– In Slate, Stephen Metcalf argues that Ian McEwan’s Saturday, which I hope to find the time to read one day in 2007, isn’t about what other critics think it’s about. This being 2005, I can’t tell you whether he’s right. For what it’s worth, however, his is the first review of the book I’ve felt like reading all the way through and, even so, one of the few that didn’t tell me more than I wanted to know about the novel’s plot.

– Christopher Orr tries to watch Closer with a straight face, an experiment that fails but amuses. (Link via The American Scene, whose Ross Douthat will “rush out to buy a ticket” for any movie panned by David Denby.)

– Don’t rush out for this one, Ross. Said Denby likes the awful Upside of Anger and thinks Mike Binder “may be one of the few male directors around who take an active interest in what women are feeling.” Sure, if you mean the beautiful, lecherous women with inexplicably low standards who populate Mike Binder’s ludicrous fantasies.

– Detractors of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close? (I think that covers everyone except Meghan O’Rourke.) B. R. Myers was already sick up to here of Jonathan Safran Foer when all of you were cuckoo for him. So there.

I was amused to discover, a few months after the fact, that none other than National Geographic interviewed Wes Anderson in December about The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. It’s a brief but entertaining softball toss, with Anderson fielding questions like “Did any Lord of the Flies stuff go on? Was there a conch shell?”

It’s been a couple of months now since I caught up with The Life Aquatic. After The Royal Tenenbaums I had just about given up on Anderson. I missed Bottle Rocket but enjoyed Rushmore, in no small part thanks to Bill Murray’s presence. But in Tenenbaums I couldn’t escape the feeling that I was being subjected to some overachieving ninth-grade geek’s school project: a lovingly and ingeniously detailed diorama, a thing to behold, but airless and unpeopled. Filled with stars, sure–but unpeopled. It made me want to pat him on the head and go home to read a simple book. When I got a load of the trailer for The Life Aquatic, it just screamed more of the same–a diorama with a Hollywood budget, heaven help us. The Tenenbaums’ townhouse taken to the nth degree. I was not hopeful.

To my surprise, however, The Life Aquatic was a pleasure. Even Owen Wilson…especially Owen Wilson? Could be. For whatever reason, I was able to take this movie seriously and even respond to it emotionally, despite the basic premise being even more precious and imaginatively labored than that of Tenenbaums. The closest I’ve come to figuring out the difference between it and its predecessor is this: animals. They’re ubiquitous in The Life Aquatic: real cats and dogs and invented fish, lounging in the background, trotting alongside the characters, populating the aqua. Animals don’t do irony, and for me their near-constant presence cut against that overweening irony Anderson is so prone to. Anderson loves deadpan, but these beasties out-deadpan the characters by a mile, with no disingenuousness about it. Maybe his next career move should be to drop those Wilson boys altogether and make some nature specials–I daresay National Geographic would get on board.

Last week, like an image consultant to the canon, I posted some funny bits from Henry James, sensing that he may not get enough credit for that sort of thing. I also suggested he wear more earth tones, but does he listen to me?

Anyway, I was glad to get a little backup when some other James fans and aficionados chimed in: Robert the Llama Butcher’s mom, Lance Mannion, who is especially good on the unfunny Tragic Muse, and Alex Ross. And there’s always been Max Beerbohm, who not only was one of the first to see the humor in Henry James but who, er, enhanced it:

It was with the sense of a, for him, very memorable something that he peered now into the immediate future, and tried, not without compunction, to take that period up where he had, prospectively, left it. But just where the deuce had he left it?

(From “The Mote in the Middle Distance” by H*nry J*m*s, by Max Beerbohm, found in A Christmas Garland.)

“I vehemently disagree with the ‘contempt for the jingles of Kipling.’ I agree that Kipling’s attitude toward life seems to me wanting in complexity and not interesting–but it will take more than Sassoon to convince me that Kipling ought not to stir the fundamental human emotions. I think he does–and that simple thinkers often do. A student of mine long dead spoke with contempt of the fighting lines in Henry V. His widow was a mainstay of the sympathizers with Sacco and Vanzetti. I was not with him.”

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., letter to Harold Laski (1928)

“Literary criticism, which is bound to pursue meaning, can never really encompass the fact that some things are on the page because they gave the writer pleasure.”

Ian McEwan, Paris Review interview

I’m belated in pointing out that Tim Hulsey wrote a thoughtful post last week on the occasion of Stephen Sondheim’s 75th birthday. I’m a newly minted fan of Sondheim’s work–well, of precisely two of his plays so far–and can’t offer anything nearly so knowledgable. But I can free-associate!

In 2004 I had my first glimpse of Sondheim’s work at a Chicago Shakespeare Theater production of A Little Night Music that swept me off my feet and left me in tears (this, I find, is happening a lot more often the older I get, and bears no necessary relation to the quality of the movie/book/play/sporting event). A few months later, in New York, Terry took me to see an all-stops-pulled-out production of Sweeney Todd at City Opera, and several months after that we saw a tiny, black-box-theater version of Todd back here in Chicago. I guess I got lucky–every one of these stagings was played with talent and conviction, and after spending half a life unaware of the force that is Sondheim, I was half in love.

What pushed me the rest of the way, into a full-fledged liaison with his work, was receiving the original cast recording of A Little Night Music as a Christmas gift. Now I could listen at will, and I learned that the songs more than held up to sustained attention. For a few weeks in January I was listening to nothing but (the neighbors are still looking at me a little funny). Musically the songs are irresistible, but I don’t have the expertise to talk about that. The lyrics, however, just slay this former English major, they’re so rich and so unbelievably deft at creating and revealing the characters who sing them. But what might get me most is simply the unabashed feeling with which the songs are performed.

To some of you the following transition will seem very sublime-to-ridiculous, but the first time I saw the Buffy the Vampire Slayer musical special, “Once More with Feeling,” I was braced for the worst, ready to laugh my way through it all. Not at all practiced at watching musical theater, I was deeply suspicious of the entire enterprise. I was surprised, then, when the Buffy musical grabbed me by the heartstrings, but by way, somehow, of the head. The wittiness of many of the lyrics authorized the heart-on-the-sleeve emotion in the show and freed me up to savor it. (Imagine my dismay, then, when at the climactic moment of Buffy’s rescue from the dancing demon’s spell, my videotape cut to the unlovely mug of Dennis Franz–I had set the VCR that night to tape Buffy followed by NYPD Blue, unaware that the musical ran an hour…plus seven minutes.)

The next day, I ran into an acquaintance who was also a Buffy watcher. I asked her what she’d thought of the musical; she laughed a bit unsurely and said, “I thought it was embarrassing.” And while I didn’t quite believe her, I also knew exactly what she meant. I had felt a temptation to react that way at first, and even into the middle of the show. Emotional content is so regularly faked, overplayed, and abused on television and in movies, you really feel like you have to start from a position of suspicion toward anything unironical. There’s something essentially unironical about singing, though, let alone singing in a musical. This is not to say there aren’t plenty of counter-examples, but song just doesn’t seem to be the same sort of natural habitat for irony that it is for feeling. In any case, I was pleased to have gotten over my own initial embarrassment toward the musical, and proceeded to establish my liberation beyond a doubt by watching it fifty more times in quick succession. When I showed it to Terry during his next visit to Chicago, he almost immediately noted the heavy influence of Sondheim, and I nodded in sage agreement, having no idea of Sondheim at all.

Obviously I see the influence now. And if one somewhat sad consequence of my new understanding has been to knock down the Buffy musical a slight notch by comparison with its models, I can’t help thinking that Joss Whedon provided some crucial paving of my way toward appreciating A Little Night Music, Sweeney Todd, and (next up) Sunday in the Park with George in full. It would be nice to claim that I wasn’t the kind of person who needed to come to it in baby steps, led by an instance of Pop Culture with a capital P, but that’s how it happened. The neighbors might be embarrassed for me, hearing show tunes through the thin walls, but I really do love this stuff too much to care.

If you arrived here by way of Sarah Boxer’s article in The New York Times, welcome! If it’s movie quotes you want, please check in here for the original post including my five quotes, here for Terry’s more distinguished five, here for the big wrap-up Boxer quoted from, and here and here for some personal favorites.

As you’ll see if you follow these links, this exercise wasn’t really cooked up in the ALN labs but borrowed from our friends at Llama Butchers, who borrowed it themselves, and so on, and so on. In fact, I’m not entirely certain this meme can be traced to its point of origination, which I suppose somehow goes to support Boxer’s infinite regression critique of culture blogs. Not that I’m necessarily buying that critique–but she definitely softened me up by building her lead around “Powers of 10,” of which I am an enormous fan.

More on the Eames’s edutainment film, and on the original chic geeks themselves, can be found starting here–first turn your attention to the clickable black and orange grid to the right. There’s a good fifteen minutes of procrastination packed into that little bitty grid.

And if your inner narcissist is at the ready with five movie quotes? Go on, send ’em! I’m done tabulating them, but I never did get tired of reading them–and I’m storing up the best of them for future fortune cookies.

On the basis of his ear for random scraps of conversation, I would venture a guess that this playwright-blogger is good at his chosen craft. If, that is, you think that unscripted-sounding dialogue makes for good plays, which I generally do.

On the other hand, I recently overheard in the soup aisle of the supermarket an apparently authentic exchange that sounded so scripted, I would hesitate to put it in a play, or on a blog like Tim’s:

SON: What’s “Soup at Hand”?

FATHER: Soup getting out of hand.

Ow. One can’t help but suspect that some coaching was involved.