Inglourious Basterds: Comic Book or Graphic Novel?

Darling CF,
Recalling the days we spent aswelter amid our video-game art and chandeliers, all I can summon up to say on this sunny September morning, when so much of your city is burning and you are in a housedress, is: You! Makeup!!! And have you seen Inglourious Basterds? Because it is a riproaring superfun marriage [...]

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Funny People: In Which Sandler and Apatow Don’t Make It to the Altar and No One Laughs or Cries. Part I.

Dear CF,
Your reaction to the Funny People movie poster was eerily prescient. You have powers. Be my psychic? Also, I’d like to point out that James Thurber wrote his autobiography, “My Life and Hard Times,” at 40. As a joke. Would that Apatow’s self-awareness ran so deep when he decided to mount a Career Retrospective [...]

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Away We Go But We’re Still Here

Dear CF,
I’m choked up with thoughts. I’ve started five letters to you and finished none of them. This I want to fix. So much to talk about: let’s start with Away We Go, which I finally watched.
I’d forgotten that Eggers and wife wrote the script. The moment those credits flashed on the screen I understood [...]

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Fables and Nests

Dear M.,
Your thoughts about names and the responsibility of labeling things correctly were quite lovely.  I wonder if pen names can be considered honest at all, when they offer such a supreme cloak of distance.  Somebody said, but I didn’t say.  I could have said, but instead, Somebody said.  And yet, anonymity also allows for [...]

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I Love You, Three Dimensional Well Written Character

Dear Millicent,
I am trying to find a phrase for the female bromance, and am not having much luck: sismance (sounds like a goiter), ladymance (sounds like a medieval weapon), cronemance (I kind of like this, but it makes me think Dune), girlcrush, or the brit term for falling in love at boarding school — –’having [...]

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Star Trek: I Love You, Man.

Dear CF,
Once, when I was fifteen and full of good ideas, I ditched my Mock Trial team at the courthouse and betook myself to an outdoor mallish esplanade that featured, among the dingy doughnut and copy shops, a clothes store and a decadent movie theater of the sort that has elaborate curlicues painted in gold. [...]

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Twilight Reviewed

Dear CF,
From the moment Bella and Edward meet and he gets his paper erection, it’s clear that Twilight is a glittery gift to cynics and romantics alike. Having watched it with a group of hardened souls, here’s what emerged:

The dad is the poor man’s Dennis Quaid.
Native Americans have specialized knowledge about all things supernatural.
And make [...]

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Hauling Foam Away By The Truckload

Dear CF,
I’d pay good money to see you in your stirrup pants, and wish so much you could have come. I wore our shirt, as you know, and my weirdo jeans from when I was 13. They’re oddly high-waisted, and from the knees down they’re tie-dyed white with embroidered stars. I have an actual picture [...]

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The Glories and The Bad Thing

Dear Millicent,
So, I am not yet through all of Peep Show season 1, but in my half review, I remembered how the first time I watched the show, it made for a particular syndrome for me.  I would watch and laugh aloud, sure that they were some of the funniest things I had seen in [...]

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The Mermaids, Singing

While watching Funny Girl, I kept wanting to apply the plot from Disney’s The Little Mermaid.  It doesn’t completely hold up, but is fun to consider.

Red hair.
The view from the bottom (Fanny’s Henry Street her own little ocean kingdom)
The singing, usually about yearning or adorable shenanigans.
Legs as the beauty ideal.  Fanny is constantly referencing her [...]

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