More Than Once Upon a Time

One hundred fifty pages in the book is now The Hogwarts Hipsters.

I’ve only read a couple of chapters, but my natural bias has already kicked in. So far I’d say Lev Grossman’s The Magicians is Holden Caulfield Goes to Hogwarts. Which might work for some people, but doesn’t for work for me.

(A diatribe.)

Forty years ago one of my best friends said he was driving up to this festival north of the city and did I want to come. We were fifteen. I said no, though I would have liked to have seen the bands. But the last thing I wanted to do was hang out with fifty or sixty thousand potheads. I still don’t regret it, even though they were half a million strong.

I was just flipping the dial and caught some remembrance show on VH1. Woodstock 40 years later. And all the talking heads were wearing sweaters and looking prosperous and I thought to myself, what a bunch of crap. The kind of folks who think rock and roll is about paying $150 to go see the Stones in the Meadowlands. I mean, come on. There have been some great bands that formed after 1971, but I got the feeling the people to whom this documentary is geared never really noticed. Hendrix, man. We changed the world.

Right. And so much for the better, too.

Couldn’t read it. Tried three times. Never made it past page 60. Trying to read this book was like getting a bucket of wet concrete poured over my head and feeling it harden.

This book is hugely popular. Could someone out there please tell me why?

Macbeth with hamburgers. Oy!

I like the idea of this movie very much. And I liked the second half, after Christopher Walken shows up, much more than the first. But the first half dragged enough that I can’t really recommend Scotland, PA as anything more than a curiosity. It wasn’t funny enough, or dramatic enough, but got caught somewhere in the middle like a failed Coen brothers movie.

Makes me think twice about my King Lear as a NY real estate tycoon idea.

In honor of the sixth movie, which opened today.

Harry Potter 1 - A good children’s book.

Harry Potter 2 - A better children’s book.

Harry Potter 3 - A fabulous, fantastic, and wonderful children’s book.

Harry Potter 4 - An overwrought children’s book.

Harry Potter 5 - A bad children’s book. (Though it does contain my favorite scene in the entire canon, the Weasley twins’ escape from Hogwarts in all its riot glory.)

Harry Potter 6 - A fine example of telling rather than showing.

Harry Potter 7 - A letdown. Could it have been anything else?

I should have loved this movie, and I did enjoy it. I love a good caper flick, especially with the cop and the bad guy going at it cerebrally. But the ending to this one left me completely unsatisfied. Except for Denzel, of course.

First thought - Blaming it on the Nazis is so 20th century. Can we retire them as the villains who justify anything now? It’s a new century - we have terrorists for that cliche now. Anyway, I’d like to hate the victim for some reason other than the fact that he collaborated with the Nazis.

Second thought - I need to like the crooks if they get away with it. I didn’t. They were violent and hurt innocent people. No sympathy from me right there.

Third thought - The structure was a complete mess. Why not start the movie after the heist and do flashbacks? That’s how The Usual Suspects did it. (Now there’s a movie I can love.) Instead I felt as if Mr. Lee was taunting me to figure the whole thing out as soon as possible by revealing the hook in the first scene. I don’t like being taunted, even if I figure it all out immediately.

Not really that bad, but I was hoping for a lot better.