Well, goddamn it all to hell:

Bite me. Guess what Monday is in Detroit? Opening day.

I should take the day off, but instead, I’ll take it easy. Yesterday I ran across something called The Documentary Blog, and found the inevitable Top 25 list. Can I see the hands of all who despise “Grey Gardens?” Of course it was on the list (No. 8); it’s on all the lists. Everybody loves it. Hidden masterpiece, etc., blah blah blah. I finally found it in the library stacks a few months ago and couldn’t finish it. It strikes me as precisely the sort of thing I would have loved at 19, which isn’t saying much — I loved “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” when I was 19. (Still do, at least a little bit. Tim Curry’s the first man in a corset I ever found remotely attractive. The last one, too.)

“Grey Gardens” is the story of two of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’ crazy relatives, who live in a crazy house and do crazy things and feed the crazy raccoons who hang around their crazy Hamptons estate, and if you like watching that sort of thing, well, you should come to Detroit. We have no shortage of crazy people here. You could follow one or two home and see how they live. I suspect the end result would be much the same, except it would happen in a cardboard box, not the Hamptons. Toe-tally crazy! The film was shot in the mid-70s, perhaps the last era in which crazy could read as “wise in a different way.” By 1980, when the nation suddenly developed a homeless problem, “Grey Gardens” would have been a harder sell. It’s easy to romanticize mental illness when it’s not taking a crap on the sidewalk in front of you.

Some things can only be thought worthwhile in their own era. Originality counts for a lot. I try to keep this in mind when experiencing art of an earlier time. It still got on my nerves.

The rest of the list was OK, although I would have made a place somewhere for Michael Moore. I suspect documentarians secretly hate him (because he’s successful), but he got the genre back into the multiplexes, and that has to count for something.

“Hoop Dreams” made the list, too. It was nominated for an Oscar, but should have won the Pulitzer Prize. I remember it mainly for the portrait of the coach at Arthur Agee’s private school, a man who was such a vile p.o.s. you could almost smell him in the theater. Also, that “Hoop Dreams” was one of the films that played during Northwood Cinema’s brief attempt to be an art house, always a dicey proposition in the Fort. I did my part as a customer.

So that’s my frame of mind this snowy morning — nasty, brutish and short. How’s yours?

Our Saturday-night plans changed due to illness, so we were able to finally see “There Will Be Blood” in the last days of its theatrical run here. With all due respect to the lemon cheesecake our would-be hostess was stuck with after being felled by the flu, I don’t think it could have possibly been as good as the movie.

[Aside to the hostess, if she’s reading: “You…eat…our…CHEESECAKE! YOU EAT IT UP!”]

If you’ve been waiting for the DVD and have a chance to still see it in a proper theater, don’t wait. Like “No Country For Old Men,” this is a lovely movie, and unless you have an excellent home-theater setup, it’s going to lose something in translation. About half of it seems to take place in firelight, and dark shadows don’t translate well to TV screens — they get all pixelated. But how it looks isn’t even half of it.

It’s a little familiar; Daniel Day-Lewis gave a version of this performance in “Gangs of New York,” right down to the mustache — loud, physical, over-the-top, bloodthirsty. His voice alone is terrifying, and his face is the perfect vessel for it; his crooked nose suggests a past you’d rather not know about, and his gaze is the one they’re talking about when people say “he stared daggers.” There are many long, long shots of Day-Lewis in extreme close-up, and you don’t have to know much about film acting to be impressed. When the shot is that tight, the subject can barely move without leaving the frame, so the actor has to sell the scene with about 10 square inches of face. (Needless to say, Day-Lewis does not mug.) The film’s leisurely revelation of its subject (Daniel Plainview, turn-of-the-century California oilman) still never makes its 158-minute running time feel too long — I was actually surprised when the credits rolled, and not because the ending is unorthodox; I just wanted it to go on a little longer.

I probably shouldn’t say more. The smartest thing I did with regard to this movie was not read anything about it beforehand, and if it were possible to do that with movies in general, I would. (If you, like me, enjoy gaping at photos of Viggo Mortensen and George Clooney, it’s hard to avoid skimming the copy, too.) But if you’ll indulge me a little more, a couple observations:

* Since I so recently visited the Ford House, I have early-20th-century plutocrats on the brain, and I was struck by the simple truth we find so easy to ignore — how often vast fortunes are made in filth and fraud and chicanery, and how quickly they go through the moral laundry of endowed chairs, hospital wings and impressionist oils donated to museums. Plainview scratches in the earth for wealth for years (his nails are filthy every time we see them) and when he finally finds it, it literally explodes in a tower of fire; it’s as though he conjured Satan himself. And we know the sort of deal that guy makes for his favors.

* I love the Coen brothers and always will, but Paul Thomas Anderson deserved the directing Oscar for this. He pulled off a much riskier, high-wire act of a movie, and did so beautifully. Maybe not a robbery, but a heartbreaker. (Another excellent take, with very mild spoilers: Roy’s.)

* Fun fact you probably know but just in case you don’t: Anderson is Ghoulardi’s son.

In other news at this hour, I talked to Mark the Shark about last week’s turnip bomb scare. Mark can tell a good story, but like a lot of people with specialized knowledge, he doesn’t know how to edit. I learned far more than I needed to know about the problems that can arise when a real-estate deal goes sour, but I also learned what I suspected from the beginning: No one seriously thought this thing was a bomb, but no one could definitively say it wasn’t, which made it a good training opportunity, and battle stations were never called off. Police lobby very hard to get all these toys — the little robot, the Klaatu suit — and if they don’t use them once in a while, they get rusty. It was a good day for a drill.

But today? Today, my friends, is a good day to go back to bed. Bear Stearns is leading us into a depression, and last night’s news-farming brought up this show-stopper, from a NYT report on the Food & Drug Administration:

The Institute of Medicine, the Government Accountability Office and the F.D.A.’s own Science Board have all issued reports saying poor management and scientific inadequacies make the agency incapable of protecting the country against unsafe drugs, medical devices and food.

How comforting! Either back to bed, or into battle. You choose.

We got some more snow over the weekend, well within normal for March in Michigan — maybe three new inches. But Columbus, which by March is usually well into the mud/freezing rain/defrosting dog poo stage of winter, got a foot and a half, maybe more. My brother said it was so bad, he closed his bar. Then he called one of the TV stations, to get it added to the ever-lengthening closings list.

“Um,” she said. “Is this….an institution?”

“Hell yes it’s an institution,” he replied. “It’s a bar in Obetz! That’s like a church!”

“Sir,” she said. “I don’t think you’re being serious with me.”

Well, in a blizzard, all the serious is being hogged by people trying to drive.

I said last fall that I wanted lots of snow this winter, and I guess I got my wish. (As for our boating fortunes this year, in the god-I-hope-our-slip-isn’t-dry sense of things, I go for cautiously optimistic.) I’m still not really tired of winter yet. I miss my bicycle and the color green, but so much of coping with cold weather comes down to having the sense to wear a decent coat and boots. Still, there was a moment Saturday when I turned a corner and was hit in the face by a blast of wind, and thought: OK, enough. By week’s end the temperature should be nudging 50. That’ll do.

The student film is done. I left at the DVD-burning point, which was four hours into our last editing session. I’d recommend a class like this to anyone who likes movies, just so you can see what it takes to make even a very very small one. You’ll learn why “creative differences” are such a big factor in Hollywood. We spent an hour tweaking audio filters to get the right sound on a 30-second phone conversation, so that when we cut to one character while the other one was still talking, the voice would sound like it was coming through a telephone. There’s a strong tendency, at every step of the game, to say, “Screw it. This is good enough.” You need a few perfectionists in the room.

But here’s the best thing: This really is a creative outlet that is truly collaborative, and if you have the right collaboration, it becomes more than the sum of its parts. I’ll treasure the wonder I felt at every step of the process as our three-minute story came together. I also learned a thing or two about cheats for no-budget storytelling; one scene was lit by two hand-held flashlights. It was great fun, and I can’t wait to take the next class. And yes, I’ll post the video eventually, but please be gentle.

So, Monday-morning bloggage for you folks to fight about:

The qualifier, now an ongoing series: Mitch Albom spends 60 percent of his Sunday metro column outlining two cases of bad behavior caught on video and seen widely on the internet (the puppy-throwing soldiers and car-wash mom, for those of you who keep up with such things). Then…wait for it…the qualifier:

Now, I am not condoning either act — not the dog fling, not the hosing. Neither was smart or necessary. Both seem cold, cruel, even deplorable. But I wonder where we are going when every moment of every life is filmed.

The only thing that could make that passage better would be a “dare I say” inserted between “cruel” and “even deplorable.”

Another shoe drops in the Detroit text-message scandal. We are shocked, shocked to find it’s about more than sex. In fact, it’s about sweetheart deals and other glories of life in a corrupt city. By 2002, I was certainly aware that it was perfectly legal for my bosses to look at my company e-mail. (In fact, I often wondered if they were, and was sure to give them lots of juicy reading material.) What sort of moron sends stuff like this over a public (translation: where bosses = everyone) network?

In a message on Oct. 30, 2002, (mayoral chief of staff Christine) Beatty asked him how much she owed (mayoral friend and favored contractor) Bobby Ferguson for the driveway he poured at her Detroit home.

“Ya know ya my sister,” he replied. “Family don’t worry about shit like money.”

Finally, Laura Lippman’s new book, “Another Thing to Fall,” hits stores tomorrow. Run out and buy it and make the Lippman-Simon Co-Prosperity Sphere’s March 2008 one to remember. Plot synopsis: Lippman’s P.I., Tess Monaghan, investigates shenanigans on the set of a TV series filmed in Baltimore. No, not that one. (Which reminds me: Wire-blogging reaches its crescendo over at The New Package. Distracted as I was last week by my other life, your correspondent will check in…eventually. The new slackage!

OK, that’s it for me. I have a story to write, and have to readjust my head into money-making mode.

Patrick Swayze has terminal cancer, you say? I will take a moment to remember the man before he leaves. For a while, I was a student of his personal catalogue, and what a time it was.

My friend Ron French and I had a ritual in the late ’80s and early ’90s: We’d choose the worst movie in town, pick an off-peak screening and go to throw popcorn and trade snark from the audience. We tried to sit in a place where we wouldn’t disturb others, but we weren’t always successful; to the couple at the Holiday 6 whose enjoyment of “Point Break” we more or less ruined, I’m sorry. We had to see that one on opening night. The prospect of Keanu Reeves as an FBI agent and Swayze as a bank-robbin’ surfer was simply irresistible. (Talking in movies was a big pet peeve of mine at the time, too. I am a hypocrite.)

Swayze was to bad movies of the ’80s what Jack Nicholson was to good ones of the ’70s. “Dirty Dancing,” “Road House,” “Red Dawn,” “Ghost,” “North and South” (bad TV) and my personal favorite, “Next of Kin” — most of these were delightful to watch, so happily did they wallow in badness. What made them good-bad instead of bad-bad was, the people in them had a sense of humor about themselves. They knew it was bad, but they brought their A game, or at least their attention and energy. (The exception to the list was “Ghost,” which was bad-bad; Demi Moore’s personality is a black hole of dumb seriousness that sucks everything into its vortex.) “Red Dawn” was just plain hilarious, but was made funnier by its cultural impact; I remember seeing the program for an anti-communist function of some sort held in Fort Wayne, and “Red Dawn” was the afternoon’s entertainment. The thought of all those people coming off a morning of seminars and panel discussions about gulags and Stalinism, and into an afternoon of “Wolverines!” and Harry Dean Stanton bellowing, “Avenge me!” from behind the wire at the drive-in/re-education camp just kills.

“Next of Kin,” about a backwoods Appalachian clan taking revenge on the Chicago mob was a classic of the good-bad genre, combining elements of standard vengeance, gangster and fish-out-of-water plots. Ron pointed out the camera’s suspicious interest in an early family-picnic scene in which the elders of the clan practice their hatchet-throwin’ skills, and sure enough — I hope I’m not spoiling this for anyone — someone gets a hatchet in the brainpan in the big fight climax. It was so awesome.

One of the joys of bad-movie fandom is, you get to see them on cable years later and squeal, “How the hell did I miss Liam Neeson in this the first time around?!” Check out some of the players in the IMDb listing, beside Neeson: Helen Hunt, Bill Paxton, Ben Stiller, Michael J. Pollard, Ted Levine and that necessity for all bad ’80s cinema — a Baldwin brother (Adam). The character names are nearly as good, with a Patsy-Ruth, Aunt Peg, Old Hillbilly and, of course, Grandpa. (He may be the hatchet-thrower; can’t remember.)

But back to Swayze. What made him a pleasure to watch was his grace. He seemed to know he’d never be doing Mamet off Broadway, but he could dance the shoes off anyone, and didn’t mind wearing tight pants while doing so. It’s hard to dislike a man so masculine, and still so happy in a body built for hip-swivelin’ rather than football. Relax, I’m not going to compare him to Gene Kelly, but they shared a distant ancestor, maybe.

The TV commercial for “Next of Kin” featured Swayze, in an eastern-Kentucky accent, warning, “You ain’t seen bad yet…but it’s a-comin’,” a line I treasure to this day. If only we’d had some more of that kind of bad.

What’s your favorite good-bad movie? Discuss in comments.

P.S. As good as Swayze’s bad was, it really couldn’t match the all-time worst movie we saw together: “On Deadly Ground,” in which Steven Seagal saves the Alaskan wilderness by blowing up an oil refinery in the middle of it. (Sample dialogue, via IMDb: My guy in D.C. tells me that we are not dealing with a student here, we’re dealing with the Professor. Any time the military has an operation that can’t fail, they call this guy in to train the troops, OK? He’s the kind of guy that would drink a gallon of gasoline so he could piss in your campfire! You could drop this guy off at the Arctic Circle wearing a pair of bikini underwear, without his toothbrush, and tomorrow afternoon he’s going to show up at your pool side with a million dollar smile and fist full of pesos. This guy’s a professional, you got me? If he reaches this rig, we’re all gonna be nothing but a big goddamned hole right in the middle of Alaska. So let’s go find him and kill him and get rid of the son of a bitch!

Also: Drunken Eskimo: You are about to go on a sacred journey.

Do we have a little bloggage? We might:

Via Jeff, in comments above, How Hillary won Ohio.

Dahlia Lithwick explains Charlotte Allen to you. Well, someone had to.

For some reason, Detroit is fond of dressing up its large statuary in clothes. With opening day less than a month away, a Tiger in Carhartt.

Off to the gym. Guess what we have to look forward to this weekend? Yes, that.

Who says the newspaper isn’t a bargain? Mitch Albom, turning up his nose at the Oscars, shares the secret of his success:

Now, I’m not a Pollyanna. I enjoy films. I collect them. And I understand that not every story ends with music swirling and heroes walking off into a sunset.

But lately there’s this sense that unless a movie is dark, violent and hopeless, it can’t be “real.” It can’t be “art.” It can’t truly “matter.” I put these words in quotes because it feels as if critics and awards committees define things that way.

So instead of praise for, say, “The Bucket List,” a film that everyone I know has loved and which has a positive message about getting old and sick, most critics attacked it as too “sentimental.” Meanwhile, we get an Oscar nomination for “The Savages,” a movie about getting old and sick that is so depressing, you want to jump off a building.

If only the crusty old dad in “The Savages” had taken the time to share some of the accumulated wisdom of a lifetime, it might have worked for Mitch. But take heed, America — if you want to be as rich as Mitch, and he is vastly rich, be more like him. Go see “The Bucket List” and don’t be afraid to smile through your tears at the end. Because that’s entertainment.

(Just a writerly aside here: Does any newspaper column these days fail to contain a qualifier? Now, I’m not a Pollyanna. I’ve learned to look for it. I’m not saying Obama is an empty suit, but… I see it because I’ve done it myself, and I know exactly how it happens. First, you state a strong opinion. Then, the imaginary editor reading over your shoulder says, “Christ, I’m going to be talking to pissed-off readers all morning tomorrow. I have better things to do.” And so you pull your punch. If Mitch Albom thinks “The Bucket List” is a better movie than “No Country for Old Men,” the spineless tool ought not to be afraid to say so. On the other hand, that might be an unpopular opinion, and the cycle continues.)

I didn’t really watch the Oscars last night, but I had it on in the next room while I farmed health-care news. My overwhelming impression: Tilda Swinton has never actually been out in the sunlight, has she? I know Great Britain is famously cloudy, but she’s as pale as one of those fish that only lives in the Marianas Trench. I’m a child of the pre-melanoma ’70s, but I never see skin that pale and think “luminous English rose.” Only “fish-belly.”

But I can’t hate her, either. She’s a great actress. I saw “Michael Clayton” Saturday night, and she did such a fine impersonation of a former boss of mine — ruthlessly ambitious, high-strung, brittle, murderous — that I nearly had to squinch my eyes when she came onscreen. I loved her white pantyhose, too. Dressing for success is the same in Omaha as in Fort Wayne, apparently.

So how about some Oscar bloggage? David Mills followed the action with underachieving crazy-lady — and Detroiter! — Debbie Schlussel: “Self-hating, pro-Palestinian Jew Daniel Day-Lewis who stars in the very depressing, awful anti-Christian, anti-business, ‘There Will Be Blood,’ wins Best Actor. Predictable.” What a fun date! P.S. Thanks to the miracle of Safari’s command-F feature, I know the word “annoying” appeared eight times in her live-blog entry.

I thought Nicole Kidman was pregnant. Aren’t pregnant ladies supposed to lay off the Botox? She’s not.

I guess John Travolta overslept, and mixed up his hair product with a can of spray paint.

Sean what’s-his-name Combs charitably described as “entertainer.” That’s one way to put it.

Javy: Still smokin‘. Viggo: Less so. Isn’t covering a natural chin dimple like his with facial hair a crime against beauty? Yes.

Finally, I see the subject of could-Obama-be-assassinated is finally being discussed openly. I guess we know why Hillary’s still in the race, then: She’s still scrambling a team down in Arkansas.

To the gym! Because I’m paying for it whether I show up or not!

So you sit down to write and look what happens: Shh. “The Godfather” baptism scene is coming on AMC. I need to watch it for the seven millionth time.

Look at baby Sofia, playing the infant. So beautiful, hands like little starfish. Let’s see if I can spot a detail I missed the first 6.99 million times. …OK, here’s one: All the anointing, all the hands laid on other bodies — this I never noticed before. Cicci gets a barber’s shave with hot cream, the baby gets the holy oils, Moe Greene’s masseur rubs him down with…probably witch hazel, back then. No faggy essential oils in the ’50s.

Michael Rizzi, will you be baptized? I will. I still get a chill.

The good-vs-evil Mafia montage is a cliché now. Done well, as David Chase did with the season-ending “Sopranos” episodes, it’s an homage, but mostly it’s just a cliché. But like the song says: The original is still the greatest.

As always, when I watch a little Godfather, I wonder what happened to Al Pacino. How did Francis Ford Coppola rein him in? His whole performance is delivered via the eyes, and look what happened when you took those away, made him a blind man — “Scent of a Woman,” that’s what.

It’s just as well cable TV delivered, because I have little for you today. The steady lengthening of the days is no longer a rumor — “be home by dark” gets Kate 45 minutes more freedom than it got in December, but, perversely, spring seems further away than ever. Fourteen degrees at the moment, bright sun, a glacier-glasses sort of day. I’m working on a piece that’s a real bolus, and every find-new-motivation strategy I deploy just feels like procrastination. Time to put the modem in the freezer.

But there’s plenty going on in the world, just the same. Out for discussion: Is Hillary finished? I’m especially interested in hearing from you Buckeyes, as that’s the next battle, and it’s make-or-break for her. Here in Michigan, the dumb-ass Democratic party is trying their best to start an insurrection; the power players are trying to figure out a way to deliver the now-you-see-’em-now-you-don’t — all of Michigan’s perhaps-mythical delegates — to Hillary. The very hint of such a coup makes Alan kick the baseboards and vow to vote for McCain if they even dare to think such a thing, but then, he voted for “uncommitted” in January. I guess I don’t have a leg to stand on, having chosen a strategic Romney vote last month.

What is rickrolling? (This baby is not played by Sofia Coppola.) The Church of Scientology, rickrolled. A more clinical explanation. I used to dance to that song in aerobics class. Not as bitchin’ly as the original Rick, however. Ha.

John reveals his inner Hawaii Five-O fan. Also, a tribute to Adobe After Effects, with which, on his last visit, he demonstrated how they got “300” to look like that.

I don’t care how Barack Obama talks, as long as he can pronounce “nuclear.”

Time to return to my bolus. Sigh.

For those of you wondering why I’m not writing more about the Michigan primary, coming up in five days, the NYT’s Nick Bunkley explains on the paper’s Caucus blog:

Because Michigan’s Jan. 15 primary violates Democratic National Committee rules, Senator Barack Obama and John Edwards withdrew from the state’s race, leaving Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton as the party’s only major candidate on the ballot. (Mrs. Clinton has pledged not to campaign here.)

The alternative, for Edwards/Obama supporters, is to choose “uncommitted,” which sort of takes the oxygen out of a campaign: Vote for no one! I’m still undecided, but considering a GOP crossover to vote for McCain. He’s a grumpy old fart, but at least he thinks torture is bad.

Talk about setting the bar kinda low.

My local-local paper, tool of the management class that it is, goes all the way parochial and endorses local favorite Mitt Romney. Don’t think so. Mitch Harper once related a quote he attributed to LBJ former Ohio Gov. Jim Rhodes, who reportedly said Mitt’s dad, George, “couldn’t sell pussy on a troop ship.” The apple did not fall far from the tree.

About that endorsement — something about it smells canned to me. I googled random phrases with no luck, but I’m still thinking it was e-mailed whole from Fortress Mitt. It’s fluently written, for one thing, and reads like a campaign speech, heavy on bumper-sticker phrases and glibness: “In 2002, Romney was elected Republican governor of liberal Massachusetts. In just one term, he eliminated a $3 billion budget gap inherited when he took office by eliminating waste, streamlining government and offering economic reforms that stimulated economic growth in the state.”

See what I mean? Just a bit script-y.

A situation like Michigan’s, where the viable candidates are off campaigning in other states and a Yellow-Dog D like me is doing the primary crossover, leads to some strange moments. Dennis Kucinich made a big splash in Troy this week:

They treated him like a rock star, screaming in adoration and repeatedly giving him standing ovations when he said he would call for the removal of all troops from Iraq within three months of taking office, and advocated impeaching vice president Dick Cheney and President George W. Bush and charging them with crimes after they leave office.

Imagine what they’d have done if he called for a public execution. They’d have lifted the little guy up and carried him around the room. Or maybe all that yelling was for his wife.

Kos thinks Mitten State Dems should vote for Romney, but not because he streamlined government and raised five sons. A pretty basic argument:

Meanwhile, poor Mitt Romney, who’s suffered back-to-back losses in the last week, desperately needs to win Michigan in order to keep his campaign afloat. Bottom line, if Romney loses Michigan, he’s out. If he wins, he stays in.

And we want Romney in, because the more Republican candidates we have fighting it out, trashing each other with negative ads and spending tons of money, the better it is for us. We want Mitt to stay in the race, and to do that, we need him to win in Michigan.

In any event, crossing over and voting for candidates I don’t endorse is a very familiar experience for me. It’s just like living in Indiana.

So, with that, then, let’s get to the bloggage:

“The Bucket List” looked like a p.o.s. from the get-go, but it does give us the pleasure of reading Roger Ebert’s withering pan. Ebert knows a thing or two about how people with cancer really experience life:

I’ve never had chemo, as Edward and Carter must endure, but I have had cancer, and believe me, during convalescence after surgery the last item on your bucket list is climbing a Himalaya. Your list is more likely to be topped by keeping down a full meal, having a triumphant bowel movement, keeping your energy up in the afternoon, letting your loved ones know you love them, and convincing the doc your reports of pain are real and not merely disguising your desire to become a drug addict. To be sure, the movie includes plenty of details about discomfort in the toilet, but they’re put on hold once the trots are replaced by the globe-trotting.

I know you will be as astonished as I am to learn Jack Nicholson plays a crusty old fart, and Morgan Freeman a wise old man. What a way for Jack to end his career, with crap like this. He wasn’t even that great in “The Departed.” Maybe these guys should retire.

Our friend, neighbor and sometime commenter here, JohnC, makes it onto the Prairie Home Companion site with a short essay about loving and hating the Red Sox with his grandma. Among other things.

Thank you, Fark, for finding stuff like this:

BREMERTON — The 27-year-old Poulsbo woman told police officers she promised sexual favors to a man if he bought her alcohol early Wednesday morning. But after getting two bottles of inexpensive fortified wine, she used one to hit him in the forehead.

He had it coming, I’d say.

Friday! Friday! Friday! Have a good one.

I’ve had some difficulty finding my feet this morning, and now I gots some stuff to do. In the meantime, someone asked what I meant by painterly composition in “No Country for Old Men.” How about this?

Kind of conventional, I know, and criminally cropped from its widescreen aspect ration, but you get the idea. (I was working from the online trailer.)

Off to have my hair highlighted, pick up antibiotics for the dog and harass foot-draggers by e-mail. Oh, and MichaelJ, you absolutely MUST intrude again. I don’t know what we’d do without you.

Saw “No Country for Old Men” this weekend. I don’t think I can discuss much without the tiresome “spoiler alert,” but I’ll try. If you’ve seen it, or aren’t bothered by spoilers (which aren’t as spoiler-y as usual — this movie is pretty high-concept in the plot department), go to Roy’s place, and check out his original post, as well as the comments, and the boot to Glenn Kenny’s.

I’m more easily pleased. I loved the thing pretty much beginning to end, although I understand the objection to the last 25 percent, as well as the ending, which was greeted by a few stunned Huhs in the multiplex where we saw it. Didn’t bother me. This is a film made to be watched again and again, after which the ending will become more coherent, I think. Besides, even if you take the position that the denouement is a disaster, who the hell cares? Jack Nicholson was the weakest thing about “The Departed,” but I’ll watch at least a few minutes of it every kind it comes around on cable, because Leonardo DiCaprio is fantastic. If you can’t be thrilled by all that’s great about this movie, from the painterly composition of every shot to the note-perfect performances, well, you should probably go ahead and buy a ticket to “I am Legend.”

A few words about that composition: The Coen brothers are famous for storyboarding their movies from first shot to last. When you see their attention to detail — the bloodstained quarter in Javier Bardem’s palm, a dog’s leap for the throat that sends you an inch off your seat — you can appreciate movies in a whole new way.

As for Bardem, I think Roy nails it:

And if Javier Bardem had not made his monster Karloff-scale believable we wouldn’t even be having this conversation. This is the greatest kind of acting — the kind that suggests its own backstory. I can see him as a hollow-eyed, beaten boy, silently absorbing evil and taking all his lessons from it, growing into a creature that cannot be stopped or swayed, but still must have his little games to prove, in the face of uncomprehending fear (his or theirs?), that he has been right all along. Bardem’s performance is eternal in a movie that could have been.

Since we were in a mood for grim violence, but mostly because it was snowing like “Dr. Zhivago,” we opted for the verboten La Shish, our local Middle Eastern chain, for dinner before the show. Bad reputation, that place, but I justified our visit thusly:

1) The profit is probably all going to the IRS these days, not Hezbollah; and
2) It was snowing really, really hard, and it was either that or McDonald’s.

And even though the whole chain is in danger of folding like a cheap tent, the food was…heavenly. The best pita bread I’ve had in my whole damn life. A vegetable melange that tasted fresh, light, and perfectly spicy. Hummus to die for. The bread came with some sort of garlic paste I wanted to dab behind my ears, it was so good. The whole east side of Detroit is pretty slim pickins, restaurant-wise, but after one bite my only regret was that I didn’t support Hezbollah’s booster sooner. Anyone who can cook like that can’t be all bad.

Just a bit of bloggage today, via Metafilter: An 1898 letter to professional baseball players, outlining the new bad-language policy. Worth a read, if only for the chuckles. Go fuck yourself! So Al Swerengen.

Found this on YouTube the other day. The sound’s lousy, but it’s an action-based scene. You only have to watch the first 20 seconds:

I think Leo speaks for all of us who have ever been asked that question.

Slate had a piece earlier this week on the amateur street-fighting genre on YouTube. I clicked a few links, but found reading about them more enjoyable than watching them. Real violence, even captured in ShakyCam with Extra Graininess, packs a wallop that even Scorsese can’t touch. John D. MacDonald had a nice passage in one of his Travis McGee books about fistfights — that 99 percent of them end after one punch, with both guys astonished by the pain, one in his nose and the other in his hand. I don’t think I’ve ever thrown a punch at anyone. Once I swung a clipboard at Name Redacted in my college newspaper newsroom, and didn’t connect, although he richly deserved it. It was also the first time I’ve ever vaulted a table in one leap — I jumped from my seat in the copy-desk slot and cleared the desk like Bruce Willis. I wish I had a video. The fight ended with Redacted holding me at arm’s length while I waved my clipboard impotently. The tension was defused when everyone started laughing. All was forgiven, and he remains a friend. His wife is even one of our commenters here. And I think if I had hit him, and I could fill the jury box with other slot men, they wouldn’t even bother ordering lunch before they acquitted me.

Remember Danny DeVito’s line in “The War of the Roses?” Oliver, my father used to say that a man can never outdo a woman when it comes to love and revenge. Women retain a capacity for viciousness that probably goes back to the cave — it’s our genetic mandate to protect the kiddies, after all — and all I can say is: I’d really like to have a couple of those breakaway beer glasses like the one Leo uses so well.

Not much for you today, folks. I’m off to Christmas-shop, lunch, work, run errands and hunt down a 4-pin to 6-pin FireWire cable. But first, a shower. Make merry in the comments, if you like.