It can best be described as a stunning piece of experimental metafiction. What if a rote, ghost-written political memoir by a second-place vice presidential candidate was penned by a Faulknerian unreliable narrator? It's like The Turn of the Screw, only the ghost is Steve Schmidt. Our protagonist, "Sarah Palin," deliberately withholds and exaggerates, even dropping into italicized internal monologue to signify that a real whooper's on the way.

Palin's grasp of American dialect is more S.E. Hinton than Twain, of course (while occasionally stunning in its experimental ambition, it is her first published work). But what it occasionally lacks in conversational verisimilitude ("a big darn deal"?) it usually makes up for in unexpected humor. Here she is describing the moment when "Sarah Palin" first learns that she's "pregnant" with the mysterious talisman "Trig":

Slowly a pink image materialized on the stick. Holy geez!

"Trig" inspires this delightfully batty biblical allusion:

Yes Lord, I thought. My name is Sarah, but my husband isn't Abraham. His name is Todd!

Did Todd offer Sarah to the Pharaoh and come away with rewards and riches? When Todd asked for another son, did Sarah offer him her handmaiden, Meg Stapleton? So many questions!

Every so often, the tone abruptly (and cleverly) switches to a savage parody of the pretentious poetics that the sort of person who'd attempt them would call "high-falutin.'" Kakutani highlights a winner from the first page (didn't finish before your deadline, Michiko?)

I breathed in an autumn bouquet that combined everything small-town America with rugged splashes of the Last Frontier.

Exposing the useless charade of an loser would-be Veep expounding on history and foreign policy (as if anyone cared! as if we believed they came up with their insights on their own!) Going Rogue presents a 15-year-old high school basketball team captain's thoughts on the Iran Hostage Crisis, and what it revealed about leadership:

I had followed the Iran hostage crisis and remember wondering why President Jimmy Carter didn't act more decisively. From my high schooler's perspective, I thought the question was, Why did he allow America to be humiliated and pushed around? The new president being sworn in radiated confidence and optimism. The enemies of freedom took notice. In years to come people would ask, What did he have that Carter didn't? To me the answer was obvious. He had a steel spine.

She uses the Dan Rathermism "high on the hog" and complains of being called a demeaning term for the lower classes that she wears with pride:

"My family was made to look like a herd of hillbillies who had come to the big city and started living high on the hog, and that hurt me for them."

"And that hurt me for them." Brilliant.

In this bravura passage, "Palin" complains that a fat man told her to eat well.

He then launched into a discussion of nutrition physiology, holding forth on the importance of carbohydrates to cognitive connections and blah-blah-blah. As he lectured, I took in his rotund physique and noted that he used nicotine to keep his own cognitive connections humming along.

I interrupted his lecture. "Steve, you know what I really need? Half an hour to go for a run in these beautiful cities we're visiting. Also, seeing my kids does wonders for my soul."

He barreled on as if I hadn't spoken. "Headquarters is flying in a nutritionist, and for three days you're going to be on a diet balanced in carbohydrates and nitrates and —"

I'm a forty-four year old, healthy, athletic woman raising five kids and governing a large state, I thought as his words faded into a background buzz. Sir, I really don't know you yet. But you've told me how to dress, what to say, who to talk to, a lot of people not to talk to, who my heroes are supposed to be and we're still losing. Now you're going to tell me what to eat?

A fat smoker told "Sarah Palin" to eat a balanced diet and that made her mad. We cannot recommend this book highly enough. And you can get it for free!

Page scans via Celtic Diva, Wonkette.

Oh, and PS: It turns out that Sarah Palin talks like that because of Government Socialism. Seriously! Alaska's Mat-Stu valley region was populated by upper midwestern farmers relocated to Alaska as part of a New Deal agricultural program. This was basically exactly the sort of thing Stalin would do, and though most of those 200 Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan families who were resettled in Alaska to farm hated it immensely and eventually left, they left behind a legacy of talking like a goober. (Palin also has a western influence in her accent, because her family is from Idaho. And also, obviously, she talks like even more of a goober when she is on television trying to prove that she is as much of a reactionary moron as the reactionary morons she is trying to appeal to. We all know Real Americans don't fully pronounce the suffixes of present participles, etc. etc..)

There is probably nothing more enjoyable on the internet today than to contrast the movie I saw with the reviews of said movie by the only other people in America who saw it: the hardcore Tucker Max fans who frequent his message boards. Never let it be said that we don't provide space for differing opinions.

1. "The comedic value isn't what sets the movie apart to me, it's the fact that it actually has a soul. When I walked out of the theater I wasn't really thinking about how funny it was, I was thinking about friendships I've had in the past that I screwed up or have lost - it made me introspective."

2. "Much in the same way 'fratire' became a new genre, Tucker made this movie from a completely different mold. And, he deserves to be evaluated on that basis."

3. "Tucker and Nils could make 10 sequels to IHTSBIH and they'd still be funny so long as the dialogue didn't repeat. Because that's where the humor was derived: the fucking English language. Crazy concept, right?"

4. "I think you infused the right amount of slapstick, physical comedy (the shit scene, Dan pissing on the cops) into the movie. I like it when you can laugh at two very different levels of humor in the same flick."

5. "I've seen Tucker on camera many times, but it was weird to see him in a movie about him...with him not playing...him. And was it me or was he overacting that role like a motherfucker in the background of those scenes? Haha, nah, you were good dude."

6. "Expected more laugh out loud moments in the movie, but that was mostly from my high expectations. I rarely laugh out loud in movies, but I remember I did during the shit scene and the scene with Drew strangling Lara. A few of the one liners like 'You smell like you got buttfucked by a garbage truck.'"

7. "Take Drew. Not a single person who's criticized the Drew/Lara relationship has mentioned a characteristic of his other than that he "hates women," a fact that shows a deep misunderstanding of the character and relationship. Drew is bitter because he's fucking hurting. He is a very deeply moral character. He clearly puts a lot of weight on trust: he won't lie for his friends because Dan's fiancée trusts him and he will not undermine that. To not have that same trust reciprocated in a relationship as involved as the one he just got out of is fucking devastating.
To give someone your all, to buy them his and hers chairs to play video games in, to so let them into your life, only to catch them sucking off a fucking rapper on your couch? The damage that does to his emotional health is so palpable it's ridiculous. Some of the shots of Jesse reacting to Lara and the kid back at their house are priceless. Bradford does such a good job letting that pain and longing simmer. Chills."

8. "I loved the fact that even though I didn't find it funny, I was only bored during one scene."

9. "We've been so conditioned to see people dodging wrenches to practice dodging a ball, Asian gangsters in car trunks, and Jason Biggs sliding to home plate with a pie that when we see flaming Dr. Peppers we probably expected someone or something to catch fire for some cheap laugh. Instead we heard "So who's the slutty one?" said to a bachelorette party. The line – like the entire tone of the movie – is in your face and that artistic choice is so different the combination is unsettling to some people, but funny to nearly everyone."

10. "In a few years, when critics look at the IHTSBIH franchise as a whole, they're going to be eating a lot of crow. Not because they wrote bad reviews (this movie, like every other movie, has its flaws), but because they failed to miss the "experience" aspect all together. In the same way that George Lucas generated long-term success for Star Wars with cutting-edge movie-making technology, IHTSBIH will ultimately succeed as a franchise and a brand because it completely redefined what it means to "experience" a movie. That's why it's unfair to compare this to any other film. It isn't like them."

Box Office Mojo sez: It opened on 120 screens and raked in a total of $369K, for an opening weekend average of $3,075 per screen. That puts Tucker's movie eighth in per-screen revenue out of the nine movies that opened last weekend. Although he came close to matching the $3,100 per screen average of Blind Date (2009).

But sometimes critically acclaimed films don't have boffo box offices. It's just the nature of high art. Let's go to the reviews:

• Reuters: "the film is unfunny from first minute to last, and its half-hearted attempts at emotion merely underscore its general loathsomeness."
• USA Today: "This unfunny, über-misogynistic adaptation of Tucker Max's audacious best-seller of the same name is unlikely to please anyone."
• Chicago Tribune: "The result just might be the most hypocritical feature in the history of film as well as the history of hypocrisy, and along with serving beer, I hope they show 'I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell' in hell."
• San Francisco Chronicle: "That was epic, bro. You should make a movie ...No, you shouldn't! Put down the digital camera, step away from Robert McKee's guide to screenplays, and get back to ramming your head through Sheetrock during spring break."
• New York Times: "a mediocre gross-out movie that barely pushes the envelope."
• Boston Globe: "Ridiculously cheap-looking, smug, scurrilous, but fairly evolved for a project so fundamentally unevolved."

It was bad. It was really bad. It was not bad in the good way. It was not bad ironically. It was not bad in the "Let's go see it because we like to watch bad movies like Knowing, and laugh at them" way. I do not want to say the wrong thing here, that might convince anyone that this movie is worth paying to see, even for train wreck purposes.

This is the movie that happens when a narcissist—not an interesting one, though—writes an entire movie about how cool he is, and is given full creative control over that movie. Imagine someone you know who is an asshole. Now imagine that person being able to write and produce a movie about themselves, and how awesome they are. There you have it.

The plot of this film: Tucker Max and two of his bros go to a bachelor party, meeting various cum sluts along the way. Whore bitches can't get enough of Tucker Max's bad boy personality, which is probably why so many of these twats want him inside of their vaginas. Tucker fucks a midget stripper and the world loves him for it, the end. Other highlights:

• Close-ups of poop, coming out of someone's butt, a lot.
• There's a wedding scene in the end where the guests are all white and the servers are all black. There's not a joke to go with that.
• The best character in the film is Tucker's friend Drew, because he looks like he was just dropped in from another movie, and can't wait to get back. Drew is a misanthropic video game nerd who goes to strip club and meets a hot stripper who is also a video game nerd and falls for him and they rush home and sleep together and Drew instantly bonds with her son and they become a couple immediately. This is as close to a plausible male-female interaction sequence as this movie gets.

This movie is not, in fact, hilarious.
[Pic: Flickr]

In his astutely worded takedown of the movie, Liel Leibovitz says that Tarantino's revisionist history—where Jewish soldiers kill Nazis and burn Hitler alive—robs history of its shades of gray, and, thereby, this "bit of shallow propaganda" ruins the lessons we were taught by WWII.

It is a failure not only of imagination, but also of morality. The desire to turn film into a literal, blunt instrument of revenge drains it of the terrific power it has as a sharp and precise tool with which to cut through myopia, forgetfulness, ignorance, and denial. When in the hands of intelligent and sensitive directors, the results are shocking, evocative, world-changing.

Of course, all the filmmakers he goes on to name who do this well—Jean-Pierre Melville, Marcel Ophüls, and Claude Lanzmann—are Jewish.

Theirs is the Jewish way. Rather than burn film, they develop it into art. They are talmudic, offering endless interpretations to the fundamental question of our species, the question of our seemingly endless capacity for evil. Tarantino, however, is not interested in such trifles. He doesn't see cinema as a way to look at reality, but-ever the child abandoned in front of the television set, ever the video-store geek-as an alternative to reality, a magical and Manichean world where we needn't worry about the complexities of morality, where violence solves everything, and where the Third Reich is always just a film reel and a lit match away from cartoonish defeat.

So, add to the heaps of criticism of the movie that Tarantino isn't Jewish enough to make a good movie about Nazis. We don't agree with that. We believe that no matter the race, creed, or color, people have the ability to make shitty movies in about equal degree.

The women, who are immaculately clean and wear uniforms which do little to conceal their glowing aboriginal cheekbones and other attractive features, have very strong hands after toil since childhood in fields and in the home virtually without tools,but are surprisingly soft and tender when they massage just the right places...

An intimacy has been shared, for the women, who speak only a handful of words in English and speak Spanish as a second language to their native Indian dialect have communicated much to their guest. And their guest understands everything.

"Please go," they communicated.

By far the best of the 11 Star Trek movies, it must rank as the outstanding prequel of all time...

The picture moves at a terrific pace, and is a satisfying tale of good versus evil, with Eric Bana a highly hissable villain...

This movie really does promise a creative re-birth of science fiction adventure.

In retrospect, perhaps the quality of the film was foreshadowed when Paramount decided to re-up with Abrams a few weeks ago.

Or maybe it's all just advance hype, and the end product will leave us feeling a bit let down, but also intrigued against all reason by hype for the next chapter of the story. But who expect that sort of plot-suspense roller coaster from the creator of Lost??

(Paramount publicity still via)

A.O. Scott at the New York Times think it's about time devotees of the dystopian tale grew the F up:

And the dramatic conflict revealed, at long last, in the film's climactic arguments is between a wholesale, idealistic approach to mass death and one that is more cynical and individualistic. This idea is sickening but also, finally, unpersuasive, because it is rooted in a view of human behavior that is fundamentally immature, self-pitying and sentimental. Perhaps there is some pleasure to be found in regressing into this belligerent, adolescent state of mind. But maybe it's better to grow up.

Owen Gleiberman at Entertainment Weekly, in a B- review, found the material a bit dated:

A no-future nihilism bled from the very grain of Moore and Gibbons' pop vision of the 20th century. But that's a real problem for the movie, since the Cold War nuclear fears of the '80s never did come to pass. Watchmen isn't boring, but as a fragmented sci-fi doomsday noir, it remains as detached from the viewer as it is from the zeitgeist.

A bored Philip Kennicott of the Washington Post, wonders if anyone should have bothered in the first place:

And yet as this continues, for 162 minutes, the usual question arises: Has the film added anything? Which forces one to confront the book, after more than two decades, with a little more critical distance. For years, people have wondered if it is filmable. But the real issue is whether the novel is worth filming at all.

Ol' Kenny Turan at the Los Angeles Times finds value in the book, but not in the film:

To be fair, on the other hand, "Watchmen's" plot is in no way chopped liver, and reverentially sticking to the source material, as the first "Harry Potter" films did, is the only thing that gives this film what watchability it has. Even if you haven't read the book, even if your first exposure to the story is in this denatured form, you can at least sense the power of the original, and that's what will stay in your mind, not what's on the screen.

Richard Corliss at Time lurves the opening sequence, which provides backstory to the tune of Bob Dylan's "The Times They Are a Changin'". He doesn't like all that much else:

Maybe there's no way the rest of the film could match this opening, and for sure it doesn't. Snyder spends much of the movie's 2 hours and 40 minutes on the splatter of crushed limbs, the chatter of Strangelovean science fiction and the nattering of the obligatory romance. He also encourages a little festival of tone-deaf acting. Yet Watchmen has moments of greatness. It proves again that the action movie is where the best young Hollywood brains have gone to bring flesh to their fantasies.

Devin Gordon at Newsweek finds moments of the supposedly-heavy-duty film quite silly:

Snyder's attention wanders when it comes to meat-and-potatoes storytelling, perhaps because he's never really had to tell one before. He draws performances that range from sublime (Jackie Earle Haley as a bitter antihero named Rorschach) to ridiculous (Malin Akerman, who has a sweet onscreen disposition but is nonetheless the Jar Jar Binks of "Watchmen"). ... Snyder also makes gross errors in tone, giving his flimsy villain a rinky-dink costume with nipples on its chest plate. He has said in interviews that he did it on purpose to preserve Moore's sendup of superhero self-seriousness, but that kind of subtlety isn't Snyder's strong suit, which is obvious the first time we see Dr. Manhattan wander across the screen in the nude, with his giant blue junk flapping in the apocalyptic breeze-another misguided sop to the novel and its R-rated sensibility.

Peter Travers at Rolling Stone, as always, boils it down to its silver-lining essence:

At its best, Snyder's movie gets at the symbolism of that smile button splashed with blood on the first Watchmen cover.

So not so good from some of the bigger critics in the land. But does it matter? Probably not initially. The film opened big in midnight screenings early this morning, and it ought to outpace Snyder's previous blockbuster effort, 300. But on the plane of pride and prestige and long-term, Titanic style longevity? Yes it does matter. In the new superhero world of a critically-adored smash like the The Dark Knight—which had a raft of strong reviews behind it (plus far more recognizable characters and a famous death) that helped it juggernaut all through the summer—people are beginning to expect a little awardsy grit with their blood and explosions. Too bad Watchmen didn't quite get there. Many non-believers will probably be reluctant to fork over increasingly-harder-earned doughlars for a long, turgid movie that's just OK.

Once again, Batman foils another plot.

Matt Selman insists he hasn't breached Warner Bros.' review embargo on the film, which opens March 6 and is review-proof anyway. But even so, where hormonal sister publication EW yelped with awe for months over Twilight, the Time blogger has claimed ownership of the geek vanguard with Monday's rather fulsome introspection:

I'm not allowed to talk details, but let's just say it is astounding how much of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' graphic novel is in this movie. [...]

Sitting in that screening room and watching the visual world of the Watchmen movie unfold was one of the most powerful experiences I've ever had. Not film experiences. Just EXPERIENCES. I don't think I realized how close I was to the original book until I saw such a loving, detail-rich, almost obsessive recreation of that universe. It had my heart pounding and head swimming. I barely slept that night. Someone took the most special personal thing of my adolescence and put it on a movie screen. That doesn't happen every day.

Thank God; "most special personal things" of our own adolescence would probably never even clear the ratings board.

• My Own Private 'Watchmen' [Time]

Christy Lemire seems to actually like the rest of the film, but can't seem to let go of the whole "Cruise-is-awful" meme:

It's too bad, too, because "Valkyrie" looks great. With its impeccable production design and German locations - including the Bendlerblock in Berlin, where Operation Valkyrie began and where members of the anti-Nazi resistance were executed after it failed - it feels substantial, never CGI-fake, and it moves fluidly. No one ever doubted the ability of Bryan Singer, director of the first two "X-Men" movies, to make a solid, energetic actioner. But - and this is going to sound like more piling on - Cruise undermines the potential of "Valkyrie" at every turn.

It's the headline 'distractingly bad' that will be remembered because it is so cruel. Yes, it plainly calls Cruise bad without trying to hedge anything. But it's also just so dismissive. "What a nuisance that Tom Cruise has become!" it seems to be saying. Finally a film review to match his increasingly grating public persona. Hell, she even says: "the iconography of his celebrity so strongly overshadowing his performance." I guess all that Tropic Thunder goodwill may have already evaporated.

Aside from the salvo from the AP, Valkyrie actually isn't doing too badly in the reviews department so far, if Rotten Tomatoes is to be believed. But many of the 'top critics' have not yet weighed in, and we're sure the likes of the Davids Denby and Edelstein are sharpening their pens to pepper their critiques with witty little barbs. Well, at least we hope they are. But kudos to Lemire for getting such a strong, nasty start so early out of the gate!

Ben Brantley of the New York Times seems to think she's trying just a bit too hard:

And while Ann is supposed to arrive at the Keller household with high hopes and good intentions, Ms. Holmes delivers most of her lines with meaningful asperity, italicizing every word. This Ann is straight from the school of the Erinyes (those avenging furies from Greek mythology), and I didn’t believe for a second that she really loved the honorable, naïve Chris.

Clive Barnes over at the Post doesn't have much to say, other than describing her as "coltish" and "looking tough under a glossy wig." Hm. Wigs are always fun!

The Daily News' Joe Dziemianowicz is a little more positive:

Holmes, a TV and film vet, makes a fine Broadway debut. Her rather grand speech pattern takes getting used to, but she seems comfortable and adds a fitting glint of glamour. Dancing with Lithgow, kissing Wilson, she makes you forget about her being Mrs. Tom Cruise. At times, however, Holmes is strangely shrill.

Yes, "strangely shrill" sounds about right.

And finally Melissa Rose Bernardo of Entertainment Weekly thinks she's just OK:

After a painfully awkward first scene, she relaxes a bit; she's at her best opposite Wilson, who's terrifically cast as Sons' moral compass.

So good notes for the boys, some pluses for Dianne Wiest, and mostly "meh"s for Mrs. Cruise. Well, at least it wasn't a complete disaster.

[Photo: Sarah Krulwich for the 'New York Times']

Though he deems it "satisfactory," Bruni points out Michael's most obvious flaw: it charges outrageous prices to people who want to see and be seen, so who cares about the food? I'll tell you who: Frank Bruni.

The shrimp were entombed in a dense, soggy beer batter and interred in an almost monochromatic landscape of goat cheese, puddles of dark miso aioli and shavings of summer truffle that might have been shavings of summer rubber for all the flavor they had.

California cuisine? More like gloppy, affected pub grub, for which Michael’s charges $25

Zing! You could have had a corner seat, Frank, but now forget it. How about the obligatory media-food tie-in?

Across a series of visits I had some enjoyable food, notably the renowned Cobb salad, less a salad than an entire ecosystem, vast and verdant, with enough avocado to feed three I.C.M. agents or five Vogue editors.

Gracious. Now back to the main point:

And shouldn’t a diner paying $38 for sea scallops get more than two, situated at opposite ends of a long hillock of sautéed snow pea leaves?

Also keep in mind Michael's is hated by its own waiters, and its sommelier gave Bruni a bum recommendation on Chardonnay. On the upside, you are guaranteed to meet Laurel Touby there.

[NYT; pic via Radar]

See, Brady really wanted this book to be a recitation by Carr of media inside-baseball stuff. "What a glorious read that would be, and what a column or two I could get out of it," he writes. But no—it's full of drug shit!

Set against Carr, Dostoevsky was a bundle of laughs, The Lost Weekend a riot, Nelson Algren's fictional "Frankie Machine" a hail fellow well met...

Fine, the man's a writer, and I want books to sell and be read. Just not this one, not by me.

But will you look at that: Brady still managed to get an entire column out of how he won't read this book! The man is a pro. Don't worry Jim, you can read this instead.

[Forbes]

• "[In] 2002 Nestlé produced a training manual aimed at waiters called 'Pour on the Tips'. Converting guests to pricey bottled water, it said, could boost their monthly earnings by $100 or more."
• "[One] executive promised a gathering of Wall Street analysts in 2000 that tap water would eventually be used only for showers and washing dishes."
• “[The] total energy required for every bottle’s production, transport and disposal is equivalent, on average, to filling that bottle a quarter of the way with oil.”
• "It costs between 250 and 10,000 times more than tap water and in blind tastings people cannot usually separate the fancy beverage from the ordinary stuff."

Of course,author Elizabeth Royte also point out that normal tap water is, in many areas, full of pollutants. So we're screwed either way. But at least drinking from the tap will save us all some money on the way to the apocalypse.

[Economist, NYT; pic via Brett Weinstein]

• "Nolan was wise enough, however, to give Ledger plenty of room to shine — albeit in the actor's indelibly perverse, twisted way. There's nothing cartoony about his Joker. Ledger wrested the role from previous performers Cesar Romero and Jack Nicholson and reinvented it completely." [AP]
• "Ledger's performance is a beauty. His Joker has a slow cadence of speech, as if weighing words for maximum mischief and contempt. He moves languidly as if to savor his dark deeds, his head and body jerking at times from an overload of brain impulses." [THR]
• "It's a stupendously creepy performance, wild but never over the top. He cuts a figure so dangerous that you wonder if Batman is up to the task—or if our hero himself will have to become as ruthless as his foe. When you're fighting an enemy who plays by no rules, do you have to abandon your own moral code to vanquish him?" [Newsweek]
• "I can only speak superlatives of Ledger, who is mad-crazy-blazing brilliant as the Joker. Miles from Jack Nicholson's broadly funny take on the role in Tim Burton's 1989 Batman, Ledger takes the role to the shadows, where even what's comic is hardly a relief. No plastic mask for Ledger; his face is caked with moldy makeup that highlights the red scar of a grin, the grungy hair and the yellowing teeth of a hound fresh out of hell. To the clown prince of crime, a knife is preferable to a gun, the better to 'savor the moment.'" [Rolling Stone]
• "How is Heath Ledger? My heart went out to him. He’s working so very hard to fill the void, to be doing something every second. It’s rave and rage and purge acting. This Joker is a straight-out psychopath—a Stephen King clown-demon with smudged greasepaint and yellow teeth and hair that appears to have never been washed. As written, the Joker is like a souped-up Andy Robinson in Dirty Harry (only this Harry won’t blow him away with a .44 Magnum), and Ledger revs it higher and higher. He bugs his eyes and licks compulsively at the gashes that extend his mouth. He tries on different voices. First he sounds like Cagney in White Heat, then slides into a prissy singsong like Al Franken’s Stuart Smalley, then throws in some fruity Brando flourishes and a dash of Hannibal Lecter. He’s lethal—fast with sharp objects—but apart from a gruesome bit with a pencil not terribly prankish. I couldn’t take my eyes off him, but in truth, I found the performance painful to watch. Scarier than what the Joker does to anyone onscreen is what Ledger must have been doing to himself—trying to find the center of a character without a dream of one." [NYMag]
• "[Bale's is] a dogged but uninteresting performance, upstaged by the great Ledger, who shambles and slides into a room, bending his knees and twisting his neck and suddenly surging into someone’s face like a deep-sea creature coming up for air. Ledger has a fright wig of ragged hair; thick, running gobs of white makeup; scarlet lips; and dark-shadowed eyes. He’s part freaky clown, part Alice Cooper the morning after, and all actor. He’s mesmerizing in every scene. His voice is not sludgy and slow, as it was in 'Brokeback Mountain.' It’s a little higher and faster, but with odd, devastating pauses and saturnine shades of mockery. At times, I was reminded of Marlon Brando at his most feline and insinuating. When Ledger wields a knife, he is thoroughly terrifying (do not, despite the PG-13 rating, bring the children), and, as you’re watching him, you can’t help wondering—in a response that admittedly lies outside film criticism—how badly he messed himself up in order to play the role this way. His performance is a heroic, unsettling final act: this young actor looked into the abyss." [New Yorker]

· "Hancock can offer only an A-list headliner in a D-list project." — Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune

· "Squanders potential greatness with lame humor and a half-baked hero." — Robert Wilonsky, Village Voice

· "It's a strange feeling to see the summer's most promising premise self-destruct into something bizarre and unsatisfying, but that is the Hancock experience." — Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times

· "It has a big sag in the middle that nothing could have fixed." — Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle

· "This movie fails so spectacularly - and on so many levels - that it's like watching a train plummet off a bridge." — Lou Lumenick, New York Post

Harsh! Has the king of the 4th of July weekend finally been dethroned? Probably not, because, critics be damned, I'm still gonna see it. Seems like the American thing to do. But perhaps Will Smith should spend less time founding robot-building Scientology schools and pay more attention to the scripts he chooses.

• Hancock [Rotten Tomatoes]

#1: Be late with the reviewer's reservation.

He returned at 9:02 with something less than disaster relief. Our table, he said, should be ready in 10 minutes. Never mind that we'd been told at 8:45 that we had five minutes to go. Never mind that Ago has some 110 seats, giving it more flexibility than many restaurants have.

We waited. And waited. One of the hostesses finally fetched us at 9:22. I'll do the math: that's 52 minutes after our reservation.

#2: Spill wine on the reviewer or his friends.

I'm talking about the "Poseidon Adventure" of wine spills. Shelley Winters could have done the backstroke in it. I'm not sure how the bartender set it in motion, and neither was he. He kept marveling at its fury and aftermath: my friend's wine-splashed chin, her wine-soaked skirt, her wine-sopped entirety.

#3: Put the reviewer at the worst table in the house.

She led us to a round table little bigger than a bike wheel. When our four appetizers later arrived and claimed every square millimeter of it, the waiter audibly contemplated balancing a fifth, communal appetizer that we'd ordered on top of our wine glasses.

The table was pressed so close to a column that I couldn't lower my right arm all the way, and if my wine-drenched friend leaned back in her chair, the column obstructed her view of me and mine of her.

#4: Have bad food.

This restaurant isn't in the hospitality business. It's in the attitude business, projecting an aloofness that permeated all of my meals there, nights of wine and poses for swingers on the make, cougars on the prowl and anyone else who values a sort of facile fabulousness over competent service or a breaded veal Milanese with any discernible meat.

The one I had one night was pounded so thin that the breading on top met the breading on the bottom without pausing for much of anything in between. A vegan could have made peace with it.

#5: Have waiters who are jerks.

Then came an entree that perplexed us, a pale slab of meat with one long bone.

"What is this?" asked one of my friends.

"The special veal chop," said the food deliverer.

"But I ordered rack of lamb," my friend said. I had heard him.

"Yes," said the deliverer. "That's rack of lamb."

My friend pressed: which was it?

"It's the special rack-of-lamb veal chop," the deliverer said, at which point we sought deliverance from him and searched for our frequently vanishing waiter, whom I had come to think of as the bucatini Houdini.

[NYT]

Well, eight months after it first started making headlines we finally managed to score an invite to the Zivity beta site, and now we can tell you: not very much.

After all the hype it's received, we expected ... well, something we hadn't seen before, or at least something pretty special. You know, something slightly more than just an opportunity to set up a profile page and look at some pictures of naked chicks female beauty.

Granted, Zivity has entered the market at more than a bit of disadvantage. With megaporn site (excuse us, modern pinup showcase) SuicideGirls setting a certain standard for adult communities online, it can be pretty hard for any new kid on the block to compete. Still, given that Zivity is clearly aware of SG (Missy Suicide is one of their photographers), you'd think they'd at least try to have a site that's more impressive.

No such luck, though: aside from the photos and their totally original voting system, there's not much there there Does anyone really need yet another website where they can set up yet another profile? Sure, the pictures are pretty hot (if a bit tame) ... but why do you have to have one more profile to keep track of just to look at them?

Sample model page

Sample Photo Set

Photo Upload Page (note: no nudity for nonmodels!)

To be fair, Zivity is in beta, so maybe they have some other features in the works that will be in place before their public launch. If not ... well, we sure hope at least a chunk of that $7 million is winding up in their models' pockets. We hate to see good money going to waste.

· Zivity

* * * * *

Previously: Zivity's Big Score: Good Money After Bad?, Porn 2.0: Haven't We Been Here Before?, The New Porn.com: When Bad Things Happen To Good Domains

The new book, by Boston University professor Donna Freitas, is called Sex and the Soul, and it's an exposition of college sex youth sex hookup soul religion relationships problems whatever shall we do blah blah blah. But honestly, Professor Mansfield's review is pure gold. Who would have thought a Harvard man could sound so formal, stilted, and full of shit?

No doubt lurid anecdote and popular myth cause us to exaggerate the actual frequency of campus hook-ups: Most college students do not share in these delights. But most students also believe that "everyone does it," even if the individual student, for some reason, cannot locate a partner. Thus an active minority sets the tone and makes hooking up a "culture."