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Now I'm a big fan of the gray lady, and I'm also a big fan of long, complicated sentences, but Manohla Dargis should be taken aside and given a strict talking-to for this doozy in today's review of Baz Luhrmann's Australia:

Though "Australia" is narrated by a young boy of mixed race, Nullah (the newcomer Brandon Walters), the illegitimate son of an Aboriginal mother and a white father, who is trying to escape the authorities, and while it opens in 1939, shortly before World War II blasted Australian shores, the film isn't a bummer.

My mother always taught me that, while complexity can be a good thing, the most critical aspect of writing is to not jar the reader out of their flow and make them back up to reread a sentence. I was quite happily zipping along this review until I hit that number, and though I can parse it quite clearly now, I had to reread it twice to figure it out. Yeesh.

My campaign to dominate the American media-on-the-media continues in a sound bite I provided for the New York Daily News article called "The Q factor: How the science behind James Bond's gadgets was reinvented". For added awesomeness, I even got the last word on the subject – and the subject is fantastical doohickeys.

I have just discovered that, in addition to Gaiman's The Graveyard Book, Pratchett's Nation, Link's Pretty Little Monsters and Carroll's The Ghost in Love, Louis De Bernieres' new book A Partisan's Daughter hit shelves today.

I yield! I yield! My poor wallet! What else could this fall possibly throw at me?

(Well, there's this, this, this, and this, not to mention this, this, this and this. Arrrgh.)

Consider this a public service announcement that Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book, Terry Pratchett's Nation AND Jonathan Carroll's The Ghost in Love are out today. TODAY. Go! Stop reading this and go, dammit! Hie thee to a bookstore! Or Amazon!

I could also note that the 2-disc Blu-Ray set of Iron Man is out today, but I suspect that will take care of its own sales figures, thankyouverymuch.

Two additional things I will note, however, is that Jonathan Carroll's jonathancarroll.com has received an astonishingly beautiful makeover, using a palette similar to my own and a design that I wish I'd thought of (and may indeed lift bits of at some point in the future, especially the gorgeous blend of blacks and parchment and breathtakingly beautiful photography); and that Kelly Link's Pretty Monsters is out next week, so you might as well pre-order that while you're clicking away at Amazon. I mean, it's just the efficient thing to do.

(I myself would be clicking away if I weren't so damned impatient. Off to the mall I go ASAP after work, I suspect...)

First it was the buy-one-get-one-free sale on Criterion Collection DVDs at DeepDiscount (which concluded as of midnight last night, thank God), but now Apple has launched a $6.99 and $7.99 sale on Classical and Jazz albums. My wallet! My poor, innocent, empty wallet!

I mean, seriously – Hilary Hahn! Yo-Yo Ma and Ennio Morricone! Joshua Bell! Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Jamie Cullum and Thelonious Monk! Damn you, Jobs!

Luckily, I already own most of these classics, but there's a couple I'm eyeing cautiously. If those of you in my reading audience pick up nothing else, the Yo-Yo Ma playing Ennio Morricone is a must-have – it's one of my favorite go-to albums whenever I need some great background music for work or writing or whatever.

Oh, well. Think of the money you'll save on gas at $4+ per gallon by staying in and watching movies or listening to MP3s. Yeah, that's the ticket...

I'll come back to this subject in a week or so, because all the things I really want to talk about in Nolan's The Dark Knight are going to require a decent number of spoilers, and trust me – this is not a movie you want spoiled. It has nothing (well, almost nothing) to do with the ending, but all the little things Heath Ledger's Joker does throughout the course of the film.

That said, I can sum up the basics of my thoughts like so: Batman Begins was an amazing film because it showed how a superhero might plausibly be created in real life. The Dark Knight, however, shows us what a real-life supervillain might be like. We hold up Seven and Silence of the Lambs as deeply disturbing, but they have nothing on this. I'm honestly having a difficult time thinking about the Joker's character in comics or cartoons now, because Ledger's Joker is that damned unsettling.

Go. Hie thee to a theater. Now. Hie, dammit, hie. We'll come back and talk this over later.

I would be remiss if I didn't point out to all my media-loving friends out there the buy one get one free sale currently going on over at DeepDiscount.com. My picks:

Box Sets
Monsters and Madmen (4 films)
Olivier's Shakespeare (3 films)

Akira Kurosawa
Sanjuro
Seven Samurai

Frederico Fellini
La Strada
8 1/2

Ingmar Bergman
The Magic Flute
Fanny and Alexander
Sawdust and Tinsel

Others
Mr. Arkadin
Carnival of Souls
Thief of Bagdad

These aren't on the AFI list I've been plowing through in my sort of Film Studies 101 "independent study" but many are classics nonetheless – and I'm also always interested in the artful depiction of magic and wonder, and a number of these are known for doing that really, really well. There are all kinds of other finds on the list – such as The Threepenny Opera, The Third Man, Sullivan's Travels, The 39 Steps, Beauty and the Beast, Brazil, M, Wild Strawberries and The Seventh Seal, all of which I own; Charade, Withnail and I and Yojimbo, which I don't own but have seen recently enough to postpone their purchase, and Bowie's The Man Who Fell to Earth, which Criterion is putting out on Blu-Ray this fall.

More blog posts are pending – I have all kinds of things I want to write about, including the ITRA Conference and our trip to Greece, as well as my thoughts on a number of recent events in the media universe. Right now, though, I must run off to the lab for a meeting.

One last parting thought: likeminded souls in the Boston area should check out Readercon this weekend, where I'm hoping to meet up with some old acquaintances (like Ellen Kushner and Nick Mamatas) and meet a few of my favorite authors (like John Clute, Kelly Link, and James Morrow). It'll be the first time in the three years I've been here when Readercon falls on a weekend where I'm actually in town, so I'm thoroughly excited to go.

Oh, and one last thing: other likeminded souls in the Boston area should check out the midnight showing tonight of The Dark Knight at The Somerville Theater in Davis Square. That's where all the cool kids will be (namely myself, Laura, Matt and Clara).

Stay tuned!

This weekend I've been continuing some old quests: regular readers will know that I've been working my way through the AFI's top 122 movies list (the result of combining the Institute's original top 100 list and its revised top 100 list – 22 movies were added the second time around). As of this writing I'm a healthy 63% of the way through, thanks to watching a couple DVDs every weekend. Over the last two weeks I've watched Stagecoach, Sullivan's Travels, Gone With the Wind, MASH, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Bridge on the River Kwai, Mutiny on the Bounty, Platoon, The Deer Hunter, and Sunset Boulevard, and this morning I watched the original 1979 version of Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now.

I had planned to squeeze in one or two more today, but instead I walked over to my bookshelves and took down a hardcover collection of selected works by Joseph Conrad. It's a big book, a Barnes and Noble edition that my mom had found for me at a garage sale somewhere (or perhaps had gotten for me for Christmas last year – my memory here fails me), and between its covers are four of the over 200 books that make up my personal to-read list: Lord Jim, Nostromo, The Secret Agent and, most importantly for this entry, Heart of Darkness. Plowing through this list is necessarily much slower-going than the AFI list – not only does this list have a nasty tendency to grow as I think of other books I really ought to read, but reading Gravity's Rainbow is inherently a much more time-intensive task than watching even Gone with the Wind. The reasoning behind this list is much the same as the AFI list – a deep-seated feeling in my bones that despite my having earned an English degree from a fairly prestigious college and my Master's degree from an even more prestigious university, there's still so much I haven't read, or so much I've simply forgotten. Since my dream is still to become an author and professor, when I consider how many huge, epic gaps there are in my knowledge I begin to feel that even if I were to succeed in these goals, I'd feel like a fraud. About three years ago now, right when I was entering MIT, my cousin Amanda and I had a long talk about our different plans. She told me that she was doing some graduate school herself, in a way – only she was doing what she called "Amanda school," tutoring herself on all the things she found interesting. I think this is what I'm doing now, in this gap between my Master's degree and wherever I settle in to do my Ph.D.: a "Geoffrey school" of films, novels, and programming books. It'd be easy to argue, of course, that this is what I've been doing all along anyway, but making a concerted effort to chew through these massive to-do lists feels like I have a good, solid way of charting my progress. Depressingly, I've been working on these lists since March of 2005 and there's still an embarrassingly long way to go (after all, in many ways I'm reading books that AP students were probably reading in high school) but I think, in the long run, it's what I need to do.

So it is that today I watched Apocalypse Now and read Heart of Darkness, both for the first time. The experience is fascinating; Apocalypse Now is not so much an adaptation of Heart of Darkness as it is a remixing of it, in the same way that CMS looks at remix culture. Both the text and the film are ruminations on the darkest parts of human nature and madness, of the fall of a golden child into the depths of despair and depravity, but Coppola's use of the text to parse the actions of American soldiers in the Vietnam war is absolutely breathtaking. What I'd originally considered to be just another rote damnation of the atrocities of war (prior to actually having seen the film, of course – if Mr. Coppola ever happens to come across this post, well, sir, please accept my apology for my wrongheaded assumptions) instead blooms into something much more profound. Apocalypse Now is an incredible example of how adaptation can work through the benefit of each media form's unique strengths – while Conrad uses loops and whorls of language and time to communicate the madness unfolding in his narrative, Coppola deploys music, dialogue, framing, lighting and slow-motion shots to achieve the same effect, and it works brilliantly.

Conrad's characters are interesting but nowhere near as startling as Coppola's, but seeing Coppola's inspirations is quite cool. This isn't a straight line-for-line lift, but an updating and a retelling worthy of a Shakespearean interpretation; Dennis Hopper's American journalist is as interesting a recreation of Conrad's Russian assistant as a reimagining of Puck, Caliban or even Hamlet might be. Conrad's Kurtz is an intriguing sketch of a character, but Coppola's Kurtz is a combination of Brando's breathtaking performance, some artisan-level cinematography and, yes, the near-perfect deployment of negative capability throughout the rest of the film to build up the character at the very end. Conrad builds Kurtz up pretty well, but Coppola's build-up is absolutely top-notch: from the description Harrison Ford gives Martin Sheen at the beginning, to Sheen's slow discovery of the character's history through his dossier, right up through to the very end – that was narrative, cinematic poetry.

Even the changes that Coppola makes for a modern audience are telling – while the protagonist's mission in Heart of Darkness isn't exactly clear, Coppola gives Sheen's character a strong, easy-to-understand mission in the form of a clearly-stated mission. By doing so, Coppola gives audiences a crystalline comprehension of the story they're about to be told, so that the film works at a surface level even if all the madness-of-men reflectiveness is lost on some of them. Although critics accused Conrad of being primarily an adventure writer, Heart of Darkness doesn't function quite as well as a ripping adventure yarn because it lacks Coppola's "go here, kill him" steely narrative core. With that intact, Apocalypse Now operates with the grace and impact of an iceberg. There's explosions and scenery and conflict to be perceived above the water, but the vast majority of what's going on is happening beneath – and that's the stuff that's really dangerous.

I wonder if I would have enjoyed either of these works half as much when I was in high school. Although I was a pretty damn bright student and English was definitely my favorite subject, I had little to no patience with works that I viewed as heavy-handed, mopey criticisms of the atrocity of human nature. I still have that issue to some extent – it wasn't until my friend Matt filled me in on the context of The Deer Hunter that I could appreciate it as much more than an extended riff on the cliché of "life is pain", but once I understood that The Deer Hunter was the first film to openly criticize the Vietnam war, then things began to make more sense. Knowing that The Deer Hunter opened the door for what I consider to be the much more nuanced, brilliantly shot and thought-inducing Apocalypse Now, well, that makes me even more appreciative of it. Of all the war movies I've been watching lately (as the AFI saw fit to include quite a few), my favorites so far have to be Apocalypse Now and The Bridge on the River Kwai – although I still haven't seen All Quiet on the Western Front or Patton yet. I'll let you know what I think after the project is done.

In any case, this type of thinking is precisely the sort of thing that this "Geoffrey school" is meant to bring about – and now, if I ever wind up teaching Heart of Darkness, I'm certainly going to be screening Apocalypse Now to drive the point home. If Comparative Media Studies had a Ph.D. program, this is what I'd like to think I'd be doing there right now anyway. Perhaps, even if I get fed up waiting for our program to finally get its Ph.D. and go get my degree in English literature, I'll still wind up teaching Comparative Media Studies in spirit and in method. Honestly, I don't think I'd have it any other way.

So far this weekend I've knocked off another two films on my AFI Top 100 project: Network (1976) and A Night at the Opera (1935), and so far it's been a fantastic weekend.

I know I should write more about these films, but really, you've gotta see these to believe 'em. When someone told me that Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip was just Aaron Sorkin drawing Network out into twenty-odd episodes, I scoffed – and now I totally believe it. It makes me even more depressed that there will never be a second season of Studio 60, but I believe it. In a way, Studio 60 is an odd mash-up of homage and meta-level remake: a story decrying the sins of television on television and eventually killed by television. TV scholars everywhere should have been curling up their toes with glee at the synchronicity between the common theme of network interference between Studio 60 and Network and the network meddling that wound up resulting in the show's feeling so wildly uneven, which, of course, led to its untimely demise. (30 Rock didn't help much either, of course, but now I wonder if the green light for 30 Rock was given so that the executives could present the American populace with an option as to which philosophy of television they'd rather believe. That the so-called "TV Generation" would pick the more upbeat candidate should come as a shocker to no one.) Network is now, as I suspected it would be, one of my favorite films ever. Absolutely fantastic writing, acting and message, with a great blend of workhorse framing not getting in the way of the dialogue and narrative and real knock-down awesome cinematography where needed (most notably in Ned Beatty's boardroom scene). Seriously. Well worth the money.

A Night at the Opera, of course, is one of the Marx Brothers' most timeless classics. The Marx Brothers, like Laurel and Hardy or Chaplin, are, I think, a sort of Rorschach test of humor – I myself found Groucho and Chico's one-liners priceless but Harpo's screwball visual gags less interesting – still, in toto I loved the film completely and can't wait to experience more of their work. Laura, on the other hand, didn't warm as much to the film, which makes me suspect the 'Rorschach Test' theory. It's also the case that my own sense of humor is, well, odd, and somewhat anachronistic – many contemporary comedies hold very little appeal to me, but I find the old stuff wonderful. I like Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau more than Jon Heder and Efren Ramirez, for example; given my choices, I'd rather see old Marx brothers movies than Harold and Kumar. I liked the movie, but I liked A Night at the Opera much more.

I suppose the common element to both movies that I appreciate the most, which should surprise absolutely nobody, is the writing. Verbal wit beats slapstick in my book, and compelling, intelligently-written and brilliant dialogue coupled with a great, heartfelt message presented well will get me to make a beeline for the theater. I enjoyed Raging Bull, but I liked Network much more perhaps due to my own preference for intelligent plots; of course, at the same time, I think I liked Raging Bull a great deal more than Rocky (which I also watched last week) because De Niro is clearly a better actor than Stallone and the character was simply more complex. On the Waterfront proves that a character can be far from the sharpest crayon in the box and still complex and endearing; of this "Pugilism Trilogy" I think I may have liked On the Waterfront best, followed by Raging Bull and then Rocky. What do you guys think? Bill?

Since the last time I posted an update on this project, I've managed to watch A Clockwork Orange, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Unforgiven, and Raging Bull. If I weren't still feeling relatively laid low by the bug I caught last weekend (this sucker's a tenacious little SOB) I'd be writing up the kind of lengthy posts I've authored for some of the others. As it is, I just don't have the energy for much more than a couple fleeting high points: Butch and Sundance may be the best buddy movie I've ever seen, and I'm taking careful notes to improve the relationship between the two main characters in my novel; A Clockwork Orange was deservedly awesome for about the first half hour and then veered off into predictability land; Raging Bull is an interesting case study of violence but not as interesting as this year's There Will Be Blood, but it's really interesting to see that hot on the heels of On the Waterfront; and Unforgiven was, as I think Jonathan Gray pointed out in an earlier comment, pretty much Clint Eastwood proving that he can still make Westerns, although it was a decent Western at that.

I think the next couple on my hit list are Rocky and Network, with maybe One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest squeezing in there somewhere. Another thing I might do is lock myself in the house next Sunday while Laura's at work, TiVo the Super Bowl so's I can just watch the commercials, and watch nothing but war movies all day. I figure with enough tenacity, chips and beverages I could probably plow through Apocalypse Now, Platoon, Patton, The Bridge on the River Kwai, All Quiet on the Western Front and maybe even MASH by the end of the day. I'm dang near done with the Westerns after binging on those already – I think I only have Stagecoach and The Wild Bunch left to go there. I also need to do a comedy binge at some point, watching Duck Soup, A Night at the Opera, The General, City Lights, The Gold Rush, and Modern Times. Ken, when's the next time you're going to be up this way?