Book Review/Dan Schneider There are certain things about a book that one can get from the title alone, such as this information: Gorgon: Paleontology, Obsession, And The Greatest Catastrophe In Earth’s History, by Peter D. Ward. Viking, New York, NY. 237 pages; 2004; $27.95 (hardbound).... Passable. 416) David & Lisa/DVD Review/Dan Schneider One of the earliest independent film successes in America, both in terms of box office and critical acclaim at international film festivals (including Oscar nominations for direction and screenplay), was director Frank Perry’s issue oriented David And Lisa, produced by Paul M. Heller.... Neglected. 417) Alice Munro/Short Stories/Dan Schneider Canadian prosist Alice Munro is not a particularly bad writer, but she’s not a particularly good nor engaging one either. Terms such as mundane, dull, and ho-hum come to mind. While she is certainly not the worst writer published, she’s only a passable writer, at best, and vastly overrated.... Overrated. 418) Daphne DuMaurier/Short Stories/Dan Schneider The name Daphne Du Maurier was familiar to me only in relation to the Alfred Hitchcock film The Birds, based upon a short story she had written. Yes, I knew that the films Jamaica Inn and Rebecca were based upon her novels, but it was The Birds that was my reference point, and as I thought the film was a good one, although not one of Hitchcock’s best, I was never motivated to read the source for the film until my wife bought this book.... Underrated. 419) Diary Of A Rapist/Evan S. Connell Evan S. Connell’s The Diary Of A Rapist fails as a novel for two large reasons. First, is the technical reason that its usage of small diary entries limits the point of view of his narrator, the rapist Earl Summerfield, which necessitates his not portraying fully his own predicament because the character simply cannot. By contrast, in Connell’s two masterpieces of prose, Mrs. Bridge and Mr. Bridge, the short sections, written in an omniscient mode, allowed a brushstroke technique.... Oy! 420) The Naked Kiss/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Maverick American filmmaker Sam Fuller was both a progressive and a prude, and no film of his better illustrates this schismic personal dichotomy, echoed in his art’s use of high and low techniques, than his 1964 black and white film noir melodrama The Naked Kiss, a cult classic whose title derives from its lead character, a prostitute named Kelly, who describes the kiss of the fiancée she kills.... Bald babe strikes back! 421) L'Avventura/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Some films that are labeled classics, or great films, are not even good films. Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless immediately comes to mind. Others, like Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura, whose title literally means The Adventure, as well as Italian slang for a one night stand, are not necessarily bad, but still only interesting failures, and not worthy of their reputation. L’Avventura was the first in a trilogy of black and white widescreen films Antonioni would make about alienation and personal anomy.... Half a great film. 422) La Notte/DVD Review/Dan Schneider La Notte (The Night), the 1961 film by Michelangelo Antonioni, and the second of his Alienation Trilogy, after L’Avventura and before L’Eclisse, is a huge artistic leap up from its predecessor film. It’s not so much that L’Avventura was such a bad film- it’s not. It has its moments, and a good premise that swiftly decays into anomie and melodrama, whereas La Notte, even at an hour and fifty-five minutes in length, is a highly focused, layered, and concentrated, adult drama about the ennui that occurs in a marriage of dilettantes where all of one’s life has been plotted out beforehand, yet happiness still eludes its participants.... All a great film! 423) L'Eclisse/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Eclisse (The Eclipse), his 1962 black and white capstone of his Alienation Trilogy that began with L’Avventura and continued with La Notte, is arguably a great film, but still a cut or two below its immediate predecessor, the indisputably brilliant La Notte, simply because it lacks the story and excellent portrayal of a human relationship that that earlier film has. It is, however, a superior film to L’Avventura, in that its sustains it sublime weirdness and disaffecting qualities throughout the film, whereas that first film in the trilogy petered out into a dull ending after an intriguing and mysterious premise.... Two in a row! 424) John Crowley/Collected Short Fiction/Dan Schneider I had never heard of John Crowley before I stumbled upon a copy of his Novelties & Souvenirs, Collected Short Fiction, a HarperCollins Perennial book from 2004, at a discount bookseller. The subtitle of the book sums up his work- Collected Short Fiction. This is because the tales, fifteen in all, are not really short stories in the classical sense, but more like the bland Ficciones of a Jorge Luis Borges.... Yawn. 425) Scenes From A Marriage/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Leo Tolstoy once opined that all happy families are happy in but a few ways, while those that are not suffer in many unique ways. This apothegm was never more well evinced than in filmmaker Ingmar Bergman’s five hour 1973 Swedish telefilm Scenes From A Marriage (Scener ur ett aktenskap), a miniseries that was even more influential in Europe than the American television miniseries Roots, which captivated American audiences only a few years later. Bergman’s miniseries was repackaged for foreign markets into a 169 minute film version that, in 1974, was almost universally lauded by critics in America.... Liv and Erland, together again. 426) Solaris/DVD Review/Dan Schneider I first saw the 2002 Steven Soderbergh version of Solaris, starring George Clooney, then read Stansislaw Lem’s novel, then watched this- Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1972 169 minute film version of the book, Solaris (Solyaris), which won the Grand Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival that year, and each successive interpretation I’ve seen of the work is better than the last, even though Lem publicly disavowed Tarkovsky’s film, which was scripted by Fridrikh Gorenshtein. The book is a good piece of sci fi, but it’s not great.... Slow but steady- you know the rest. 427) Mr. Arkadin/DVD Review/Dan Schneider The first time I’d ever seen Orson Welles’ 1955 black and white film, Mr. Arkadin, was a few years ago, on a cheap 91 minute DVD version put out by LaserLight DVD. It was a film often called Welles’ ‘European Citizen Kane’, and had a bizarre introduction by a fey and gloved actor Tony Curtis, and was a very poor quality disk, with a scratched and highly white contrasted print that looked washed out.... Finally, together again! 428) On Plagiarism/Google/Dan Schneider In recent years the state of literature has been in manifest decline for a variety of reasons. Instead of seeking to ameliorate the situation, the people who run the publishing industry have exacerbated the decline with increased cronyism, the fostering of -isms and schools of bad writing, the refusal to publish real criticism, and having publishers, editors, agents, and critics refusing to do their jobs. Many bad writers who have benefited from this system have decried it, although always ‘safely’, speaking of ‘unnamed others’ who have ruined things. Never do they ‘name names’ of the offenders- be it bad Postmodern writers like David Foster Wallace.... The future will prove. 429) Political Aesthetics/The Eumenides/Max Herman I think there is a need to study more an ancient play, The Eumenides. Aeschylus wrote it in 458 B.C., showing revenge transformed to love. It tells the story of the house of Atreus, and how Orestes killed his mother. I read the Richmond Lattimore translation: "Get him, get him, get him, get him." By voting to forgive the matricide, Athena founded the great polis. The elder gods, the Furies also called, were not destroyed but blessed and changed. In this we see an early vision of art, or exosomatic evolution. Why must forgiveness be a part of growth, and sometimes violence go unpunished? Perhaps because to punish all, infinitely, rains blood on blood.... Max is back! 430) Teaching Poetry/A Foray/Neil Hester Ah, yes, the poetry unit. Every year in America we spend one approximately six-weeks on the study of poetry. I consider this a good thing, naturally, but there are certain changes that need to be made in order to create an effective curriculum.... Youth responds. 431) Ikiru/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Ikiru (To Live), by Akira Kurosawa, is sort of a ‘lost’ film. No, it was never really lost, but it is unlike the archetypal Kurosawa film Western audiences think of him making, and thereby lost in his canon. It is not some historical epic filled with honor, samurais, and swordplay. It is more in line with the genre of retrospective life films in the vein of Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane or Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries, in that we drop in the on the life of an ordinary man.... Masterpiece. 432) 8½/DVD Review/Dan Schneider In his 1988 film Another Woman, director Woody Allen has one of his minor characters, named Paul (Harris Yulin), confront the film’s lead character, Marion, played by Gena Rowlands, with a comment that she made upon his attempts at writing. Years earlier, when Paul had shown Marion a manuscript of some of his writing, Marion declared to him, ‘This is overblown. It’s too emotional. It’s maudlin. Your dreams may be….meaningful to you, but to the objective observer….they’re, they’re.…it’s so embarrassing.’ I use this quote from Allen because.... Near-miss. 433) Seven Samurai/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Some films do get better with repeated viewings. Akira Kurosawa’s 1954 black and white film Seven Samurai (Shichinin no samurai) is one of them. It was well deserving of winning the 1954 Venice Film Festival’s Silver Lion, as well as the two Academy awards it won for Best Art/Set Decoration and Best Costume Design. On a first view it’s simply a great action film, but with subsequent viewings the finer points of characterization come through in each moment, seeping into the mind subliminally and purposefully..... Better each time. 434) My Best Fiend/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Werner Herzog’s 1999 documentary, Klaus Kinski: My Best Fiend, is yet another in the dazzling array of Herzog documentary, or documentary-like, films. This one follows his turbulent friendship and creative partnership with the legendary German actor Klaus Kinski. Herzog also serves as narrator, in German (with English subtitles, or dubbed into English).... Portraits of artists. 435) Angela Carter/Short Stories/Dan Schneider Reading Burning Your Boats: The Collected Short Stories of Angela Carter (1940-1993) brought to my mind two things. The first came while reading the book’s Introduction by Salman Rushdie. Some years ago, a good friend of mine excitedly handed me a copy of The Satanic Verses, with several pages marked off especially. We were at a function, but he insisted that I read them. I did, and asked him what was so urgent in the text that I needed to read them. It was a passage describing a character who was manifestly the Ayatollah Khomeini. It describes him stewing in his apartment in France, plotting his overthrow of the Shah.... Overwrought. 436) The Cocoanuts/Groucho's In The Room/Dan Schneider I have never been as big a fan of The Marx Brothers as I have been of other great comedy teams, be it the verbal brilliance of Abbott & Costello, the pathos laden antics of Laurel & Hardy, nor the violent slapstick of The Three Stooges. The reason is because the team’s success or failure basically falls all on the shoulders of its lone truly brilliant member, Groucho Marx..... The man. 437) The Magdalene Sisters/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Brutally psychopathic lesbian nuns and lascivious pedophile priests. What else is new? No, seriously, watching the DVD of The Magdalene Sisters was like a time machine for me. Not that I was ever an unwed mother in an Irish hellhole run by religious extremists, but I did grow up in a poor neighborhood that was patrolled by reprobate and psychotic cops that made the bad cops in Serpico look virginal, by comparison..... Lesbo nuns- eew. 438) Same Place, Same Things/Book Review/Dan Schneider Having recently read a short story collection called The Mountains Won’t Remember Us, by Robert Morgan, set in southern Appalachia, I was heartened after reading the first two of twelve stories in Same Place, Same Things, by Tim Gautreaux. While Morgan was the quintessential generic and bland writer (despite his regionalism)- not really horrible, but not really good, in the first two stories of this 1996 book I felt that Gautreaux was a writer like Morgan, but a bit juiced up.... Yawn.... 439) A Jacques Barzun Reader/Book Review/Dan Schneider Jacques Barzun is sort of the social sciences’ equivalent of Harold Bloom, albeit less personally and intellectually noxious. He is, however, the quintessential living ‘Dead White Male’ scholar whose knowledge about his subject matter is very broad- he can write seemingly convincingly on opera, politics, baseball, Paris in the 1830s, and Raymond Chandler, but whose depth of wisdom about any one thing is paper-thin..... Old man whines. 440) Umberto D./DVD Review/Dan Schneider Lost between the glare of his earlier The Bicycle Thief, and his later films with Sophia Loren, Vittorio De Sica’s 1952 film Umberto D. stands as an almost forgotten masterpiece of Italian Neo-Realism, and one of the last films that could claim to be of that movement alone. It was pilloried by myopic critics upon its opening- mostly Left Wing dilettantes who thought that the formerly middle class civil servant’s tale was not ‘socially conscious’ enough for the filmmaker.... Neglected classic. 441) Blowup/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Blowup was Michelangelo Antonioni’s first English language film, made in Great Britain, in 1966, and it’s a flat-out great film, at a crisp 111 minutes. It was nominated for two Academy Awards; Best Director, and Best Original Screenplay- by Antonioni, Tonino Guerra, and Edward Bond- adapted from the short story Las Babas Del Diablo, by Argentine writer Julio Cortazar, and won the National Society Of Film Critics title as best film of 1967.... Masterwork. 442) Ugetsu/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Ugetsu (Ugetsu monogatari), a 1953 film by Kenji Mizoguchi, which won the Venice Film Festival’s top prize (the Silver Lion Award for Best Direction) that year, is one of the best films to ever deal with the subject of human desire, and not only the obvious sexual aspects of the emotion. While ostensibly it is labeled a ghost story.... Wonderful. 443) Day Of Wrath/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1943 film Day Of Wrath (Vredens dag), adapted from Hans Wiers-Jenssens’ novel, Day Of Wrath, by Dreyer, is an earlier, better version of the issues tackled in Arthur Miller’s play, The Crucible, because, even though the film was made during the Nazi occupation of Denmark, and there are obvious parallels to be drawn between that and the film’s narrative, it is never as psychologically obvious nor melodramatic as Miller’s later allegory.... Stylized power. 444) Chaplin's Goliath/DVD Review/Dan Schneider The Time: Mid-1970s, summer vacation, 1 am. The Place: My dining room, in front of a small 15” black and white Philco tv. On WOR, Channel 9 in New York City, there is a 90 minute talk show called The Joe Franklin Show. It is unlike any of the other talk shows of the era.... Forgotten funnyman. 445) Matthew Ridgway/Bio Review/Dan Schneider Of all the great American military leaders the last century produced, from Black Jack Pershing to the World War Two icons- Dwight D, Eisenhower, Chester Nimitz, George Patton, Omar Bradley, George Marshall, Douglas MacArthur, through Stormin’ Norman Schwarzkopf, perhaps the greatest of them all, militarily speaking, was General Matthew Bunker Ridgway, the man who took over from MacArthur after Big Mac was dismissed by President Harry S. Truman.... Forgotten hero. 446) Blue/DVD Review/Dan Schneider *Krzysztof Kieslowski was one of the more interesting filmmakers of the last quarter century, and the centerpiece of his claim to greatness is the Three Colors* (**Trois Couleurs) trilogy of films that he wrote and directed in the early to mid-1990s, filming them all at the same time. Blue, White, and Red represent the three colors of the French flag, and symbolize the three virtues of liberty, equality, and fraternity respectively. Blue (Bleu) is the first film in the series, and was released in 1993..... Musical masterpiece. 447) White/DVD Review/Dan Schneider The middle film of Polish-French film director *Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Three Colors* (**Trois Couleurs) trilogy of Blue, White, and Red is a very black comedy, and generally considered the weakest of the three films. This is true, although, given the high quality of the tercet, White (Blanc) is still an excellent film, and compared with the mind-numbing comedies that Hollywood regularly cranks out, it is exceptional. And, at a mere hour and a half, this 1994 film never drags on too long. However, one of the major misconceptions about the film and its hero, Karol Karol (Zbigniew Zamachowski)- literally Charley Charley, is that he is a Chaplinesque figure.... Comic grimness. 448) Red/DVD Review/Dan Schneider The final film of Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Three Colors (Trois Couleurs) trilogy, Red (Rouge), released in 1994, is almost universally acclaimed as the best of the films. For once, the common consensus is correct. Of course, if one is to believe some of the online reviews of this film, and the whole trilogy, there are plenty of people who seriously question whether or not Three Colors is a better trilogy than the two Star Wars trilogies.... Capstone perfected. 449) The Circus/DVD Review/Dan Schneider One can argue that Charlie Chaplin wrote, directed, and starred in greater films than his neglected 1928 gem, The Circus, his last fully silent film, which he also wrote with Joseph Plunkett, but one cannot reasonably argue that he made a funnier film; nor can one argue that The Circus is not a great film itself. Yet, critics, fans of Chaplin, and even Chaplin himself, long overlooked this great film. The reason has more to do with the highly publicized divorce trial from Lita Grey that Chaplin endured while filming the feature over two years.... Laugh, clown, laugh.... 450) Shame/DVD Review/Dan Schneider I should no longer be surprised when critics miss the most obvious things in works of art, because they are human beings, and the vast majority of human beings are lazy by nature. That said, the simplistic notion that Ingmar Bergman’s great 1968 film Shame (or Skammen) is merely an anti-war film does a great deal of damage to the reputation of this very complex, and highly nuanced, film.... Overlooked. 451) Breathless/DVD Review/Dan Schneider The fact that an artist writes boringly to convey boredom, or childishly to convey puerility, has no effect on the resultant work not being boring nor puerile. Self-awareness of a flaw does not alleviate the flaw. For this to not be true intent in art would have to matter, meaning that all art would necessarily have to be accompanied by a detailed explanation of itself and its conception by the artists, which would therefore render the idea of the art as its own best explanation worthless. Naturally, this would rent the very essence of the artwork.... Overpraised. 452) A Great Day In Harlem/DVD Review/Dan Schneider I recall first seeing the lauded and multiply awarded jazz documentary A Great Day In Harlem a dozen or so years ago on PBS, and while not a jazz fan nor aficionado, it was a short film (only an hour) that seemed to compress much of jazz history into a convenient package.... Pretty good, not great. 453) The War Against Cliché/Book Review/Dan Schneider Of recent vintage there has been a spate of the talentless children of talented literary figures getting into print. The two worst examples are Thomas Steinbeck- son of John Steinbeck, who whined of ‘being forced to write a novel’ by his publishers; and Frieda Hughes- spawn of Sylvia Plath’s unholy coupling with Ted Hughes... Perhaps just a hissy fit. 454) The Wages Of Fear/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Think that space invaders, aliens, dinosaurs, cyborgs, or monsters of one sort or another are needed to make a film a thriller? If so, I recommend you watch Henri-Georges Clouzot’s 1953 black and white masterpiece The Wages Of Fear (La Salaire De La Peur), about the evils of runaway greed and capitalism, all in the name of oil. It’ll change your mind. Over half a century later, and in light of the current American war folly for oil in the Middle East.... Great film. 455) Faces/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Faces, by John Cassavetes, is a 1968 film generally credited as being the first popular independent film in America to make an impact in the public consciousness. But, it is more than that. It is a film that totally subverted the dominant themes and forms of Hollywood cinema, at the time, showed that ‘adult’ films, truly adult, not a euphemism for pornography, could have mass appeal, and paved the way for the great auteur decade of American filmmaking that was the 1970s.... Acting not. 456) Saraband/DVD Review/Dan Schneider In 2003 Swedish film legend Ingmar Bergman made his last film ever- although he’s said that before, some two decades after his prior farewell to film with Fanny And Alexander. He should have never come back after that valedictory, for his effort, Saraband, a supposed sequel to his 1973 Swedish television smash Scenes From A Marriage, is a bad film- the worst I’ve yet to see from Bergman, and a bad film by any measure. His other ‘bad’ films, Cries And Whispers and The Serpent’s Egg, at least had some redeeming features.... Bergman bombs! 457) Isaac Bashevis Singer/Short Stories/Dan Schneider Isaac Bashevis Singer is not a good short story writer. Isaac Bashevis Singer is not a bad short story writer. Isaac Bashevis Singer is not a mediocre short story writer. He is all and none of these things because he is primarily not a short story writer, in the modern sense. Yes, a handful of his forty-seven tales in the Collected Stories are short stories, but most of them are really Polish and Jewish fables.... Myth Man. 458) Zora Neale Hurston/Short Stories/Dan Schneider Isaac Bashevis Singer with a tan….and breasts. That’s what I was thinking of Zora Neale Hurston as I read her Complete Stories, except she’s not as good a writer nor tale teller. Or, perhaps a less skilled Sherwood Anderson. There is a sense one gets when reading these tales that Hurston was born too late.... Not quite. 459) John O'Hara/Short Stories/Dan Schneider I picked up an old Modern Library edition of the Selected Short Stories of John O’Hara, and was alternating my reading of them with a short story collection by postmodern poseur David Foster Wallace. The difference in skill and accomplishment is immense. As could be expected, Wallace’s work is utter tripe- devoid of wordly skill, insight, and any hints of good conversation or character development. Not so with O’Hara.... Forgotten man. 460) The Blood Of A Poet/DVD Review/Dan Schneider I recently got The Orphic Trilogy of films, written and directed by Jean Cocteau, and decided to start with the first film, 1930’s The Blood Of A Poet (Le Sang D’Un Poète), which runs about 50 minutes. I was dubious about Cocteau as a filmmaker since, as a poet, he was one of those laughably bad frauds that the decadent inter-war years of Europe produced, trying to be Surreal.... Yuck. 461) Le Notti Bianche/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Luchino Visconti’s 1957 film, Le Notti Bianche (White Nights), winner of the Silver Lion Award at that year’s Venice Film Festival, and adapted from a Fyodor Dostoevsky story of the same name, is not quite a great film- for it lacks any great nor new ideas, but it’s a very good film that uses the elaborate Hollywood style sets of that era, crafted by Enzo Eusepi on a Cinecittá sound stage that is manifestly artificial.... Marcello rocks! 462) Strangers On A Train/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Strangers On A Train, the 1951 black and white film by Alfred Hitchcock, is a damned good movie- with many of the requisite Hitchcockian flourishes, but it is not a great film, despite many great aspects about it. The reason for this devolves down to one basic fact- it’s merely a melodrama, not a true drama. Melodrama always depends upon the propulsion of the plot by the characters within doing the dumbest possible things to get to the next scene. Melodrama thrives on the lowest common denominator.... Psycho- the real prequel. 463) Rear Window/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Some films show their age, and others do not. Despite its reputation as a classic of great filmmaking, Alfred Hitchcock’s 1954 film Rear Window, unfortunately, shows its age far too much. No, it’s certainly not a bad film, by any standard, and is a pretty good one, but it’s not one of Hitchcock’s best, much less a great film, nor deserving of any place in the Top 100 Films lists of the last few years.... Burr or thorn in Stewart's side? 464) F For Fake/DVD Review/Dan Schneider One of the greatest pieces of charlatanry in Orson Welles’ brilliant pseudo-documentary F For Fake, released in 1974, is the idea that Welles’ lover and one time sculptress, Oja Kodar (née Olga Palinkas), had any real hand in crafting the film; specifically in writing it alongside Welles. Don’t get me wrong; I have nothing against the woman nor the claim, for the claim is in keeping with the whole tenor of the film, and when she was young, well, the lovely Ms. Kodar looked positively ferocious in a bikini.... Yeowzah! 465) Melvin Goes To Dinner/DVD Review/Dan Schneider On the down side is the fact that the 2003 film Melvin Goes To Dinner, directed by first timer Bob Odenkirk, is a watered down yuppy version of the great 1981 Louis Malle film My Dinner With Andre. On the up side is that if you are going to imitate something, at least choose something great, for the imitation, while not great, is likely to be good, which My Dinner With Melvin is. It was written by actor/playwright Michael Blieden.... So-so. 466) The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy/DVD Review/Dan Schneider The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy is one of those films that seems a lot better if one has not read the source material it’s based upon- in this case the series of Hitchhiker books by Douglas Adams, the BBC radio shows, or the 1970s BBC television series of the same name. This was manifest immediately to me, as one who’d seen the repeats of the tv show on PBS, but never read the books.... So-so, deux. 467) Babes In Toyland/DVD Review/Dan Schneider The scariest dreams are tattered and not seamless. They are not like slick Hollywood special effects laden films, but like those lower budget masterpieces; Carnival Of Souls or the original Night Of The Living Dead. Thus the most scary villains to ever appear onscreen in film may well be the semi-simian Bogeymen in the Hal Roach Studio’s 1934 filmic adaptation of Glen MacDonough’s and Victor Herbert’s 1903 operetta Babes In Toyland.... Scary? 468) The Iconoclast Goes To Sea/Book Review/Dan Schneider One of the things I’m proudest of in regards to Cosmoetica is that I’ve never been a snob in regards to art. Whether or nor someone is famous, lauded, or not has no bearing on how I view the art in front of me. This has led me to some great poetry.... Stay proud! 469) Champion/DVD Review/Dan Schneider The other day I watched the recent Ron Howard boxing film Cinderella Man on DVD and found it predictably mediocre. Part of this came from the fact that it was a Ron Howard film, and part of it from the fact that it was a boxing film. Raging Bull is perhaps the only boxing film that can come close to being called great, although the first Rocky and films like Jimmy Cagney’s City For Conquest.... Classic schmaltz. 470) Broken Flowers/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Bill Murray is the closest thing to a modern Charlie Chaplin, not in being a filmmaker, but in creating an onscreen persona. His ‘dour schlemiel’ is every bit as iconic as Chaplin’s tramp. He has played the same basic character in films from Groundhog Day to Lost In Translation to his latest incarnation in Jim Jarmusch’s latest film Broken Flowers.... Jarmusch's ennui. 471) Danny Deckchair/DVD Review/Dan Schneider The seep of the worst aspects of American culture is always depressing to watch. Witness the 2004 Australian film Danny Deckchair, which is an off the rack romantic comedy without a whit of inspiration, and as predictable as they come. Granted, Hollywood romantic comedies can be bad to occasionally mediocre, and this film gently crests out of bad and into tepid mediocrity.... Hollywood crap down under. 472) Thumbsucker/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Thumbsucker is the first film made by indy director Mike Mills, in 2005, and it’s a solid film, but nowhere near as good as one might presume according to its plaudits. The story was adapted from an autobiographical 1999 novel by Walter Kirn, and while it is uniformly well acted the basic problem is that it is yet in another of the series of ‘American suburbia is hell’ films.... So-so. 473) Vera Drake/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Vera Drake was a highly praised 2004 film, written and directed by Mike Leigh, that detailed the cruelties and hypocrisies of England’s anti-abortion laws back in post-World War Two 1950. It won the Best Film Award at the Venice Film Festival and from the British Independent Film Awards, and deservedly so. Yet, despite its ‘large’ backdrop, the film is one of the most intimate character studies ever put to celluloid.... Abortion nightmare. 474) Filmatic 1/Le Mystere Picasso/Dylan Garcia-Wahl Legend has it that upon completion of the film, Le Mystère Picasso, Pablo Picasso destroyed the nearly two dozen works he created in the film. What has transpired of this story would have made a nice appendage for Orson Welles’ brilliant 1974 film essay, F for Fake. Peggy Parsons of the National Gallery of Art denies that the works were destroyed and claims to have seen several of the paintings herself.... Hmmm? 475) Dishonesty vs. Stupidity/The Horror!/Dan Schneider In the last few decades there has been the rise of a strong cult in the Western World. I am not speaking of Christian Fundamentalism nor Radical Islam, nor am I even speaking of assorted political persuasions. Yet, this cult has had an even greater and more widespread deleterious effect on culture than any religion or political party could ever hope to get. They go under many monikers: Political Correctness, Postmodernism, Moral Relativism, etc., but they all have in common the silly notion that there are no objective standards to what is good and bad in the arts and sciences.... Academia blows! 476) Life Without Sassy/A Jeremiad/Dan Schneider Several years ago I had a beloved cat of mine named Chia run away. It devastated me, for while I had suffered through the deaths of cats before, the physical loss of one was a new experience. With death there is certainty. Not so with mere loss. There was no closure with Chia. A few weeks ago I did get closure with the death of another cat of mine, after I got home late, after a day of work. Sassy was an overweight orange and white cat that was a few months shy of turning seventeen. Two other cats of mine, Freddy and Kitty, also died at sixteen, so I was hoping Sassy might set a Schneider family record for oldest cat.... With love. 477) Orpheus/DVD Review/Dan Schneider The second film in the so-called Orphic Trilogy of Jean Cocteau, Orpheus, actually deals with the classic Orpheus and Eurydice myth, and is a better film than the predecessor film, The Blood Of A Poet, in the three film The Criterion Collection release, but it’s by no means even close to a good film, much less a great one. Its special effects were long outdated when they were first tried in The Blood Of A Poet in 1930.... Awpheus? 478) The Conversation/DVD Review/Dan Schneider There are some works of art that are obviously derivative of others, and obviously inferior, because they simply ape the earlier work, tweak a few minor things, and try to pass off their theft as ‘homage’. The Conversation (1974), written and directed by Francis Ford Coppola, is not one of those minor works. It has a manifest endebtedness to Michelangelo Antonioni’s brilliant 1966 film, Blowup, yet it does not merely ape that film’s existential dilemma of an accidental photograph possibly cluing its lead character into murder.... Coppola's best. 479) Blind Chance/DVD Review/Dan Schneider If you have ever held a pupa in your grip, you know that, if held up to a light, at a certain angle, the fully formed insect can be seen, even though it has yet to emerge. This was the sensation that I had while watching Polish director Krzystof Kieslowski’s 1981 film Blind Chance (Przypadek) after having seen his glorious Three Colors trilogy.... Half-blind? 480) Persona/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Persona, Ingmar Bergman’s 1966 black and white film, reminds me of Herman Hesse’s novella Siddhartha. Not in the subject matter, but in that both works of art perfectly marry their messages with their forms, and both say so much with so little a narrative spine. In that sense, both are great works of art that transcend any of the discomfit their often dubious artistic and social claims make.... Bergman's babes. 481) Filmatic2/The Sweetest Melody/Dylan Garcia-Wahl I realize, before I even begin, that I am courting blasphemy. But I have never been one to shy away from blasphemy. The Silver Screen legend of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers is as large as any to ever come out of Hollywood. Movies like Top Hat and Swing Time cemented their names (and feet) as the most beloved dancing duo ever paired. However, I would maintain that not only was Top Hat not Fred Astaire’s best film but that Ginger Rogers was not his best partner.... Oo-la-la... 482) All The Real Girls/DVD Review/Dan Schneider All The Real Girls was David Gordon Green’s 2003 follow up film to his 2000 debut film George Washington, which became an underground classic. The good news is that it is a superior film to that earlier excellent film, and Green shows real growth as a filmmaker. Like the earlier film, this film breaks with traditional narrative, and spends the first third, or so, of its hour and forty eight minutes running time devoted to simply introducing the viewer to the main characters.... Southern tried? 483) Without A Hero/Book Review/Dan Schneider This book was written after its writer, Thomas John Boyle, became T. Coraghessan Boyle, but before he morphed into merely T.C. Boyle. Some online sites suggest that Coraghessan was a middle name made up because it was ‘sexier’ than mere John, or T.J., while others claim it as his second middle name from birth. I don’t know which is true, but the first option seems far more in line with the egoistic ravings of this man.... T.C. Boyle sucks....ass! 484) The Serpent's Egg/DVD Review/Dan Schneider When Ingmar Bergman was in self-imposed exile from Sweden, in the late 1970s, over a flap where he was accused by the Swedish government of tax evasion, he made several films abroad. One of them was The Serpent’s Egg (Das Schlangenei-Örmens ägg), an English language film (his second- The Touch was the first) made in 1978, in West Berlin studios, for legendary film producer Dino de Laurentiis, who was reeling from the financial disaster that was his 1976 remake of King Kong.... Bergman in minor key. 485) Filmatic 3/Hitler As Human/Dylan Garcia-Wahl Many great actors (some even knighted) have played Hitler on film. All have failed in one sense or another. Sir Alec Guinness played him in Hitler: The Last Ten Days (1973) and Sir Anthony Hopkins donned the armband for The Bunker (1981), Welsh accent and all (he actually did a better job playing Mussolini years later). Both these first rate actors couldn’t fully capture the part so what chance did the likes of Mike Gwilym have when he turned in a robotic caricature in 1990’s The Plot To Kill Hitler – none.... Ach tung! 486) Good Bye Lenin/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Wolfgang Becker’s 2003 film, Good Bye Lenin!, is not a great film, but it is far better than the usual Hollywood tripe, as well as being a cut above most independent films released by filmmakers not named John Sayles. The two hour long film was written by Becker, Bernd Lichtenberg, Hendrik Handloegten, Christoph Silber, and Achim von Borries, and has a unique, if strained premise- that as the Berlin Wall fell in 1989.... Solid. 487) Wild Ducks Flying Backwards/Book Review/Dan Schneider Tom Robbins, a self-proclaimed Zen Hedonist, is one of those writers whose name is now vaguely known- although it has slipped considerably in recognition and reputation from his 1970s heyday, but whose works are doomed to end up in antique shops in a century as people hold up his moldering books and wonder why and how his banal and flat out bad writing ever got into print in the first place.... Shoot the man, not the birds. 488) The Mountains Won't Remember Us/Dan Schneider Not all bad writing is bad. That statement may confuse people who are longtime readers of mine. What I mean by it is that all writing that is considered bad is not necessarily badly written. There are writers whose work avoids the obvious clichés, easy stereotypes, bad music (especially in poetry), and the glaring maladies that kill a written work, which tends to fail in only a handful of ways.... Zzzzzzzzzz.... 489) How To Draw A Bunny/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Henry Darger. That is the name that hovers behind this 2002 documentary film, How To Draw A Bunny, by John Walter, which won the Special Jury Prize at the 2002 Sundance Film Festival, and details the life and wannabe legend of minor pop artist Ray Johnson (1927-1995).... Bad & worse. 490) Whity/DVD Review/Dan Schneider In 1970 the German film director Rainer Werner Fassbinder wrote and directed a German language American Western film that, unlike the Spaghetti Westerns of that era- also filmed in Almería, Andalucía, Spain, was not played straight, but more like a silent era Expressionistic film, replete with melodramatic music, cartoonish face makeup, and over the top acting, especially in the physical movements of the actors’ bodies. It’s one of those films that is so highly stylized, so earnestly trying to be deep and/or profound that it is instead really, really bad.... Ed Wood, ach tung? 491) Nosferatu/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Werner Herzog is an artist out of his time….and that’s a very good thing for lovers of great films. His own great 1979 film Nosferatu, Phantom Of The Night (Nosferatu, Phantom Der Nacht), which was released in America as Nosferatu, The Vampire, is less a classic vampire film and more a Post-Apocalyptic tale, having more in common (especially image-wise) with films like On The Beach, The Quiet Earth, the Vincent Price classic The Last Man On Earth (based on Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend), and even the first Night Of The Living Dead, than with the Hollywood Dracula mythos, and even its silent filmic predecessor.... Herzog at his best. 492) Tokyo Story/DVD Review/Dan Schneider There are many roads to greatness. This is a notion that I have always held to be true. No greater example of this could be given than by comparing the films of two of the greatest filmmakers from Japan. Of course, most people have heard of Akira Kurosawa and his classics like Seven Samurai, Rashomon, and Ikiru. But there is also Yasujiro Ozu (1903-1963), whose canon of films is set in modern times far more often than Kurosawa’s. Where Kurosawa was grand, Ozu is small.... Masterpiece. 493) La Dolce Vita/DVD Review/Dan Schneider La Dolce Vita (The Sweet Life), as ironic a title as has ever been used in motion picture history, Federico Fellini’s 1960 film commentary on modern hedonism and anomy, and filmed in 1959 in Rome, may just be the best film in his canon, for it combines the Neo-Realism of earlier classics like La Strada and Nights Of Cabiria, while admixing some of the surreal touches of his later classics.... Masterpiece squared. 494) Civilwarland In Bad Decline/Book Review/Dan Schneider Every so often I come across a writer I think will be bad, due to an image they cultivate, but turns out to be a good one, just as there are writers I think will be good, via reputation or personal recommendations, that turn out to be atrocious. Then, there are writers that split the difference.... Misses. 495) Seconds Of Pleasure/Neil Labute/Dan Schneider Why did Eugene O’Neill decide to publish a book of his poems? Granted, I could ask the same of, say, Leonard Nimoy, but the famed Star Trek actor never laid claim to caring for the written word the way the great American playwright did. Yet, both published hideous doggerel for the same reason- they could, because of their celebrity. This phenomenon is not limited to writing of course.... Not. 496) Rope/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Alfred Hitchcock is always considered a fine technical craftsman of film, but he has always been perceived as something less of an artistic filmmaker in comparison to other world greats, such as Akira Kurosawa, Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, Orson Welles, Stanley Kubrick, or even his fellow countryman David Lean. This is because as well plotted, acted, and directed as his films manifestly are, they appear to most critics as mere shiny baubles- all style and little substance.... Excellent. 497) 49 Up!/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Yes, he did it again! One of the great filmic projects of the 20^th Century, Michael Apted’s The Up Series, makes its entrée into the new millennium with the seventh bravura installment of its documentary format. Although shown on British television over the last four decades, viewers in other parts of the world have usually had to see it on the big screen, in local arts and independent theaters. Late this year, the DVD of the 49 Up was released in America, just a few weeks after its theatrical release, and it’s a worthwhile successor to earlier films.... Another masterpiece. 498) Testament Of Orpheus/DVD Review/Dan Schneider The third film in the so-called Orphic Trilogy of Jean Cocteau, Testament Of Orpheus (Le Testament D’Orphée, Ou Ne Me Demandez Pas Pourquoi!), is also the third film in The Criterion Collection release boxed set, and while it’s the best of the trio it’s nowhere near a good film. It does have perhaps the best scoring, and a dozen or so moments in its eighty minutes that have some spark of creativity.... The horror! 499) Godzilla vs. Gojira/DVD Review/Dan Schneider *Heaven.* When I came across the long awaited release of the original 1954 Japanese monster film Gojira on DVD I thought I had struck heaven. That it was accompanied by its Americanized cousin, Godzilla, King Of The Monsters, only doubled the joy of expectation. And for once, I was not disappointed.... The King lives! 500) Discover Magazine/ The Email/Dan Schneider In the December, 2006 edition of Discover magazine, there was a listing of the 25 Greatest Science Books Of All Time. I responded with an email to the magazine. In the February, 2007 edition the magazine ran this portion of my email.... Teaching the scientists.


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