Dear General Public,

I’ve had to speak to you before about your gruesome reverence for dead celebrities. Every famous person who dies is instantly idolized out of all recognition. The same ugly venal toad of a has-been star or notoriously despicable no-talent hack that you were mocking or simply ignoring on Tuesday becomes a beloved secular saint on Wednesday, the second his or her diseased heart stops beating.

This maudlin nonsense really must cease! Your hypocrisy is rank and stinks to heaven! Try to have a modicum of decent self-restraint!

Yours in contempt,

Eileen J.

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There’s a new ten-part series running on Sunday nights called Copper that’s getting all kinds of notice for its Gangs of New York-ish set-up. That’s why I watched it, hoping to see some of that potentially great 19^th century slum material redeemed by BBC America. It’s a good title, Copper, so maybe, maybe…

But no. It’s rotten. The first show was nothing but wrong notes struck very hard over and over. Maybe it’ll improve somewhat in future episodes, but I won’t be there to see ‘em.

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I can’t do Best Film lists. Somebody recently asked me to—a former student—it was sweet of him and all—but I can’t. They’re so embarrassing.  You no sooner put down a title than you feel like an idiot—really, this is the BEST film ever made, of all films from all nations, in all genres, for all time, the very BESTEST??

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Dear Reader,

This whole review’s a spoiler, so if you’re not prepared to handle an all-spoiler review, take a hike. (You know the drill.)

Yours in despair,

Eileen J.

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The Amazing Spiderman’s a hit, and I just saw it, and I can’t remember it.  Which is a GOOD thing, in its way.  That’s what loud CGI nonsense is FOR.

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Am I missing something? Did Nora Ephron do something great once in her seventy-odd years that I never heard about? She cure cancer and I was never told? She make an uncharacteristically watchable movie and hide it in a vault for posterity and we’re just discovering it now?

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By now I’m assuming you’ve seen Prometheus, and we can talk freely. If not, beat it, because I’m telling all, plot-wise.

Prometheus starts out gangbusters, so beautiful and ambitious that you have to wonder how Ridley Scott is going to manage to screw it up. He does screw it up, of course, but the thing is, I don’t know why he does. He had it; it was all right there in the first scenes, all he had to do was play out the implications.

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