I just watched "Maybe Logic," a heartfelt and gleefully mind-expanding documentary on the ideas and philosophy of the late Robert Anton Wilson.





I heartily recommend this to anyone seeking a witty, intelligent discourse on the perplexing experience we all-too-casually call "consciousness."

I saw "The Dark Knight." Aside from some fine supporting roles, I found virtually nothing of interest. The title character (and his alter-ego) are wooden, unconvincing and unsympathetic. (Contrast Christian Bale's comatose delivery with those of the always dependable Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman, characters I would have been happy to see more of.)

"The Dark Knight" has garnered some serious praise. I don't doubt it's a superior super-hero movie. But it's devoid of ideas and stripped of character; whereas many viewers see the reinvented "Batman" franchise as cerebral and even morally challenging, I see an excuse for yet another car-chase.

I read the first half of Cormac McCarthy's "The Road" this evening. I'd been hearing a lot of good things about it -- and hey, it takes place in a post-apocalyptic near-future and won the Pulitzer Prize, so how can I go wrong?





No one can plausibly dispute McCarthy's grasp of the English language. From the opening page, "The Road" glints with impressively understated feats of wordcraft and images of aching beauty: the omnipresent drizzle of ash that's turned the sky the color of gunmetal, the silent forests of blackened trees. McCarthy summons an image of a cataclysmic world so exquisitely realized it borders on the shamanic.

Nevertheless, I'm wary.

There don't seem to be any real ideas at work in "The Road." McCarthy's focus is the relationship between the unnamed father and son, whose trek across a gutted, toxic America forces them to perpetually confront their own mortality. But their strife is condemned to a vacuum; we view them in such extreme close-up that -- aside from a few obligatory shocks -- their devastated surroundings sometimes seem like an afterthought. (Compare McCarthy's approach to the vision of seasoned science fiction writers like Robert Charles Wilson, whose "Blind Lake" -- to use only only example -- utilizes the universe itself to underscore the inner lives of his characters. Forgive my impertinence, but I'll happily choose the latter anytime, Pulitzer Prize be damned.)

Just as ominously, McCarthy's novel is stained -- of only faintly -- with devices that serve little purpose other than to remind the reader that he's in the presence of True Literature. I'm unimpressed, for example, with the author's haughty disdain for punctuation. (In "The Road," abbreviation marks have been obliterated almost as thoroughly as the population.)

I just endured M. Night Shyamalan's "The Happening." I knew it was getting bad reviews, but what highly anticipated movie doesn't? Plus, I checked Roger Ebert's review and found it encouraging, if not exactly gushing. (I was particularly struck by the poignancy and subtlety cited by Ebert and purchased my ticket expecting a thoughtful new take on a shopworn, if dependable, theme.)

If only I'd trusted the bad reviews. For a movie ostensibly about the fragile balance of life on Earth, "The Happening" is conspicuously devoid of vitality. Shyamalan has crafted an ecological cautionary movie for people who've never seen an ecological cautionary movie -- and a worrisome self-portrait of a skilled film-maker who doesn't seem to realize he's on the verge of irrelevancy.

The characters in "The Happening" are mere sketches, static and uninteresting. The plot -- what there is of it -- is no more than an excuse for Shyamalan's characters to wander a dull New England countryside, where they're predictably picked off by their arboreal assailants.

Oh, there are some intriguing moments. Even a few brushes with the kind of quiet menace evidenced in "Signs." But they're fleeting and under-realized: gems left unexcavated for no real reason exept, one suspects, sheer laziness. For the most part we're left with a grind of a movie, as unarresting as it is unoriginal -- and capped by an ending so palpably condescending and unscary you'll want to take the movie's token graphic violence to heart and slit your wrists with the nearest possible sharp object.

After reading a particularly vicious review, I saw the new Indiana Jones movie half-expecting to be disappointed. To my surprise, I thought it was fresh, exuberant and fully in touch with charm of the earlier films. As far as I'm concerned, endlessly debating the merits of "Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" relative to its predecessors misses the point of the series; the Indiana Jones movies have always been homages to pulp adventure fiction, and the new installment advances the action admirably without sacrificing attention to the characters.

This film could easily have been a hokey embarrassment. To George Lucas' and Steven Spielberg's credit, it's anything but.