I was rather started the other day to read this confession by Mike White, the editor of Cashiers du Cinemart, one of the most interesting and ecclectic of cultural ‘zines. For the past few years, it turns out, White was also the brains behind the graymail website SuperHappyFun.com. As he closes down his version of the site (someone else is carrying on the idea), he finally admits his involvement, how it came about, and what it meant to him.

I bought a few graymail discs off of the website, because I couldn’t find the films I needed for a book project anywhere else. The depth of the site’s elsewhere unavailable films was fairly deep, and after that I checked it occasionally for updates, when I wasn’t reluctantly walking down the street to Portland’s Movie Madness to get some of its gray market discs or tapes, found mostly in the film noir and Asian action film sections, and reluctantly fielding the inexplicable and unprovoked scorn of its bored clerks (I guess they’d rather be off “rockin’” somewhere). Examples of gray market movies would be Max Ophuls’s two American noirs, the Reckless Moment and Caught, which seem to be neither officially on tape nor DVD, or The Friends of Eddie Coyle, the cult Robert Mitchum film from the 1970s, also not available in any form of home replay.

Discovering that Mike White was also the man behind SuperHappyFun was like discovering that Deep Throat lived down the street, or that AICN’s Alexandra DuPont was someone you know. Suddenly something distant was closer than you thought. Cashiers du Cinemart, now also folded, sadly, was one of the best of the zines. The irregularly published mag’s fields of interest were wide ranging and obviously reflective of White’s eclectic tastes. A given issues could have everything from essays on the films made from mystery writer John D. McDonald’s novels, to an exegesis on the films of the obscure Japanese avant garde filmmaker Shuji Terayama. And like most zines, the magazine contained a blend of personal interests and gross confession (White’s work history, as recounted in one issue, is hilarious). White was an exemplar of zine publishing at its best and most intelligent.

It’s possible to make a name for yourself in the world of zines or, now, their successor, the Internet. It’s hard, but it’s possible. One base criterion is that you have to be good. And you have to have a gimmick. Thus among the movie review-reading cognoscenti the name Vern rises high. A contributor to AICN, Nerve’s The Screengrab, and other sites, including his own, Vern is the new Joe Bob Briggs, a straight talking reviewer who is free of the lockstep that seems to afflict most other reviewers, who take their cues from the New York Times, Variety, or the Village Voice or the cool blog of choice this week. Vern is unashamed of his range of interests, which is mostly action films, is un-self-censored, writes reviews the way most people talk about films (which would get a daily reviewer in trouble, if not fired) and has the wit of a stand up comedian. Vern has been at it for several years, and has now produced a pair of books, one a collection of some 80+ of his best reviews available from Lulu.com, and just recently his magnum opus, Seagalogy: A Study of the Ass-Kicking Films of Steven Seagal. Originally serialized at AICN, the book has been expanded, cleaned up and published by a reputable press that specializes in movie books (Titan Books, 352 pages, $15.95, ISBN-13: 978-1845769277). Titan will be doing all the Watchmen books, for example.

The premise behind Vern’s book, that actors can be just as much the auteur behind their films as directors, is not new. Patrick McGilligan asserted the same thing about James Cagney back in the mid-1970s (even soliciting a generous foreword by auteurism arbiter Andrew Sarris himself). But by carefully collecting and collating recurring motifs, Vern makes a strong case.

And make no mistake, as the once alternative weeklies like to transition, Vern takes Seagal seriously. He makes large claims for the action star, and damned if they don’t make sense within the context of Vern’s hagiography. Vern has drunk the Kool-Aid of Seagal Idolatry. In fact he’s even drunk the Kool-Aid Seagal makes and sells himself, the difficult-to-track down (but Vern found it) energy drink Lightening Bolt. But beneath the bluster and high comedy, Vern has a serious point, exemplified by a paragraph late in the book:

I don’t know why the mono-monikered Vern hides his identity, but a careful reading of Seagalogy, and probably his other reviews, reveals a lot about him: that he lives in Seattle, that his ancestry comes from the Caucasus, that his late adoptive father may have been a soldier or a cop. One doubts that he recently got out of jail and stopped drinking and that he is pursuing a cleaner life, as the original Vern mythos asserted. Other than that, the book is all Seagal, in excrutiating detail. Vern is not an uncritical fan of Seagal, and is wont to call a scene lame if it is. But he follows Seagal from his first film, Above the Law, in which Seagal burst upon the scene virtually fully formed as an action star and as a character, to the string of straight-to-DVD films with which he has been associated during the last decade. Vern also tracks down stray Seagal appearances, such as on a British comedy show and in a cameo in a celebrity wine connoisseur’s laser disc, and the book ends with a charming account of Vern’s attendance at a live performance of Segal and his blues band at a Seattle nightclub, where he finally shakes the hand of his hero. Along the way, Vern charts themes, visual and action motifs, and chronicles the gradual politicizationh of Seagal’s movies from an environmentalist position.

What made his solo name is that Vern is funny. His reviews are like stand up comedy routines. For example in discussing Under Siege, Vern notes that the film’s villain, Tommy Lee Jones, is employing the skills taught him by the CIA against the military industrial complex itself for personal profit, and “in fact, he has a North Korean submarine at his disposal because he told his boss he had sunk it (the counter-terrorism equivalent of taking home office supplies).” Vern primarily employs the time-honored technique of finding some line of dialogue or poster tagline and strategically re-using it against the film later in a different and unexpectedly hilarious context. But it works.

But despite what one might assume going into the book, Vern is not a “mean” critic. He is surprisingly gentle, sympathetic towards many of the characters in Seagal’s films, sensitive to forgotten plot points, and approves of Seagal’s political positions and that the actor manages to insert them into the template of this otherwise right-wing tilting genre.

I was a little worried diving into this book, because I’d just written a review of Seagal’s latest film, Kill Switch for the Vancouver Voice. I was concerned that my take on Seagal was too common, too knee jerk, especially after reading the first half of Seagalogy and garnering a deeper understanding and respect for Seagal’s career, thanks to Vern’s tearing away the assumptions and media hype. I was relieved, then, to see Vern catch up with Kill Switch at Ain’t It Cool News and express similar reservations. The film is just as inexplicable to Vern as it was to me (though Vern appears to have missed the promotional verbiage I saw somewhere that indicated that the film’s hero, Jacob King, travels the world tracking down and killing serial killers, which sort of explains the coda-ending.

In any case, Seagalogy is a great, fun book, clearly one of the best film books of the year, and it inspired me to order his first book, 5 on the Outside off of lulu.com, which is perhaps the highest testimony a reader can make.

All things, good and bad, must come to an end, and now this dire truth includes one of the best shows on British television, Foyle’s War. Recently aired on PBS, the final three episodes of the series, which take Detective Chief Superintendent Christopher Foyle of Hastings to the very end point of WWII, whence he started out in May of 1940, 18 episodes and seven years earlier, the conclusion has recently been released on DVD by AcornMedia (AcornMedia, $49.99, street date, Tuesday, August 5). The three discs of Foyle’s War: Set 5 are a valediction and a celebration, as well as a long goodbye.

In case you haven’t heard of it, Foyle’s War is a nifty series about a socially reserved investigator in the south coast of England during the war years, but with the crimes he takes on at first seemingly pallid in comparison with the looming war. Michael Kitchen has an Anthony Hopkins-like reticence as Christopher Foyle, as he chews his lip and ruminates quietly over small details. His team is fairly stable: Honeysuckle Weeks as his batman, and Anthony Howell as his assistant. Foyle is widowed, but has a grown son in the RAF.

The first season of four movie-length episodes aired beginning in October of 2002 on Britain’s ITV, and the show was conceived from scratch by Anthony Horowitz, who had just come off of Midsomer Murders. Foyle’s War from the start beautifully recreated wartime England, was superbly photographed, and most important, offered interesting points of information about the times and an unvarnished portrayal of differing British reactions to the conflict, including such now near-forgotten aspects of the Home Front such as the looting of bombed out houses. For example two of the episodes in the second season reveal how some industrialists profited from the war. The series also reveals peculiarities of war time, such as “trekkers,” people who sleep in their cars far outside urban areas in order to avoid being bombed, and a term that sounded to me like “funcourts” (the set isn’t subtitled), which refers to well off Britishers who hide from the war in London by renting digs in B&Bs in obscure places. Curiously, the series has an interestingly bleak view of marriage, nearly each episode portraying a particularly harsh or violent union of one kind or another. The first four episodes covered stories set from May 1940 through summer. Season two covered September 1940 to October. Season three starts in February 1941 and goes to June. America’s season four (different from Britain’s) went from April 1942 to March, 1943. Finally, the last episodes take us from April 1944 to May 1945.

But what was best about Foyle’s War was that the mysteries were damned clever. I have never figured out a single one of them before the denouement, while the narrative journey of getting there was fascinating and entertaining.

I don’t know if there was a huge British bear hug that surrounded Foyle’s War, but there should have been There is a shot in the middle of the second episode in season three of fly-fishing that is so beautifully pastoral I had to believe that English viewers swooned over it. The series takes place in Hastings, location of the Battle of Hastings between King Harold II of England and Duke William of Normandy, a site that looms large in the British lexicon.

Foyle’s War does traffic in certain cliches about England and its emotional stillness and stiff upper lip, but might be the element that would attract more middlebrow English viewers. But creator Anthony Horowitz’s real achievement is to ransack the history of the era to find unusual yet highly indicative subject matter as plot premises.

Fans will recall that in the previous box set ends with Foyle resigning his post. Of course, we knew he would be hired back, and one of the main tasks of “Plan of Attack,” the first of the last three eps, is to reassemble the team, which requires that Foyle be summoned from the task of dictating his memoirs to find out who killed a highly strung and religious aerial map analyst. “Broken Souls” tracks two stories that intersect, one about the problems of returning vets, the other concerning a murder in a psychiatric institution. Finally, “All Clear” deals with a community attempting to adapt back to a non-war world, with a character from a previous episode returning to reveal that the wounds of war are not so easily healed.

Horowitz is a children’s author turned TV-movie writer and from the evidence of his own website, he is a very busy chap. His wife, Jill Green, produces the show and has written a book of her own about Foyle’s War that may appear someday as part of a complete series box set. That the makers of DVDs realize the rising esteem in which Foyle’s War is held finds evidence in the increasing number of supplements that appear on Acorn’s DVDs. Set five includes a 12-minute making-of documentary, along with text-based statements by two key cast members reflecting on the conclusion of the series, and a text-based account of a “real life” Foyle, plus, finally, cast filmographies. They are all indeed helpful but the first thing to do is simply watch the show, let the characters grow on you, and marvel at the cleverness of the mysteries. To that end, I highly recommend starting with Season 1 and going on from there. And, though I don’t usually say this, avoid spoilers at all costs.

Was there any film director who was at the same time both more British and yet more international in spirit than Michael Powell? On the one hand, he made the most bucolic, most pastoral of British films, celebrating the landscape, the character, and ambition of Britain, yet often took on exotic subjects and locations. Only Powell would have made Black Narcissus, or set a war movie in Holland or Canada. He often blended both elements in one film, to the ire of contemporaneous critics. Take The Small Back Room, a petite black and white drama which comes within the midst of several expansive color exocticisms, such as The Red Shoes (1948) and The Elusive Pimpernel (1950). There is hardly a more “British” film than this somber character study set during WWII. Yet Powell interrupts the proceedings at one point to entertain an expressionistic sequence that shows its hero grappling with alcoholism, a sequence with giant Scotch bottles and long shadows that comes across, as many others have pointed out, like the Dali sequence in Spellbound and the DTs in The Lost Weekend.

Of course there wasn’t only Powell, there also Emeric Pressburger, yet it wasn’t this Hungarian emigre who brought continentalism to the films, but Powell himself who was impatient with the stodginess of British cinema. They were one of the great partnerships brought together by an intuitive third party, like Laurel and Hardy and Wilder and Brackett. Pressburger is pegged as the writer half of the partnership, but as Charles Barr asserts convincingly in his audio commentary track for The Small Back Room, Pressburger was also important in the post-production stage, supervising the editing and helping to shape the final film. Pressburger anchored the film front end and back while Powell embarked on flights of fancy.

Powell seems simultaneously British and un-British. His films dwell on proper yet eccentric characters, yet veer toward the exotic. He embraced color, sparkling, smashing color, as an antidote to British grayness, and his films aren’t “smooth” and commercial; for that turn to Hitchcock, or compare Powell’s Contraband to Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent to see the difference between English oddity and a highly attuned commercial sense and vision. Contraband’s scrambled egg story makes it less predictable in a commercial sense but also interesting for all that, since it reflects a sensibility that refutes gross commercialism. As a storyteller, Powell is interested in process, procedures, details, mechanics, of the times and dates of things. In this he is a little like David Lean, whose career interests mirror Powell, going from intimate “small” films to elaborate international tales, though Lean, a location masochist, really went to difficult locales whereas Powell like to construct them on a set. Powell was also interested in “the arts” as a general, uplifting enterprise, like any well-meaning social engineer from the 1950s, and his films can be as “meaningful” or politically pointed as those of Stanley Kramer. Still, Powell’s films represent a stimulating blast from the past yet with a thoroughly modern sensibility, and they are a tonic to anyone feeling bogged down by the sameness and anonymity of modern films.

Based on a recent survey, I’ll guess that Powell is attracting among the best film criticism and writers, or at least was during a phase in the late 1990s. Though the scholars don’t seem to be much interested in Powell’s notion of “the composed film,” which goes unmentioned, for example, in Ian Christie’s excellent, fun Arrows of Desire, you can feel the excitement of the scholars that surges though their prose style and ideas and their attention to details. This wasn’t always the case, as is well known from the critical literature. Movie, my favorite film magazine, placed him in the fifth tier of directors, as part of a general antipathy toward British filmmakers in favor of the more vigorous American artists (with the exception, it appears, of the late Seth Holt). As a youth I inherited this prejudice, which I was recently able to trace back to questions and remarks that Truffaut made to Hitchcock in their interview book. All an aesthetic bigot needs, however, is a dose of Powell films to see that at least in this one filmmaker British filmmaking was in good hands.

To that end, there is an agreeable influx of Powell on DVD, not as much as presumably is available in R2, but enough to help fill out the collection or introduce Powell to newcomers. The earliest films offered up chronologically are two that are part of a package called Classic British Thrillers, from MPI. The offerings are two Powell quota quickies, of which Powell did about 15 in seven years, in this case Red Ensign from 1935, and The Phantom Light, from the same year. Red Ensign concerns a Scots industrialist impeded in his vision for implementing a new ship design by a recalcitrant board and a ruthless competitor. It’s curious how similar the Powell QQs, made without Pressburger, are to the films later made in collaboration with him. Red Ensign features a dynamic brash manipulator who is like a rough sketch of The Red Shoes’s Lemontov, who also steals another guy’s girl. The Phantom Light rhymes with Canterbury Tale. Like it, Light concerns a trio of new visitors to a town where they set forth to solve a local mystery (in this case a haunted lighthouse beam that lures ships to wreckage), whose progenitor has a watchful, though here dire, supervisory view over the village. Red Ensign is also filled with in jokes and quirky passages that appear to reflect attitudes on Powell’s mind about some of his employers and other people. The Phantom Light reveals that Powell is something of a leg man, with its insistent tendency to expose Binnie Hale’s gams through much of the running time.

A third film on the disc is the James Mason vehicle, The Upturned Glass, which the actor produced and which stars his wife as well. It’s a complex thriller from 1947 that juggles time in a rather modern way, anticipating Louis Malle’s Elevator to the Gallows, for example, and in its medical crisis passages and philosophy near the end, offers pallid versions of some of the concerns that preoccupied Powell and Pressburger in A Matter of Life and Death, and others. The film has an excellent score by Muir Mathieson and Bernard Stevens.

MPI’s Classic British Thrillers has no extras to speak of, but good transfers (for a contrast compare the film’s to Kino’s washed out Contraband disc, which came out in 2001), and hit the street, if you can find it, on Tuesday, July 29, 2008.

From the QQs, Powell went on to make The Edge of the World, which brought him to the attention of Alexander Korda, who hooked him up with Pressburger for The Spy in Black and Contraband, before assigning the director to help out with colorful, big budgeted The Thief of Bagdad, the kids film that remakes a Douglas Fairbanks silent. Criterion released a double disc version of the film on Tuesday, May 27th, 2008, and it should be a treat for those who favor “sense of wonder” films.

Personally, I’ve never been much interested in fantasy films, animation, or the sense of wonder, which is a matter of personal taste, though I do note that sense of wonder buffs seem to spend more time looking at blurs along blue screen image edges than expressing interest in stories. Thus, for me, most of contemporary cinema is closed off, of complete uninterest, and Thief of Bagdad is just a movie for children. It has a modicum of interest as a film that filmmakers found influential, and bits of Coppola, Scorsese, De Palma, Spielberg, and Lucas can be entertainingly tracked down in it. For example, in its domineering villain and kidnapping of a princess, and its partnership between a childlike kid and a cocksman, it presages Star Wars, and it anticipates other Powell images, such as the all-seeing eye, which is echoed in Powell from the camera obscura in A Matter of Life and Death and in the eye imagery of Peeping Tom.

Enthusiast Bruce Eder gives background in his audio commentary track, and Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese share another one without overlapping. Curiously, in his commitment to showing how much the film influenced him, Coppola doesn’t mention the horse’s head that sits in the lap of the toy obsessed sultan. SoW boys will be satisfied with the video interviews with special effects experts Craig Barron, Dennis Muren, and Ray Harryhausen (who says he once saw the film’s giant spider lying discarded in a corner at the National General studios). But for Powell buffs, the treat is the war propaganda film that Powell helped make immediately after working on Thief, The Lion has Wings. It is antique and creaky, and was evidently screened as a comedy in Germany at the time, but good to have for completists. The disc also features a stills gallery and the original trailer, plus the usual 22-page booklet with cast and crew, chapter titles, transfer information, and two excellent essays, by Andrew Moor and Ian Christie.

Powell and Pressburger were eager to make The 49th Parallel, which was released in 1941, and became a Criterion two-disc set on Tuesday, February 20th, 2007, but which was, surprisingly, set in Canada, as it follows a team of German sailors on the run from an abandoned U boat who crisscross the nation, proselytize, meet resistance, and finally, as their numbers are reduced, face capture. Again it is a typically weird P&P movie, wholly unexpected in tone, setting, and more nuanced in political import than you expect for its time. P$&P essentially remade it from the other, but more “British” perspective a few years later in “One of Our Aircraft is Missing.”

Bruce Eder provides another informative audio commentary track, and the disc also presents a segment of the British news program Arena on Powell and Pressburger, “A Very British Affair,” supervised by Gavin Millar. Besides the trailer, there is also Powell’s further contribution to the war effort, The Volunteer, a recruitment film made with much input from Ralph Richardson, and a lengthy selection of audio tapes of Powell dictating or reading from his autobiography in process.

The most recent Powell film to hit DVDs and the immediate cause for these meditations is the P&P firm’s 1949 film The Small Back Room, one I’d surprisingly never heard of. Based on a novel by Nigel Balchin, one of those numerous British writers who toiled in near obscurity to the rest of the world but whose work enriched Brit Lit all through the 20th Century, the movie essentially tells the story of a man rendered impotent and his eventual achievement of potency. The man is Sammy Rice (Powell regular David Farrar), and fortunately he has the love of a good woman, Susan (the exotic Kathleen Byron) who also works with Sammy in an obscure, non-military science unit during the world (the film is set in 1943, in real time while P&P were making A Canterbury Tale). Sammy’s impotence is symbolized by a “tin foot,” a replacement right out of Maugham for a disablement incurred as a youth. It’s unclear if Sammy and Susan are having sex, though they live together, but she remains steadfast, and also sticks with him through bouts of alcoholism, which helps him forget his foot, and perhaps even his homosexual tendencies, which are hinted at obliquely in a nightclub scene (gay guilt wrestling also played a role in the book on which The Lost Weekend was based). Sammy’s specialty is fuses, and one main plot threat has a young soldier, Capt. Dick Stuart (the once venerable Michael Gough), urging Sammy to help with a series of cunning bombs dropped by the Germans that have been killing children. The extremely tense final movement of the film has Sammy finally coming up against one of the small cunning German explosives (those who recall the television series Danger UXB from 1979 will have a sense of the scene’s flavor). Naturally, a triumph over the phallic shaped device will also restore Sammy’s potency, but leave it to Powell and Pressburger to make even their “happy ending” ambiguous and perplexing.

The Small Back Room is a throwback, in a sense, to the kind of British film that people love and which P&P didn’t really make, set in a rain swept yet cozy world of cramped apartments and bureaucratic jobs, where the spirit of England is kept high despite privation and tormentous neuroses that don’t stop for the war. It’s a Brief Encounter sort of world, but P&P wouldn’t settle for such a thing. For one, they would steam it open like a rancid envelope and find out what’s really inside, and for another, they would find every opportunity to expand its playing field with passages of crazy visual extravagance. Over several viewings The Small Back Room grew to be a rich, nuanced work, and clearly one of Powell and Pressburger’s best films.

Supplements are a tad minimal for this film compared to the other recent Powell discs, but lead off with an excellent audio commentary track by film scholar Charles Barr, for whom Powell is one of several specialities. Barr is the first person I’ve heard mention average shot lengths in a track, and there is a nice moment when he pays tribute to the late Raymond Durgnat, one of my favorite writers and for a long time the lone voice of support for Powell amid critics of the 1960s.

Supplements include again audio tapes of Powell dictating or reading from his autobiography in progress, of which the chapter about a deleted scene is especially interesting, plus a video interview with Chris Challis, the cinematographer. The 16-page insert has an essay by Sight and Sound editor Nick James. The Small Back Room hits the streets on Tuesday, August, 19, 2008.

I’ve always wanted to write Roger Ebert and contribute one of those cliches he collects for his little movie glossary column (professional discretion and the fact that he probably already has my ideas in his list have prevented me). I’ve got two or three but the other day I was reminded of one of them while watching Mongol. In this cliche, whenever there is a blood oath drawn, the initiator takes a knife and attacks his hand like Jack the Ripper leaping upon Mary Jane Kelly, leaving a gash as big as the Joker’s grin on his palm, a cut that would take most of us to the ER for 36 stitches. There is a blood oath in Mongol. There is also a kid who falls through the ice of a frozen lake, a shot of a sunset with the sudden appearance of nomads over there at the right hand side of the frame marching into view, and many, many scenes of somber eating rituals. This is also a movie with repetitive stress syndrome. Every time time you tune back in, the Mongol of the title, Temudjin, the later Genghis Khan, is someone’s prisoner, yoked to a pillory for a few years of humiliation, before he escapes again, finds his family, has a ceremonial bowl of yak milk, and then goes off to unite the Mongols. Mongol is a bore, but it has a useful function as an anthology of all the cliches of modern movies, the sort of filmic affect that we seemingly require from movies these days in order for them to feel like movies to us, from the succession of short, unresolved bio-pic like scenes, to the gross and childish battle scenes with the silent flicker images. Then there is the music, god-awful, inappropriate, always running counter to what the scene seems to say or want, and an added dash of chloroform to an already deadly presentation. Naturally, director and writer Sergei Bodrov promises two more. Mongol is currently playing at the Hollywood Theatre.

The mysterious Alexandra DuPont over at Aiint it Cool News is on a roll. For the second week in a row the writer has taken on the big geek movie release, this time The X-Files: I Want to Believe, but it is safe to say that this time Ms. DuPont didn’t like the movie. For those who think that all internet writing is junk, DuPont exists as a shining refutation. Especially liked her joke about the stamp collection. My much more pallid review will appear in the August Vancouver Voice.

Hey, I know that I am supposed to hate Mamma Mia!. It has but a 54 percent approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and virtually every responsible critic (i.e., the ones who actually write for newspapers and are edited), has lambasted it, the show it is based on, and ABBA, who provided the songs the story is built around.

Apparently derived from a 1966 comedy called Buona Sera, Mrs. Campbell, about three soldiers who converge on an Italian village where they have been sending upkeep money to good time girl Gina Lollobrigida for the daughter each thinks is his, Mamma Mia! attempts to integrate a bunch of divergent ABBA songs into a rather slight story. Slightly reworked, Mamma Mia! concerns Donna (Meryl Streep), an aging hippie who runs a broken down hotel on a Greek island. On the day of her daughter Sophie (the wide eyed Amanda Seyfried)’s wedding, the three men who could be her father all arrive together, at Sophie’s secret invitation. The trio are writer Bill (Stellan Skarsgard) who has his own yacht, architect Sam (Pierce Brosnan), and (secretly gay?) financier Harry (Colin Firth), a man with a musical bent. For some unclear reason, Donna has not wanted to acknowledge these men for over 20 years even though one of them is the dad, and so there is a succession of push-pull scenes as the foursome interact singingly, with Sophie’s mostly forgotten fiance causing a contrived fight over being left out of the secret in order to give him something to do.

Again, I know I am not supposed to say this, but Mamma Mia! has the exuberance you want out of a summer musical movie. It’s all about giggly girls conspiring to get men, and long lost friends are unable to greet each other without screaming, hopping up and down, and racing toward each other with the speed of greyhounds for a ritual round of hugs. It takes me back to summer fun movies of the ’60s such as Where the Boys Are. Subsequently there has been a long tradition of older women in the noonday sun, from Pauline Collins in Shirley Valentine to Diane Lane in Under the Tuscan Sun. Mamma Mia! takes these premises and settings and adds the exhilaration of ABBAs produced-to-the-teeth numbers and succeeds in winning over at least one viewer.

I missed the stage show, which is supposed to be horrible, and yet has proved resilient, but I love most ABBA songs (except for half the ones they put in this film). The movie is not supposed to work, for these reasons. In addition, the producers plucked the stage director Phyllida Lloyd, a neophyte film director, to re-stage and mis-stage the movie version in its cramped living quarters and narrow white-washed Greek alleys and stairways. The dances and songs don’t jump out at you as much as they could. Yet the film has a certain ABBA energized charm. I think one has to like bad musicals to appreciate Mama Mia!, musicals with a good heart that try too hard but don’t have much going for them in the first place, oddities such as Bogdanovich’s At Long Last Love, or the short-lived TV musicals such as Cop Rock or Viva Laughlin, which lasted two episodes). Seyfried acquits herself well as a story-song singer, and Streep appears to have a blast leaping up and down on beds and leading chorus lines of finger clicking villagers. You have to an appetite for the bad to enjoy, say Pierce Brosnan, who gamely joins in the frolics but who has a voice like a gravel truck unleashing its load down an iron funnel.

I daresay that Mamma Mia! is a better film, for all its numerous flaws, than Sex in the City, with all its over-excused flaws, including static, over-familiar characters trapped on a treadmill of audience expectation. Mamma Mia! unleashes its actors, and they have fun with their parts in a way the sexless Sex girls won’t or can’t.

It’s making millions of dollars, it’s pleasing millions of fan boys, and it is making cinematic history (short term though movie “history” often is these days), so The Dark Knight looks to be the major topic of conversation for the next two or three days at work and on the chat boards. My response is typically perverse. I want to be contrary when others overpraise it, and I want to defend the film when skeptics attack it. The two best advocates for these opposing positions thus far are the mysterious Alexandra DuPont at AICN, writing a FAQ-as-legal-brief for the defense, and Devin Faraci’s thoughtful but not wholly unsympathetic demural at CHUD.

Part of the problem with The Dark Knight for the critical cast of mind is the fact that it is such a multifaceted film that criticisms and praise alike get swallowed up into its richly textured abundance of character, incident, politics, and pointed set design. Though its two-and-a-half hours does make up a unified whole, with a couple of digressive longheurs along the way, the film does lend itself to atomization, creating handy parcel with which the critic may make salient points sometimes relevant to the whole. In fact, there are at least 11 The Dark Knights, each self-contained units lending themselves to in-depth treatment.

1. The Dark Knight as a Film That Gives You Your Money’s Worth

At two-and-a-half hours long, with rousing music, a good cast, a complicated yet clear story that has logical motivation (though some reviewers argue against that) with periodic fits of crowd pleasing violence and action, the heavily advertised Dark Knight could hardly fail, at least at the box office. The first aspect that is immediately apparent is that The Dark Knight is not just a superhero film. It is set in the world of cops and courts and judges and cages and process and procedures with frustrated and compromised cops. It could be an episode of Law and Order. It could have been written by James Ellroy, and in their praise, some writers have likened it to LA Confidential as a perfect movie. Because of this similar, if less dark tone, The Dark Knight has reminded viewers of Mann’s Heat, possibly just because of the efficiency of the bank heist at the beginning. For me the closest analog is se7en, and not because of the coincidence of Morgan Freeman: rather, its the two films’ darkness, their bleakness, their methodical habit of taking everything away from everyone, but most of all the complete singularity of the villain, “John Doe” and the Joker, unrestrained disruptive forces of nature that shake society’s core beliefs and ethical foundations. These villains come from nowhere, have no true identity, operate with seeming impunity and in invisibility to set up elaborate performance pieces, and have a psychological advantage over their opponents. They don’t play by the rules. They bring anarchy and chaos to the city. Gotham was already in trouble, but it appears to have enjoyed an agreeable stasis, and the conflict between crime and justice was on the level of a game, though a serious one, between Harvey Dent and his gangster foes. The Joker shatters that. The stakes are raised. He is loyal to no one. As he dies, Fichter laments that the new criminals no longer believe in “honor, respect.” The Dark Knight is a film for adults, not kids. Adults interact in this movie, not teens in colorful pajamas. Serious issues are discussed and / or implied in the body of the action.

2. The Dark Knight as a Batman Adaptation

It’s a long lament, the number of times that Hollywood has taken a comic character or pulp star and essentially had their way with him, unaware of the hopeful fans out there yearning, finally, for a truly accurate account of their heroes. From Doc Savage to Spider-Man, few if any comic adaptations truly bothered to capture the essence and the spirit of the beloved comics, which in most cases had decades to build up their world. I disliked all the previous Batman movies, except for Burton’s second foray (it was actually about something), because, among other things, each one was dogged by a series of disastrous casting choices. The ne plus ultra of disastrous, ignorant comic adaptations is the pair of Alan Moore movies, From Hell and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, miscues that would require books of equal length in order track down each misstep and violation of Moore’s intentions. But the situation with the Batman movies is that no one who makes them is particularly interested in anything about the series before 1985. The 40 years of Bob Kane comics are as nothing to them, except a depository of names and villain features, like the James Bond books are now, or the old Dick Tracy strip. Instead, filmmakers are interested in a vague idea of the uptight old Batman from those days as modified by the darkening vision of Frank Miller and Alan Moore. Thus it hardly matters that the crusading D.A. who becomes Two Face is actually named Harvey Kent, but thanks to a typo alternated between Kent and Dent. Nor is Kane’s fascination with the psychological effect of his ugliness on his career and romance, and of fate itself, over the course of some 12 periodic issues in the late 1940s and early 1950s of any merit to the filmmakers. If all you care about is the Moore-Miller years, than yes, The Dark Knight captures some of the spirit of the comic, of the modern version of the comic.

3. Christian Bale as the Dark Knight

When Christian Bale first appeared in Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun I thought he was the best kid actor I’d ever seen. Since then I’ve wondered what the hell has happened to his mouth. His upper row seems to have been added to his facial construction, and he often appears having difficult speaking around his own teeth. If it is a disability I feel sorry for him, but no one else ever seems to mention his odd dentition. I don’t think he is the perfect Wayne / Batman but he is better than the five guys before him. Yet as DF has pointed out, he is practically a guest star in his own movie; villains and subsidiary characters have more weight. I think this is intentional and that this approach gives the film more weight. It also emphasizes the theme of the the fluid nature of identify. Wayne and everyone else in the film is suffering an identity crisis, forced to choose between impossible options or make difficult decisions, yet without the strong identity that would make those decisions easy. Identity is so fragile in Gotham that ramrod straight Dent could change into a trickster figure when the society he is committed to protect fails him. Some have criticized Batman’s gruff voice, but it is part of Wayne’s split identity. He must disguise himself in order to do his Bat tasks (and the film is successful in making Batman unassociative with Wayne, they don’t look or sound alike at all), but it also hints and his unintegrated sense of self, personified in his yearning for Rachel. Only the Joker is a fully integrated self, but he is a force of destruction, with no human “context” at all. Wayne is striving to reconcile his selves into an integrated identity, by assembling the people he needs around him,wife, successor, and so on; as an agent of chaos, a focused, heedless, rule-breaking trickster, the Joker undermines Wayne’s psychological goals.

4. Heath Ledger’s Oscar

Does anyone doubt that Heath Ledger will win an Oscar, probably a best supporting award, for this film? Hollywood sentimentality is too high and the actor contingent of the Oscar voting block too large for it not to happen. Thus, when Tilda Swinton announces Ledger’s win and Daniel Day-Lewis comes out to accept it on behalf of the family, and there is a close up of Ledger’s child in the lap of the widder Ledger, Hollywood will have reached its apotheosis of sentimentality and self-regard. OK, Ledger’s apparently drug-fueled interpretation of the Joker is innovative and intuitive, and I enjoyed the hell out of it, but frankly that’s what actors are paid for, to bring their all, and I can think of several actors from the equally dead River Phoenix to Leonardo DiCaprio who could bring the same craziness and innovation. (My ex-editor makes the cogent point that it’s too bad Warner didn’t know that Ledger was going to die after shooting, or they could have written him out of the picture better.) The crazy loose cannon has been a staple in films since at least the time Richard Widmark threw the lady down the stairs in Kiss of Death (did Ledger get his funny Joker voice from Widmark in that film?), with great turns by David Patrick Kelly in The Warriors as noble predecessors. Tom Noonan could have played the part in his sleep. One doesn’t want to argue against the performance. One wants to shrink from the self-aggrandizing sloppiness that is going to surround it next February. For some of us it is going to be the final break, and we may never watch or care about the Oscars again.

5. How Character Actors Succeed in Hollywood

The first visible actor of name in the film you see is William Fichter as the bank executive who, as so many characters do in this film, performs the unpredictable. Instead of cowering under his desk, he appears with a sawed-off shotgun and begins taking out the clown-masked bank robbers, chastising them in no uncertain terms for being stupid enough to steal, in a nod to Charley Varrick, from a mob-run bank. It’s a small part but Fichter makes the most of it. He knows that everyone else around him will be acting up a storm, so he brings a calm anger to his role. Gary Oldman must have taken the same advice. This is his most “normal” performance. While everyone else is chewing up the green screen, Oldman appears to be a memorable island of sanity.

6. The Dark Knight as a Romance

The Dark Knight describes a love triangle. Wayne loves Rachel Dawes, who has ceased waiting for Wayne and turns to new D.A. Harvey Dent. The contours of this triangle are well set out, realistic, and not easily resolved, despite the fact that they mimic set ups from other comic book movies, most notably the Spider-Man series. Mainstream movies aspiring to make over $400 million dollars need a love story to pull in the female viewers, especially if the basic template is a guy thing like Batman. That it works on its simple level is a credit to the film and yet facets of this thread of the film’s story are crucial to major plot developments and the denouement. A convention of the genre is turned into a crucial thematic foundation.

7. The Dark Knight and Politics

Some reviewers have likened The Dark Knight to a 911 movie, and there is a political debate marbled into the narrative spine of the film. It’s not just that Bruce Wayne at one point decides to go rogue with his FISA-esque NSA level cellular phone spying. Throughout the film there are debates, implicit and explicit, about how the justice system should work, what is the role of the police, how does one keep corruption at bay, how do you make your town work? The FISA part seems tacked on, a limp effort to both acknowledge immediate realities and to set up an even darker, more ruthless Batman for a third film.

8. The Curious Case of the Dogs on the Knight

How did there get to be so many canines in this movie? I can’t think of another recent film in which dogs figured in the plot so much. Though here, they don’t figure in the actual plot so much as they add more texture. The vigilantes at the beginning have dogs; The Joker has three dogs (a mythological reference?), and in the dreamy time-shifting ending Batman is pursued by police dogs through an industrial section. Bruce Wayne even has a chat with his “Q” (Morgan Freeman) about improving the bat suit to withstand dog attacks (which inspires an allusion to a possible Catwoman presence in a third film, as various talkbackers have ejaculated). These dogs are vicious but controlled, synecdoches of the ideal Gotham, creatures who are loyal, unlike cops and gangsters, and not subject to corruption except by those who train them, the corruption lying on the next level up of power.

9. Coins of the Realm

Harvey Dent-Kent was flipping coins to determine thet fate of his victims long before the Coen brothers were even born but it is an interesting coincidence that Chigurh in No Country for Old Men uses coin flipping as a way to fuck with the heads of his victims. Like The Joker, Chigurh is a man without a country, a man without a past or present, who appears and like the Terminator proceeds with his implacable quest. He’s the scariest thing that’s ever been in a Coen brothers movie and has little if any precedent. A sociologically minded critic might point out that this coincidence of relentless agents of disruption and greed reflect a national fear of the Other undermining what is left of our society. On the other hand, the seemingly casual flipping of a coin as evidence of grace under pressure has a long history, going back to George Raft, and Kane probably got it from the movies and from his interest in the statistics of dualities.

10. The Ugliness of Maggie Gyllenhaal

Talkbackers seem to be united in their joy that Katie Holmes did not repeat her role as Rachel Dawes but that Maggie Gyllenhaal is sloppy seconds. She is no invisible man. She is a woman of copious, flexible visage, a nose of cylindrical protrusion, a liquorish, ample, fluctuating mouth, and hair of bristling eccentricity. Her figure inclines to embonpoint and her short limbs accentuated this inclination. But we had better get used to her. There are no more beautiful actresses in Hollywood. Either they have the uniform possibly-medically-enhanced blandness of a Kirsten Dunst, or they have the untoward eccentricity of the kind of women you see in your home town, kinda cute but unworthy of the big screen, faces such as those belonging to Claire Danes, or Clea DuVall, or Scarlett Johansson, or the mopish Selma Blair, people plucked from the coffee bars and alternative night clubs to be in movies with their untrained voices and awkward bodies. These are college girls, not starlets, and they leave a hole in the center of the films they are in, better filled by competent, beautiful, exotic actresses of the first rank…of which, apparently, there are no more.

11. The Dark Knight as a Christopher Nolan movie

I fell asleep half way thought Batman Begins and didn’t care for The Prestige, yet all these films, including The Dark Knight continue variations on Nolan’s theme of a man being somehow controlled by another, stronger, smarter man. His first feature, Following, established this template, as a writer is swept into the complicated scheme of a professional criminal (in whom one sees Joker DNA), and Leonard is utterly controlled by Teddy Gammell in Memento. What Nolan took away from the source film Insomnia is a weakened Detective Will Dormer manipulated by serial killer Walter Finch to his death; The Prestige posits a lifelong struggle of wills and competition between an effortless magician, Alfred Borden, and his Salieri, Robert Angier, in what is essentially a rough draft of The Dark Knight. The only thing that Nolan hasn’t acquired is a signature visual style that sets off his films from the run of action narratives. In The Dark Knight he relies on the same roving, circling camera that every comic book director from Jon Favreau to Louis Leterrier exploit to disguise otherwise talky, static scenes.

12. The Prisoner’s Dilemma

One of the most interesting things about The Dark Knight is that it ends in a downbeat, almost actionless multi-layered sequence whose core is a version of The Prisoner’s Dilemma, the Game Theory puzzler that asks two prisoners to guess if each is betraying the other. Here the scale is larger (two ferries, each with the ability to blow up the other), but in a final refutation of both the Joker’s beliefs in human nature and the likely outcome of a Prisoner’s Dilemma situation, each side chooses not to eliminate the other (and in any case, the Joker was going to blow them up anyway). You don’t see game theory pop up in mainstream, multi-million dollar movies often, and it’s a measure of The Dark Knight’s depth and intellectual expansiveness that not only does the sequence exist, but it is populated with a whole other cast of interesting characters who embody the good and bad citizens of Gotham. In additional, this game of prisoner’s dilemma is a culmination of a series of similar impossible choices offered characters throughout the film, Rachel choosing between Wayne and Dent, Batman and Gordon choosing between Rachel and Dent atop explosive oil cans, gor example. As we can see from these two Dark Knights, despite codicils and quibbles, The Dark Knight is surely one of the most interesting films of the year, and certainly one of the best so far in its all-too-often-compromised genre.

Sometimes approaching the World Wide Web is like unleashing the Library of Alexandria on yourself (before it went up in flames, anyway). For example, the other day I stumbled upon something that I had been wanted to re-see since the ’60s: the short lived TV show Coronet Blue. Since it was so obscure to begin with, I never thought I’d ever have a chance to see and reassess the program, but now, here it is.

Beginning and ending its life as a summer replacement on CBS in 1967, Coronet Blue was one of the first of the shows to adopt a running mystery that teased the viewer from week to week, an ur-Lost or X-Files. Coronet Blue concerned itself with an amnesiac who takes the name Michael Alden after he is found by the riverside. What he doesn’t remember but which the viewer sees in a teaser opening to the debut episode that “precedes” Alden’s memory loss is that he appears to be either a gangster or an undercover cop. Alden is shown making his way through a Manhattan ferry just before it sets off. He spies a room with the words “Danger” written across it, and that seems to be a rendez-vous of some kind for him, but before he has a chance to enter it, a man addressing him as Chico tells him that Margaret wants to see him. He is led to the roof of the ferry, where he is confronted by Margaret as a some kind of spy, though the language is intentionally vague. He is attacked, then he is thrown overboard and the series begins. Though aired in ‘67, the show was shot in 1965, and though it was popular as a summer replacement, the lead actor, Frank Converse, had by then signed up for another show, N.Y.P.D.

The rest of the series follows Alden Fugitive - Run For your Life style as he tries to uncover his past and figure out why someone somewhere is still trying to kill him. Seeing the first few episodes after so many years can only lead to disappointment, if only in so far as the program was less interested in Alden’s mystery than in the sort of mixed, incoherent social commentary and “relevance” that shows went in for in those days. For example, the third episode, called “The Rebels,” and probably meant to be the second one aired, has Alden on a UC-Berkeley like campus willing to be subject to the experiments of a scientist (Richard Kiley). The “mystery” is deflected as Alden gets involved with a mixed bag of campus radicals, who include Jon Voight, David Carradine, and Candice Bergen. While keeping the exact nature of the students’ dissatisfaction vague, the episode manages to flatter all possible argument adherents. Though Converse was the agreeable star of the show, it’s funny to watch his fellow actors, all stage or screen competitors, flail for attention behind their waxy make-up (we must have still had a black and white TV when this show was on, as I was startled to see that it was in color). Both Bergen and Converse look like carefully sculpted Al Capp characters.

The show appears to have been youth skewed, from its subject matter and its theme song, sung by one Lenny Welch (”Coronet Blue, Coronet Blue / Deep down inside my brain I keep hearing that wild refrain / Coronet Blue, no other clue /I know that this must be the thing that can set me free /For I was born just yesterday along a misty river / Always a-moving like the river /If I lay here I will die / And as so I go my lonely way / Every day can be a danger / Even to myself a stranger / Wondering who am I.” )

One reason for film students to view the show, at least in part, is because it was created by Larry Cohen, who was very involved in TV at the time, but who later emerged as one of the key horror films specialists of the 1970s. The program was also produced by the late Kenneth Utt, who was much involved in the career of Jonathan Demme and produced The Silence of the Lambs among numerous other key films starting in the ’70s and though into the 1990s.

Coronet Blue is easy to find on the Internet if you know where to look, or is in pieces at YouTube, and is aired, or was, on TVLand.

Though only four years old, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow seems now to be a harbinger of things to come. For one thing, it is completely animated, except for the live actors who include Jude Law as the film title’s action pilot, Gwyneth Paltrow as the girl reporter, Angelina Jolie as a butch ex-lover, and even Laurence Olivier in some manipulated footage. Seeing it again today, one realizes that Kerry Conran’s film anticipated Sin City, Peter Jackson’s King Kong, and even the new Indiana Jones movie in its prophetic “borrowings.” By borrowing from Wells’s War of the Worlds, it anticipated Spielberg’s take on the novel.

It’s is a film steeped in new technology in service of an imaginary pop culture past. Sky Captain looks like a cartoon, though a softly lighted one, which makes the outlandish array of villains, robots, giants, wing-flapping planes and Dr. Moreau style monsters acceptable. Conran’s script is an anthology of old movies, pulp novels, serials, and action films, referencing everything from Lang’s Metropolis to Titan A. E., with nods to Lost Horizon, and Brad Bird’s The Iron Giant among scores of other movies (Sky Captain even borrows a few lines of dialogue from Marathon Man). Unfortunately, the mass of viewers are impatient with aggressive movie referencing (is it too much like film school), and the $40 million dollar movie (a bargain today) apparently made but $37 million.

In fact, it’s somewhat hard to tell just for whom this film was made, given that it is perhaps too sophisticated in its referencing for kids and old hat to oldsters. Vancouverites will have a chance to find out, however, when Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow initiates Uptown Movie Nights latest season of summer fun films on Saturday July 19. Best of all, the first four weeks offer free movies and music (though popcorn, candy, and soda still go for $1), right there on the corner of 23rd and Main Street with Jeremy Kobel the first of the season’s musical guest. Music starts up at 7:30 PM and the movie begins at dusk, or about 8:45 PM. For more info please go to the Kiggins website or the page dedicated to the Uptown Movies events.

Let me make this clear from the outset: I am not obsessed with Conan O’Brien. I have opinions about the late night talk show host — that his show is lousy, that he is not and has never been funny, that as a replacement for Jay Leno he will be a disaster — but I am not obsessed. Rather it is Entertainment Weekly that appears to be obsessed with him.

Buried deep within its television section, EW runs SoundBites, a weekly collection of “funny” things heard on television, a column which has surprisingly survived EW’s recent disastrous, text-halving redesign. Generally the quotes are culled from “sharp” witticisms enunciated by the likes of Chuck Lorre sitcoms, or The View, or the late night talk shows. Of among these, Conan O’Brien receives an inordinate proportion of coverage. There is no rational reason for this, as the “jokes” from O’Brien that SoundBites shares with us are not funny.

Since EW invites letters to the editor, addressed to ew_letters@ew.com, I decided that I would make the occasional enquiry about the reasons for the barrage of O’Brien apercus appearing in this column. On March 12, 2007. I wrote, “Is the person who does the SoundBites column figuratively or literally in bed with Conan O’Brien? Issue No. 925 is the second issue in a row in which a witless monologue comment by O’Brien is highlighted as a quote of the week. This is the rebirth of a trend that lapsed for a few weeks (was the compiler of quotes on vacation and unable to see his or her favorite show?), but throughout last year O’Brien was probably the most quoted person in the column. This would not be a problem if he were funny, but he isn’t (God, how I dread his taking over the Tonight Show), while there are truly witty comments emanating nightly from Leno, Ferguson, Stewart, Colbert, and Maher that go ignored. Is the columnist an old pal of O’Brien’s from Holworthy Hall at Harvard University. Or maybe it’s some sad fat girl, a cog in the AOL-Warner-Time-Life empire who landed upon the SoundBites column where she realized that she could promote the career of her beloved. No matter. One has to wonder what the secret deal is between O’Brien and Sound Biter.”

Naturally the letter was ignored. All my letters to the editor are ignored. But then O’Brien popped up again, so on May 24, 2007, I wrote again, starting off with that week’s O’Brian quote: “‘One of the most popular gifts for high school graduates this year is a gift certificate for plastic surgery. Apparently, the gift certificate is a perfect way to tell a recent graduate that you can be anything you want to be but not with that giant honker.’ Huh! How curious. Yet another Sound Bites quote culled from O’Brien’s witless, insight-free monologue. What is this, the fifth week in a row? You guys act like he is Mark Twain when he is little better than Pauley Shore.”

Again, no response, except that O’Brien appear only a month later, sparking yet another (useless) letter, on June 18, 2007. “No, really, seriously, it’s got to end. No more weekly O’Brien in the SoundBites column. He’s had more than his share of space and time to win anyone over. He isn’t funny and the laborious set ups for those limp punchlines take up space — three times the space of other quotes — that could be more charitably used for actual humor. Please, insist that the compiler of this column change the channel at 12:30 to one of O’Brien’s competitors, people who really do say funny, quotable things, Jimmy Kimmel, for example, or Craig Ferguson, TV personalities who are never quoted in the column.”

Was my plea answered? No, thus this bulletin from July 16, 2007. “My missives decrying the inclusion of witless ‘jokes’ told by Conan O’Brien in the SoundBites column seems to be having the opposite effect. Instead of avoiding him like the plague, as you should, you instead print yet another ‘joke’ in issue No. 944 (for the third time out of four weeks, it should be pointed out) and even highlight it with a photo of the ‘comedian.’ So what is EW going to be like when O’Brien ascends to the Tonight show chair, simply transcribe each of his monologues in full? I also defy you to explain the current joke, which has James Hetfield of Metallica at the airport setting off the ‘heavy metal detector.’ Like all O’Brien jokes, whimsy is set before sense. If it is a ‘heavy metal detector,’ wouldn’t it be a good thing if Hetfield set it off? After all, he is a heavy metal artist. What is setting off the alarm supposed to mean in this joke? What does it mean?”

None of these pleas were answered. When EW redesigned itself (always a sign that a publication is in trouble) a couple of weeks ago, I thought that maybe either SoundBites would be dropped (casting the poor fat girl adift to write an insiders novel about Time-Life), or that O’Brien would be dropped from it, thanks to a new, anonymous composer. Instead, O’Brien appeared in the “debut” redesign issue, and now, on Friday, three weeks later, I have received my latest issue, and there he is again, illustrated with the same image the magazine used the last time. Clearly this madness will never end. We must come to endure it as a cultural condiment, something we can never escape, like “good to go” or caveman ads or the phrase “Let’s not go there” or “I could tell you but I’d have to kill you,” all cultural artifacts about as funny as Mr. O’Brien himself. .