Time has been slipping slipping slipping, people...but the Index shall return! In the last few weeks, I've started an absolutely awesome new job, tweaked my back, reorganized every closet in the house, memorized a slew of new passwords, ate way too much Peterson's honey nut crunch, and so on and so forth. The awesome new job does not allow blogging, so my productivity is way up...just not around here. Roadside Sightings, movie roundup, and more on the way...foreals!

"David Dinkins and I are lucky that Rudy didn’t cast our portraits onto a bonfire along with the First Amendment, which he enjoyed violating daily." -- Here's the article I've been waiting for from the NYTimes, dredging up the hurlyburly of Rudy Giuliani's mayoralty, checkered as it was with political machinations, ruthlessness, and over $7 million paid out to settle civil rights lawsuits against his Administration. Just who we want in the Oval Office, right?

"Hi, nice to meet you...aaaaAAAGGGHHHH!" -- Behold, the easiest cheapest neat-o-est combination Halloween costume and job interview outfit evah! Tentacle Arms, people, and they're one size fits all. Time to get your Cthulu on...

"But what worries me is that he is seen as unifying by his race while she is seen as divisive by her sex." -- That might be a bit more simplistic than reality, but as usual Gloria Steinem is on to something. Her op-ed in today's NYTimes picks at the irritating double standard applied to our two "outsider" Democratic frontrunners...should be an interesting night here in the Greater New Hampshire area...

Now that we've turned the page over to 2008, I can complete my Holiday TicketStub Roundup -- stay tuned for my Top Five of '07, I'm still deciding.

* Atonement: Ladies, the English Patient of the new millenium has arrived. With the same sepia-toned historical detail, Atonement also makes an impenetrable (for me) book into a sweeping movie tromancedy. Keira Knightley smolders and James McAvoy hunks it up as the starcrossed, mis-classed lovers in prewar Britain. The doomed trio is completed by young Saoirse Ronan as Bryony, a precocious, sheltered bookworm of a little sister with the fevered imagination to match. When she accidentally interrupts two very different interludes on one fateful night at her parents' sumptuous country estate, all hell breaks loose, just as it soon will across Europe. Recrimination and war separate the sisters as well as the lovers, and as the story flickers back and forth through battles and bombing, then finally far ahead in time, we wonder whether it's forever. I won't give away Ian McEwan's much-discussed twist, nor the delightful cameo, but suffice to say it's a multi-hankie finale. Blood, grime, tears, privation of body and soul -- all made misty through the fictional lens, but still -- add heft to the story, saving it from melodrama for the most part. The film drapes and reveals like the incredible green silk gown Keira wears in the pivotal scene -- lovely to behold, more surface than substance...but sometimes that's we're in the mood for. The production design is the movie, and the excellent sound and score (sometimes one in the same) set the perfect mood. Not a classic, but a well-wrought trifle, like a diamond hairpin that falls carelessly to the carpet. (B+)

* Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story: A goofy take on the crusty "music legend" biopic, a la Walk the Line, Ray, Dreamgirls, La Bamba, The Doors, Great Balls of Fire, The Buddy Holly Story, Coal Miner's Daughter, etc etc etc. A usual-suspects cast from the Acme Apatow Co. stable take a run at all the sacred cow setpieces of the genre, from hardscrabble boyhood to the drug-addled wastrel phase to the penitent golden years, with chuckleworthy results. John C. Reilly uses his comedy and vocal chops, a nice bonus, and is backed up by the ultimate straightman sideman in Tim Meadows, who owns the funniest sequence as the "do as I say, not as I do" guy. The laughs succeed for the most part on cleverness, and the cast's willingness to play along -- Reilly and Meadows are good at this, along with Kristen Wiig, but Jenna Fischer is a little too plodding and earnest to be this type of funny, and some of the other bit players get tiresome. The spoof music is spot-on, and there are a few loopy moments that stand out, but an hour after the ending you'll just remember a couple good lines...like a decent SNL skit, really. Brilliant Beatles send-up (including animation!) makes up for the inexplicable arrival of Eddie Vedder, who may be the Sean Penn of music and actually willing to poke fun at himself a bit? Also, I'm not sure if I'm puzzled or thankful that Will Ferrell did not appear. (B-)

* I Am Legend: My personal surprise hit of the year! I like Will Smith and was willing to watch him fight off animated ghouls for 90 minutes, but this film far, far exceeded my expectations. It shook off its dated scifi premise (it's a remake of a Charlton Heston movie, for pete's sake!) and managed to take its place alongside some of the best speculative storytelling of any kind -- think CastAway, Jurassic Park, The Road and The Little Prince. What sets it apart is restraint, in how the story was told and in the production values themselves, not to mention in Smith's performance, and that was such a treat. The no-name director thankfully shows just enough of what's happened to the world through careful flashbacks to keep us guessing. I hereby assign this dude to adapt Girlfriend In A Coma, posthaste. This was the opposite of a Michael Bay blockbuster, thank god (we watched Transformers the same weekend and just had to laugh at its bloated...everything). Don't get me wrong, it's a spooky thriller too -- set in a grim near future after 99% of humanity is dead or mutated by a killer vaccine, there are some ghouls and they're nasty. But there's also the bewildering quiet of an empty, crumbling Manhattan, where Smith holes up in a fortified townhouse with his trusty pup, a lot of firepower and bottled tomato sauce, some liberated artworks from the Metropolitan Museum, and all his regrets. He seems to be totally alone, and it's going on four years so the edges are starting to fray. There's wild deer running through Times Square, people, never mind the zombies. The digital enhancements are convincing, such that the night scenes set at South Street Seaport, lit only by moonlight, were as creepy and surreal to me as the WTC collapse, something that's never supposed to happen -- for it's been many decades since the East River was lit by anything but an all-pervasive electric glow. That glow has gone out, and Smith hangs on by a slim thread, busying himself with routines and talking to his dog...and don't they sometimes give out canine costar Oscars? Abbey deserves one for sure. Smith himself makes it all look easy. It's so difficult to carry a whole movie like this, to be in every single scene, always alone, and make us believe you and believe in you. Smith delivers another great performance: assured enough to freak out, macho enough to outwit some baddies, human enough to be a bit funny and compelling. Legendary, you might say. (A)

* The Golden Compass: Mostly, a big mess. A delightful lead performance by Dakota Blue Richards as Lyra, the daring young heroine, cannot save this tricky adaptation from logorrhea, ADHD, and finally, irrelevance. I am a huge fan of the His Dark Materials trilogy, so my expectations for this were skeptically low. I left the theater even more frustrated than I imagined, because there were flashes of great creativity and characterization here...they just weren't properly showcased or developed. Clearly Chris Weitz was out of his depth, and I can only hope that the bipolar pacing, clumsy score, and gratingly didactic tone were the fault of studio pressure to compress a subtle allegory into a 90-minute family feature. What a mistake -- they should've held out for Guillermo del Toro or Julie Taymor, someone with an uncompromising artistic vision. The source material deserved better, as did the towering slush pile of adult actors and voice talent. If you're going to cast Kathy Bates, Sam Elliott, and Daniel Craig, give them more than a few lines! Talk about Harry Potter envy. Nicole Kidman was very good as the shimmeringly sinister Mrs. Coulter, though it's hard not to rise above a catch-all supporting cast imported wholesale from the BBC (including Derek effing Jacobi!). The animated animals were sublime, but some of the setpieces were overcooked -- who decided to lard on those endless steampunk fantasy shots? The "dust" effect was cool, and wisely used, so why couldn't they lop out all those expository speeches and just show how this universe works, instead of always telling? The storycraft here (or lack thereof) makes Star Wars look like a minimalist Zen masterpiece. I don't know whether I'm irritated or relieved that there won't be sequels to this...shame on you, New Line! (C-)

* There Will Be Blood: There will indeed. Thundering like a runaway boulder into a year of mostly mediocre Hollywood offerings, this film is a welcome anachronism -- a long, carefully hewn, perfectly cast character study that grapples with ancient themes of power, brotherhood, succession, and greed. Sounds like The Godfather, right? A dash of that, a measure of Citizen Kane, a sprinkling of Giants In The Earth, sure. But this is less an all-American saga than a primitive, prehistorical one, despite its strong polemical points about our own troubled times. Daniel Day-Lewis is a marvel as Daniel Plainview, a flinty hands-on oilman with a pathological thirst for success, on his own terms. The movie opens down a hole, where he's methodically chinking at the rock with a pick-axe. A long, wordless sequence shows us the lengths to which he will go to strike the vein. What might be a prison punishment to others is Plainview's metier -- he is most at home in the dirt, sleuthing and claiming the riches below, though he's ill-equipped to enjoy or share them topside. Day-Lewis plays him like a crusty old Greek god, Cronus perhaps, not a bronzed hero but a cunning beast, certainly not a man. Plainview acquires land, oil, and a son -- the wide-eyed Dillon Freasier, who stands by like a mute Jiminy Cricket. When Plainview is tipped off to a potential gusher at a remote goat farm, the troubles begin -- he brings his usual smooth sales pitch, but is stymied by a stubborn young preacher, Eli Sunday. Paul Dano takes this role with zest -- he actually gets into fisticuffs with Day-Lewis, watch out kid! These two duel until the final scene as the oil begins to flow, and with it a host of challenges and setbacks. Like with any homicide -- in this case, of the earth itself -- something always goes awry. Paul Thomas Anderson uses his stylist's eye here to animate the blank terrain. People's faces are smudged with dust, smeared with oil, lit by fire...but give little away. Dano's preacher leads his meager congregation like a lightning strike with holly roller flair, and while Plainview wobbles a bit under that glare, in the end he rebuffs religion like he does everything else. The film posits some unanswerable questions: which is more powerful, faith or commerce? What bonds hold a father and son together, or brother and brother? How do you find something buried underground, whether its silver, oil, or what they represent: the past? And most importantly, once you dig it up, are you prepared to deal with the consequences? Heavy stuff, and Anderson is up to the task. He deftly deflects the original socialist evangelizing of Upton Sinclair onto the characters themselves, rather than directly on the viewer or our blood-soaked, globalized, uber-capitalist society. He's taken a muckraking book and turned it into a psychodrama -- the muck he rakes is symbolized by the oil onscreen, but it really lies much deeper than that. In the end, there's nothing for the idealistic preacher to do but enter the lion's den, and the lion is Daniel. Absolutely stunning. This film crunches up No Country For Old Men and spits it out like a cherry pit. A note about the avant-garde-y score: Nat found it intolerable and intrusive; I didn't enjoy it exactly, but I liked how it was used to prod the audience rather than fade into the background. You've been warned. (A+)

Behold, the Invisible Library is real. -- Well, one volume, anyway...bravo, J.K. Rowling! She hand-wrote and illustrated seven copies of The Tales of Beedle the Bard, the Aesop's Fables of the wizarding world that figure so prominently in HP7. Encased in leather, silver, and moonstones, one copy was auctioned off at Sotheby's to raise money for The Children's Voice campaign. And who coughed up the $3.8 million winning bid? Amazon.com, and they've decided to share! Check out the amazing photos, plus reviews of the stories, video of the book itself, Q&A with the lucky editors who get to look at it in person, and kvelling galore. At least they know how to spend all that money I send them wisely...

This freshly hatched new year has already yielded a bumper crop of Roadside Sightings -- enjoy the randomness:

* On a refrigerator repair truck, a bumper sticker reading "I (HEART) Ammonia."
* On an undistinguished white sedan, with Colorado plates, an "I (HEART) Portland" sticker.
* On a prissy green Subaru wagon, a "KILL YOUR TV!" sticker. Give me a break.
* We saw two separate cars on our drive to NJ with "I DON'T BREAK FOR YANKEES FANS" stickers. Yikes.
* This was balanced out by a "David Ortiz For President" sticker on a pickup truck.
* I've seen three trucks in the past week with a colorful placard: "Good Stuff. Trucks Bring It."
* On a concrete overpass in Reading, there's a yellow graffiti scrawl: FREE SACO.
* A shiny tanker truck reads "Proud to be your means of transport" in English and French on the back.
* A panel truck from Murphy's Refinishing.com highlights their "Door Dipping" service. Hmmmmmm.

OfficeLOL, vote early and often! -- What with the Hollywood writer's strike and my own ongoing subemployed state, you'd think I'd have more time for blogging, not less. Well, what little time I do have has lately been spent over at Office Tally, where fellow bereft fans of the greatest of all comedy shows are turning their talents into hilarity. Not sure why mine didn't make the final cut...

w00t! -- That's Merriam-Webster's Word of the Year, people. Plus, they seem to think it's an acronym...? It's just a plain old onomatopoeic ejaculation, if you ask me.

Sometimes a tampon is not just a tampon -- and sometimes a TV commercial is worth rewinding the TiVo for! This morning I caught a blip of an ad for Tampax's Protecting Futures campaign. They are working with the UN Association's HERO program to help provide menstrual supplies, clean water, and puberty education to girls in Southern Africa. Apparently, many girls miss days of school during their periods, which they find hard to manage without access to pads, reliable bathing water, and other basics we take for granted. Now I feel a mite less guilty for buying that variety pack o' tampons...but I'll hold off on the "Use Your Period For Good" t-shirt. Eeep.

The holidays mean more moviegoing at our house -- here's my Good, Better, Best Edition of TicketStub:

* Dan In Real Life -- Sometimes you've got tinder and sparks but the flame just doesn't catch. That's the problem, literally and figuratively, with this movie. Written and directed by Peter Hedges, he of the superb indie family dramas What's Eating Gilbert Grape? and Pieces of April, this one promised a fresh take on a time-worn premise (the aspirational, multigenerational family vacation house movie) starring the talented and conveniently white-hot Steve Carrell. All the elements are there: sad-eyed widower father, check. Spunky teenage daughters, check. Wry grandparents (in the form of John Mahoney and Diane Wiest, oy), smartass younger brother (in the form of Dane Cook, double oy!), foxy interloper (Juliette Binoche), check. Why doesn't this succeed? Tepid writing, an overall lack of subtlety, and one too many forced setpieces -- I think you can either sneak off for romantic twosome bowling or put on a family talent show art-directed by Martha Stewart, not both, in one of these movies. Whoops, I forgot the expository, girls-against-the-boys team crossword puzzle contest! See what I mean? Maybe this subgenre has run its course, maybe they forgot to give Steve Carrell some meaningful character development, or maybe I'm just too old and jaded...come to think of it, the worst thing I can say about this movie is that if I were still 15 I would have loved it. Yikes. Extra points for Dane Cook, actually, for his surprising underplaying of the cuckolded brother, and Emily Blunt for making a meal of a bit part. Copious points off for the entirely unnecessary nuptial finale. (C-)

* The Mist -- What's more satisfying than Hollywood finally getting around to adapting your favorite Stephen King story? When the movie itself is awesome! Frank Darabont, the man who left me cold with The Shawshank Redemption, makes good here with a note-perfect visualization of this classic creepfest. A summer storm unleashes a mysterious mist on a small Maine town, and our hero, the smart and strapping Thomas Jane, is trapped in the local supermarket with his young son, ornery neighbor, and sundry local folk, who start to squabble, subdivide, and eventually turn on each other. This is unsettling enough, but then...monsters come! And the monsters look exactly as I imagined them, although one takes the form of Marcia Gay Harden. The story is more Lord of the Flies than The Blob, though, and Darabont takes a huge gamble by tacking on a dark and disturbing ending -- far darker than the original, if you can believe that. Personally, I appreciated it, while Nat was appalled. I think the film can be read as an allegory of America's misadventures abroad and the high price we pay for sacrifices made in the heat of the moment, or the miasma of uncertainty. But don't worry about all that -- monsters, people! Big creepy crawly ones! Judicious special effects make the difference here, though some of the best thrills come from simple sounds, shadows, and a length of clothesline stained crimson with blood. Eeek! (A)

* I'm Not There -- A rambling ride through the life and times of a great American self-inventor, Bob Dylan. Lovingly staged and lushly shot, the film shuffles together a half dozen characterizations, from hobo dreamer to Jesus freak to pretentious aesthete, and everyone in between. Cate Blanchett is the clear standout -- now that I've seen her, I cannot imagine what other actor could possibly have pulled off the prickly, wired, louche genius of the "goes electric" period...maybe Peter Lorre? I kid, I kid. Heath Ledger adds an interesting twist as a bona fide hunk, for the "failed family man" segment, and Marcus Franklin as a young black runaway/blues prodigy is a wonderful blend of innocence and gravity. I was less impressed with Richard Gere (The Hermit) and Christian Bale (The Firebrand), but they balance out some of the tumult. I also thought Julianne Moore misfired as a faux-Joan Baez, which is odd...maybe she can only do anachronistic drama, not comedy? The unevenness adds to the impressionistic feel: it's like watching an old-fashioned zoetrope strip with some of the images missing. You get a feel for the story even though it's choppy and unfinished. A bit overlong and at times painfully overdone: I was loving the rapidfire sequence leading up to Dylan taking the stage in Newport, right until the "assassin" metaphor went totally over the top. But overall it's enjoyably shaggy and reasonably authentic, just like the subject. Many extra points for Charlotte Gainsbourg as his long-suffering wife "Claire," making an impossible role (for if we don't know the real Bob Dylan we certainly don't know what really happened within his infamously rocky first marriage) a compelling portrayal of individual artistry squandered in the Feminine Mystique era. Oh, and the music is great. (A)

"Many of our nation's idiosyncrasies—both good and bad—can be observed the moment you step inside its hallowed halls: our preoccupation with jaw-gaping enormity, our irrepressible capitalist spirit, our cultural diversity, our insistence on wearing jorts even in mid-November." -- And they sell plenty of jorts at the Mall of America, for your convenience! I've been there and ridden the rollercoaster, but I don't think I could live there for a week. One guy did...that's a lot of cheese curd lunches.

"But this is PLANET EARTH where no such thing as IDEAL actually exists, and these particular self-checkout machines are so fundamentally broken that it takes the average person no less than 15 minutes to pay for an apple." -- The inimitable Dooce tells the local self-checkout lane to piss off, and nearly 5oo commenters to date agree! This one's for you, honey...

A couple random, back to back Roadside Sightings today:

1. A bright red panel truck zipping along Rt.3A with a large anthropomorphized lightbulb character on the side, wearing a cap and holding a stopwatch in one hand and a lightning bolt (!) in the other. His name? Mr. Sparky. His business? Being "America's On-Time Electrician." Around here, he is also the Vulcan best friend of a certain Enterprise captain...get it??

2. Inside a nondescript office in Burlington, I'm sitting next to a nondescript faux ficus plant in the waiting area. I look absently at the pot it's "planted" in, and there are several silk leaves gently scattered over the "soil," just where they would fall if the ficus were real -- and if you've ever had a real ficus, you know there are a lot of fallen leaves. I looked at the branches -- no bare plastic tips. So, did the fake ficus come with an extra packet of fake leaves to scatter around its trunk for extra realism? I can only leave you with this thought.

"If the writers want diamond-crusted laptops, give it to them!" -- Proof that the creative impulse shall survive the WGA strike...of course, it would be nice for these two entrepreneurial scribes to have decent profit-sharing when they inevitably get a network deal...