Bizarrely ruined by H. Hughes. The last half veers wildly between some genuinely funny stuff w/ V. Price and some silly and protracted Mitchum-abuse on the boat. Oh and the dumb stuff they do to the neckline of Jane Russells dresses! But Mitchum and Russel are great despite the insanity, and well, its Robert Mitchum, so it is worth seeing.

I love John Dall, but this wasn’t very good.

I love a bleak movie, but not bleak and pointless, bleak and without beauty or meaning. Oh how profoundly damaged and horrible we all are. How interconnectedly miserable. I’ve disliked every one of his films. They all seem like self-aggrandized moralizing.

This one has a great episode in which they’re caught on a mysteriously purple and discontented sea as a new island erupts from the depths. Also has llamas.

Way better than Proust.

Not an easy book to read, but far easier to read than most that try to accomplish what this book successfully does. A brilliant exploration and assertion about time and cinema.

There are a lot of post-apocalyptic books and movies out there right now but this one, in true Cormac McCarthy style, boils it all down to just the essentials. It reads quickly. The dialog has the same brittle, poetic rhythms of the cowboy and desperado banter of McCarthy’s border trilogy. While reading I was reminded of the Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler. Every excess in that story (a book whose direction I admired yet felt was largely unsuccessful), The Road seems to have dispensed with. It is almost entirely devoid of Who, What, When, Where, and Why. No explanations of how the end came to be, none of the particulars of who the good guys and the bad guys are, or why, nothing but the simplest, yet most revealing, details about the main characters, not even their names. Very effective, evocative, and moving. Is my approval of this novel somehow shaped by my utter mystification over why everyone thinks Children of Men is such a great movie?

For some reason allconsuming won’t let me label this “wishy washy.” It was a quick read, with touching moments, but I really wanted it to be an adventure, or at least a romantic adventure, rather than a straight romance. I do think the characters are more ambiguous than many readers acknowledge. If read that way, the story is darker and raises more questions. I think I was uncomfortable with how some pretty dusty gender roles were unchallenged and, in fact, reinforced. It did capture the mood of twenty-somethings in the nineties pretty well.

I really enjoy the Milhauser stories about illusion and magic, so I figured this would be good. Nothing earth shattering, no high art here. It was just very lovely to look at, had a nice restraint to it, and was romantic. Entertaining. Some who liked this may want to try Trzaskalski’s The Master, aka Mistrz.

I would never recommend this as an example of great series. Instead, its an example of what could have been a great series. The inconsistencies and digressions of this patched together series must be acknowledged, yet it is somehow still compelling and worth watching. Some say the second season was best, but I found it somewhat snide and pointless. The third season was my favorite; it got back on point and the focus on characters Frank and his daughter made for some very nice moments.