Culture Snob 
In this campaign season, what can we learn from the performances of An American Carol and Religulous? The easy conclusion is that audiences aren’t real keen on such aggressively political material, with the two movies finishing ninth and 10th, respectively, in the weekend’s overall box office. The second easy conclusion is that conservatives are slightly hungrier for entertainment than people who don’t like religion. Neither is correct.
I find it baffling to read even marginally positive reviews of Sarah Palin’s performance in last night’s debate. I saw it the same way noted political commentator Roger Ebert did.
A common regret is watching blog-a-thons come and go with nary a contribution from Culture Snob. So I was overjoyed to see the announcement at He Shot Cyrus for the “My Best Post Blog-a-thon”: “Everyone should participate because here’s the best part: You’ve already written your entry!” What surprised me was how easy the decision was.
The Ani DiFranco appearing on stages these days might not be the same Ani DiFranco who became something of a legend over the past two decades. The old Ani averaged a record a year from 1989 through 2006, toured incessantly, and was a punkish-folk, feminist, do-it-yourself, and bisexual icon. The new Ani has a 20-month-old child and a “baby daddy” (her words, referring to producer Mike Napolitano), and in September released her first studio album in two whole years: Red Letter Year.
Late afternoon Tuesday, the Christian drama Fireproof had unofficially won this week’s Box Office Power Rankings, with a gross of almost $7 million and a per-theater average to make Eagle Eye sweat. By Wednesday morning, however, it was in fourth place. Call it the Curse of the Small Sample Size.
In the pilot episode of Fringe, one bit of dialogue struck me as so wrong that I backed up to transcribe it. An FBI agent (Anna Torv) is speaking to the man who’s supervising a mysterious case in which everybody on an intercontinental flight arrived with only their bones intact. Earlier in the episode, we had seen Torv’s character in bed with another agent, whose life now hangs in the balance after being attacked with a similar flesh-eating agent. Here’s what the supervisor says: “It would be nice to think that your tenacity in this case is a byproduct of a remarkable and robust professionalism.” That’s a good line.
If you glance at the box-office top 10 this week, you might think that the supernatural romantic comedy Ghost Town was a bomb, finishing last among the four major new releases and eighth overall. But the movie’s title was almost a self-fulfilling prophecy, as Paramount/DreamWorks only exhibited it in 1,505 theatres – a sure sign the studio doesn’t believe in the movie.
Much has been written over the past 18 months about the death/irrelevance of film criticism in print media, as newspapers scaled back their movie coverage and Premiere stopped publishing a print edition. The refrain has been that movie critics are out-of-touch and elitist, that they don’t reflect the values and tastes of audiences, etc., etc. While that might appear true when Bangkok Dangerous tops the box office (as it did the first weekend in September), the truth is a little more complicated. Numerous (mostly unscientific) studies have found a correlation between box-office performance and critical reception.
It’s been linked to plenty over the past few days, but David Foster Wallace’s 2005 commencement address deserves to be read, in light of and in spite of his suicide.
Some marriages come with two microwave ovens or two sets of dishes. Ours did, too, but it also came with two copies of Infinite Jest. This speaks less to our reading habits than our book-buying habits. I do not believe that Bride of Culture Snob has read David Foster Wallace’s doorstop from 1996. I didn’t get far enough to invoke the 69-page rule, which dictates that I must finish a book once I’ve gotten to that point. So I won’t tell you – now that he’s killed himself at age 46 – that I devoured every word he wrote, or that I’ve memorized favorite passages, or that I’ve ranked my favorite Wallace foot/end notes.
