Scrawler's always been the perfect gentlewoman in allowing me to share that particular fantasy.

Nah, nothing like that. In the West, the stereotype emerged because of specific historical circumstances: most Russian literature was entirely unknown in the West until the late 19th century (the only real exception was Turgenev, because he lived and worked among European literati). When the floodgate did open, there…

Ah, well, isn't lazy framing the job of critics? Heh. There are some good, longer essays on the movie's take on theodicy (not all of them positive).

Probably not, no. Both the character (described as an Edomite) and the text have likely non-Jewish origins, though the text is difficult to work with because it's clearly in a later state of rewrite (especially in the Elihu section). This is one of the most pored-over texts in Biblical scholarship, because it's…

I think you may be selling the movie short: it gets a lot of mileage out of displacing traditional questions of theodicy into contemporary, secularized life. If Job is tortured less by his physical ailments than by the possibility of an unjust order to the universe, the Coens extend this to the literal uncertainty of…

Honestly, the "prosaic test of faith" reading is pretty plausible for this movie. There are two religious figures who've stepped right out of Dostoevsky (a humble parish priest and a wealthy hypocritical bishop; the former delivers a monologue on suffering [oh, Russia!], the latter has a brilliantly…

My #2 film of the year, though I didn't find it nearly as dour; and certain scenes, like the booze-drenched shooting party, are very much in the spirit of Chekhov. It's also gleefully vulgar in a way that's still not too common in Russian films, and the flow of (again: booze-drenched) expletives has a funnier effect…

I'm talking about pop music, though. There's plenty of good religious stuff in art music.

Find new parents.

Joke I heard while I was living there: What's the Czech word for church? Muzeum

I love the sense of terror he conveys in "Seven Swans": the real awe of an all-powerful god that's less the kind of drippy admiration of modern religion, and more the ancient holy-shit of the incomprehensible coming for you.

I'm curious why you wouldn't consider Vonnegut postmodern. He and Pynchon are a lot closer to each other in most ways than Wallace, who's a different beast altogether. What have you read by Pynchon?

One thing that I enjoy about the fifth film is that, for all its bombastic silliness, it essentially ends with an extended fistfight. Oh, and all the male characters are knocked out quickly so the women can brawl it out. Not really a thing you'd get in any other action franchise.

I don't listen to nearly enough Christian music to pretend this is a fair judgment, but what's always attracted me to Sufjan's religious-themed music is that he tends to approach faith and religion from more complicated, thorny, controversial points of view than what I hear whenever I accidentally land on Christian…

It kinda makes sense with the shift in focus that the review suggests: Anderson takes much more time emphasizing Doc's immediate human contacts (especially Shasta and Bigfoot, and the resolution of Coy's subplot) that the bigger picture in Pynchon's novel is sometimes more suggestive than direct. Some of it does work…

I can't speak for other people, but I was so thoroughly sucked into the world of The Master and its central platonic love story that I've watched it now four or five times and love it more with each viewing. It's stark but rich; formally rigid but messy. Phoenix's performance may be my single favorite of the last, I…

It's hard to tell. It's not as inscrutable as either (and a lot more direct stabs at comedy), but it has its own rhythms and moods that I can't imagine are going to be popular with everyone. That it's linked to a very established genre makes it easier going than his last two films, but it's still not the lucid romp…

I can't speak for the critic, but it took me a second to adjust to Wilson, because he's so clearly cast against type (I mean, yes, it's easy to see Owen Wilson playing a drugged-out surf saxophonist, but at this point in the story, he's a tangle of sober regrets and mixed alliances.) His monologue in the movie is one…

Well… it is a car in a fog; whether you'll like what they did with it is another question. I vastly prefer the book's ending, although I do think Anderson gets some really good stuff out of the ending he wrote.

The closing shot, a parting moment of Anderson’s invention, is pure bliss