On Literature and Film

Right now I'm reading Into Thin Air, which is making me really want to watch Vertical Limit, and also giving me hideous nightmares about being trapped on a snowy mountain. Note to self: Watching Vertical Limit would probably, actually, exacerbate this condition.

Speaking of movies, we all know why we watched The Brown Bunny (at least I do, considering I was lying half-dead on the couch after a near all-nighter at the Luxor and Matt put it into the DVD player and pressed "play"), but what I'm now trying to figure out is why I actually watched The Brown Bunny. Call it art if you like, but I had a really difficult time trying to find the "artistic" parts when the guy spent most of the movie driving and the other half, taking a piss and unloading his motorcycle from the back of his van. Got good in the last 3 minutes when there was a sort of Sixth Sense kind of thing going on, but again...the guy really did spend most of the movie driving, and without the promise of the crucial scene in which Chloe Sevigny did you know what, I can't say I would have felt compelled to keep watching past the first 10 minutes of the fucking driving.

Now here's where a truly "artistic" person would criticize me for being your usual American idiot, almost immediately after watching The Brown Bunny I took in the last half of Team America: World Police and found it much more entertaining.

I'm now convinced it was actually a good thing that ye olde publisher refused to publish Only the Lucky, due to the fact that its August release would have introduced the reading populace to a main character named Shiloh and therefore, I fear, spawned message board comments such as, "This book was totally unoriginal--she used Brangelina's baby name!"

After finishing my current, uplifting read about people dying to reach the top of Mt. Everest, I may just go for the record of being the last person in the civilized world to read The Da Vinci Code. Yeah, I've heard it's pretty good.