Here's the most astonishing cinematic rumor I've heard in a long time: is Alfonso Cuarón directing an adaptation of In Search of Lost Time?

I hope that everyone got what they wanted for Christmas! In my stocking, among other things, was a copy of Emmy Rossum's new album, which I presumably received because Santa (or one of his helpers) noticed that I watched this video way too many times...

A blessed event in Vancouver: The X-Files sequel begins filming today!

The New York Times finally addresses an issue that Torrey and I have been arguing about for years. Except in our case, both of us would be trying to throw the softball game. Perhaps we could put it to an internet vote...one of the choices would have to be Nat's suggestion, "Manman."

In a recent issue of The Atlantic, Andrew Sullivan writes: "It’s November 2008. A young Pakistani Muslim is watching television and sees that this man—Barack Hussein Obama—is the new face of America. In one simple image, America’s soft power has been ratcheted up not a notch, but a logarithm."

I love the image and the sentiment, but come on—"a logarithm?" What does that mean? (It's worse than saying that something represents a "quantum leap"—which, as one of my former roommates never tires of pointing out, is the smallest leap there is...)

This clip and this clip of Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer going nuts are officially my favorite viral videos of all time. They're a couple of years old, but if you haven't seen them, they're new to you!

My favorite reporter at the Chicago Tribune has an excellent article about Kindle, Amazon's new electronic book reader. The coolest thing about this gadget, as far as I'm concerned, is that it includes free lifetime access to Wikipedia. Why am I so excited about this? Well, think about it: it's a convenient, paperback-sized device that gives you instant access to a universal encyclopedia of dubious accuracy. Yep, you've guessed it: it's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy...

I never thought that Tom Cruise would ever release a movie that I wouldn't want to see in the theater, but life is full of surprises. Adjusted for inflation, Lions for Lambs is on track to be lowest-grossing movie of his career. (Even Losin' It has sold more tickets.) As an obsessive completist, I'm sure that I'll rent it eventually, but sadly, it doesn't sound like a movie that I'd pay money to see—and I've paid to see Southland Tales.

It's been a while since I've posted an item about the bond market, but this article from the Times, about an MIT professor's study of Iraqi bond prices, is too interesting to pass up:

Comparing the yields on Iraqi bonds from the start of the surge in February to late August, Professor Greenstone calculated that the bondholders implicitly raised the chances of an Iraqi bond default by 40 percent. Over that period, Iraqi bond prices fell about 14 percent—as much as the Confederate cotton bonds fell after the battle of Gettysburg.

Oh, and if you're interested in those Confederate bonds, there's a study about them, too. Until Gettysburg, the odds of a Southern victory were priced at 42 percent...

It took a force as powerful as Bill O'Reilly to get me back into blogging. I spotted his lastest work, Kids are Americans Too, in the bookstore last week, and I was hooked - I spend the next forty minutes devouring it (this wasn't very difficult - the book is 130 pages long and is double-spaced with generous margins). I even wrote an Amazon review, the first time I've ever done that with a book.

While I won't repeat what I said on Amazon, suffice to say that this book is an awful embarrassment. I usually don't read books about current events by people like Bill O'Reilly because I already know what they're going to say, but they're just giving opinions that people can accept or reject. What makes this book so fascinating/infuriating is that it purports to be something of a treatise for young people about their constitutional rights. I am quite certain no lawyer ever read this book before it was published, and the legal analysis is astonishingly inaccurate. (To take one example, O'Reilly asserts that the Constitution protects the right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," which of course it does not. He then frames a hypothetical to analyze how different people's rights to "happiness" might conflict and how courts resolve those conflicts. Quite bizarre.) Shouldn't publishers at least feel some responsibility to ensure that informational guides for children aren't filled with falsehoods?

You've probably heard this already, but No Country for Old Men is an absolutely sensational thriller, with sequences of extraordinary suspense and excitement, a consistently dazzling level of craft, and one of the four or five best villains in movie history. At its best, it shows how simple, and excruciating, good suspense can be: all you need is a darkened hotel room, a light in the hallway, and knowledge of who is waiting on the other side of the door...

As for Norman Mailer, for all his posturing and insecurity, he was a mensch, too, my hero and role model. For much of my life, I wanted to be like him. In the end, he showed that the line between exemplar and cautionary tale is fine indeed—and that, my friends, is a life to envy.

As we were leaving the screening of Blade Runner a few weeks ago, Wailin and I noticed Ethan Hawke exiting the same theater. Ethan and I haven't spoken in a few years (okay, I interviewed him once about his performance in Hamlet), and I found myself unable to even remember what he'd done recently. (Training Day was the last of his movies to come to mind.)

Well, it turns out that he's been busy doing the best work of his career. Before the Devil Knows You're Dead is just about the darkest, bleakest thriller in years, and among its many triumphs is that it casts Philip Seymour Hoffman and Hawke as brothers, of all things, and somehow makes it plausible: there are even moments when you can see a family resemblance. The plot is classic noir, with a deceptively simple premise—one that I wouldn't dream of revealing—that grows inexorably more complicated with every scene, and provides wonderful moments, like arias, for all of its leading actors.

The fact that this uncompromising, searingly entertaining movie was directed by 83-year-old Sidney Lumet only makes it more astonishing. A.O. Scott, as usual, gets it right: "The screen may be full of losers, liars, killers and thieves, but behind the camera is a mensch."

Watching American Gangster last weekend, there were moments when I thought that it was the first movie in a long time that deserved to be compared to L.A. Confidential. In the days that have followed, my memories of the movie have faded a bit (due partly to the film's only major flaw, an oddly listless color palette that had me squinting at the screen), but it's still the most muscular job of acting, writing, and directing that I've seen this year, a movie that absolutely nobody should miss.

Between this film and the final cut of Blade Runner, which I saw last month at the Ziegfield, I may need to revise my opinion of Ridley Scott, whom I've always found hard to love. David Thomson seemed to get it right: "He has no character: it is as difficult after fifteen years and eight films to guess the kind of person he is as it was before he started." But Thomson also points out that, for Scott, collaborators are vital. As a case in point, Steven Zaillian's screenplay for American Gangster is the best that Scott has ever had—it's also the best script of the year—and he turns nearly every scene into something bloody and glorious.

Is this the greatest YouTube video of all time? Maybe. It's certainly in the top hundred...

Earlier this week, I finally had the chance to see Across the Universe, a movie that inspires highly divided reactions, and for good reason. There are sequences (especially "Because" and "Hey Jude") that I wouldn't have missed for the world, and other scenes (notably Eddie Izzard's cover of "Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite") that play like something from the notorious '70s version of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

Julie Taymor, who is possibly the leading female director in the world today, has delivered an ambitious, lovingly constructed movie, but it suffers from a general absence of humor, which seems profoundly antithetical to its source material. After all, the Beatles themselves made a number of musicals that were irreverent, fast, and cheeky, which reflects the spirit of their music more than this sometimes lugubrious tribute. I'm always heartened by the fact that the last song on the last album that the Beatles ever recorded wasn't the glorious "The End" but the goofy "Her Majesty," a reminder that everything was always, ultimately, meant to be in fun—a fact that Across the Universe doesn't quite understand.

(Of course, I also believe that the greatest rock movie ever made is Pink Floyd The Wall, an astonishingly pretentious film that perfectly fits the personalities of its creators. There's a time and place for everything, I guess...)

I just got back from conducting a short seminar on The Red Shoes at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, which went surprisingly well. (A friend of a friend is teaching the class, and I was invited to come in as a guest lecturer.) I did a shot-by-shot analysis of a couple of scenes and had a great time. The timing was especially appropriate because Deborah Kerr, star of The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp and Black Narcissus and a longtime companion of Michael Powell, died earlier this week. Kerr was discovered by Powell and Pressburger, and was far more interesting in her early work with the Archers than she was later in Hollywood. The obituaries give scant attention to this period in her career, which is a shame. In particular, nobody who has seen her in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (in three roles!) has ever forgotten it. If you've never seen this movie, well, this is as good a time as any...

I've just found out that NetBank, the online bank where I used to keep a good chunk of my savings, filed for bankruptcy last week as a result of the subprime mortgage crisis. (It's the first savings and loan to fail in more than fourteen years.) As you probably know from the fine print on your banking statement, deposit accounts are covered up to $100,000 by the FDIC, but a lot of people seem to have been keeping savings in excess of that amount, which means that they get to be creditors in NetBank's worthless receivership. As for me, I switched to a different bank a couple of years ago, but if nothing else, the situation serves as a good reminder of why you shouldn't keep all of your eggs in one basket.

Last weekend's activities were among the more crowded and culturally diverse in recent memory, so you'll need to be satisfied with a précis. Highlights included:

1. Lust, Caution. Along with Zodiac, Ang Lee's NC-17 epic is one of the most technically accomplished movies I've seen this year, and seems likely to score Oscars for its cinematography, art direction, and costume design. It's long and emotionally reserved, but always absorbing, and it serves as a reminder that Lee is a director who can do just about anything. The level of craft displayed here is astounding, and it's enough to move the story past moments of implausibility that would have wrecked a lesser film. (If Lust, Caution and the amazing Eastern Promises are any indication, the fall movie season is off to a great start.)

2. The Lincoln Center premiere of The Darjeeling Limited. We didn't actually go inside, but we lingered on the red carpet long enough to catch glimpses of Adrien Brody, Bill Murray, Wes Anderson, Tilda Swinton, and Leelee Sobieski (who is infinitely more stunning in person than she is on screen).

3. High School Musical: The Ice Show. Don't ask me how I ended up at Madison Square Garden with thousands of screaming six-year-olds, but I did. I'll say this much: Disney puts on a good show, the songs are pretty catchy, and at least now I'll have something to talk about with my cousins at Christmas.

4. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. A midnight showing at Landmark Sunshine Cinemas on the Lower East Side. Yes.

This tribute is several months overdue, but I was saddened to learn that Colin Fletcher, one of my heroes, passed away in June. Fletcher was the greatest and most eloquent author ever to write on the subject of camping and hiking, and although I've never backpacked in my life, Fletcher occupied a prominent place in my pantheon of writers on literary merits alone. (As one measure of my respect, several years ago, I wrote the original version of Fletcher's wholly inadequate entry on Wikipedia.)

If I were forced to reduce my library to only ten books, the third edition of The Complete Walker, which has been one of my favorite books since childhood, would have to be one of them. It's been a constant companion for more than fifteen years, a source of wisdom and entertainment, a book that nourished my dreams. I'm grateful to Fletcher in ways that I can barely express, and I can only hope that his spirit lives on.