So anyway.

Right, so where was I? Oh yeah... A list of random things I want to get out of the way. Huzzah for lists.

• Two years ago I read Tom Perrota's Little Children. It didn't make a huge impact, but it was a pleasant enough read. Odd, as novels about sex predators and the havoc they create aren't normally "pleasant," but whatevs. It was well-written and smart enough and I enjoyed it. When I heard that Todd Fields was following up Granola Death Wish In the Bedroom by collaborating with Perrota on a film version of Little Children, I was intrigued. And when the eerie/ominous/beautiful trailer dropped, I was actually excited for the project.
  
  Oops.
  
  Look: I get it, the film's gorgeous. Antonio Calvache is a fine cinematographer. And yes, Kate Winslet is one of the best actresses working. Noted. But I have a really hard time sitting through two-plus hours of reactionary, puritanical claptrap masquerading as "progressive" satire. Sorry. Do we really need another film that tells us that the 'burbs are a hotbed of hypocrisy? Really? Oh I forgot, there's also a really weak bit of Iraq-allegory and a whole lot of anti-sex posturing. To recap: the suburbs are filled with hateful, ignorant people; fear controls us and that's stupid; porn is bad. Thanks, Todd, but no thanks.
  
  Of course, while Little Children is being ridiculously lavished with praise, John Cameron Mitchell's Shortbus is being largely ignored. It's far from a perfect film, but it's legitimately progressive and patriotic and that's... well, refreshing.
  
  
• Best passage from a book I couldn't manage to finish:
  "You will not apply for membership, but the tribe of the elderly will claim you. Your present will not keep pace with the world's. This slippage will stretch your skin, sag your skeleton, erode your hair and memory, make your skin turn opaque so your twitching organs and blue-cheese veins will be semivisible. You will venture out only in daylight, avoiding weekends and school holidays. Language, too, will leave you behind, betraying your tribal affiliations wherever you speak. On escalators, on trunk roads, in supermarket aisles, the living will overtake you, incessantly. Elegant women will not see you. Soon detectives will not see you. Salespeople will not see you, unless they sell stair lifts or fraudulent insurance policies. Only babies, cats, and drug addicts will acknowledge your existence. So do not fritter away your days. Sooner than you fear, you will stand before a mirror in a care home, look at your body, and think, E.T., locked in a ruddy cupboard for a ruddy fortnight."
  --David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas.
  
  
• Worst passage from a book that I did manage to finish:
  "I was able to enter the room and stroll about and, magically, I did not get in the way of the Gestapo officer and the Chinaman who were having their way with Nicole [Kidman]. She wore a very revealing brassiere, a size or two too small, I calculated--how else was her bosom such a promontory? And her matching white panties were meshed with a garter belt that held up her long stockings. She gasped and sighed at every intrusion and indecency from her odd Abbot and Costello. You know the sort of thing."
  --David Thomson, Nicole Kidman.
  
  
• Regarding David Thomson's Nicole Kidman:
  (1) Dude, "chinaman" is not the preferred nomenclature.
  (2) The book isn't as bad as the passage above. It's actually a really entertaining riff on Kidman's body of work.
  
  
• When I was 12, this was, like, maybe the sickest shit ever:
  
  No, I'm not joking.
  
  
• Trust me on this, bump Weeds: Season One to the top of your Netflix queue. Thank you.
  
  
• Oh, one more: buy AIR's Late Night Tales pronto. I know, I know, just what you need, another chillout comp. I ask you this: how many chillout comps do you have that successfully segues a Cure song into a Black Sabbath song into a Nino Rota track? Yeah, that's what I thought. Buy it.
  
  
• Monkey portraits!
  
  
• And because it's been two months, an Armondism just for you:
  "The difference between Infamous and last year’s Capote is the difference between feeling and sophistication. Hoffman and his writer, director team Dan Futterman and Bennett Miller took pride in loathing Capote (a subtle, culturally accepted homophobia). They built their bad-art, Oscar-nominated reputations on Capote’s dead body while sneering that Capote had built his literary reputation on the deaths of Smith, Hickok and the Clutter family. It was an arrogant indie attempt at seeming superior to an artist of an earlier era. (There are Hitler biopics more compassionate than Capote.) This contempt gave itself away in the film’s pseudo-sophisticated literary exposé. But condemnation of Capote’s careerism actually reflected Hoffman’s own gloating egotism, his look-at-me stunt performance."