Nick Clooney hit upon an interesting idea when he was approached about doing a book about film: that movies sometimes should be looked at outside the realm of entertainment.
The blog “Notes from Classy’s Kitchen” recently cited my essay on Stone Reader.
Although it would appear to be a collection essays about 31 disparate songs, the true subject of Nick Hornby’s Songbook is our relationship with music, particularly as we mature.
There is the sneaking suspicion reading The New York Trilogy, Paul Auster’s collection of short novels, that the works are related. The hunch is not only that the stories are related thematically or in their ultimate message or outcomes – they most certainly are – but that they represent a single, cohesive work rather than three repetitive novellas.
I had more fun at Holes at age 32 than I’ve had at an “adult” movie in ages, and Louis Sachar’s screenplay features a number of subtle but important improvements on his novel, and it’s a model of efficiency and pacing. It’s going to take a damned good batch of movies to knock Holes off my list of 2003 favorites.
The irony of the success of Michael Lewis’ wonderful Moneyball is that it should bring the Oakland A’s back to earth. The justice is that Oakland’s demise doesn’t appear imminent. This is baseball, after all, and there’s no reason to change something just because it’s never worked very well.