Todd and Me, Sittin' in a Tree, W-A-I-T-I-N-G

In fashion, as we know, you're either In or you're Out. Book publishing, however, appears to follow different rules. I can't tell if the anthology The Cinema of Todd Haynes, edited by James Morrison, is Out or Not. The original publication date from Wallflower Press in the UK was scheduled for last spring, with a joint publication from Columbia University Press, which later announced a June release. Then, both dates were moved to December. However, the Wallflower page indicates that the book has been out in the UK since September, and the unillustrated Amazon page says it's been available for purchase in the U.S. since November. But I haven't seen it anywhere, and nor has the editor.

Why do I care so much? Because I'm in it! Chapter 8, y'all. So, when the book eventually does come to a bookstore near you, give it some love! And don't begrudge a blogging academic who's geeked to see his name in print, particularly in connection to the work of a Living Genius, and who is therefore shamelessly hawking the wares. (It would help, of course, if the wares would appear, so that they might be hawked.)

Meanwhile, tomorrow's a big day for movie-going: I'll finally be hitting up Dreamgirls at midday and Children of Men in the afternoon. Comments and Globe predix soon to follow. I expect I'll also hunker down with When the Levees Broke over the weekend, and I've got a group date to go see Letters from Iwo Jima on Tuesday. Once those verdicts have rolled in, I'll just be waiting on this and this and especially this before my Top 10 list and all the other Best of 2007 features pop up on the main site. When that eventually happens, don't expect more than a nod apiece, if even that, for Our Brand Is Crisis, an intriguing documentary with a great subject that nonetheless holds back too far from the issues and events at its core, or for The Painted Veil, which is less precious and dainty than it might have been but still omits any fresh insights or directorial signatures, resulting in a movie with casual appeal but zero urgency.

(Image © 2005 Wallflower Press)

A Beatrix Kiddo Moment

In this superb example of shallow focus, you can see Uma looking fierce and resilient in the foreground while the background is crowded by a blurry horde of ungraded papers, unfinished course proposals and internal paperwork, mounting inboxes, missed trains, delayed film reviews, and friendly phone calls still waiting to be returned. Don't worry; you can still place all your bets on Uma for the win. But if I come to work tomorrow in a pinstriped yellow track suit, y'all will know why. </vent>

(Image © 2003 Miramax Films)

Back in the High Life Again

If you've been wondering where I suddenly disappeared to after a relatively prolific August, I've just been gearing up for my first teaching term at my new job at Northwestern University. My Fall Quarter course, which meets for the first time this afternoon, is called Gender Studies 231: Introducing Queer Cinema, and it's a lecture-scale reworking of a seminar I offered last year at Trinity College and even earlier at Queering the Apparatus (a blog that is no doubt also feeling the excitement and the pinch of a new academic year, as are this one and this one!).

Anyway, thanks to all you regulars for being patient with me while I figure out where and how this blog will continue fitting in to the vida loca of a new assistant professor. My plan is for the pendulum of energy to swing back toward the main website, and maybe even to integrate the blog more directly as a scrollable frame within the website homepage. At the very least, I'd like to be writing more full reviews. Anyway, I'll be brainstorming for a while, so don't be shy about posting recommendations of things to keep, purge, or change. In the meantime, at least two book reviews and two film reviews coming up soon... plus the next entry on the Favorites countdown, which contends that you really can go home again, though you may not always want to.

The Last Supper

This just in: I am not dead. Even better, I am finally riding an inland wave, away from the whirlpool of end-of-semester activity. Aside from grading, my last big obligation before tying a bow on the term is a dinner I am hosting tonight for my graduate students, which is doubling as our last class. It's my first gig at making food for 12 people at once (so I'll be channeling Dr. S, findfinishfreedom, The Boyfriend, and the other accomplished kitchen wizards who frequent these parts). There's also a certain poetic symmetry to the event, since we're gathering to discuss our last book for the course, Reading Lolita in Tehran, which itself is about a group of graduate-age students who convene regularly at a professor's house to discuss literature. So now I have to cook, clean, and (um) finish the book.

I'll be back, though, to resume the favorite films countdown, and to report on my recent reimmersion into the moviegoing world: most recently with the jazzy street politics of Dave Chappelle's Block Party, the outré pleasures of Matthew Barney's Drawing Restraint 9, and David Jacobson's promising and yet intensely frustrating Down in the Valley. Stay tuned!

Image reproduced from the website for Sugar's Uptown Cabaret in Austin, TX.

Break Out the Bubbly...

Dear readers, I may have been out of sight, but you have not been out of mind... and at least I recognize that, having ignored this blog for over a week, I better have something appreciable to say for myself upon returning. So I'm giddy giddy giddy to let fly with the news (admittedly, not all that well concealed in my last post), that I have accepted a tenure-track professorship at Northwestern University to begin in the Fall of 2006. I couldn't be more excited. Literally, if you try to imagine me being more excited than I in fact am, you will fail. The job is a joint appointment in the Department of English and the Program in Gender Studies, which only makes it easier for me to offer a wide range of courses in film, literature, theory, drama, gender and sexuality studies, etc., etc., at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, and at a truly premier and exciting institution. In a fantastic city. With job security. The official offer arrived late last week, after all the usual bureaucratic processes, and I gleefully accepted it yesterday afternoon.

As if I needed any further incentive to accept this terrific opportunity, there's the enormous karmic plus that follows from Northwestern being mentioned by name in When Harry Met Sally...:



HARRY (lamenting his first date Back Out There): So I downshift into small talk, and I ask her where she went to school, and she says 'Michigan State.' And this reminds me of Helen. All of a sudden, I'm in the middle of this massive anxiety attack, my heart's beating like a wild man, and I start sweating like a pig.

SALLY: Helen went to Michigan State?

HARRY: No, she went to Northwestern. But they're both Big Ten schools.

Anyway, thanks to all who have e-mailed encouragements or written to ask whether I was c) trapped under something heavy. (See above, and for gosh sakes, do yourself an enormous favor and memorize the movie.) Much more to say on the eve of Oscar, after second viewings of Capote, Munich, Good Night, and Good Luck., and Walk the Line, plus a bunch of off-the-radar Oscar nominees from year's past, ranging all the way from delectable surprises to deadening fiascos.

And I read two fascinating plays, and I'm back in the middle of an all-time favorite novel (come on, people, it only costs one cent!). Things have been hopping. More soon. No for real, I promise.

Happy B-Day to This Lovely Lady

More likely than not, if you read this blog, you know this woman, which—when you consider the 6 billion people in the world you could have met in her stead—is a major stroke of good luck. Some of you do not know this woman, and that is something you should really get working on. Either way, I want to see the Comments section get burned up today. Consider it your own private donation to Nick's Flick Picks (again, that stands for Not For Profit), a tiny tithe that I extract every few months in exchange for any scrap of pleasure you find or have ever found on this website.

Please be so kind as to shout, sing, exclaim, extemporize, bellow, blow, and beat-box some Happy Birthdays for this gorgeous gal. Let's make her day.

If it helps to know why you are doing this, She—who posts anonymously, so I'm keeping her secret—She is an undisputed, uncontested Life Force of an English Ph.D. program in a wintry mountaintop town. I know a lot of grad students read this blog, including some non-Cornellians, and if there's anyone in your program who smiles at you and hugs you and encourages you every time you need it, who remembers everything about your life from your birthday to your shirt size to some joke you made five years ago, then you know how it feels to know the Lovely Lady. You recognize how a drab linoleum hallway, a slow line at the xerox machine, a bored lull at the seminar table, an awkward silence at a talk, a grey month in a grey season, how all of these things need a sunny-side optimist and a caring friend to put the pulse back into them, which is what She does.

As the above picture amply illustrates, she is so much fun, she gets you smiling like some kind of deranged Osmond.

If you have ever moved to a new place, even as an adult, by which time you feel you really should have mastered the skill of meeting new people quickly (you were so outgoing in your previous digs, so surrounded by friends!), and yet you're still having trouble figuring out where you'll fit in.... please look at this woman's face, and trust me that she is the person who invites you out to the front steps of the building where you both work now, and she exchanges confidences and confides insecurities and includes you in her goals and introduces you to her raucous, unembarrassed laughter, and you know without a doubt that you've just made the closest friend you are going to make in your cohort.

If you ever sat around a seminar table, or in a meeting, or at a reading group, and you wondered, Why do people still read literature? How will I ever catch up? What right do I have to insist on my own instincts, my own way of doing things, which keep appearing to lead me into trouble? And how do I know this degree I'm pursuing isn't a self-indulgence? then this is the woman you are so whole-heartedly grateful for, the woman who commiserates with your bouts of self-doubt and self-criticism, because she has plenty of these bouts herself (and you wish so much you could relieve her of these, find the magic mirror that shows her the She that we all see, whom all of us admire and adore)...... and yet, she doesn't doubt the value and worth of what you're there to do. She sees the beauty in your work and the promise in your ideas when you don't, she feeds the institution and the profession just when you're feeling most cynical about them or aloof within them, and she inculcates in you a desire to be of service, to be active and engaged and engaging, and to trust that everything you're doing is for a noble purpose, and for the sake of its own pleasure (no small thing!). These, after all, are an unbeatable tag-team of reasons to choose a profession.

She introduces you to people, some of them standing right in the room with you, some of them—Saidiya Hartman, Farah Jasmine Griffin, Kara Walker—faraway ideals that turn into shared idols (and some of whom, if enough years go by, are suddenly standing in the room with you, too).

She gives herself no credit for being beautiful, but she is, as is so manifestly clear in photos like this one (my favorite). I don't remember ever seeing her dressed this way, but something about the frontways Hurston-tilt of the hat, the radiant grin, the mischievous twinkle, the lovely indigo color of the blouse, the fact that you wonder what's in the locket, the fact that she is so obviously happy to be sitting on someone's floor (because none of us own enough furniture to sit on, and we're used to this, and who are we kidding, it's fun)... all of this captures how terrifically vivacious she is, how unexpected and memorable her humor is. The longer you look at the picture, you realize with a start that apparently, some graduate student in the tundra of Ithaca actually succeeded in keeping a plant alive in their apartment, and you can't but credit Her with some of this achievement. She is photosynthetic.

She is a terrific and generous cook, unembarrassed of spice and flavor. She sends you gifts when it isn't your birthday, or your anything. She keeps your secrets, and you keep hers. She lets it bump with the BEST of them. She is full of love for her family. She is so full of love for her friends that it's like being in her family. She speaks truth to power. She laughs infectiously when Grandma Vargas tries to hand Victor over to the state, with all of his belongings tied in a Hefty bag.

She makes. a huge. difference. All the time. She'll keep making a difference. People who care and who follow these sorts of things, her sorts of things, will know her name. In her own words, she doesn't want to be one anymore... and she doesn't have to be, and she won't be.

For now, she's the birthday girl. Now give it up for her!

Big Dreams for 2006

Happy New Year to All! New Year's Day is still my favorite holiday, or at least my favorite that has nothing to do with AMPAS or the HFPA. The whole year feels so full of possibility, and it's a remarkably personal holiday: on Christmas, the Fourth of July, even Thanksgiving or Valentine's Day, the way I'm feeling is always shaped for better and for worse by ritual, expectation, convention. New Year's Day has nothing publicly ceremonial about it, or at least it never has for me, except at the literal first second. After that wonderful moment (and yes, I always watch the ball lower over Times Square, on TV), I always experience the whole day as a free-flowing, flushed, excited, but almost totally quiet reflection on what's been going on with me and the people I know, where it's all going, and what I'm hoping for, or committed to, or planning on, or hoping to be surprised by. Yesterday, I did yard work for my Mom, ate some simple but delicious meals, and not much more. I always write a long diary entry, none of which I have ever re-read.

And as y'all know, because I never stop flapping my jaws about it, I make my silly lists of films to watch and of plays and books to read in the next 12 months. I never finish them, or even half of them, but if Walter Benjamin can defend the sentiment that it's crucially important to anticipate, even to own more books than you'll ever actually read... well, what's good enough for Walter is 500% good enough for me. I've just posted 2006's revised film itineraries, two-thirds of which will be instantly recognizable as holdovers from last year that I never caught up with. But since I've come to enjoy writing up plays and books and scholarship on this blog, too, and since I *love* hearing impressions and recommendations and conversations from you all, this year I'm posting all of my lists. If there's anything you'd be excited to read or watch together, let me know, and we'll beat Oprah at her own game.... it'd be fun to have a Nick's Flick Picks Book Club (or Film Club, or Play Club) with an agreed text each month, but I'd rather one of you regular lot pick it than me. Pipe up if you see something you like!

All this, and more soon. Life is still intervening (though, for those of you in the know, Mom is recently doing much better). Regular entries and more conversation will follow shortly. Suffice to say for now that in a week of moviegoing, Brokeback Mountain was pleasurable but, I thought, rather gauzy and unspecific; Munich was, like so much recent Spielberg, better at sequences than at sustained wholes, but it's still a wowzer of a story and I admired good stretches of it quite a bit; King Kong lost a little luster for me on second viewing, with secondary characters and psychological pretexts seeming a little wobblier, but I'm still quite impressed on the whole; and the stark, somewhat hermetic, but bravely principled and sturdily made Wolf Creek was my favorite of the lot. (Oh, and Wild Iris, a Showtime movie that won Laura Linney an Emmy and Gena Rowlands a nomination a few years ago, is utter dispiriting dreck—now showing, natch, on Lifetime. Treat like hemlock, asbestos, or similar.)

xo.



ENGLISH-LANGUAGE FILMS FOR 2006
Ace in the Hole/The Big Carnival, Billy Wilder, 1951
The Crowd, King Vidor, 1928
Crumb, Terry Zwigoff, 1994
Drylongso, Cauleen Smith, 1998
F for Fake, Orson Welles, 1974
Fast Company, David Cronenberg, 1979
I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, Mervyn LeRoy, 1934
Jubilee, Derek Jarman, 1977
The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, John Cassavetes, 1976
The Killing of Sister George, Robert Aldrich, 1968
Lost Highway, David Lynch, 1997
Monsieur Verdoux, Charlie Chaplin, 1947
The More the Merrier, George Stevens, 1943
Mrs. Miniver, William Wyler, 1942
Out of the Past, Jacques Tourneur, 1947
Parting Glances, Bill Sherwood, 1986
Performance, Roeg/Cammell, 1970
Salesman, Maysles/Maysles/Zwerin, 1969
7 Women, John Ford, 1966
The Steel Helmet, Samuel Fuller, 1951
The Tarnished Angels, Douglas Sirk, 1958
Thieves Like Us, Robert Altman, 1974
Thirty-Two Short Films about Glenn Gould, François Girard, 1993
To Each His Own, Mitchell Leisen, 1946



FOREIGN-LANGUAGE FILMS FOR 2006
L'Âge d'or, Luis Buñuel, Spain, 1930
Alexandria...Why?, Youssef Chahine, Egypt, 1978
Bandit Queen, Shekhar Kapur, India, 1994
Céline and Julie Go Boating, Jacques Rivette, France, 1974
Code Unknown, Michael Haneke, France/Austria, 2000
Dakan, Mohamed Camara, Guinea, 1997
Faat Kiné, Ousmane Sembene, Senegal, 2000
Gertrud, Carl-Theodor Dreyer, Denmark, 1964
Ivan the Terrible, Sergei Eisenstein, USSR, 1944-46
Knife in the Water, Roman Polanski, Poland, 1962
Landscape in the Mist, Theo Angelopoulos, Greece, 1988
The Leopard, Luchino Visconti, Italy, 1963
The Marriage of Maria Braun, R.W. Fassbinder, West Germany, 1979
Matador, Pedro Almodóvar, Spain, 1985
Open City, Roberto Rossellini, Italy, 1945
Orpheus, Jean Cocteau, France, 1950
Pandora's Box, G.W. Pabst, Germany, 1928
Raise the Red Lantern, Zhang Yimou, Hong Kong, 1991
La Ronde, Max Ophüls, France, 1950
Sansho the Bailiff, Kenji Mizoguchi, Japan, 1954
Scenes from a Marriage, Ingmar Bergman, Sweden, 1973
The Spirit of the Beehive, Victor Erice, Spain, 1973
That Obscure Object of Desire, Luis Buñuel, France/Spain, 1977
Three Days, Sharunas Bartas, Lithuania, 1991



PLAYS FOR 2006
Blood Knot, Athol Fugard
Blood Wedding, Federico García Lorca
The Conduct of Life, Maria Irene Fornès
The Destiny of Me, Larry Kramer
A Doll's House, Henrik Ibsen
Intimate Apparel, Lynn Nottage
Life Is a Dream, Pedro Calderón de la Barca
Loot, Joe Orton
Never Land, Phyllis Nagy
Old Times, Harold Pinter
Phèdre, Jean Racine
Porcelain, Chay Yew
The Potting Shed, Graham Greene
Pygmalion, George Bernard Shaw
Radio Golf, August Wilson
The Saint Plays, Erik Ehn
The Skin of Our Teeth, Thornton Wilder
Softcops, Caryl Churchill
The Three Sisters, Anton Chekhov
Timon of Athens, William Shakespeare
A Touch of the Poet, Eugene O'Neill
The Way of the World, William Congreve
We Righteous Bombers, Kingsley B. Bass, Jr. (aka Ed Bullins)
A Woman of No Importance, Oscar Wilde



CANONICAL LITERATURE FOR 2006
The Ambassadors, Henry James
The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, James Weldon Johnson
Between the Acts, Virginia Woolf
Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
The Bridge, Hart Crane
For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway
The Good Soldier, Ford Madox Ford
Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
In Dubious Battle, John Steinbeck
Jude the Obscure, Thomas Hardy
Look Homeward, Angel, Thomas Wolfe
Maggie, A Woman of the Streets, Stephen Crane
Mansfield Park, Jane Austen
Mosses from an Old Manse, Nathaniel Hawthorne
My Ántonia, Willa Cather
Our Nig, Harriet Wilson
Pudd'nhead Wilson, Mark Twain
Quicksand, Nella Larsen
Silas Marner, George Eliot
Swann's Way, Marcel Proust
Tender Is the Night, F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Trial, Franz Kafka
Wieland, Charles Brockden Brown
Women in Love, D.H. Lawrence



POST-WWII LITERATURE FOR 2006
Alias Grace, Margaret Atwood
American Pastoral, Philip Roth
The Autobiography of My Mother, Jamaica Kincaid
Brown Girl, Brownstones, Paule Marshall
Days Between Stations, Steve Erickson
Desire, Frank Bidart
Disgrace, J.M Coetzee
A Fable, William Faulkner
Flaming Iguanas, Erika Lopez
Funeral Rites, Jean Genet
Juneteenth, Ralph Ellison
Just Above My Head, James Baldwin
Native Speaker, Chang-Rae Lee
Nervous Conditions, Tsitsi Dangarembga
Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro
On Beauty, Zadie Smith
Pale Fire, Vladimir Nabokov
Parable of the Sower, Octavia Butler
See Under: Love, David Grossman
The Story of a New Zealand River, Jane Mander
The Swimming Pool Library, Alan Hollinghurst
Thereafter Johnnie, Carolivia Herron
Those Bones Are Not My Child, Toni Cade Bambara
Wise Blood, Flannery O'Connor



SCHOLARSHIP & CRITICISM FOR 2006
(Wherein I read past key chapters and finally finish the books!)
Black, White, and In Color, Hortense Spillers
The Body in Pain, Elaine Scarry
A Cinema of Loneliness, Robert Kolker
Disidentifications, José Esteban Muñoz
Empire, Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri
Enjoy Your Symptom!, Slavoj Žižek
Fear of a Queer Planet, Michael Warner, ed.
Female Perversions: The Temptations of Emma Bovary, Louise J. Kaplan
Lesbian Rule, Amy Villarejo
Libidinal Currents, Joseph Allen Boone
Male Subjectivity at the Margins, Kaja Silverman
Mimesis, Erich Auerbach
Movie-Made America, Robert Sklar
One Hundred Years of Homosexuality, David Halperin
The Practice of Love, Teresa de Lauretis
The Rise of the Novel, Ian Watt
S/Z, Roland Barthes
Strategies of Deviance, Earl Jackson
Tendencies, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
Thinking through the Body, Jane Gallop
This Sex Which Is Not One, Luce Irigaray
A Thousand Plateaus, Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari
Unmaking Mimesis, Elin Diamond
The Use of Pleasure, Michel Foucault

R.I.P. Fred Pfeil

My friend and recent mentor Fred Pfeil died today, nine months after suffering a massive seizure that was quickly diagnosed as an effect of already-metastasized brain cancer. Fred has been bravely fighting his disease and even more bravely withstanding the intensive treatments of radiation and chemotherapy that became such a dominating part of his last months of life. It's a marvel that he never acted as though his life had been co-opted by illness, and he remained cheerful, funny, and warm even after he was inducted into hospice care in the days before Thanksgiving.

He died between 3:00 and 3:30 this afternoon, almost a full day into an unrestful and machine-assisted "sleep" that he entered on Monday, after suffering a painful fall in the middle of Sunday night. I was with him in his hospital room less than an hour before he died, and since he seemed able to hear (though not to open his eyes or raise himself, much less talk), I did at least get to speak to him one final time. It bore no relation to "saying goodbye." Fred and I always talked about movies, and I was telling him that tonight I am screening one of his absolute favorites and mine, Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line, after which I am assigning my students to read his own essay on the film, entitled "Terrence Malick's War Film Sutra: Meditating on The Thin Red Line," anthologized here. I told him that I was looking forward to returning to his hospital room to read him my students' responses to his essay and to the film we both love so much. I told him that a graduate-student advisee that I inherited from him when he got sick had just come down for a meeting last week, and that his project is exemplary and exciting, and something that Fred would be so proud of when he got to read it. And I told him that I was glad he had been able to spend Thanksgiving with his father and sister—he was awake and fairly lively through Sunday evening—and that I had missed him these last few weeks and was eager to talk with him soon.

No one, at least none of the people who were already in his room when I arrived there today, seemed to think he had so very little time left, so I wasn't being false in looking forward to future conversations. In a lot of ways, I'm glad that I didn't know, since it stopped me from being maudlin and from unburdening my own sadness onto him as he was going. (I hope I wouldn't have done that anyway, but you just never know.) His expression did seem to change when I started talking and identified myself by name; that was the only sign that he really could hear me, and that he knew who I was and what I was saying, and it was such a subtle change that I hope I wasn't just projecting it.

I had to rush off at 2:15 to go teach my afternoon class, which stretches from 2:40 to 3:55. When I walked back into my department afterward, I ran into a colleague in the doorway, and she told me what had happened. I didn't even read the e-mail until just now. I went immediately to see two of the friendliest people in the department who have been here for the longest time: the administrative assistant and the current chair. I admire both women so much, and I know how much they loved Fred.

After talking with them, I came back to my office, which is really Fred's office—you see, I was hired at Trinity to teach the classes Fred normally teaches, but not because he knew he was sick at the time (or at least he didn't tell me so, nor anyone else that I know of). He was going to be teaching in a special interdisciplinary lab on campus these next two years, and I was hired to teach the Film and American Literature courses that he usually offered in the department, even though he was initially hired years and years ago to teach Creative Writing (Fiction). He was a talented and polydextrous person. Fred was devastated by that final seizure in February only hours after he had called me to offer me my job, i.e., his job. When I had met him in the weeks before—to interview for the position in December (at MLA, for you academic types) and to present a sample seminar on campus in February—he was not only the picture of health, but he was so kind, affable, gentle, hilarious, and lavishly admired by his students that I instantly made up my mind to accept the job if it was offered to me, in order to be around him, and hopefully become more like him.

As it happened, I only ever saw him three more times: at lunch in late August (early September?), where he told me the last movie he'd seen in a theater was Batman Begins, which he thought was much too loud; in the middle of a rainstorm in late October, on his way to the campus bookstore to pick up some newly-arrived special orders (he didn't have a coat or an umbrella, and he only accepted mine when I drew him into a conversation about Ernst Lubitsch and Josef von Sternberg); and then, today.

I've shed a lot of tears in the last two hours, and I expect I'll cry some more tonight during the movie, thinking of why Fred loved it and of how immediate our friendship was when we discovered what a mutual passion it was. I tried to make three phone calls after I came back to my office (again, Fred's office) to be alone, and though I couldn't get through the first two times, bless my brother for being there and letting me talk. My head is full of thoughts, but not really full of memories; it couldn't be. I didn't know him that well. But almost never in my life have I known someone so little who elicited such profound love and admiration right on the spot, and it's been made pristinely clear from all of Fred's friends and colleagues at Trinity that my response to him, sublime though it was, was also quite common. He was a hero of so many people. All semester, while he's been sick, people have walked past my building, seen the light on in this second-floor office, and walked up and in, hoping against hope that Fred was here. A few of these disappointed visitors—I always say, as they try to mask their disappointment, "Don't worry, I feel just the same way!"—have stayed in my office to tell me about how they knew Fred and all the things he did for them: as a teacher, an award-winning local peace activist, a friend, an advisor, a colleague, a kind editor, a gleeful conspirator in sweet-tooth indulgences.

I don't know what to think about having spoken with him mere hours before the catastrophic and unpredicted onset of his illness, and then again less than an hour before his well-prepared-for but still unpredicted moment of letting go. I will never know what to think about this. The sentimentalist in me, leaning on coincidence but also on some fingerfuls of friendly confidence he offered me last winter, wants to believe that Fred was proud to have me standing in his professional shoes, though only temporarily, and nowhere near to filling them. He always talked to me with the tone of a mentor, even when we were too slimly acquainted for that to make sense, even though I felt the same way about him just as swiftly. Scores and scores, hundreds of people at Trinity and in Hartford were closer to Fred than I was, and I trust they all have intimate memories of how special he was, and how special he made them feel when he was with them. My heart is with all those people right now even more than it's with myself. And I wonder so much, with such acute concentration—I'm almost embarrassed by the questions, and by their involuntary force—where Fred has gone, what has become of him, what he is right now.

But I admit, my heart is heavy and full for myself right now. I'm too sad, momentarily, to really take comfort in what a loving, supportive hand he always held out to me, but I know I'll take comfort in this later. I miss my friend, I wanted to know him better. He was young, no more than 60, if he was that. I'm sitting in his office, surrounded by his books—those he wrote, and those many more that he owned and read and annotated. I see little notes that he scribbled to himself and forgot, an old turtle shell that has always sat on the corner of this desk, even after he cleared out his personal mementos so that I could better use the space. He left teabags and microwavable soups, stashed in a bottom drawer, a snapshot of an otter enjoying the water, a poster-sized print of an artist's rendering of the 1912 Bread and Roses Strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts. Taped to the wall is a collection of undated Gallup Poll figures from early in the Second Gulf War, indicating the degree of opposition to the war registered in public surveys in dozens of countries: Albania 89% against, Argentina 87%, Australia 83%...

His gloves are in a drawer. His phone line, split off from mine, just rang. (Of course I didn't answer.)

I miss you, Fred!

(Thanks, everybody for listening.)

V.G. News!!!

That's V.G. in the Bridget Jones and also the Todd Haynes sense: I just got word that my article "'The Invention of a People': Velvet Goldmine and the Unburying of Queer Desire" has been accepted for publication in a book called The Cinema of Todd Haynes, to be published in Spring 2006 by Wallflower Press, a film-based subsidiary of Columbia University Press.

Some of you know that my dissertation chapter about Velvet Goldmine was the one dearest to my heart and also the one that met with the frostiest general reception at my dissertation defense. It's also my first print publication in the field of academic film studies. So, in my own mind, and relative to my own self-confidence about my work, to have a condensed version of that particular chapter accepted for publication is a real spirit-lifter. Thanks to everyone who left encouraging comments since yesterday... they worked! So, hey, are y'all on permanent call for this good-luck-charm hoodoo, or what??

Notes from Underground

So, while Nick's Flick Picks has been in another two-week hibernation, plenty has been going on above ground. In the Glass Half Full category, Tom DeLay finally got indicted, Lynndie England got sent to prison, Rita din't wreak what Katrina wrought, and residents of New Orleans started making their way back home. As for the Glass Half Empty, many of those same New Orleanians got sent back out again, Rita was bad enough for what it was (and only augurs the gloomy future of global weather), Cindy Sheehan got arrested outside the White House, John Roberts was confirmed as Chief Justice, and reports are running wild that Bush's top contender for the open Rehnquist slot is Lord Voldemort.

In local Trinity news, two weekends ago, as Wesleyan started pulling ahead of us at a home-field soccer match, a loud clutch of Trinity undergrads began taunting Wesleyan athletes, fans, and fellow Trinity students as "fags" and "homos." So, no, that chill you're feeling in the air isn't just the autumn weather. Thankfully, in the Newtonian universe of Equal and Opposite Reactions, this truly disgraceful incident has sparked campus conversation about homophobia, public letters and Campus Conduct indictments from both the Dean's and President's offices, and a rally tonight called "Don't Commit It, Don't Permit It." In an extremely mature and impressive move, one of the targeted Trinity students published an open letter to the campus citing not the homophobic taunters but the silent majority of deniers and tongue-cluckers as the real problem.... Real change happens when compassionate people act on their outrage rather than commiserate about it in private, so tonight's rally and the very public, very concerted response to this flare-up marks a huge change in Trinity's social life, and I'll be thrilled to go.

Meanwhile, at the movies—you knew I was getting there!—September combined still more extremes, including the two best movies I've seen in 2004 as well as the absolute worst (paging Mr. Gilliam). Here's a September recap, in partial compensation for the recent paucity of reviews. Keep checking back over the course of the weekend for updates!

And yes, if you do the math, 18 movies in 30 days means I was in a movie theater 3 out of every 5 days in September. Welcome, all over again, to my world.

The Brothers Grimm F
Ever heard of saving the best for last? Now let's try dispensing with the worst first. It's not that absolutely everything fails in The Brothers Grimm: Heath Ledger saves many of his own scenes with a kooky, Depp-in-Pirates delivery, and occasionally the film coughs up a decent if slightly mean-spirited image, like Monica Bellucci's glassy face shattering into shards. Still, the vortex of suckage is enormous, and it swallows the whole enterprise, even the stuff that works. The hiring and firing of key technical talent during production is plainly visible in the schizophrenic switches in light and palette, which are nothing to write home about even in the individual set-ups. Costume changes seem to happen mid-scene, Lena Headey seems stuffed with sawdust as the Amazonian pseudo-love-interest, and the overall narrative lacks any kind of clarity or motivation. Dozens of millions of dollars down the toilet, ten of which were mine.

The Constant Gardener C
A rather stentorian exercise in stating the obvious, Fernando Meirelles' political epic is also rather less than the sum of its schizoid parts. For a while, it's easy to resent the pasty romance between Fiennes and Weisz while the gears of corporate machination start (read: keep) grinding away at the developing world. At some point, largely due to Weisz's thistly and exciting demystification of her somewhat preciously conceived character, the romantic strain gets a helluva lot more interesting. But around the same time, the multinational plot boils down to the usual suspects of isolated baddies, both believable (Nighy) and intolerable (Huston). Frenetic editing and slick direction dissolve the ligaments of the film's political as well as its emotional arguments. The finale still works pretty well, but it's the film, not just the protagonist, that finds itself feeling a little weary and overspent.

Corpse Bride B
A macabre little delight that manages the durably difficult task of squatting its hero between two romantic options and making them both quite appealing. Deft voice work from Helena Bonham Carter and Emily Watson helps make the worm-ridden Corpse Bride and the moon-faced Victoria such endearing creatures, but the film is already plenty endearing with its cheerfully Guignol mood, its terrific verbal zingers ("Little Miss Living," grouses the Corpse Bride, "with her rosy cheeks and her beating heart!"), and its hilariously elongated character designs—Victoria's mother with her towering, knobby upsweep is a stand-out in all senses. The songs feel a little wispy, and the film eventually feels the same, nailing the coffin shut after only 77 minutes, but it's a merry dose of early-autumn fun so long as it lasts.

The Exorcism of Emily Rose B–
A film that I enjoyed probably more than I had reason to. As I try to articulate in my full-length review, Emily Rose's variable quality in narrative and technical terms has a weird and surely inadvertent way of clearing space for its thematic centerpiece, which is a surprisingly involving standoff between faith and doubt, explored in legal as well as theological contexts that harmonize in darkly fascinating ways. Sure the plot is full of holes, but spiffy actors like Laura Linney and Campbell Scott help to plug a lot of them, and the B-grade thrills of arbitrary auto-crashes and diabolical body-contortions carry their own weight. Both a guilty pleasure and an anatomy of guilt, The Exorcism of Emily Rose has dry runs of pure, risible silliness until it snaps awake at more than reasonable intervals with some real frights and honest questions.

The Doctor... Is Back In

A lot can happen in four weeks: I officially filed my dissertation, got my certificate, packed my house (with a little... okay, a lot of help from good friends), moved to Connecticut, unpacked, took a weekend trip to New York City, checked in with my family in Virginia, came back to New York to read some beautiful Walt Whitman poems at my friend's absolutely delicious wedding, arrived back in Hartford, and finally got my phone and internet turned on, two and a half weeks after I arrived. The e-mail DTs have been shaking and quaking me, and I know half the people in my life think I've met the fate of the Grizzly Man, but lo, I am alive, and this blog will be back up and running in no time.

After all, there is plenty to say, including:

• A modified version of Cinemarati is back up, and it's more nutritious, better-looking, and more fun than ever!
  
  
• The New York Film Festival looms on the autumn horizon, with a newly-announced lineup that includes Michael Haneke, Lars von Trier, and the much-hyped Romanian breakthrough The Death of Mr. Lazarescu.
  
  
• Hayao Miyazaki's Howl's Moving Castle, the last movie I saw in Ithaca, is not quite up to the level of Spirited Away but is still enough to raise the bar on 2005 at the movies.
  
  
• Can I just say again how sensational that wedding was? This probably won't be the last time I mention it. Props to same-sex couples expressing their devotion and commitment and love in public, and beautifully, too.
  
  
• The year's best film so far, at least on my watch, is the tantalizing French character study-cum-thriller The Beat That My Heart Skipped, featuring some master-class editing by Juliette Welfling, and a stunning sound design that features another terrific score from Alexandre Desplat. (Yep, and the acting and the writing are top-notch, too.)
  
  
• Michael Winterbottom's sex-filled and endlessly maligned 9 Songs is actually one of the year's more compelling films, if you ask me...
  
  
• ...and if you keep asking me, and I hope you will, since you're reading this site, Jim Jarmusch's Broken Flowers, fresh from its Cannes prize and reveling in a warm batch of rhapsodic reviews, is actually a jaw-dropping piece of crap. Though the essayists at the interesting on-line film journal Reverse Shot mostly take Jarmusch's side.

More on all of this and more in the coming days, but finally, while it's still in the gloaming hours of August 17, don't let me forget to mention that today is the birthday of America's greatest working actor (Male Division—don't worry, Julianne and Joan), not to mention the official husband of this blog. You can catch My Sean acting exceptionally in almost every role he assumes. I first started paying attention during 1995's Dead Man Walking, but I really fell in love during 1998's one-two punch of his implosive, reptilian, and cracked lead performance in Hurlyburly (rent it!) and his complicated, muted character work in Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line. Among his recent performances, the pick of the litter is in one of his least hyped films, last winter's peculiar true-crime snapshot The Assassination of Richard Nixon.

All right, you few, you patient. Hang in there with me as I get back to work! (And say a little prayer for Sean—namely, that the upcoming remake of All the King's Men does justice to the magnificent novel, and to the contemporary world that this 60-year-old story still has much to say to. I'm keeping my fingers crossed for you, Sean! Now blow out your candles!)

The Doctor... Is In

Don't Phunk with My Ph.D.

All right, y'all, sorry for the si longue absence, but we're back to Zero Hour, and I've been revising, extending, reordering, copy-editing, and even retitling this dissertation to suit the needs of my committee and get ready for Dissertation Defense 2.0, which is supposed to go down tomorrow at 3:00. We're up to 332 pages now. I swear to you, the only things this dissertation doesn't have at this point are a kitchen sink, a brand new bag, and a Scientology chaperone.

Loyal readers—and y'all really are loyal, if you're hanging in there through the Bad Period surrounding this dissertation defense... anyway, loyal readers know that funny things can happen on the way to a defense, so I'm just taking it on faith that I'm not going to get another dyspeptic 1:00 phone call. The air is weirdly quiet, like when the soldiers draw up to the shore of Guadalcanal at the beginning of The Thin Red Line. Is this a good or a bad thing? Nick can pick flicks, but his Dissertation 'Dar is not always, as we have seen, in perfect working order.

In fact, the only place it isn't really quiet right now is in my apartment, where Gwen Stefani's "Hollaback Girl" has sort of emerged as the official Dissertation Defense Theme Song – especially since, after the June episode, I really have been around this track a few times, and it's not just gonna happen like that again. Nick's rolling into the defense with a little bit of 'tude, I have to admit. I mean, this baby is not perfect: a little baggy, a little overwritten, stuff that could go here instead of there, etc. But as someone once said:


"I want to dance, I want to win, I want that trophy"

And as someone else once said, pardon my discourse, but
This Shit Is Bananas! [B-A-N-A-N-A-S!]

So, let's rock. Let's roll. I'll report in tomorrow night.