Here's a connection that I'm still waiting to be widely accepted: Infinite Jest doesn't have a direct adaptation because it already has a film equivalent—viz., Magnolia, the similarly over-the-top Millennial masterpiece that's almost IJ's equivalent in its admixture of grand ambition and weird, tonally strident…

I'm glad you reminded me that's out. My Saturday night now has some meaning.

Speaking of the "Who's the crazy person here?" genre, have any of you guys seen the movie Bug? It's directed by William Friedkin, the Exorcist guy, and goddamn is that movie frightening. I should watch it again sometime, because my memory of it is that it's one of the top scariest movies I've seen.

A good question. I'd supposed, with the "no grade inflation" policy they seem to cherish around here, that anything above a C was probably fresh-ish.

You don't have to agree w/ a political subtext to notice it.

Horton Hears a Who!, by Planned Parenthood, more like.

I heard Pietsch give a talk at my college a few years ago, and it was interesting to me because "editor" didn't seem like much of a thing at the time, but the presenter kept comparing his having a bunch of National Book Award nominees as his output as being similar to a director having a bunch of Academy Award…

At least when Bret Easton Ellis writes about rich people, he's considerate enough to loathe them utterly…

For a book like this, it functions as a sort of warning: stay out. I've only read one short story by this guy in the New Yorker, but it was some incredible BS about a guy disappearing because of misused punctuation. Next, please.

Senator, you don't have to agree with the ratings system to concede that "protecting kids from disturbing material" is sort of the point.

Ex-Lawrence…Represent! I cherish my memories of the promised land.

Shh, no gauntlet throwing, hey. There's enough bullying in the world, and we don't need any of our own getting beat. You know they're still listening to us.

I attended an outdoor showing of this one summer during college, and it was enough to make a bro uncomfortable, feel me? Please?

To offer a dissenting opinion: I think it's pretty reasonable for the MPAA to rate this an R, at least if you're gonna compare it to other R-rated pics. Filmed school is in some ways more vivid than real school. There's an anecdote about Tobe Hooper where, before he made TX Chainsaw Massacre, he worked as a hospital…

I always hear about people having to turn movies off because they're feeling too scared or disturbed or whatever to go on, but The Talented Mr. Ripley is the only movie I've actually done that for. That's not a negative. It's just that I was expecting a sort of nice movie, and, as…

Poor Danny McBride, huh?

Through-narrative…though that's based on my listening to less than the first half of the book on audiotape during a trip once and not picking it up again. From what I got through it seemed to be expertly put together, but if you're already a classical music fan it may not be as revelatory as it was hailed by some…

In "The Rest Is Noise," Alex Ross's history of classical music in the 20th century, a pretty convincing case is made for the complicity of the art worlds in the idiocy that was WW1, inasmuch as the Germans and the French, for instance, found each other's art to be decadent or flat-footed, respectively, and a source of…

You just need to squint really hard during that one scene in GoodFellas, man.

"Just like that! Fuck me, Mr. M! Fuck me!"