http://www.ifc.com/news/2010/01/sundance-spin-for-125-does-the.php
Without having seen the film yet, obviously, it seems to me that the reviews suggest that everyone likes their movie psychopaths except when they are actually psychopathic. Although I admired Mary Harron's film version of Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho quite a bit, there is no doubt that she shied away from making Ellis's brutal descriptions literal on the screen. Winterbottom doesn't seem to have taken that evasive approach with Thompson, so naturally, people are aghast. This will be a hotly debated movie. (By the way, there was an earlier film version of Thompson's novel in 1976, starring Stacy Keach, directed by the usually genial Burt Kennedy.)
The Times (U.K.), as if on cue, just posted a list of film's Top Ten Serial Killers:
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/film/article6993830.ece
The Rap Sheet has put together an excellent tribute to the late Robert B. Parker, consisting of a thoughtful assessment and comments from dozens of crime writers and mavens:
http://therapsheet.blogspot.com/2010/01/looking-for-robert-b-parker-fond.html
http://therapsheet.blogspot.com/2010/01/looking-for-robert-b-parker-fond_25.html
Following up on my birthday comments on Placido Domingo the other day, here is a New York Times salute that compares him to (of all people) Elaine Stritch:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/26/theater/reviews/26notebook.html
The New Yorker's art critic, Peter Schjeldahl, offers a penetrating article and slideshow on the drawings of the 16th century Florentine painter Agnolo Bronzino, all currently on display at the Metropolitan Museum:
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/artworld/2010/02/01/100201craw_artworld_schjeldahl
http://www.newyorker.com/online/multimedia/2010/02/01/100201_audioslideshow_bronzino
Among notables born on this date are composers Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Edouard Lalo, Juan Crisostomo Arriaga, and Jerome Kern, children's writer Lewis Carroll, novelists Ilya Ehrenburg (Russia), Mikhail von Saltykov-Shchedrin (Russia), Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (Germany), and Mordecai Richler (Canada), dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov, graphic novelist Frank Miller, broadcaster Keith Olbermann, theater historian Ethan Mordden, French architect Eugene Viollet-le-Duc, American jurist Learned Hand, Ukrainian landscape painter Arkhip Kuindzi, fashion designer Narciso Rodriguez, German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, blues singer Bobby "Blue" Bland, pianist Jean-Philippe Collard, and actors Donna Reed, James Cromwell, and Ingrid Thulin.
When I worked at the record counter at the Doubleday Books at 5th Avenue and 53rd Street in Manhattan in the early Eighties -- the narrow store with its spiral staircase was famously featured in the Barbra Streisand/George Segal movie The Owl and the Pussycat -- Ethan Mordden was a regular and would hang out and chat with all of us. He was writing a column at the time for a New York weekly, and wrote up the store because we carried international musical theater and opera LPs that no one else in town had. All us clerks got shouted out: I was "Ivy League and literary" (which of course pleased me, and was also true).
Arkhip Kuindzi is not nearly well enough known for his landscapes (at least outside eastern Europe) as he ought to be. Here is a fine example, Night on the Dnieper:
