Vautrin

Walter's flirting with Phyllis was just a feint. He was really interested in a three-way with Lola and Nino Zachetti. When Nino took an instant dislike to Neff, he knew his life was over and he didn't care what he did anymore.

It set the standard for thick, gooey projectile vomit in mainstream Hollywood movies. Bllllaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa.

I haven't read Moliere in years, not for any particular reason, just one of those things. I would certainly rate him highly. At a certain point people will have their own reasons for liking one author more than others, though that is no knock on the others.

Maybe a declaration of whatever. No, I was thinking along the lines of the more writers who come up the more likely it is to find some common ground with another person. I don't dislike Shakespeare and agree he is one of the greatest writers in English. I just don't go as far as to put him in a category by himself.

I would only buy a Fred Mertz "action figure" if the pants came to within six inches of his armpit. That's on the human figure, don't know what it would be on the "action figure." And it has to come with a money belt, at no extra charge of course.

And Sulu had a much better haircut than Chekov or whatever that thing on the top of his head was.

There you go. It only took a little extra time.

Yeah, I remember there was a lot of discussion when his book came out. He described a wild night spent with a drunken Spencer Tracy. Well, the drunken part is believable, but the rest seemed more fantasy than truth. I think he was mostly exaggerating to a great degree. He might have been a bit player with some low level clients, but that's probably about all.

I was just wondering why someone who was able to recite quite a lot of poetry from memory would than go to the extreme of saying he could recite the whole of Shakespeare and Blake. It's at the point when someone will say to their friend C'mon buddy, quit it. I doubt he could even recite the whole of Blake's Jerusalem. Whatever the reason, in his later years Voltaire had a very negative view of Shakespeare. James was a 19th century novelist, not a 16th century playwright, even if he tried his hand at writing plays and failed miserably. So I don't see much comparison between the two. I never thought of Shakespeare as a God in any sense of the word and don't think he belongs in a category all to himself. I like Chekhov as much as Shakespeare.

That's the impression I get from the little I have read about him. He's entitled to his views on the subject, but he's just one voice among many.

True, Bloom was not a Jackie Collins, but advances are all about the hoped for popularity of the book. If it's brilliant and sells, so much the better. If it's not brilliants and sells, that's okay too. Just as long as it sells. It just seems rather silly for an often very serious man like Bloom to make such claims when they serve no purpose. Reciting the whole of William Blake. Why even bother to make such a ridiculous claim, unless it was meant as a joke, which it doesn't seem to be. Oh well. Well, most of the writers mentioned in the Western Cannon, at least in the short list, are pretty much the usual suspects that most literary folks would likely mention. No writer is universally liked or within some flaws, including James. IIRC, Voltaire did not have a very high opinion of Shakespeare. I don't see a "false note" in James, at least no more so than in other writers. I will say that his detailed and acute psychological examinations aren't everyone's cup of tea and besides literary judgments are mostly subjective anyway.

She was beaten up but I don't think she ended up hanging in the apartment. If she did, she certainly deserved a better fate.

I guess lucratively pompous at least. Authors get large advances for the belief their book will be very popular. I don't think being brilliant or not brilliant is much of a factor. Whatever one might think of Bloom's literary theories and opinions, he was much smarter than Peterson, but then who isn't? I read the NYT obit, very informative. The writer hints that Bloom only named one book of Updike's, The Witches of Eastwick, on his expanded canonical list, as possible payback for Updike's torturous comment. Who knows. There were a few things in the NYT's obituary that might come under the heading of exaggeration if not actual pomposity. Bloom claimed he could read and understand a 400 page book in one hour. Okayyy. He also had a photographic memory and said he could recite the whole of Shakespeare and Blake. That would make a great bar bet. I have no doubt that Henry James, torturous or not, is firmly ensconced in the literary canon.

He defended his view of literature from people with different views of literature. It's not like Bloom owns Western literature. I don't think the Western Canon is in any need of defense. People will still be reading it on their own or as part of an educational curriculum no matter what. I think the idea of a canon is somewhat unusual because it consists of literature that is far apart in geography, time, and content. There's nothing wrong in bundling these works altogether as the Western canon, but I read books primarily as individual works not as one part of a canon.

From what I recall there were a couple of wiseguys, but I didn't think of them as having much of a superiority complex.

Harold Bloom, the sad-eye professor of pomposity has died. Oh no, how will we ever be able to understand texts without the near divine guidance of the Martha Stewart of literature.

Yes there are certainly a lot of similarities between the two movies. The Big Chill is mostly a larger budget with more prosperous characters version of The Secaucus Seven. I would also say the latter is more realistic than the former. I haven't seen either one in a while, but I don't recall the folks in TSS being that bad, at least for movie characters.

I liked that one too. I'd say that Secaucus Seven is more releatable, at least to Americans, than Petra Von Kant.

Don't beat yourself up Lawrence, that's what other posters are here for. I think Petra Von Kant has more negative feedback than positive, along the lines of being a dull, slow moving, self-indulgent talkathon. Like other movies, I can see where those criticisms come from, but I like it anyway.

I doubt there are truly any movies that one person alone likes, but just to play along I'll thrown in The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant.

Wouldn't you know it. A colorized 3-D version of Hot Spell is on the November schedule. Damn.

Maybe she has something on the upper management of ID.

Trapped was an enjoyable, quickly done flick that doesn't waste any time on non-essentials. I wonder if people who saw the movie when it first came out took the cornball narration at the start seriously. I always laugh when these super serious things are read in these types of crime films. Also funny was John Hoyt thinking he had a chance with Barbara Payton though that was only a part of his undercover job. Not only was Sylvester an unprepossessing villain, but a stupid one, managing to electrocute himself.

She's Back!!! In a network that seems to have new shows every month, Zahn has been on for a long time. I think Kenda quit because his ratings were probably down, not because he had some grand epiphany that it was time to end things. I haven't seen the promos yet but I'm sure I will soon. So the fingerprint was a key to identifying the killer? Yes, the fingerprint was key in identifying the killer.

I watched most of the Country Music show, though I missed the first episode. Interesting, though the short biographies of one country star after the other got a little boring. Jimmy Joe Clampett was born in Wompachochee, Arknasas in 1935 to a very poor family headed by his dad, who was a mean drunk and his mother who went to church every day. They were so poor they ate the cotton they picked for supper every night. At age eight his mom gave him a geetar made out of an old kerosene can and leftover kite strings. I don't remember seeing Don Williams mentioned, though I might have missed it. I got a kick out of Roger Miller's line Our town was so small we didn't have a town drunk, everybody took turns. When it first started out, Homicide Hunter was interesting, but after a while its appeal wore off for me. If Kenda smoked as often as he is shown to have in the dramatic reenactments I'm surprised he's still alive. And then there was the apparently severely undermanned Colorado Springs homicide bureau, since he seemed to be called in every day of the year.