It all started innocently enough over at my place when I put up this charming clip.

One of the two or three regular readers of my blog, who chooses, perhaps out of laziness, to go by the moniker Anonymous, left this comment:

Great 60’s Male Vocalists in No Particular Order:
John Lennon Elvis Presley
Paul Jones Paul McCartney
Roy Orbison Van Morrison
John Fogerty Bob Dylan
David Ruffin James Brown
Arthur Alexander Sam Cooke
Jackie Wilson Brian and Carl Wilson
Robin Gibb Gene Pitney
Solomon Burke Brook Benton
Aaron Neville Wilson Pickett

I quickly responded with:

Anon, dig it, love them all. I’m so glad you mentioned Robin Gibb, because I love the early BeeGees. So many great singers and this is only the dudes. Just off the top of my head I’m tossing in Jackie Wilson, Otis Redding, Eric Burdon, Mitch Ryder, Dyke of Dyke and the Blazers, Tommy James, Colin Blunstone of the Zombies, Steve Marriott of the Small Faces and Humble Pie, Gary Brooker of Procol Harum, and, yes, a couple of obscure r&b shouters named Mick Jagger and Rod Stewart. Oh, and just squeezing into the 60s with that first Stooges album, Iggy Pop. And I think we’re still leaving out fifty or sixty.

Anon soon came back with:

Jackie Wilson is worth mentioning twice, he was so amazing. Also:
Marvin Gaye / Roy Hamilton / Dee Clark / Rudy Lewis, Johnny Moore,and Charlie Thomas of the Drifters (various lead singers) / Alex Chilton / Roger McGuinn / Joe Cocker / Eddie Cochran / The Everlys / Tommy Hunt / Jimmy Hughes / Jerry Butler / Major Lance / Gene Chandler / Robert Plant / Leonard Cohen / Lee Dorsey / Fats Domino / Little Richard / Mark Lindsay /
Ray Charles / Steve Winwood / Tom Jones / Lou Reed / Jesse Colin Young

Ball in my court:

Wait, did we mention Smokey Robinson, or Curtis Mayfield, or Clarence Carter? Ray Davies or Scott Walker?

And we haven’t even gotten into the blues, or country.

So now we know why I’m still living in the 60s…

Oh, yeah, and Jackie Wilson three times!

Anonymous, fa fa fa, your turn:

Percy Sledge, Sam and Dave, both Rightous Brothers, Dion, Eddie Kendricks, Tim Buckley, Harry Nilsson, Paul Rodgers...this is making me really depressed.

Back to me:

Aw, damn, and we forgot Felix and Eddy from the Rascals!

Hey, but don’t worry, there’s lots of great singers out there today, like, uh, um, oh, I know, like this dude.

Ah well. And we still left out about seventy-five. Sorry, Jim Morrison, I still love you.

And as for the girl singers from the 60s?

Don’t get me started.

Ah, hell, just dig this.

We Philly kids grew up with great rock and roll radio in the 60s. You’d switch on the transistor and you had it all, from the Supremes and the Four Tops to the Stones and the Beatles to the more obscure but fantastic Dyke & the Blazers and the Shadows of Knight and the Seeds. Then things got even better around 1967 — you still had the great AM stations playing weird and wonderful singles but FM radio started up playing even weirder and equally wonderful album tracks.

Somewhere along the way, around the early 70s I suppose, rock and roll radio went to shit. I stopped listening to what passed for rock radio. My tastes expanded, and over the years I spent a lot of time listening to jazz and classical radio, but I never even bothered looking for rock and roll radio.

Then a couple of weeks ago I finally checked out Little Steven’s Underground Garage.

Rock and roll radio is back, baby. Just hit on the above link and put your headphones on. You don’t want to disturb the neighbors. Or fuck that, hook your computer up to your stereo and let it rip. Log in, and go to the “Archives” section. Do what I did and just start on the first archived show from 2002, or skip around, it doesn’t matter, it’s all cool.

Steve Van Zandt calls his show the Underground Garage but the songs he plays are not necessarily underground or garage. What he does do is play only songs that are cool.

Here’s a partial playlist from the show (August 18, 2002) I’m listening to right at this second:

Title: I’m Crying
Artist: Animals

Title: You Really Got Me
Artist: Kinks

Title: I Only Want To Be With You
Artist: Dusty Springfield

Artist: King Midas In Reverse
Artist: Hollies

Title: Anyway You Want It
Artist: Dave Clark Five

Title: Wailin’
Artist: The Wailers

Title: Once Before
Artist: The Remains

Title: Be My Baby
Artist: Ronettes

Title: Day Tripper
Artist: Beatles

Title: If I Needed Someone
Artist: Beatles

Title: Lawn Mower
Artist: Los Straitjackets

Title: Biff Bang Pow
Artist: Creation

Title: Say Those Magic Words
Artist: Birds

Title: Shapes of Things
Artist: Yardbirds

Title: Song of a Baker
Artist: Small Faces

Title: A Legal Matter
Artist: The Who

Title: Ghost Rider in the Sky
Artist: The Ramrods

Title: Pictures of Matchstick Men
Artist: Status Quo

Title: I Can Hear the Grass Grow
Artist: The Move

Title: Every Christian Lion-Hearted Man Will Show You
Artist: Bee Gees

Title: I See The Rain Again
Artist: Marmalade

Title: Coloured Rain
Artist: Traffic

Title: Blue Shift
Artist: Davie Allan and the Arrows

Title: No Other Guy
Artist: Kaisers

Title: This Year’s Girl
Artist: Elvis Costello and the Attractions

Title: Come See Me
Artist: Pretty Things

Title: Here Comes The Night
Artist: Them

Title: God Save The Queen
Artist: Sex Pistols

Title: Blues Theme
Artist: Davie Allan & The Arrows

Title: Anyway You Want It
Artist: Dave Clark Five

Title: Wailin’
Artist: The Wailers

Title: Once Before
Artist: The Remains

You can be forgiven for not knowing all the above tunes, but don’t worry about it. Take my word for it, the one thing all these records have in common is that they are rock and roll and that they rock.

In-between the songs and wacky movie-dialogue clips (and over other songs in the sections he calls Musical Beds) Steve Van Zandt talks, and not only does he have perfect taste in rock and roll, but he knows everything about rock and roll and he is funny and he lays it all out for you. He plays mostly 60s stuff, but as you can see from the above list, he plays real rock and roll whether it’s “fifty minutes old or fifty years old”, so you’ll also hear the White Stripes, Tom Petty, Hole, and lots of contemporary groups with one-syllable names I’d never even heard of, and they all rock.

Van Zandt plays songs that go chunka chunka thump thump through your brain, songs with guitars that rip and jangle and buzz, songs with vocal harmonies that make you think you’re not annoying the neighbors when you just must sing these words not because they were written by Shakespeare but because they go so perfectly well with that chunka thump and that jangle and buzz, songs that wake up the rammy sixteen-year-old inside you.

I do not hate this show.

I love this show.

Just dig it.

(Another great rock show on the web whose playlists include a lot of the stuff Little Steven plays is Technicolor Web of Sound. This is for all you stoners who only want to hear 60s psych, and it’s brilliant. This Newcritics exclusive has been my response to Tom Watson’s call for fave-rave media joints of the past year. A Shel Talmy/Jack Nietsche/ Andrew Loog Oldham Production. Check out my joint for only the finest in contemporary rock and roll fiction.)

The thing about writing about comedy is that writing about comedy is usually not funny. Let’s face it, comedy itself is usually not funny, so it stands to reason that talking about comedy is even more likely not to be funny.

So I won’t bore you with a shot-by-shot exegesis of some of my favorite comedy movies like The (original) Producers or Waiting For Guffman, or TV shows like Seinfeld or Malcolm in the Middle or King of the Hill. I’d much rather just watch and re-watch those shows and occasionally quote lines from them, so instead I’ll share a moment of hilarity from my own life.

Comedy is pain and frustration and crushing embarrassment; in other words comedy is much like real life. The whole trick is to go through the day suffering all one’s usual defeats and calamities and somehow to see yourself as a sitcom character, or, if you’re feeling really grandiose, like a big-screen funny person like Jack Black or Vince Vaughn or Ralph Fiennes.

Personally I prefer to think of myself as a small-screen hero, and preferably not one of the big popular shows but instead one of those under-the-radar shows that you’re not even aware of until it’s been on five years and it suddenly shows up in syndicated nightly re-runs in that post-11PM grey zone I like to call Sitcom Alley.

I’m talking about shows like Becker or Still Standing.

I could be Becker; of course I’m far too lazy and unmotivated ever to have gone through medical school like Ted Danson’s immortal Dr. John Becker, but I could definitely be as grumpy and misanthropic as Becker. Come to think of it I am that grumpy and misanthropic.

I could also be Mark Addy’s average clod Bill Miller in Still Standing. Bill was a lazy slob of a toilet salesman, but I’m probably a lazier slob than Bill ever was. I mean, he actually managed to live in a house, and he had a car, and Jami Gertz was his wife. I live in a small dive of an apartment, I don’t own a car, and Jami Gertz no longer even takes my calls.

Which takes us back (actually it doesn’t, but segues are for lesser minds) to the glorious mid-Eighties; cocaine and bad hair was everywhere. Reagan was president and we couldn’t believe even in our most despairing hungover and coming-down-from-coke-binge grey dawns that there could ever be a more foolish president; we were wrong.

Basically everything sucked in the Eighties.

Except for the Smiths, who sang about how everything sucked, popular music sucked; TV sucked, and movies got really really bad.

The only good thing about the mid-Eighties — which turned out to be a very bad thing — was that people hadn’t really got the message about AIDS yet, and so there was still a lot of leftover Sixties- and Seventies-style casual sex going on.

Personally I had always been as terrified and appalled by the idea of sex as I was attracted to it. I liked the concept of having sex, but the actuality turned out to have innumerable downsides, not the least of which was the fear of impotence. Twelve years of Catholic school and a shy, introspective nature conspired to turn my first attempt at embodying my half of the beast with two backs into a spectacularly limp failure.

Eventually though I got a proper girlfriend, and managed to successfully commit the act of darkness; after her there were other girlfriends, and I like to think I performed at least adequately. Being a former good Catholic boy sucks in practically every way, but on the other hand it trains you to be eager to please and to follow orders; I was usually so amazed that a girl would actually not mind having sex with me, that I did try my best to follow instructions, or, since women have an odd way of giving instructions only via ESP, I would do my best to try to guess what my instructions might be.

Back in the Eighties nearly anyone could become a player, and so, in my humble way, I finally shook off most if not all of the last of the shackles and chains of the good Catholic boy and tried to be a player. The ensuing sex was sort of fun, but mostly it was, as Andy Warhol once described it, “work”. There was this agonizing business of having to talk to the women, and then you had to try to remember their names, too. Also, you had to make some sort of effort not to be boring yourself, and we all know what a chore that can be. And all for what? For something that was rarely as much fun as a quiet wank at home.

And it was all so time-consuming. I sometimes wonder what my mind would be like today if I had not wasted thousands of hours chasing women. I might have learned Japanese, or read all of Henry James’s novels, or at least one of them, or I might have used all that energy to write a great novel myself. After all, didn’t Balzac once say, referring to one of his sexual discharges, “There goes another novel”?

Stalling no longer, I present the afore-mentioned classic comedy highlight moment from the inexplicably long-running sitcom of my life:

I went home with a woman. I secretly called her the Cockatoo, because she had one of those stiff brightly-colored quiffs that women wore in those shameless days; she probably had an equally unflattering private nickname for me, like “He’ll Do In a Pinch”. I can’t remember what my haircut was like, but I’m sure it was a bad one. The cockatoo and I had nothing in common really, but that meant nothing to us. We were young, or almost young, and wild, or almost wild.

We went through some pro forma preliminaries; then, as Samuel Beckett put it somewhere (quoting from memory; scholars, feel free to write in with corrections), “I toiled and I moiled until I discharged or gave up trying or was begged by her to stop.”

We lay there in the dark in her bed, the Cockatoo and I. It was a ground-floor rear apartment in a major East Coast City. I think the time of the year was autumn, or perhaps spring. We lay there, probably the both of us sort of wishing the other one wasn’t there, when suddenly we heard a voice from outside the window above our heads.

“I know you’re in there!”

She whispered to me something about how this was her former boyfriend. I had sort of met him once or twice. Not an enormous guy, but still, he was an angry guy, and angry guys are scary no matter what their size.

He apparently didn’t agree with the “former” designation, because he kept screaming that he knew we were in there, using lots of variations of the F- and M-F-words

I don’t think I ever really cowered before in my life, but there and then, lying naked under the covers with the Cockatoo, with an angry (possibly) former boyfriend screaming at a window just a couple of feet over my head, I cowered.

Fortunately, this apartment being in a large East Coast city, the Cockatoo had bars on the window, so the angry possibly not-quite former boyfriend couldn’t actually get in. But the window sash was up, and he was able to reach his arms in.

I looked up and saw two groping hands in the moonlight inches above my face, accompanied by the repetitive but effective screaming of him to whom these Eighties-slasher-flick claws belonged.

F-words and M-F words abounded, the C-S-word and its variants joined in, I could almost feel on my face the hot spittle-spray of jealous rage, and come to think of it, perhaps I did.

“Go away!” shouted the Cockatoo. “I’m gonna call the cops!”

“Go ahead and call them,” yelled the maybe-not-former-at-all boyfriend. “It’ll take ‘em ten minutes to get here, and by then I’ll break in and kill that motherfucker!”

With that he knocked over some potted plants and nicknacks from the window shelf, spilling soil and tea roses onto my face and onto the Cockatoo’s quiff.

I had never actually seen a French farce, but I had heard about them, and here I was in the middle of one.

Even while it was happening I thought it was funny. Not funny ha ha, because after all, what if this maniac managed to pull the bars out and then thrash me senseless with them? But funny in that looking-from-outside-yourself way, when you see yourself as a character in a play or movie.

Why didn’t angry ex-or-maybe-current boyfriend realize this? Well, I guess every actor just takes the roles he’s given, and this was his, the enraged jealous lover. Me, I played the cowardly Lothario, staring up at those grasping hands in the moonlit air above my face, and wishing I had another role, like Guy Who Stays Home With a Good Book.

Well, he didn’t break in, and he obviously didn’t kill me.

He went away after a while. Or at least he seemed to go away.

I got dressed, in the dark.

“Be careful going home,” said the Cockatoo. “Watch your back,” she added, not very reassuringly.

“Sure,” I said.

I managed to walk home without being attacked, maimed, or otherwise thrashed to an apologetic gibbering pulp.

For some reason I never went out with the Cockatoo again.

A month or two later I was in a crowded bar; Camper Van Beethoven were performing. I saw the Cockatoo at a table and said hi. She said hi too, but then I noticed that the former, now apparently current, boyfriend was sitting with her. I left the bar. I wasn’t all that into seeing Camper Van Beethoven…

Now I lead a life of quiet contemplation. I refrain from sex, and sex with a great sigh of relief refrains from me.

But do I miss those nights of hooking up at smoky clubs where sweating people in shiny tight orange sleeveless t-shirts danced to “Come on Eileen” and “Tainted Love”, and “Don’t You Want Me”, of flowerpots and tchotchkes landing on the pillow next to me, of skulking home expecting former or current boyfriends to come leaping out like Freddy Krueger from every dark alleyway?

Hell yeah.

(This exclusive is my humble entry in our Newcritics Comedy Blogathon. Check out my joint for more hilarity.)

Americans are an optimistic people. Most of us are descended from men and women who came over here because their lives in the old country sucked, and so they uprooted themselves and their families and left everything they knew to come to a country in which they hoped to have a better chance for happiness. And even now people are doing this. I work with a bunch of guys from Africa who came over here speaking little or no English — although most of them spoke a couple of African languages as well as French — they work their asses off and don’t complain and they send money back home.

The pursuit of happiness is ingrained in anyone who comes to America to live, and in anyone who was born here. And I think this might really be an American as opposed to a generally human trait. I think that in much of the world life is more about the avoidance of misery as opposed to the pursuit of something so lofty as happiness.

In America we believe that not only is happiness possible, but that it’s our right.

And thus we have Hollywood movies.

Presented for your consideration, a recent Hollywood movie, now just out on DVD: Reign Over Me, written and directed by Mike Binder, and starring Adam Sandler and Don Cheadle.

This movie manages to exemplify a lot of what is best and what’s worst about Hollywood movies.

On the one hand the movie attempts to deal with serious issues: devastating grief, mental illness, friendship and love.

It presents a middle-class black man and his family as human beings, as Americans with lives and problems just like those of any other middle-class family. And it presents a friendship between a black man and a white Jewish man as a friendship between two men, with no reference to their ethnicities or religions as immutably defining factors.

But on the other hand the movie suffers from the great failings of American “serious” pictures: sentimentality, artificiality, unreality.

It also tries to be a 9/11 movie.

What American wasn’t devastated by 9/11? As a country we had never had such a sudden, awful calamity, made all the more awful by its unfolding in real time on our television screens.

This was not the America we had grown up in, the America in which you were supposed to be okay all the time or there was something seriously wrong with you. In less than a half hour everything in our lives was decidedly not okay.

As a nation we went slightly insane, and this insanity is currently playing itself out, seemingly indefinitely, in some middle-Eastern country that six years ago very few of us could have pointed out on a map.

We were supposed to be happy, this was our right, our birthright, and now we were unhappy.

We were finally becoming a little bit like the old countries we had left behind, but only a little bit.

Because, after we got over the shock, we still wanted to feel okay.

Is there any more American phrase than, “Are you okay?”

It’s a phrase that actually appears in Reign Over Me.

Are you okay?

If you really want to disturb a fellow American, simply say “No” the next time someone asks you that simple question.

There is nothing more abhorrent to the average American that the idea of not being okay.

In Reign Over Me Adam Sandler plays Charlie Fineman, a man who is not okay, and with good reason. His wife and three daughters were killed in one of the 9/11 airliners.

It’s now several years later and this former dentist has become what we call a basket case. He rides around Manhattan on a motorized scooter, has no friends, doesn’t work (and doesn’t have to, the death of his family has left him rich in money if nothing else), he collects vinyl records, plays drums in a hardcore band, and then he goes home and plays computer games when he’s not obsessively remodeling his kitchen.

One day his old dental-school roommate Alan Johnson, played by Don Cheadle, sees him scootering by. Alan calls out to him, but Charlie’s wearing thick headphones, in his own iPodded classic-rock world, and he zooms off into the traffic.

We see a bit of Alan’s world. He’s got an apparently very lucrative dental practice judging from his Woody Allenesque Manhattan apartment, and he also has two lovely and apparently well-adjusted daughters; but Alan and his wife Janeane (Jada Pinkett Smith) have modest communication problems, and there’s a crazy woman, Donna (Saffron Burrows) who comes for a tooth veneer but really wants to give him a blowjob; when Alan sends her packing she makes trouble for him at his office. But his basic problem seems to be that in some way he’s not living life with gusto. Join the club, Alan.

Because this is a movie, and especially because it’s a Hollywood movie, Alan sees Charlie on the street again and forces him to talk to him. At first Charlie doesn’t even remember who Alan is, but, because it’s a Hollywood movie, Alan is persistent, and gradually he breaks through the thick layers of psychic protection Charlie has built up around himself.

Alan tries to help Charlie. Alan may not be entirely okay with his life but Charlie is obviously and utterly not okay. Conveniently, Alan shares an office building with a very attractive mental therapist, Angela (Liv Tyler). You know from the word go that Charlie will wind up consulting with Angela, and that’s what happens.

More plot also happens. Charlie is a tough nut to crack, and he does something really crazy that could well get him committed to a mental hospital for at least a year. The subplot with the loony woman who wants to give Alan a blowjob does not disappear, and you know that there has to be a payoff there, and there is.

In the end, because this is a Hollywood movie, an American movie, Charlie is on the road to recovery. The nutty woman, unlike nutty people in the real world, becomes not nutty and altruistic, and she conveniently transfers her affection from Alan to Charlie. Alan learns a lot from the whole deal and manages to work things out a little better with his wife.

Things are going to be a little more okay now.

But the problem is that while this movie wants to be about loss and about the importance of friendship and love, what it’s really about is making us, the audience, feel okay. It’s in the great tradition of “feeling okay at the end” movies. Good Will Hunting driving off to a new life after a bracing final session with his good shrink Robin Williams. All The Big Chill gang realizing at the end of the movie that friendship and love are what it’s really all about. Jennifer Lopez at the end of Enough kicking the living shit out of her bastard husband and starting a new life.

Reign Over Me is about the Hollywood ending.

Mike Binder says he was inspired by the tragedy of 9/11 to make this movie, and I don’t doubt he was sincere in his efforts to dramatize the effects of that day on one man. This movie is a 9/11 movie in that its anti-hero’s family died on that awful day, but would his story be much different if his family had died in an automobile crash? Would his grief then have been any less? No. But by making him a 9/11 victim the film-makers automatically make him more sympathetic. A very basic manipulation of the audience is built into the plot. And the first great 9/11 drama has not yet been made.

I’ve become boring on the subject of a brief time, roughly from the mid-sixties to the late seventies, when Americans could make serious movies, like Hud, like The Panic in Needle Park, like Five Easy Pieces, without the need for contrived plots and Hollywood endings.

We still make good comedy movies here (although not as good on the whole as out best comic TV shows), and we still make cracking thrillers for the big screen.

There has been some excellent drama on American TV the past ten years, primarily on cable.

We make loads of enjoyable straight-to-video crap, and we make some cop shows that very satisfactorily fill up an hour after a hard day.

But only very rarely does a good serious dramatic feature film get made.

I’m afraid that Reign Over Me is not one of them.

(This has been a Newcritics exclusive, approved by the Department of Homeland Insecurity. Turn to my place for more frivolous fare.)

Death Proof was Quentin Tarantino’s half of his and Robert Rodriguez’s homage to trashy double-features, Grindhouse (complete with some fake trailers for imaginary movies directed by some other schlockmeisters). When I saw my first internet ad for this movie I e-mailed it to a friend who shares many of my own louche tastes, saying, “At last, a movie you actually want to go to.”

She e-mailed me back with another great poster for the flick, saying: “Indeed, this movie will be hot.”

For one reason or another, having mostly to do with the odd hours I keep, I didn’t go to see the movie (on the other hand I didn’t go to see any other movies, either.) But I definitely looked forward to catching it on DVD. It promised to be good trashy fun, it had both Rosario Dawson and Rose McGowan in it, why wouldn’t I want to see it?

So Death Proof has just come out on DVD, in an expanded and unrated edition, separate from Rodriguez’s Planet Terror, and with a bonus disc of special features, but minus the trailers for fake movies that a lot of people raved about. The movie is indeed trashy fun, but there’s a problem with this “expanded” business. The theatrical version clocked in at 90 minutes or less. The DVD version is 114 minutes long, and I do mean long. Apparently Tarantino put back in about a half hour of cut dialogue, plus one lap dance. I could deal with the lap dance, but Tarantino’s dialogue even when it’s good tends to run long; at his best this dialogue is fun and wild, and there’s a tension behind the absurdity, something about to happen but you don’t know what.

In the DVD Death Proof the dialogue just goes on, and on. And on. You know, like the way real people talk, which is bad enough in real life but even worse in a movie.

Three wacky chicks in a car, an actress, a stuntwoman, and a make-up artist, going out to pick up their girl-buddy at the airport. They stop at a convenience store. It is the longest convenience store stop not only in cinema history but in history, and even in herstory; it’s just plain long, because the girls talk and talk. And talk. At one point one of them just seems to fall into some sort of black hole for five minutes, solely so the other two can talk and talk and talk for those five minutes.

I’ve put in some time listening to attractive women talking drivel, and God knows I’ve talked my own share of mindless drivel right back at them, but, Quentin, in the holy name of Roger Corman, did no one grab you by the shoulders and say, “Cut to the chase”? Not figuratively cut to the chase, but — really — cut to the fucking chase. Well, apparently, no one did say this.

I watched the whole movie again a couple of nights later. It was still a half-hour too long, but oddly enough I liked the movie better this time. I think I just sort of spaced out during the boring parts, or concentrated on looking at the actresses. (There are worse things to look at than Rosario Dawson, believe me.) Or maybe I had better pot.

The action scenes are great; Kurt Russell as a psycho murderous stuntman is great; the two separate sets of stalked hottie chicks are all great; Rose McGowan is, was and will always be great. The stuntwoman Zoë Bell, playing the stuntwoman Zoë Bell, totally rocks. I loved the muscle cars smashing the hell out of each other.

And the movie has certain raffish charms which would be incidental in another movie, but in this movie are as important as nearly any other of its elements, for instance it has the best dive bar in the history, herstory, and itstory of cinema. What a dive bar. A jukebox that plays real 45s, and all the songs don’t suck. A joint where you can kick back and light up a bowl right at a table. A dive that seems to have six hottie chicks for every guy, and chances are those guys are just a couple of harmless loser dorks, unless one of them is Kurt Russell. A joint where the proprietor is Quentin Tarantino, and he’s always sending rounds of Chartreuse or Wild Turkey over to your table. A joint where you can go outside on the porch and watch the cinematic rain. I want to find this place, and when I do I will lash myself to the bar the way Odysseus lashed himself to the mast, and I will never leave.

I may be a hater, but I love the songs Tarantino puts in his movies. This one has “Down in Mexico” by the Coasters, “Jeepster” by T. Rex, “The Love You Save” by Joe Tex, “Good Love, Bad Love” by Eddie Floyd, and:

Dig it: the first pack of hottie chicks (the doomed pack, but you knew that) barreling along a country road at night, boogying down to “Hold Tight!” as performed by the immortal Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich, a band which the music-geek chick says Pete Townshend almost joined, and “should have”. She’s right, too; it’s as good as almost anything on the Who’s first two albums, their last really good albums in my humble opinion, but I’m the guy who prefers everybody’s early albums to their later ones.

The even more immortal Michael Parks, reprising for the third or fourth time his role of Texas Ranger Earl McGraw, ambles brilliantly through three or four pages of beautifully wacked monologue as he ambles down a hospital corridor with his real-life and cinematic son, the almost as cool James Parks. If Tarantino finally does the right thing and does a Texas Ranger Earl McGraw movie I will go to see it even if it’s four hours long, just to watch and listen to Michael Parks do what he does. (In the meantime I patiently await the DVD release of Parks’s Then Came Bronson, the best TV show ever.)

But the DVD version of this movie — unless you are as totally enamored of his actresses as Quentin Tarantino understandably is, and unless you love his dialogue as much as he regrettably does, and unless you have access to much better pot than I was able to get — still runs a half hour too long.

If you like Tarantino’s stuff, if you dig car chases and chicks and Kurt Russell in psycho bad-ass mode, if you like songs that don’t suck, go ahead and rent Death Proof. Just make sure you have some really good weed on hand and keep your thumb near that fast-forward button.

(This has been another Newcritics exclusive, brought to you by Quinn/Martin Productions, but kindly turn to my place for only the best in contemporary grindhouse literature.)

I bow to no man in my avant-gardity. My avant-gardedness? My avant-gardicity? No matter, you get my point.

I’m so avant-garde I once did a performance piece where I played Andy Warhol come back from the dead. (Some of my audience felt I was more life-like than Andy himself had ever been.)

I once directed another piece about a stripper who had an eyeball where her vagina was supposed to be. (And my mother came to see the show.)

I wrote a play about a girl bringing her new young man home to meet her parents and the play ends with the daddy shooting the boy dead. (The shooting took place offstage; one night the sound man was enjoying the show so much he forgot to press the button for the gunshot sound-effect. There was the most god-awful long pause with the daddy actor backstage waiting patiently while I frantically waved at the chuckling sound man. Finally he remembered and pressed the button. Oddly enough the audience thought the ungodly long pause was on purpose; they thought the pause was avant-garde.)

I actually listen to Trout Mask Replica several times a year, and one of my favorite box-sets is John Coltrane Live in Japan, 1965, where he and his band play “My Favorite Things” for, like, a whole day.

Avant-garde movies? Come on, I was watching Kenneth Anger and my pal Andy Warhol’s movies when you punks were in knee-britches, so we’re talking some serious avant-garde cred here, and I haven’t even mentioned the TV show I wrote (oddly short-lived) whose two leads were transsexuals.

And I’ve always dug David Lynch. I even liked Dune, even though it was long and boring. My friend Andy once said that he liked long, boring movies. So do I sometimes, and Dune was one of those long boring movies I liked. When I watched it in the theatre I somehow knew that it was okay to step outside midway and smoke a joint; I knew that when I came back inside I wouldn’t have missed much and I’d still have lots more of the movie to watch.

I’ve liked all of David Lynch’s movies, but what I liked most of his was his one TV series, Twin Peaks, especially the first season. One of the best TV shows ever, it was a stoner show in the tradition of Star Trek or Kung Fu or Murder, She Wrote that you didn’t even have to be stoned to watch.

David Lynch’s latest, Inland Empire, never came to theatres down here in Philly, so I leaped right on it when it came out on DVD, shoving aside a couple of skinny art students to grab the last tag on the display shelf. It’s a two-disc edition, one disc for the three-hour movie, one for special features.

I knew ahead of time that the movie was going to be long, I knew it was going to be weird, I knew that Lynch had shot it on cheap video. None of that bothered me. It was the new Lynch and I was ready to see David just let it rip.

I even asked my friend, the Meeg, to watch the movie with me, knowing that all her favorite movies star Kari Wuhrer. But even the Meeg has watched most of Lynch’s movies, and she was a big fan of Twin Peaks too, so she was willing to give it a shot, even if Kari Wuhrer wasn’t in it.

I hate reviews that just go through the plot of the movie, thereby spoiling half the fun for anyone who might actually go and see the movie, but I’ll slightly break my own rule here by just mentioning that the first scene of Inland Empire begins with a single-set-up scene of three actors dressed as — well, I’m not going to say what animal they’re costumed as, because that would be a spoiler, so I’ll just say it’s a certain small hoppy animal with long ears. So we’re watching this scene, the Meeg and I, and the animal people say some things, nothing worth repeating, and a laugh track comes on now and then, even though nobody says anything funny, which is pretty avant-garde. The whole scene was pretty avant-garde, actually. It was also really long, and not fun-long, it was boring long, like standing in the subway car when the power goes out, and you wait, and wait, and wait. That kind of boring. And definitely no sight of Kari Wuhrer, so I said to the Meeg, “We can put something else on.”

So we put on a re-run of Still Standing.

Later that night though, and the next night, and the night after that, I dove again (alone) into the mysteries of Inland Empire. It actually got better after the (first) animal people scene (which did finally end, or get cut away from, to return, again and again, like that fear of inadequacy that hammers you repeatedly each time you sit down to write your masterpiece). A plot lurches into view with Laura Dern playing some kind of fantastically rich movie star, complete with Jeeves-ish butler. Grace Zabriskie (an actress so avant-garde she was named after an Antonioni movie), who plays weird women in all of David Lynch’s shows, bangs on Laura Dern’s door. Laura lets her in for a chat, and, sure enough, Zabriskie’s character turns out to be a weird woman. This scene wasn’t so boring, and I thought, okay, this movie might be good.

And then you even get more plot. Laura starts making a movie, even though I think the weird woman told her not to, with Justin Theroux playing the guy movie star, and the great Jeremy Irons playing the movie director. I love all these actors, and I even dug it that Jeremy Irons plays the director even though he looks ten times the movie star that poor Justin Theroux will ever look, through no fault at all of Justin Theroux’s. I think Justin Theroux is great, but it’s funny, he’s one of those good actors who can play a movie star really well, but he himself will never actually be a movie star.

Which I guess is Laura Dern’s case, too, She’s never been a star, but you can believe her when she plays a star.

But here I have to say something which is very delicate. Laura Dern is no great beauty, but she’s not ugly, and Lynch makes her look really ugly in this movie. I’m old-school in some forgotten gentlemanly ways, despite my hardened avant-gardism, and I like it when directors make their stars look good. Unless the character is supposed to be plain or ugly or the Elephant man, do the actor or actress and us a favor, make them look good. Poor Laura Dern. I’m sure she loved getting the lead in another David Lynch movie, but, boy, does Lynch make her look rough. She looks like one of the women in the background of an old Spiderman comic back when Steve Ditko drew it, one of the extras who are always screaming, “Look! It’s Dr. Octopus!”

So you have a set-up. An actress and an actor and a director set out to make a movie. There’s this bit of foreboding plot element here that I won’t go into (but I will mention to any of you theatre people out there that it’s just a little like the legend about “the Scottish play”).

But then after about an hour Lynch seems to dispense with what little plot has been suggested.

The animal people return. More than once.

A band of slutty-looking young women show up. I perked up a bit here, but they were kind of rough-looking too when you got right down to it. They looked a little like those girls who say, “Call now!” on those late-night commercials, except these girls weren’t so funny. None of them were as hot as Kari Wuhrer, either

The slutty girls turn up a few more times and one time one of them lifts her top up and bares her breasts, and this is where I really had to say, “Okay, David, I know what’s going on here. You’re a guy, I’m a guy. And we both know you had that chick flash her breasts just because you wanted to see them yourself and you knew you could get away with it, because everybody will just say it’s David being avant-garde, and not just another old perv with a cheap video camera.”

After about an hour-and-a-half, I really was tempted to switch to the “special features” disc. I loved the special features for Eraserhead, and I would love to see a David Lynch movie which is nothing but special features. And then the DVD release could have a whole extra disc of special features about the movie that was nothing but special features. Somehow I knew that the special features for Inland Empire would be about a dozen times more fun than the movie they were the special features for. But I didn’t switch discs, I hung with it for about another hour.

This was the third night I had been watching, or trying to watch, this movie.

I turned it off and watched some of The Sisters with Bette Davis on TMC, then I finally passed out.

The DVD was due back at the video store today. I took it back. I sort of wanted to try watching the rest of it, and I still would really like to see the special features one day. Just not enough to pay the late fee.

(This has been another Newcritcs exclusive; go to my place for more avant-gardiferousness.)

I don’t know about the rest of you, but my own life has been a series of defeats, humiliations, pratfalls, and disasters (and one or two of these have not even been my fault) against a background of tedium, boredom and neurotic dissatisfaction.

Is it any wonder that I am a fan of Extras?

Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant could have called it quits after writing and directing (with Gervais starring in) the two brilliant seasons of The Office (UK). Thanks to the excellent American version of the show they probably would have been able to retire comfortably, and their place on Comedy Olympus would have been secure, because The Office was the ultimate workplace comedy, a show for anyone who’s ever worked at a boring job for an incompetent, self-deluded boss who thinks he’s funny but who isn’t; and isn’t this all of us?

But Gervais and Merchant didn’t retire, and they did an amazing thing, they went right out and created another series equally as brilliant: Extras.

Season One of Extras (which consisted of only six episodes) told the story of Andy Millman (Gervais) and his friend Maggie (Ashley Jensen), professional “background artists”. Fortyish, fattish and short (“Average height!” says he) bachelor Andy has quit his day job to pursue a career as an actor, and he takes any “extra” work he can get while hoping for a break into roles where he actually has a line or two. Maggie, who is painfully not bright but good-hearted, seems to have no ambitions beyond the extra work. Maggie is the downtrodden working-class girl who has always been downtrodden and accepts her lot; Andy is the working-class guy who cannot accept his lot, and who is willing to eat ungodly amounts of shit in hopes of one day not having to eat shit at all.

In each episode Andy and Maggie work with celebrated actors and comedians (Patrick Stewart, Kate Winslet, Ben Stiller, et al., all playing versions of themselves) who each prove to be as vile and stupid and vain as we somehow suspected and hoped they would be. Andy, who is not stupid, but who is increasingly desperate and occasionally lacking in social savoir-faire, meets crushing humiliation in each episode, and, much like in real life, he does not triumph at the end of each half-hour. But at least he has his friendship with Maggie, who seems to be interested in lots of handsome guys who come and go, but not, alas, in Andy, whose ongoing humiliation in the sexual department is to play the dreaded part of the clever but somewhat homely “friend”.

As season one goes on, it turns out Andy has written a pilot for a sitcom, hoping that writing his own vehicle will give him the boost that his hopelessly inept agent Darren (the very tall and very googly-eyed Merchant) seems temperamentally incapable of giving him. Miraculously, as the season ends Andy gets a deal to write and star in a series that sounds suspiciously like The Office.

Season Two, the six episodes of which have just come out on DVD, starts off with the shooting and airing of the première episode of Andy’s series, When the Whistle Blows.

This is Andy’s big break.

It’s all happening for him now.

Or is it?

Well, no, it isn’t.

You see, Andy wants to write and act in a show that isn’t shit. He wants no laugh track, no cheap jokes, no catch-phrases, no stunt-casting. Unfortunately, what the producers want is a laugh track and cheap jokes, catch-phrases (“Are you ‘avin’ a laugh?) and stunt-casting (bring on the dude from Coldplay), and then for good measure they toss in an awful curly wig and a pair of stupid glasses for Andy to wear.

Andy considers just pulling the plug on the show. This isn’t the show he wanted to do, and he says so to the producers. And they say, basically, “Fine, Andy. You can do that. And then you can go back to being an extra.”

I once found myself in this position, where some short pieces I created for a TV show were turning out not quite the way I envisioned them, to put it mildly. To tell the truth I couldn’t have pulled the plug even if I had the balls to do so, because I had signed a contract basically saying I’d surrendered my balls in perpetuity to the network, but I wouldn’t have pulled the plug anyway; I was quite willing to compromise. Which is what Andy does. In fact he surrenders, abjectly.

But Andy’s show, despite being crap, and because it is crap, becomes a hit. The critics hate it, he hates it, but the public loves it. And so his humiliation continues.

In the first season of Extras, Andy’s humiliations were on a small scale, although of course they were large-scale to him.

In the second season, Andy’s humiliation is on the air for millions to see every week. He’s making money, he’s befriending stars (if stars can be befriended at all, because all the stars that Andy meets are still the same sort of vile creatures he met when he was an extra) but he has even less self-respect than he had when he was working as a “background artist”. At least back then he had his dream of artistic success and fulfillment. Now he’s got his own show, but he knows it’s crap and so does anyone else with a lick of good taste. As he finds out one night when he slimes his way with Maggie into the VIP section of a fancy nightclub, and David Bowie himself takes to the piano and extemporizes a song on the spot about the “sad, fat little man” — Andy — a song which everyone in the club gathers around the piano to sing along to.

Welcome to success, Andy.

The season ends as the first one did, with Andy walking away from the camera with his dim but lovable friend Maggie. She suggests that if neither of them has met anyone in five years’ time, maybe the two of them should get together.

I hope they do. Meanwhile, Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant have reportedly decided not to do a third season, but to wrap up the show with a one-hour Christmas special, as they did with The Office. It seems that they don’t want to take the chance of descending to the level of crap.

These guys would never make it in American TV.

(Another Newcritics exclusive, brought to you by the National Endowment for the Inhumanities. Thanks to Lance Mannion for the suggestion. Please go to my joint for more tales of humiliation and disgrace.)

I took a mini-vacation last week, and for once I chose not to do battle with the big bluefish off Cape May or to stride manfully into each of the Atlantic City casinos in turn, clad in my finest white dinner jacket and breaking their baccarat banks one by one. No, this time I stayed at my mother’s place in Cape May Court House, NJ, and read Proust. Well, not only Proust, I also finished re-reading one crime thriller (Firebreak, by Richard Stark) and read another one for the first time (The Prone Gunman by Jean-Patrick Manchette). There was also some Regis and Kelly in there, and a little of The View, even some Rachael Ray, but all that is another and perhaps more profound article.

My goal for this holiday not-in-the-sun was to get back into Proust.

Proust is my desert island book. I’m cheating, really, because when we say Proust we mean his masterpiece, In Search of Lost Time (À la recherche du temps perdu), and this “book” comprises seven books, and in the current Modern Library edition, six volumes. So it’s one book and a lot of books at the same time. Just as our lives are one life and a lot of lives at the same time.

In Anne Tyler’s excellent The Accidental Tourist, her hero, Macon, is a man who doesn’t really like to travel but he makes his living writing books for people who have to travel for their jobs. So Macon’s guidebooks are all about making the agony of travel a little less agonizing for working stiffs who may not have the inclination or the time to see the sights or soak up foreign culture but who just want to do the traveling and do their business and then go home with as little hassle as possible. (And this was before 9/11!)

One of Macon’s personal methods for getting through the tedium of air travel is always to bring along an enormous novel called Miss MacIntosh, My Darling. When I read The Accidental Tourist I had never heard of Miss MacIntosh, but I looked it up and it actually exists; it’s by Marguerite Young, it’s almost 1200 pages of poetic prose, and it Is Not An Easy Read.

If you find a copy of Miss MacIntosh and leaf through it a bit you can see its utility for Macon. I imagine he might get through ten or so pages of this dense prose in a trans-Atlantic flight. Then on the flight back he might plow through seven or eight more; then he can put the book away until his next long flight. It will be there, waiting for him, this world of Miss MacIntosh, a world that will never end because he’ll most likely never finish the book. And there’s something very calming about visiting a world which, unlike our own, will never end. Macon may be in a steel contraption hurtling dubiously over an ocean between one chaotic and annoying airline terminal and another, but in the world of Miss MacIntosh he is separate, and safe.

Proust is my Miss MacIntosh, my refuge, my other world, except I read it when I’m not traveling.

I’ve been reading In Search of Lost Time off and on for years, and am now somewhere in the fifth volume of the Modern Library edition. I take months off at a time, but it’s always fun to dive back in. If it’s been a particularly long gap, I have to back up a bit, just to re-orient myself, figure out what is or sometimes is not going on.

Now Proust is the opposite of a page turner. He’s a page-returner. I read a sentence, or a paragraph, then read it again. Then I stare off into space. Then I read the passage again. The thing about Proust is you can’t just read him and let yourself be carried along the way most good writers will carry you along. You have to carry yourself along. Proust doesn’t make it easy for you to keep up with him, but then he never makes it any harder than it has to be in order for him to get his ideas across. if Proust needs a sentence to run for a whole page (with two or three parenthetical asides), then that sentence will run for a page, even if it is part of a paragraph that runs for three or four pages. Is this easy? Hell no. Is it rewarding? Infinitely.

Some people like to climb Mount Everest. I’m sure this is slightly difficult, but apparently the maniacs who climb Mount Everest get something out of it. So it is with the maniacs who enjoy reading In Search of Lost Time.

But I don’t want to give the impression that the book is inherently deadly or forbidding. Proust’s voice is a good-humored, good-natured voice, a wise voice. If David Foster Wallace, another author infamous for his verbosity, is (to me!) like a smart guy who sits next to you on the plane to Europe who at first seems really witty and brilliant but after an hour or two you just wish he would put a lid on it for a while and let you read your Richard Stark thriller, Proust is the guy who might shyly start to talk to you, asking questions about yourself and your family and job, what books and movies and music you like, and then he’ll start talking about anything at all and he’s so brilliant that you don’t want him to stop talking, even though he’ll keep saying, “Oh, but I should shut up, I’m boring you, you talk for a bit!”

There is a plot to In Search of Lost Time, but you’re barely aware of it while reading the book, just as we’re barely aware of the plots of our own lives. The book is a story of a man’s life, a gentle, social, intellectual, art-loving man who suffers from rather precarious health and who fortunately doesn’t have to work for a living. But his life and his heart is full, with books and music and art, with family and friendships and conversation, and with love affairs, each one somehow more gloriously tortuous than the one before. The man writes about all of this, not just bringing it to life the way all good novelists do but somehow taking an event or an idea and taking you deeper into it, and then deeper still, so that when you pause at the end of a passage you don’t rush headlong into the next but sit there, as I said, staring off into space. It’s like at a museum — a painting stops you. You don’t want to go on. You want to live with this painting for a while. Or a piece of music, an aria, a guitar or sax solo — you listen, and then you think, okay, I’m going to listen to that again.

The only way to appreciate Proust’s famous long rolling passages is just to start reading the book, but he does sprinkle the work with innumerable small gems, so I’ll pull out some random, short samplings (these are all from the current Modern Library translation):

“We are all of us obliged, if we are to make reality endurable, to nurse a few little follies in ourselves.”

“Perhaps some of the greatest masterpieces were written while yawning.”

“The most exclusive love for a person is always a love for something else.”

“Her friend had extraordinarily bright eyes, like a glimpse through an open door in a dark house, of a room into which the sun is shining with a greenish reflection from the glittering sea.”

“…a certain similarity exists, although the type evolves, between all the women we successively love, a similarity that is due to the fixity of our own temperament, which chooses them, eliminating all those who would not be at once our opposite and our complement, apt, that is to say, to gratify our senses and wring our hearts.”

“The human face is indeed, like the face of the God of some oriental theogony, a whole cluster of faces juxtaposed on different planes so that one does not see them all at once.”

“There is nothing like desire for preventing the things that one says from bearing any resemblance from what one has in one’s mind.”

“Like many intellectuals, he was incapable of saying a simple thing in a simple way.”

I suppose someday I’ll finish In Search of Lost Time, if I live long enough. But I won’t be sad when I read, and re-read that last sentence. You see, I’m working on my French, and my goal is that by the time I’m done with the Modern Library translation my French will be good enough to start in on the original. And that should last me at least until I’m ninety.

(This has been a special Newcritics exclusive for Quinn/Martin Productions; check out my joint for some cheap laughs.)

Ladies and gentlemen, presented for your consideration: Californication, premiering tonight on Showtime right after the season opener of Weeds.

This has to be a great time-slot for a new show. For one thing it’s following a series that’s already pretty popular. For another thing most of the people who watch Weeds are stoners and they’re going to be getting high while watching it. This means that they’re probably going to be too stoned to change the channel when the show’s over, and it’s also going to mean that they’re not going to be excessively critical. I’m sure Showtime would do fine if they simply ran some old Star Treks after Weeds. But you have to hand it to them, they’ve produced this new series, Californication, and, even though I watched the preview version unstoned (unfortunately), the show doesn’t totally suck.

The star of our show is David Duchovny. Say what you will about Duchovny and his abilities as an actor, he managed to pull off that rare feat, he brought to life an entertaining and memorable character in a long-running TV series: good old Fox Mulder of The X-Files: brilliant, wry, celibate, and slightly damaged Mulder. Thanks to this role Duchovny will never die.

But if an actor is to be an actor then he must keep acting, even if his greatest role is already behind him. So here’s Duchovny, back on TV. Can he do what James Garner and Bob Newhart and Andy Griffith and Jack Klugman did? Like those giants can he create another loveable lead role in a whole new successful TV series?

Well, who the hell knows. I couldn’t tell you from the première of Californication. As I said, the show doesn’t totally suck. And, besides Duchovny, it’s got this great British actress Natascha McElhone, for whom I’ve had the hots ever since she played a renegade Irish gunwoman in Ronin. Her role isn’t so cool in this show, she doesn’t get to shoot anybody, at least not yet (although I would like it very much if she would).

I hate recount-the-plot reviews, so all I’m going to tell you is that Duchovny plays a fucked-up writer in L.A. Despite being fucked-up and despite being a writer he gets laid. He gets laid a lot. Oh, if real life were only like that. This is where we get into the problem of shows being written by these writer-people. Come on — a show about a writer who gets laid a lot? What is this, Fantasy Island Redux? Okay, sure, the writer in question is David Duchovny. I can buy David Duchovny getting laid a lot. But David Duchovny is David Duchovny. Of course he’s going to get his end wet now and then. But a writer who looks like David Duchovny, and who is as cool as Duchovny? Only a writer would dream up such a conceit. Writers don’t look like David Duchovny. (And, no, they absolutely do not look like William Holden in Sunset Boulevard.) Writers are short, bald, dumpy, and lacking in social graces. And that’s just the women writers. The male writers are really unattractive.

So, okay, this is a fantasy world. It’s a TV show; what the hell, if you want realism watch Jerry Springer.

I suppose I should deal briefly with Duchovny’s fucked-upness, since that’s sort of what the show is about, besides him getting laid. Okay, his longtime girlfriend McElhone has left him, taking their twelve-year-old daughter (who looks disturbingly like a miniature 19-year-old art student), and of course McElhone is getting ready to marry some other dude whom we haven’t met yet, but if we do I suppose he’ll be even a bigger ass than Duchovny is in the show. And, yes, Duchovny’s character is a major ass; but, unlike you or me or anyone we know, he’s a charming ass. A rogue. A charming rogue. Chicks dig him, even though he’s a writer. (I guess they never heard that old Hollywood joke about the dumb actress. Oh, you never heard that one. Okay, here it is: this one actress was so dumb she fucked the writer. Sorry, I didn’t make it up.)

So what can I say, if you’re a Weeds fan, fire up an extra doobie and hang in there for Californication. Guys might dig the show because you have a dude who doesn’t seem to have a lot going on, but he looks like David Duchovny, and he gets off some good bitter lines, and he gets laid. He gets laid a lot. Women might dig it because it’s got David Duchovny, and after watching him not get laid for ten years in X-Files maybe they won’t mind seeing him get laid, a lot, now.

Poor Natascha McElhone is stuck playing the ex-girlfriend, and that’s a drag, because that’s all the character is right now: the ex-girlfriend. McElhone deserves better and I hope the writers give her better.

Showtime’s calling the show a comedy. Is the show funny? Well, sorry, Showtime, Seinfeld or King of the Hill or Malcolm in the Middle this show is not. It’s not even Becker, but then it’s not trying to be a funny ha ha show like those shows. It’s trying to be dramatic also, and I wish they wouldn’t try, because the drama is cliché: Dude is fucked up because he wants to get back with his longtime girlfriend, um — no. Somehow I’m just not buying it. And I’m especially not buying it (spoiler alert!) when they play Elton John’s “Rocket Man” over a slightly sappy montage at the end, and it’s not even Elton singing but some other sensitive motherfucker.

But I like Duchovny. I like him in the role. I like the way he plays it. The man is a charmer. And McElhone is a brilliant actress in search of a role. I just wish there was a better show for them both to play in. Or, failing that, that I had some pot to watch the show with.

(This has been another fine Newcritics exclusive for Desilu Productions. Go to my joint for more cheap thrills.)

But on the other hand I’ve gone long stretches in which I didn’t own a TV or didn’t have cable (which in downtown Philadelphia means you don’t watch TV); I used to read books in those days, and I attribute to those TV-less periods the fact (or my claim to the fact) that I still have a slightly discriminating brain.

Perhaps it’s evidence not of a discriminating brain but of a yawning character fissure, but I never liked M*A*S*H, and I wasn’t impressed enough by some shows that seemed not to stink completely like Hill Street Blues and N.Y.P.D. Blue to make a special point of watching them; I’ve never watched an entire episode of St. Elsewhere or Chicago Hope or E.R. or Grey’s Anatomy. I get bored easily and I get annoyed easily.

But I’m not a total crank; there are shows I have watched and enjoyed on a regular basis, and I even dabbled momentarily in writing for episodic TV myself until I realized that I just didn’t give enough of a fuck and preferred to haul garbage for a living while writing plays that fifty people would come out to see on a really good night.

So in other words, just as anyone who has ever watched one inning of a neighborhood softball game thinks he could manage a major-league team to the World Series, I think I am qualified to pontificate briefly on the elements that make a TV show good and on how a paucity of these elements are what make a TV show suck.

Ladies and gentlemen, presented for your consideration: Mad Men.

Contributors to Newcritics’ live-blogging of Mad Men, like Tristan and Karen, are probably right about the show’s faulty representation of 1960 America. For instance the scene where one dad smacks somebody else’s kid at a birthday party — I’m of the generation of the little kids in the show and my dad (true, he was a tool-grinder and not an ad man) would have absolutely kicked the living shit out of anyone else who laid a hand on me (unless of course that person was a nun, a priest, or a sadistic Cardinal Dougherty High School lay-teacher).

And then there’s just the general squareness of most of the characters. At one time I did a lot of research on the early Sixties — lots of fun, and a lot of it consisted of poring over old magazines and papers, and, yeah, people were weird back then, as they are now, but these advertising guys would have been at least slightly hip, or at least not quite such a pack of cubes. Their livelihoods depended on knowing all the latest. Check out a Mad magazine from 1960. (These ad men would have.)

And James Wolcott and everybody else is so right: the jury may still be out on Mad Men, but the ad agency in the show definitely sucks. All they do is walk into meetings completely unprepared and come up with no ideas. Then they slink out and hit on the secretaries. Hey, if it was that easy I would be an ad exec myself.

But I can live with bad verisimilitude. I doubt that Deadwood was very historically accurate, and I doubt that The Sopranos was much like real mob life. (Definitely not like down here in Philly, anyway, where the mob guys live in row houses instead of McMobmansions.) I don’t watch TV for its true-to-life representation of life. I think the first season of Twin Peaks is my favorite show ever, and how real was that?

People have also complained about the lack of plot in Mad Men, but I could also live with a reasonable lack of plot. I hardly ever knew what the hell was going on in The Sopranos or Twin Peaks or especially in Rome or in Deadwood, and most of the time I didn’t really care. But one does want to feel that something is going on, even if you’re not terribly sure what it is.

What I do want from a show are great characters.

My own quaint theory is that to have a really good TV show you need good — and preferably great — lead characters, and you need more than one of them.

The Sopranos had wild and memorable people in it — not just Tony and the regular gang, but all these guys who would come on for a season or two, wreak some havoc and then get killed off, like David Proval’s Richie Aprile and Joe Pantoliano’s Ralphie Cifaretto and Steve Buscemi’s Tony Blundetto. Same thing with Deadwood — Al Swearengen, E.B. Farnum, even the seemingly eternally constipated Seth Bullock — they kept me watching that show even when after two or three episodes into the third season I was wondering if anything was ever going to fucking happen ever again in the town of Deadwood.

Now it is possible to have a good show that has only one great or really cool regular character, but then you have to have him wander around and meet other cool characters. The 1960s were great for this. Please see Have Gun, Will Travel, or Run For Your Life or my personal all-time favorite, Then Came Bronson with the great Michael Parks. (That’s Parks on the Sportster in the photo accompanying this piece.) All these shows had a cool, endlessly interesting lead guy, the kind of guy you’d actually like to know, and in every episode he’d meet up with one or two or three other interesting people, and always played by some terrific character actor or actress like Jack Klugman or Albert Salmi or Shirley Knight. Oh, and yes, there would be a problem. A problem for the star and a problem for the guest star. It wouldn’t be just, “Oh, hi. You seem like an interesting person.” No, something would be the matter, and you’d want to see how your lead character and your guest stars would deal with it.

So first you need some good characters; then you need some problems for the characters; and then you need some dialogue that’s not quite as boring as the dialogue we hear every day out in so-called real life.

So far in Mad Men you’ve got great production design, great hair and costumes; and you’ve got Don Draper who isn’t too boring and four or five women characters who are sketches of non-boring characters; everybody’s problem — at least the ones who appear to have problems besides the fact that their personalities are boring clichés — is basically that they’re just a little bit dissatisfied with life; and you’ve got dialogue that’s about at the same level of the mundane crap we hear in our own sad lives.

Maybe this is enough to make the show a hit. God knows, lots of shows have run for years that I couldn’t stand watching more than a few minutes of, and usually it was because I thought the characters were dull. I really wanted to murder the whole cast of thirtysomething for instance, and I finally stopped watching Six Feet Under because finally the two somewhat interesting characters, the younger sister and the gay brother, just weren’t enough for me amidst the tedium of the other brother and his fucked-up girlfriend and her more fucked-up brother; no, sorry, when it comes right down to it, sometimes I’d really rather read a book.

Maybe the writers of Mad Men have something up their sleeves.

I thought they were going to try to make Vincent Kartheiser’s Pete Campbell into the evil antagonist of the show. But then this somewhat interestingly vile baby-faced cad comes back from his honeymoon and all of a sudden he’s de-balled, and he actually likes being married. What’s up with that shit? Kartheiser when he was only eighteen or so turned in a brilliant turn as a junkie thief in Another Day in Paradise; so let him play a real scumbag and give us a villain to root for.

Give us some characters that are just a little bit more interesting than the dullards we meet every day when we go out the door, or when we watch MSNBC or reality TV.

Let’s have that supposedly scandalous divorcée do something really scandalous and tell the Good Wives Club to fuck off and die.

Let’s have Betty the nice but neurotic wife start doing the postman. Give her something; give us something.

Let’s have Miss Menken the department-store owner walk into the next ad agency meeting and say, “Hey, ya know what? Fuck you, you incompetent anti-semitic and boring assholes. You’re fired, and I’m going with the Jewish agency down the street.”

Maybe the Jewish agency down the street could spin off into its own show.

And maybe it won’t be boring.

See ya this Thursday at 10 PM EDT.

(This Newcritics exclusive has been the first in an eighty-three part series under the umbrella title We Who Have No Lives. A Quinn/Martin Joint. Abject apologies to Blue Girl for using the word “suck”. For sublime fiction and poetry, please visit my place.)

Now the last of the great masters of cinema is gone. There are still some fine movie makers around, but I don’t think that Coppola or Scorsese or even the one possible remaining master, Claude Chabrol, would dream of putting themselves in Ingmar Bergman’s league.

There was no one else in Ingmar Bergman’s league.

Every great artist creates his own league, his own genre. There is only one Dostoyevsky. Another writer might have Dostoyevskyan tendencies or ambitions, but there’s only one Dostoyevsky, just as there is only one Tolstoy, one Flaubert, one Proust. Cinema had a Fellini, an Antonioni, a Kurosawa; and Bergman.

When I think of Bergman’s movies (besides thinking of the the obvious: the grimness, the sadness, the lack of sentimentality) I think of one thing: truth. In the best of movies there are always moments that strike me as forced, as not real, as not true. I don’t remember ever seeing one of these false moments in a Bergman movie. You might feel drained after the movie, you might never want to watch another Bergman for ten years, if ever, but you don’t feel you’ve been talked down to. You haven’t been lied to.

I’ve written before somewhere about how I love the documentary Ingmar Bergman Makes a Movie, directed by Vilgot Sjöman. My favorite part shows Bergman joking and laughing with the great actor Gunnar Björnstrand on the set while the next shot is being set up. The shot is ready, Bergman and Björnstrand get serious, they shoot the take with utter concentration, Bergman intent on the actor, the actor perfectly in the moment. Cut. If there was some little thing wrong, either with camera placement or lighting or actorly “business”, Bergman makes the adjustment, and does another take. When the shot is as true as he can make it, it’s cut and print. Then back to the joking and the camaraderie of the set. I just felt privileged to watch this world of creation.

Bergman always stayed true, he never let himself or his audience off easily. His final film, from a few years ago, Saraband, was as uncompromising as anything he ever did.

There’s never been a better movie about childhood and about magic than Fanny and Alexander. There’s never been a better movie about men and women and what they do to each other than Scenes From a Marriage.

There was never a film maker like Bergman before Bergman, and there will never be one again, and that’s all right.

Somewhere there’s a young man or woman who is going to take some digital equipment and gather some dedicated actors and technicians and he or she is going to make a film as brilliant in its own way as Persona, or The Seven Samurai, or I Vitelloni.

And that young movie maker will invent a genre whose name will be the name of that young artist.

And that’s as it should be.

(Slight return:)

As mentioned in the comments below, when I wrote the above I wasn’t aware that Michelangelo Antonioni was still alive at the time of Bergman’s death, and then he went and passed away later the very same day. So you could say that Bergman was the next-to-the-last of the great ones. But as Weepingsam and other commenters have pointed out, more than a few film makers survive who could easily be counted as great.

In another article I mentioned that odd time in American film-making, when Coppola and Scorsese were in their heyday, when people who somehow later fell to the wayside like Jerry Schatzberg and Bob Rafelson and Peter Bogdanovich were able to make movies like Scarecrow and Five Easy Pieces and The Last Picture Show, when a young actor-director like Jack Nicholson could make a novelistic piece like Drive, He Said. And what a period for actors: Pacino, Hoffman, DeNiro, Hackman, and Nicholson.

Antonioni’s passing made me think of another time, in Italian movies: how strange and how great that I Vitelloni, La Strada, 8 1/2, La Dolce Vita, L’Avventura, La Notte, Rocco and His Brothers, Divorce Italian Style, Two Women — just naming some personal favorites, and please add your own — all came out within ten years of each other. It’s as boggling and as wonderful as the fact that Proust and Joyce and Kafka once all walked the earth at the same time.

After all the introductory stuff, featuring Grace’s dysfunctional relations with her hard-drinking sister Terri (Tori Spelling) and hard-drinking mother Terri Sr. (Kathleen Turner), the plot finally starts to kick in with Grace kicking the crap out of a perp with her hard-drinking gay partners (and Desert Storm vets) Antonio (Stephen Dorff) and Rolph (Casper Van Dien). After they lock him up they go to some gay bar on Quince Street and get drunker, and then Grace staggers out to her ’67 Thunderbird and tries to drive home but runs some guy over. She gets out of the car to make sure the dude’s really dead so she can get back in the car and book it the hell out of there when all of a sudden the dead guy stands up and introduces himself.

It turns out the dead dude is a zombie named Earl (William Sanderson from Deadwood), and it was just pure dumb luck on Grace’s part that she ran him over and not some other poor bastard, because everybody knows the only way you can finish off a zombie is by shooting them in the head, or chopping their heads off, or just blowing them up completely with some dynamite or something, but just running them over with a Thunderbird isn’t going to do jackshit. It might slow them down a little, but zombies don’t exactly clip along like Speed Racer anyway. (Which brings up a question: since zombies move so damn slow, how come in all these zombie movies people don’t just run like hell to get away from them, or, you know, like, get in a car and drive away, or catch a bus, or even just walk really quickly? I could never figure that one out.)

Earl the zombie grabs Grace’s arm, trying to find a relatively meaty part to take a bite out of, but she remembers the bit about shooting zombies in the head, pulls out her service automatic and puts a bullet right into his walking-dead brainpan.

But she feels that this incident has taught her something.

Like, if you’re going to get drunk, don’t drive; and if you’re going to drive drunk anyway and you run somebody over then you better make damn sure it’s a zombie.

So, life, or God, or some damn thing has given her another chance. She drives really slowly and carefully home while a Tori Amos song plays on the soundtrack.

It turns out that home is a semidetached on Mascher Street up in Olney, where Grace lives with her hard-drinking old WWII vet granddad (Charles Durning) and her hard-drinking defrocked priest (and Grenada-invasion vet) of an unemployed brother Stosh (Mark Addy). She tells these two that she’s quitting drinking. Her brother asks her if she’s quitting pot, too, and you can tell he’s thinking that if she is he’ll get to inherit her stash. She says, “No. I didn’t say anything about pot, so stay away from my stash, loser.”

She goes to her room and rolls up a fat one. She’s getting high watching a re-run of Becker when she hears a scratching on her window pane. She looks out and, wouldn’t you know it, it’s some more goddam zombies. She gets off the bed (showing off that slender frame I might add, all she’s wearing is a John Kruk Phillies jersey), grabs her pistol, opens the window and points it at one of the zombies.

Fade to black, roll credits and another Tori Amos song.

I for one will be tuning in next week.

(Drawing by Stéphane Lemarchand. This has been yet another Newcritics exclusive for Quinn/Martin productions, but tune in to my humble abode for more crap.)

So I’m reading the Shamus’s perfectly nice recent article in these parts about that perfectly nice artist Stevie Wonder and I had the awful urge to leave a comment, but after for once thinking it over, I desisted. So now I’m writing this instead.

Because I have to admit I fucking hate Stevie Wonder. No, that’s not true, I don’t hate Stevie Wonder, but I do hate the horrible sappy life-affirming music he puts out. Now if Stevie had called it quits when he was Little Stevie I’d have no problem with the dude. If he had hung it up after “Uptight” he would be in my own private pantheon of almost-forgotten 60s greats like Dyke & the Blazers, and the Seeds, and of course Gabby and the Gazelles. But Stevie did not hang it up, and he went on to record crap like “You Are the Sunshine of My Life” and “Isn’t She Lovely”, and most horrible of all, “Ebony and Ivory”. Which brings me to Paul McCartney. I don’t hate the man, but I really hate his silly love songs, I hated them when he did them with the Beatles, and they just got worse when he didn’t have John Lennon around to cast a withering cold eye on him.

Let’s see, who else do I hate? Oh, yeah, Billy Joel; Crosby, Stills and Nash; Simon without Garfunkel; the Eagles. Hate him, hate ‘em, hate him, hate ‘em.

The Police? Please. Sting? Fuck off to tantric heaven, dude. A bunch of people I work with went to see the Police reunion concert. They loved them. Stewart Copeland is the best drummer ever, Sting still looks great and has the same voice he had back then. Really? That means I still hate them. The Police are the rock & roll quintessence of white boy smugness and I hate ‘em. Speaking of smugness, I never liked the Talking Heads and every other cracked-voice art-school band that followed in their wake.

I get tired thinking about all the crap I hate. I mean, I like the Grateful Dead (whom just about everybody else around here hates), but I hate Bob Weir’s songs and I really hate Deadheads, and I wouldn’t be caught dead going to one of these post-Garcia incarnations of the Dead.

And so far I’ve only talked about music.

I’m a writer and obviously I’m a contemporary or else I wouldn’t be writing this, but I hate just about any contemporary fiction I pick up. I loathed The Corrections. I was at my mom’s for a week and she had accidentally taken out a large-print edition of The Corrections thinking it was a thriller, so I thought I’d give it a shot. I tortured myself halfway through that book, hating every sentence and the onanistic self-loving personality underriding it all, and finally could take no more. I would have tossed it into the trash but it was a library book.

Don’t get me started on romantic comedies, let’s just not go into Bruce Willis, and I’ve already dealt with Robin Williams.

For years I worked in theatre, despite the fact that I have hated nearly every play I’ve ever seen. There’s something terribly wrong with me, I know.

Don’t talk to me about Bush and Cheney, those are givens. Me, I’m still hating Bill Clinton because if he had only kept his dick in his pants Al Gore would be president today and not Dick Cheney.

I’ll just close this before everyone totally hates me, but I do want to say one last thing; I hate magic tricks and I hate magicians. About ten years ago this woman friend of mine apparently thought she was doing me a favor by taking me to see Penn and Teller. God I hated that show, with that blustering big guy just never shutting the fuck up. I kind of liked the little guy because he never said a word. But why couldn’t the big guy keep his trap shut too? At least then I might have been able to catch a nap. But oh, no, it was ninety minutes of bellowing, I felt like I was listening to the mating cries of some magically boring tuxedo-clad elephant. And to make matters worse the dude had a ponytail.

And I really hate dudes with ponytails.

(Photo of Jacques Prévert by Robert Doisneau, neither of whom were haters. This has been another Newcritics exclusive and a Quinn/Martin Production, but you can check out my joint for charming little tales and poems of sunshine and love.)

Robin plays Reverend Hank, who is secretly the comedian who becomes President in that other recent Robin Williams movie that seven people actually saw. It seems that his character in that movie got impeached and thrown out of office because everyone in the country was just too plain bored with him, and so he changed his name to Reverend Hank and bought some minister uniforms and bamboozled himself into a minister’s job at some church in some vague suburb somewhere. He’s hiding out pretty quietly, only occasionally committing a random murder just for kicks, when a young couple show up at the rectory one day saying they want to get married. Robin is really hungover, plus he’s got a dead body in the basement he hasn’t disposed of yet, but he agrees to give them some reverendly advice; he tells them not to do it, that they’ll soon get tired of having sex with each other and what’s the point of having kids and raising a family anyway. Best just to take up some harmless hobby like stamp collecting or watching Battlestar Gallactica.

He’s shutting the door in their faces when the girl (Lindsay Lohan) shoves her nubile body between it and the jamb and insists on satisfaction. Wearily, Reverend Hank agrees. The dude (the nice guy from The Office, what’s his name, Ted Kluszewski), he’s already having his doubts about the whole enterprise but he knows that once a chick gets her mind set on marrying you there’s not a whole hell of a lot you can do about it, and he’s not doing too much with his life anyway, so he goes along for the ride. Besides, as he says to his stoner buddy (Jack Black), “Hey, this is my first sort-of-starring role in a movie, even if I do keep getting upstaged by this tiresome old ham, so I’m just gonna keep my trap shut, look good, and collect my paycheck.” “Word up,” says Jack, passing Ted the doobie.

Things got a little dull and plotty here; there was something about Lindsay’s gal-pal (Paris Hilton) having had sex once with the dude, and another thing about Lindsay having once had sex with the dude’s other stoner buddy (Johnny Knoxville), and another subplot about dude’s other other stoner buddies (Luke and Owen Wilson) getting recruited by the CIA to come back and do “one last job”, and then some really creepy business about Reverend Robin and a digital video camera. I went out for a cigar break, and there were a few dozen other guys out there smoking and chatting; they’d all been dragged to the movie by their girlfriends and wives. Some of the guys weren’t smokers, so they just stood around, kind of wishing they were smokers. There was even one gay dude who had been dragged there by his boyfriend. A couple of guys were passing around joints, and I’ll admit it, I took a toke or two. It helped. After a while I rubbed the cigar out gently on the brick of the movie theatre’s wall, wrapped the stogie in a Kleenex and put it in my shirt pocket to save for later. I went back inside and I slipped back into my seat as unobtrusively as I could because I didn’t want to wake anyone up. Up on the screen Robin was doing something funny, and all of a sudden I realized that the chick wasn’t Lindsay Lohan after all, it was that other one, Hilary Duff, but I guess it doesn’t really matter.

There was a really good scene at the end where the world-weary cop played by Al Pacino arrests Robin Williams. “I useta be somebody,” says Robin. “Useta be don’t count for shit, my friend,” says Al, shoving him up against the wall. “You, me, Bobby DeNiro, Steve Martin, Dusty Hoffman, we all used to be somebody. But we got rich, and our shit got soft, and our edge got as dull as a Republican housewife’s brain. Sure, everybody makes a crapola movie now and then, that’s the nature of the business. But this time you went too far, Reverend. This time you’re goin’ down.” He cuffs him and shoves him out the door. “I’m still good at stand-up!” says Robin. “Nobody can touch me at stand-up!” “Tell it to the judge,” says Al. “Gene Hackman’s doin’ the cameo, maybe he’ll take pity on your tired ass. Now walk.”

Fade to black. You don’t actually see Robin’s character get executed, so maybe there’ll be a sequel. I got up to go. The aged couple next to me seemed to be still asleep, so I nudged the man. He didn’t move, and I realized he was dead. I checked his presumable wife, and she too had passed away, the both of them dead of boredom. I got the hell out of there.

(Some of the names have been changed to protect the less guilty. This has been a Newcritics exclusive, brought to you by Quinn/Martin Productions, but turn here if you just can’t get enough.)

This is the one that kicked off Al Pacino’s career, and it’s easy to see why Coppola picked him for The Godfather. Pacino’s performance is smart and wily and truthful: qualities of a good actor; and he’s also charismatic: or whatever that quality is that makes a good actor into a movie star (and which has made lots of severely limited actors into movie stars).

The unsentimental script by Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne (based on a novel by James Mills) tells a simple story: unmotivated nice girl from the Midwest meets old-school New York hustler, they fall in love, they get hooked on heroin. Most of the movie tells the even simpler daily saga of the drug addict: getting dope, getting high, getting more dope. There’s a bit of plot having to do with one of the lovers betraying the other to the cops in order to avoid jail-time. Love prevails in this movie, but it does not prevail over heroin. And that’s about it; no great revelation, no slambang ending, no cathartic tears from the stars and no swelling John Williams strings, no music at all. Jerry Schatzberg (who before he made movies was a successful fashion and celebrity-portrait photographer) tells the story without tricks, putting the camera on the actors and allowing the actors to create a reality with him. He does not indulge in late-60s-early-70s “daring technique” — no jump-cuts or fast cuts, no strobe flashes, no “psychedelic” effects, no rapid zooms, none of the shit that sometimes charmingly dates so many movies from that time. And when I said no music I wasn’t speaking metaphorically: Schatzberg uses no music score at all, but unlike with some scoreless European movies where the lack of music makes you miss the music (or something, anything to relieve the tedium), in this movie you might not even notice its lack; music would have added something this movie didn’t need: cues to tell us how to feel. Schatzberg takes it a step further: there is not even a note of “source” music in this movie, not a passing car radio, nothing. The only background score is the grimy white noise of New York traffic.

This is the non-chic heroin world of unwashed clothing and clammy sweat, of scummy apartments, of cheap diners where junkies nurse paper cups of coffee between now and the next hit. They huddle together nodding or hurting on a bench on a concrete island on Broadway as the out-of-focus straight world goes past them and around them. And again, real needles puncture real skin. A director willing to go this intense might well have gone the neo-realistic, Robert Bresson route of using non-actors, but I’m thankful Schatzberg gave the main roles to talented and daring professional actors. Pacino, Kitty Wynn, Richard Bright, Alan Vint, all give realistic performances, but they give performances. They give life to the talking pictures on the screen; each actor lives a man or woman’s life onscreen.

The Panic in Needle Park was made in that strange period, roughly from the late 60s to the late 70s, when American filmmakers could attempt to make movies as works of art and actually complete them and see them released. A lot of bad movies were made by people attempting to make art, but also this movie was made, and The Godfather, and Five Easy Pieces, and Mean Streets, and The Last Detail, and Schatzberg’s later Scarecrow, also with Pacino; fill in your own favorites. Of just the above-mentioned movies the only one I can see being made readily in today’s world would be The Godfather, and with any luck at best Steven Spielberg would make it, and it would probably be okay but it wouldn’t be great. I think that if Coppola himself were making that movie today it would probably be okay, but not great. Mean Streets might get made today but it would be straight-to-DVD and starring a couple of earnest pretty-boys from TV. Sometimes there are times when an art flowers up all at once. Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson. James Joyce and Hemingway and Fitzgerald and Faulkner. The Beatles, the Stones, the Beach Boys and Dylan and Hendrix. Coltrane and Davis and Monk and Rollins.

I’ve been looking forward to this movie’s DVD release for years. After watching it last night I do not want to watch it again soon, but that’s not a knock by any means. This isn’t Drugstore Cowboy; that was a good movie, but it was also an entertainment movie. I really liked Larry Clark’s Another Day in Paradise, but besides being a good movie about junkies, that was also an entertainment movie. Ditto The Man With the Golden Arm. The Panic in Needle Park is not an entertainment, but it is something that only a few American movies a year are nowadays: it’s a work of art.

Oh, one last warning; it’s a double-sided DVD, full-screen on one side, widescreen on the other, so don’t be an idiot like me: check the Antman print on the disc before you put it in and start bitching about the pan-and-scan.

(This has been a Selmur Productions exclusive for Newcritics; check out my joint for some lighter fare.)