Nell,
My quotation of a Cook’s Illustrated writer attempting to deduce how to boilwater was a parody, but I forgive you if–not being a cook but a pot-destroyer, like, incidentally, my wife–you took it straight. Actually, thetype of vessel you boil water in probably does have an impact on the flavor.When I used to hang out with beer-brewers, they were always talking soberlyabout cooking materials, not to mention the mineral content of the wateritself. God, they were boring.
Thank the Lord I don’t have to finish reading Ulysses right away because I’mlike the frog in the slippery well who can’t go up one foot without fallingback two. A week ago I was on page 41; now I’ve slipped all the way back toxxvi of the preface. Instead of curling up tonight with James Joyce, I’ll gosee The Parent Trap so that tomorrow you and I can actually get down todebating ideas.
List-making has always driven me nuts, although I get the appeal. It’s easyand fun and it makes you feel important. When I was at the Village Voice, Ienvied Andrew Sarris that he got to spend so much time adding and deletingdirectors from his Pantheon instead of actually writing about movies. Yearafter year I used to rail against 10-Best lists on the grounds that they wereonanistic–but then I’d turn around and make a list anyway because I’mnothing if not an onanist. Robert Brustein has pointed out that critics’opinions–“Loved him! Hated her!” as Danny Kaye said of the Himalayas–arehighly perishable, whereas convictions might even outlive them. (That might bethe only conviction of Brustein’s that actually outlives him.)
That said, while working on my HalloweenH20 review, I’ve been trying to comeup with a list of the five greatest hack-’em-ups–a hack-’em-up beingdefined in this case as a film in which serial victims are gorily murdered,with each killing amounting to a big production number. This excludes the morefree-form carnage of Night of the Living Dead but makes room for the serialdisembowelments of Alien. Here’s my tentative list:
1. Psycho
2. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
3. Halloween
4. Twitch of the Death Nerve
5. 2000 Maniacs
Halloween H20, which opens today, is a pretty good time by the standards ofmost hack-’em-ups. It’s really short, and the first 45 minutes are extremelyannoying–full of false scares, the kind where the camera follows someone asthey walk into someone else and the audience goes AAAARRRGGGGG!!! but it turnsout to be a boyfriend. Yet, there are few things scarier than a blank mask,even (or especially) when the mask was originally borrowed from a WilliamShatner Halloween costume. When the white-masked Michael Myers and his sister,played by Jamie Lee Curtis, regard each other, and Myers cocks his headslightly, quizzically, seemingly in wonderment, the effect is–I swear, I’mnot just using this word casually–poetic. So while I see The Parent Trap,do you want to brave Halloween H20?
