Senator John Danforth has written a book, Faith and Politics, which is subsitled: "How the 'moral values' debate divides America and how to move forward together." It sounds hopeful enough. Indeed, had it been a magazine article I would have liked it well enough. As an 80,000 word book, it is a disaster.

As a magazine article, it would have worked as a moderate's plea to extremists. You see, Danforth is a social moderate. Although he is an ordained Episcopal priest, he is definitely one of the "let's leave religion in church" variety. To him, Christianity is all about reconciliation. This is a priest, after all, who finds ostentatious displays of religiosity embarrassing. He doesn't like saying grace in public, for example. I'm with him on all that.

Just the same, I can see why radical Christians would simply disregard what he has to say. He doesn't speak for them. What's more, he doesn't seem to understand them any better than I do—and that's saying a lot.

So even as a well-focused magazine article, what the Senator has to say would only resonate with other social moderates. It is always interesting to be reminded that not all religious people are extremists. But other than that, what exactly does a polemic such of this accomplish?

The big problem with the book is that Danforth does not have a great deal of material. As a result, the book is heavily padded with anecdotes from his life—anecdotes that are, almost without exception, boring. How could a man with the career he has had, have lived such a mind-numbingly tedious life?

I think the answer is in Woody Allen's Annie Hall. In it, he asks a couple how they manage to make their relationship work. The woman says, "I'm very shallow and empty and I have no ideas and nothing interesting to say." The man then adds, "And I'm exactly the same way." I thus conclude that Senator Danforth is a happy man, but he's not a carrier.

When I checked out On Evil from the library, the librarian asked me, "Do you believe in it?" I stared blankly for a moment before realizing that she was referring to "evil." I gave her my best intellectual answer, "I guess it's definitional." And then I added that I might have more to say on the subject after reading the book. I don't.

On Evil is the fourth Eagleton book I've read this year. It is also—by far—the worst. I found myself annoyed through most of the book because he pointedly avoids ever saying what he thinks evil is. It was only on finishing it that I realized that he had not, in fact, promised me any such insight. The book is called "on evil" after all, and didn't he spend 159 pages writing "on evil"? Indeed he did.

In the end, though, what is the whole point of this book? It seems that he most wanted to address the issue of terrorism and the stupidity of assuming people who fly airplanes into buildings cannot be understood. And he does an excellent job of this in the last four pages. So really he has a good solid (though short) magazine article.

All of this is not to say that the book isn't a quick and fun read. It is filled with humor and insight, as when discussing the differences between the angelic (not necessarily good) and the demonic (not necessarily evil), "The angelic consists of high-sounding cliches like 'God bless this wonderful country of ours,' to which the demonic replies 'Yeah, whatever.'" And again, when talking about the lack of true purpose to actions, "In fact any purposeful activity, if you push it far back enough, turns out to be in the service of some nonpurposeful state of affairs. Why did she run for the bus? Because she wanted to get to the pharmacist's shop before it closed. Why did she want to do that? To buy some toothpaste. Why did she want some toothpaste? To brush her teeth. Why brush your teeth? To stay healthy. Why stay healthy? So as to carry on enjoying life. But what is so precious about an enjoyable life?" Or finally, on Aristotle's notion that living is something that takes constant practice, but which we never succeed at, "It is just that most of us are better at it than Jack the Ripper."

As I read On Evil, I kept thinking that there is one kind of evil that I do believe it: institutional evil. It is a system that allows mostly banal actors to produce deleterious results. Consider, for example, the recent Gulf oil spill. It is not that any person involved needed to be evil—be they employee, collaborator, or customer. Individually benign character flaws like greed and laziness are enough to fuel the system that leads to catastrophe. The same could be said for genocide, although such instances seem always to be additionally fueled by evil participants. How Eagleton, a neo-Marxist, could wait until page 143 to bring this issue up—only to drop it within a page—amazes me.

In the end, Eagleton's evil requires both a soulless actor and a harmful act. This is a definition I can deal with, but not one that I find that compelling. This leaves me with nothing new to say about evil if that librarian ever asks me.

Schopenhauer

Eagleton is at his best when discussing Schopenhauer. For example, he writes, "Isn't the material world incurably banal and monotonous, and wouldn't it be far better off not existing? The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer certainly thought so. Nothing struck him as more self-evidently foolish than the assumption that the human race was a good idea."

Later, he quotes Schopenhauer from The World as Will and Idea, stating that life consisted of, "momentary gratification, fleeting pleasure conditioned by wants, much and long suffering, constant struggle, bellum omnium [everyone against everyone], everything a hunter and everything hunted, want, need and anxiety, shrieking and howling; and this goes on in saecula saeculorum [forever and ever] or until once again the crust of the planet breaks."

I read The World as Will and Idea when I was in high school, but I really don't remember any of it. I do, however, think it had a profound effect on me because Schopenhauer's view of the universe is very similar to my own. This is why whenever Eagleton talks about him it makes me laugh in a knowing way—like I'm laughing at my own foibles. Yes, Schopenhauer is unrelentingly depressing. But that doesn't mean he's wrong.

Now I have to get The World as Will and Idea. It's going to be a bumpy week.

If I remember anything from the 2008 Presidential Campaign, it is Sarah Palin answering questions. She was easy to fear, but hard to hate. She always seemed to me like a small animal in the middle of the road not sure where to run to escape a fast-approaching car. Much later, when she spoke more coherently, I found that she was, in fact, easy to hate: she was filled with the same right-wing hate-mongering that we've come to expect from the once Grand Ol' Party. I miss those early days. And I've coined a term to celebrate them.

Katie Couric

Palin's most famous "answer," of course, was her answer to Katie Couric's question about what Supreme Court decisions she was against. Palin provided the following answer initially, "There's of course in the great history of America there have been rulings that there's never going to be absolute consensus by every American. And there are those issues again like Roe v. Wade where I believe are best held on a state level and addressed there so you know going through the history of America there would be others."

Based upon this one interview, I conclude that Couric is a nice woman. She wasn't trying to "get" Palin. After this answer, Couric follows up with, "Can you think of any?" She says this in the soft, encouraging voice of a good grammar school teacher. A smart, but ignorant person would say, "My mind's gone blank with all the lights and pressure of the campaign; let me get back to you on that." Palin says, "I would think of any again that could best be dealt with on a more local level maybe I would take issue with. But as a mayor and as a governor and even as a vice-president if I'm so privileged to serve. Wouldn't be in a position of changing those things but supporting the law of the land as it reads today."

There are some interesting things to note about this exchange. There's the fact that Palin almost never uses the word "um." I think this is because she doesn't need to. When most people talk, they need to pause occasionally to collect thoughts. Palin doesn't need this time because she is not collecting thoughts; she's just spitting out words and phrases in the hope that it will make sense. It is the equivalent of a bimbo's giggle or a redneck's "ah, shucks!" And that's just fine if all you want to do is hang out with the girls or throw back a few with the boys.

Also interesting is the fact that Palin correctly states that the VP doesn't really have anything to do with the Supreme Court. When she first met with the McCain people, she asked what the VP did. So this phrase is probably something they had been pounding into her brain. And it came out at Katie Couric!

If you look at just her first sentence you will see what she has going on, "There's of course in the great history of America there have been rulings that there's never going to be absolute consensus by every American." (Remind anyone of Mars Attacks!?) This would be somewhat coherent if the question had been, "What do you think of the conflict between majority rule and Constitutional protections?" However, even if that were the questions (and it wasn't—not even close), it would still just be a jumble of words.

The Palindrone

This is why I have coined a term: Palindrone. Or, if you prefer: Palin-drone. As all nerds know, a palindrome is a word or phrase that reads the same forwards and backwards. A Palindrone, however, is a collection of words and phrases combined randomly and signifying nothing, which, if combined in any other order, would still signify nothing. It is pronounced just as you would the two words: Sarah's last name and "drone." The accent is on the first syllable.

You might think this is a fairly limited word, but it isn't. It is very common in politics. Most politicians do not have Palin's ability to keep a Palindrone going for several minutes, but they can easily do it for a sentence or a whole "paragraph." If you doubt me about Palin's ability, see the 2008 VP Debate.

Palin Is Everywhere

Shortly before the 2008 election, Las Vegas held a "Sarah Palin look-alike stripper contest." Here is a picture of the event from the Daily Telegraph:



What is most interesting about this photo is that when I saw it, I thought it was Sarah Palin. The fact that I had no trouble believing that Palin would be dressed like that during her beauty-pageant days says more about me than it does her. But it does say a lot about her. It is sad, but those five women are probably more serious thinkers than Palin. They just don't get booked on Faux News.

Update

Although I coined this term, I knew that many other must have thought of it before I did. The Urban Dictionary currently has 19 definitions of the word. They roughly fall into two categories: meaningless speech and Palin follower. Most of the meaningless speech definitions focus on the backward-forward aspect of the pun. This is fine, but it doesn't make a lot of sense. There is no reason that one would parse a sentence backwards. This is a reason to start moving the words around because such sentences sound like they mean something. Almost all of the definitions are from right before the election two years ago. As usual, I'm right on top of things.

Earlier this evening, I sent out some email that contained the following sentence, "Paul Krugman wrote a column that I think is really insightful and enunciates a lot of the frustration that I feel about the Obama administration." But before I did, I spent a half-hour fretting over whether to use the word "annunciate" rather than "enunciate." Other people spend their evenings watching TV or visiting with friends. These options are not available to me, having neither TV nor friends close by. So I get enunciate and annunciate.

Normally, such a question would be easy to settle. A hare has hair and not the other way around. But the definitions of "enunciate" and "annunciate" are frustratingly similar. What's more, reference to Fowler and other usage guides were, in this case, useless—I dare say because "annunciate" is effectively obsolete and literally archaic.

I will get to the differences between these words, but I would like to point out that the Internet—as I find increasingly—provided at best flawed and at worst simply wrong information on the subject. One Step Forward provides a nice overview of the two words—including the etymology of the words, only half of which I could corroborate, but provides a highly misleading definition of "enunciate." Much worse, Mighty Red Pen rightly blasts a Huffington Post column about Perez Hilton for using "annunciating" where "enunciating" is required, only to provide a ridiculously limiting definition of the latter.

Everyone seems to understand that "annunciate" means "announce." Thus, it is wrong to say that Perez Hilton over-annunciates. (Although it might be alright to say that Thomas Paine over-annunciated Common Sense. Maybe.) The problem is "enunciate." Again, everyone seems to understand it as an intransitive verb: to utter articulate sounds. We run into trouble when we deal with it as a transitive verb: to make a definite or systematic statement of. This definition is, in most cases, identical to "annunciate."

In addition to these problems, the two words have pronunciation issues. "Annunciate" is pronounced with a soft-E, "enunciate" hard. In my experience, "enunciate" is pronounced with a soft-I. This places it right in between the sounds of these two easily confused words.

I think we should jettison "annunciate." It has many problems:

1. It is almost never used.


2. It means exactly the same thing as "announce."


3. Its meaning is roughly the same as "enunciate" when used the same way.


4. Enunciate and it are too easily mixed up in spoken English.

Regardless of what the rest of the foolish world does, I plan never to use "annunciate" again.

I just watched Infamous—some five years after seeing Capote. The two are not only Truman Capote biopics, but ones that focus on the same event: the writing of In Cold Blood. The similarities between the two films cannot easily be overstated. Since Capote beat Infamous to theaters by roughly a year, it seems to have done much better at the box office. This is not surprising. It also did better with the film ombudsmen, but I doubt this has a great deal to do with the release dates, despite Steve Persall's unfortunate summation: "Call this race nearly a draw, with [Capote] simply crossing the finish line first."

There is certainly a little reluctance to like Infamous too much after so much had been made of Capote, and particularly Philip Seymour Hoffman's performance in the title role. After labeling it a great film (!), it must be a little humiliating to have another set of filmmakers come along and make a film (despite comments to the contrary) that everyone agrees is pretty much as good. In the end, all the reviews I have seen are the same as Persall: both films are of equal quality but I'm going to put a negative spin on Infamous, just as I put a positive spin on Capote.

The most important reason that Capote is considered better is that it is far more vague. I really didn't like Capote very much—so much so that I was reluctant to watch Infamous. The film can be summed up thus: Capote is conflicted about his role as an artist and a human—but we don't have any insights into that conflict. In the end, the portrait that it paints of its main character is decidedly superficial. Of course, this kind of filmmaking is great for actors because audiences will naturally fill in the subtext. "He's not showing any emotion: what great acting!"

In contrast, Infamous does have something to say, and as a result is a far more watchable film. However, because the script tells us what is going on, we have a decent idea what the characters are thinking. This has led many ombudsmen to call Toby Jones' Capote mere impression while Hoffman's was "acting!" This is rubbish, of course. Jones' Capote is clearly better, but this is not because Hoffman's is bad. Based upon the performances, it is hard to imagine that either film would have changed in quality if the stars had been reversed.

It is hard to understand how two groups were independently convinced to invest roughly ten million dollars to make a film about Truman Capote. It is even harder to understand why one of the films went on to make a lot of money. The personal investment would be better spent on reading Breakfast at Tiffany's. Again.

Just to show that an evening spent with H. W. Fowler 's Modern English Usage can be dangerous, I am now going to spend a little time with the word mutual. Because I am a product of the United States where the only things that really matter are commodities, my first and most profound connection to this word is the Mutual of Omaha ad song, so familiar to viewers of Wild Kingdom:


Through force of will and years spent doing such uncool things as spending evenings with Fowler, I have a second, though less powerful, connection to the word: Charles Dickens' Our Mutual Friend. This is a more important connection, because I find more occasions to use "mutual" in a sentence than to break into a rendition of the Mutual of Omaha song.

I dare say that I learned everything I knew about how to use "mutual" in a sentence from Dickens' title alone—until last night. What I found out last night was that using the word in this way is incorrect. And it isn't just Fowler (dead almost 80 years) who says so. Only 58% of the most recent Usage Panel think that the construction "our mutual friend" is correct—a majority, but not a large one.

So what is the big deal? Let me quote Fowler:


This is, of course, useless; it sounds like a children's rhyme. What he means is that mutual concerns two parties to each other and not two parties to a third. Thus, "They shared a mutual attraction" is okay; "Our mutual friend" is not.

The question obviously comes to mind: if Dickens uses "mutual" in this way, can it be all that wrong? It turns out that this use of the word was already quite common long before 1865, when Dickens wrote it. So we are talking some 200 years of this being common usage.

I think we should all make friends with this usage. Then it can be our mutual friend.

I just read Terry Eagleton's Reason, Faith, and Revolution. It is largely an attack on the atheism books by Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion) and Christopher Hitchens (God is Not Great). In his typically sardonic manner, Eagleton refers to the two authors as a single entity he calls Ditchkins. The book is, like all of his "popular" writing, funny and insightful; but one would expect this regardless of his past work because almost no one would think Eagleton's views about religion have anything to do with religion. Indeed, the book is mostly about politics. He seems to be fascinated with the Gospels because of the implicit and explicit political messages of Christ's teachings. I must admit it is nearly enough to turn me into a Christian—albeit one that few would recognize.

Eagleton largely agrees with Ditchkins about religion. His complaint is that they do not argue against the best case that can be made for faith. In other words, they are committing the straw-man fallacy. However, it is hard to think too badly about Ditchkins when the vast majority of believers are nothing but fideists.

Reason, Faith, and Revolution comes down to an attack on liberal humanism, and as such, was helpful to me in seeing some of my own blind spots. I do tend to believe in the march of human progress without seeing that it is largely a matter of faith. (In my defense, there is a good rational argument in favor of it.) But I think Eagleton overstates how strictly rational liberal humanists are. I, for one, am well aware of the great amount of faith there is in my life; I have never wished for—or thought possible—a culture that was strictly rational. I'm afraid that he is at least as guilty of overstating the rationality of non-believers as Ditchkins is of overstating the irrationality of believers.

In the end, Reason, Faith, and Revolution leaves me where The Meaning of Life did: more committed to living a good life and working toward a culture that is just, forgiving, and above all, humane. Although I may quibble with Eagleton about some details, his book is a welcome reminder that my belief in the existence of this more perfect self and society is a matter of rational faith. This might be something that Eagleton, Ditchkins, and I could all agree upon.

When I was high school, I was in speech club. In fact, hard as it is to believe, I was president of the club. One year, I competed in the "programmed reading" category, which I was apparently rather good at because I went to the state championship—a feat I accomplished that one time only. My presentation was about war and the highlight of it was part of Joe's speech at the end of Dalton Trumbo's great novel Johnny Got His Gun, where Joe is begging to be killed. I still remember the excitement of doing that. It is great writing and I was at the right age to be doing it.

I just picked up the film version of the book when I was at the library. I was curious to see if Trumbo had written the screenplay, because he was blacklisted in the late 1940s. To my delight, far from just being the writer, he also directed it. (I didn't know that Trumbo ever directed anything—and in fact, this was his first and only directing gig.) Wow. The movie is wonderful. It is life-affirming at the same time that it is the ultimate condemnation of war. The print used to create the DVD is not that good, but it doesn't too much matter—the movie is so gripping that it is likely that only film geeks will notice. However, it is sad that such a great film hasn't been restored.

My extremely positive reaction to Johnny Got His Gun may have something to do with having spent the afternoon watching Iron Man 2 with my brother. In general, I will watch anything with my brother because I haven't spent that much time with him over the past couple of decades. He likes these kinds of films, so fine. But this film was really too much. I'm getting to the point where I can't watch a film like this without seeing it in a larger context.

Hitler oversaw the genocide of six million "sub-humans" and we rightly call him evil. Andrew Jackson oversaw the genocide a large group of "sub-humans" (Native or First Americans) and we put him on our $20 bill. (Admittedly, the numbers are smaller and no Final Solution was ever attained; but the smaller numbers are due to the far lower population density of all people in the United States at that time; the early Nazi solution to the "Jew Problem" was the same as the Jackson solution to the Indian Problem.) As a country, we are frighteningly ignorant of just how evil we have been and continue to be. As a nation it seems that the more than 600,000 Iraqi civilians killed by us is nothing compared to the slightly more than 4,000 American professional soldiers who have died. (Even the left-leaning Antiwar.com seems to think American lives matter more than Iraqi lives.) Seeing Iron Man 2 within this context is a real problem because the film demands the context that Americans never abuse power—it is just those horrible foreigners who do that.

Even if you take away this evil aspect of the film, Iron Man 2 sucks. It has a few laughs and Mickey Rourke and Sam Rockwell put in good performances as one would expect. But that's about as far as the good goes. Robert Downey is really starting to look his (my!) age, and his performance is not up to par. In the first film, Pepper Potts (the character played by Gwyneth Paltrow) was smart enough not to become romantically involved with the narcissistic Tony Stark, but she's not smart in this film. Jon Favreau shows yet again that he is no better at directing than he is at acting. (And he is a terrible actor, if my sarcasm is not screaming off your computer screen.) The story is totally ridiculous. The only believable character was the villain who also has the only true human scene in the film (at the start where he watches his father die). He has a reason to be angry. And our hero? I guess we're just supposed to know that arms manufacturers who are implicitly guilty of millions of deaths are the good guys. And boy is the film long! Most movies do not have more than 45 minutes of material in them; this one surely didn't—unless you think "Oh! Let's put Tony Stark in a race car!" is content; it lasted two hours and ten minutes! I was so bored with the film, I got out my notebook after a half-hour. Unfortunately, much of the film takes place at night, so I was limited as to how much I could write.

After the film, I was sitting with my brother waiting for his bus. A guy came by and heard us talking about Marvel Comics and the movies that it has spawned. The guy asked us with some enthusiasm if we had seen Iron Man 2. We said that we had just seen it. He began to gush about the film and told us he had seen it twice. A teenager, you ask? Oh, no. This guy must have been in his mid-fifties. And he wasn't crazy, in the drooling sense of the word. But of course he liked it. What's not to like? It tells Americans just what they want to hear. It is just the kind of entertainment that a culture creates while it is disintegrating.

Perhaps I grabbed Johnny Got His Gun as a kind of antidote to the two-hour propaganda poisoning I had just suffered. I can't say. If so, it worked. If you are forced to suffer through Iron Man 2 or any of the many films just like it, I highly recommend Johnny Got His Gun; it's better than the suicide hotline.

Many people miss the point of Miller's Crossing; what's more, they don't judge it on its own terms. It is widely known that the Cohen brothers were inspired to make this movie by the works of Dashiell Hammett. But their inspiration does not matter in the least; it only tells us where they started, not where they ended. Thankfully, they did not end up with some modernized Hammett "tough guy" story, with characters who almost always lack depth and humanity. Miller's Crossing is certainly not a perfect film, but it is a fine film—far better than almost all the movies that have ever been made.

Miller's Crossing, like all movies that are more than simple entertainments (such as the much better film Gosford Park), really need to be seen more than once. This film is dense; for example, the subplot involving Mink was not clear to me on the first viewing; nor was the sexual relationship between Mink and the Dane. It all became clear on subsequent viewing.

Even with multiple viewings, Miller's Crossing has its problems. The homosexual relationship between Mink and the Dane is not very believable. J.E. Freeman is a fine actor, but he is not really cast well in this role. This is not surprising, however, since that part had been written for Peter Stormare—who I'm sure would have portrayed the character as implicitly gay along with the angry sadism that Freeman has in abundance; Freeman's Dane clearly cares about Mink, but it seems more like Mink is his son or brother—not his lover. We learn that Mink and Dane are lovers almost exclusively from other characters.

This is a fairly minor problem, however—and one that would probably be easily fixed with a single scene including both characters together; the biggest problem in Miller's Crossing is that the filmmakers maintain rigid first-person POV [caveat] throughout the movie except for one scene in which Leo survives an assassination attempt. It acts as a short film put in the middle of the feature. It is spectacular, but it doesn't belong. As the saying goes, in editing you usually have to kill your darlings and that was one they should have strangled. (There is one other very short POV problem toward the beginning where a young boy steals the hair piece of a dead Rug Daniels, which should have been cut—other than being a classic Cohen Brothers moment, it serves no purpose. On the other hand, the fire-bombing of Leo's club seems like a POV error, but it is not; Tom witnesses it and even comments on it—albeit from a distance.)

Taking the assassination scene out would have allowed them to spend more time on the Mink-Dane relationship and to have further developed Tom's attraction (love?) for Verna. As it is, Verna disappears for far too long during the latter half of the second act. This missed opportunity is particularly sad because the love triangle involving Tom, Verna, and Leo is the heart of the story. Without getting too Oedipal about it, the film works as modern tragedy. Tom saves Leo (his father surrogate) resulting in the loss of Verna (his mother surrogate). Given his loss of Verna, the film ends with Leo and Verna about to be married; this causes Tom to lose Leo (again) because he cannot accept being around Leo married to Verna. And it is all Tom's fault; he controlled all the action in the film.

Consider this: Tom could have asked Verna to leave Leo, and she would have; this would have hurt Leo, but it would not have poisoned his relationship with Tom; Leo would then have given Caspar the okay to kill Bernie; and Tom and Verna could have relocated Bernie somewhere far away before he was killed. But the tragic course Tom followed was dictated by his own ethical sense (ironically, shared with Casper, who he has murdered as part of his plan). Tom's ethics result in the unhappiness of Verna and himself (and to a smaller degree Leo), and the deaths of many people (most innocent in the universe of the movie).

As has been pointed out ad nauseum, the film is beautifully "shot" and expertly acted. I actually have something to say about this other than the usual comments of the film ombudsmen, so you will forgive me if I add to the nausea. Let me start with the acting.

Acting

Gabriel Byrne does an excellent job in this film, but it is rarely mentioned because this is the kind of role that just seems to be standard and easy. But this film lives and dies on his performance. Without his subtle, emotionally deep performance, the film would have no center. In addition to the serious scenes he shares with Finney and Harden, he also has scenes where his character is playing a role. The contrast is stark and riveting.

Of course, everyone applauds Jon Polito in the role of Johnny Casper—and rightly so; but Polito is pretty much always great in whatever he is doing. Is he really particularly better in this film than he is in other films? Just to mention two (later) Cohen brothers films, he was wonderful as the gay dry-cleaner in The Man Who Wasn't There and comically genius paired with Jeff Bridges in The Big Lebowski. He is a fine actor who unfortunately gets a lot of the same kinds of roles because of how he looks; but on the good side, he works a lot.

I'm not sure about John Turturro's performance; I have a hard time reconciling his pleading in the forest with his sociopathic behavior elsewhere. He does redeem himself during his second pleading scene where his character's acting job is far less convincing.

Marcia Gay Harden does a fine job, despite having to recite some of the most tired dialog that the Cohen's have ever created. It is sad that her character was probably the least fleshed out. Albert Finney provides a workman-like performance. His character too is not well written. It is hard not to question how such a nice guy could have survived with the likes of Johnny Casper around. Okay: he's good with a machine gun and he is calm during stressful situations; but he seems more like the city's most popular tailor than a crime boss. In Finney's defense, he was last minute casting, after Trey Wilson (originally cast) died right before shotting; so it isn't like he had a great deal of time to prepare, and considering his body of work (Murder on the Orient Express and The Dresser come to mind), I would never doubt his talent. And let us never forget that casting, editing, and directing are usually just as important to the success or failure of a performance on film as is the acting itself.

The Look

Miller's Crossing is the Cohen Brothers' third film. Their first film, Blood Simple, had a budget of one and a half million dollars; and it showed, even if the low-budget look of the film worked perfectly. Their second film, the highly over-rated Raising Arizona cost about six million dollars (and I can't help but compare it to Jon Jost's work which is generally made on a shoestring and yet produces remarkable—and arguably greater—results). So it isn't surprising that Miller's Crossing, with it's 14 million dollar budget would look good. Their first two films had good camera work and reasonably good lighting. Barry Sonnenfeld lit those films. I assume Joel Cohen shot Blood Simple; no one is credited. David M. Dunlap shot Raising Arizona, along with Stephen St. John doing the steadicam work. Sonnenfeld lit and shot Miller's Crossing with Larry McConkey on the steadicam. I mention all of these people, because the cinematographer tends to get all the credit, while the camera operator is easily as important—and in the United States, it is rare for someone to do both in a budgeted movie. Before moving on, I should point out that these people are really just department heads; they all have large crews of assistants who are generally very talented. (Consider the lowly camera loader; do you have any idea just how hard and stressful it is to load a camera with film? By feel alone? It is a demanding job, especially when every minute you slow down the production costs about $50—or more—much more.)

Sonnenfeld's camera work is hardly inspiring. It reminds me a little bit of Jim Jarmusch's Stranger Than Paradise which was lit by Tom DiCillo and shot by Jarmusch or DiCillo or various people. It doesn't too much matter because the camera hardly moves: there are no tilts, pans, dollies or anything else. The shooting for which Sonnenfeld is responsible is almost motionless; I assume this is what the Cohen's wanted. However, where Jarmusch's movie frames each shot in interesting ways; the Cohen's movie frames each shot in a classic manner. Not that this is good or bad; it is a decision. Helpfully, it does make the viewer focus on two things: the acting and the set design. I've already discussed the acting, which deserves the attention the filming provides. This is even more true of the sets.

The production design by Dennis Gassner is great. Ditto for Richard Hornung's costume design. Even the short scene outside in the rain taking cover in a doorway looks great and says as much as the filming and the acting. What's more, the sets and costumes do more than define the environment and mood—they provide insights into the characters. It is a lot more than pretty. Again, as with filming, there are a lot of people who work under these department heads. And in Miller's Crossing, there was a much bigger Art Department than there was on Raising Arizona (which itself had a much bigger Art Department than Blood Simple).

To me, Miller's Crossing is a love story that just happens to take place in that fictional land of mobsters who are not, in general, homicidal psychopaths. So while the film may look like something Dashiell Hammett wrote, it isn't at all. It lives in his literary universe, if you will, but it is populated by characters who just don't exist in the classic genre. This fact confuses a lot of viewers and makes them think that this fine film is bad. Any good work of art needs to be experienced multiple times before it can be fully appreciated. Unfortunately, the newspaper columnists who call themselves "film critics" generally see a film only once before passing judgment on its artistic value. This is fine, because most people who read such "reviews" simply want to know if they will enjoy watching a movie once. So we should call these "film critics" something more appropriate: "film ombudsmen".

This discussion of Miller's Crossing is far longer than a typical "review" and yet, it is far too short to begin to seriously criticizing the film. But it is long enough to make the argument that the film cannot be dismissed as bad art and that it deserves at least two viewings, whereas The Maltese Falcon is deserving of one reading, at most.

I have long felt that Scott Turow taught me how to write a novel. In particular, I experienced an epiphany while reading his third novel Pleading Guity. It was probably just that it was the third novel of his that I had read, and that I had figured out his tricks. Although I have previously thought that Turow is a character-oriented writer, he is in fact a plot-oriented writer—clever and capable in his way. Regardless, he did not teach me everything I needed to know about writing a novel—it took me seven years and many aborted attempts to complete my first, deeply flawed and largely lost novel Camping on Asphalt. But I can say this for sure: Turow showed me how to trick the reader. And I am strip-mining that territory in my current work on Treading Asphalt. [Note]

I just read Turow's sixth novel Reversible Errors. Here's my review: it's a Scott Turow novel. Other than that, I don't want to go into all the reasons that this is an entirely workman-like effort, fiction by the numbers—the same numbers we have seen in his previous five novels. If you like his books, you will probably like this one. It annoyed me for a couple of reasons, but the main reason was its treatment of the romantic subplot. (Don't worry, there are no real spoilers here, even though I talk about events at the beginning and end of the novel.)

The main character, Arthur, becomes involved with a woman who used to be a judge, but is no longer because she was convicted of taking bribes. This is pretty bad, because judges are supposed to come to just decisions and when justice becomes a bidding war, it becomes simple commerce. [Note] Arthur does not seem to have a problem with this, perhaps just because he has the hots for her. Fine. One nice thing about Turow is that he has always been willing to show that people over thirty have sex drives (often more explicitly than I would prefer in such a novel).

We know from the beginning, however, that the judge was really being bribed because some people in power knew that she was a heroin addict. When Arthur finds this out he does what pretty much all Americans do when they hear the word heroin: freak out. Thomas Metzger has written wonderfully on the history of perceptions of heroin from its invention to the present in The Birth of Heroin. As Metzger points out, the modern perception of heroin is as a dirty, evil "other". And this is precisely why people like Turow approach it as though it were the worst thing in the world.

Arthur can deal with the judge committing felonies that have a direct effect on her job. But he can't deal with her drug choices. A corrupt, drunk judge: yes. A junkie judge: no. The novel ends with the judge begging for Arthur's forgiveness. Arthur gives it. But what Arthur really needs is a clue. As does Turow.