Humanizing The Vacuum

The greatest thing about Laurent Cantet’s The Class is the way in which its long, unmediated exchanges between teacher and students play like the most delicate international diplomacy — which, considering the state of modern, multiracial France, it probably is.

This practically indecipherable single about unhealthy food is my single of the week.

Olivia de Havilland lives! The ninety-two year-old two-time Oscar winner talks to The Independent about Meryl Streep (“I would watch anything with Meryl Streep in it”), Erroll Flynn (they were never lovers, she insists), and writing her autobiography. What she won’t discuss: her decades-long rift with sister Joan Fontaine.

What can I say about John Hughes that hasn’t been already? His funniest script was National Lampoon’s Vacation (I haven’t seen Planes, Trains, and Automobiles in years).  The Molly Ringwald Trilogy meant nothing to me growing up (I was a Heathers guy, but it isn’t much better; it’s a mirror-image…

A couple of unexpected deaths today. Will come back later. Until now: I work all day, and get half-drunk at night. Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare. In time the curtain-edges will grow light. Till then I see what’s really always there: Unresting death, a whole day nearer…

Former Solicitor General Ted Olson keeps raising my eyebrows. A few months after agreeing to file a lawsuit in federal court with Democratic paladin David Boies on behalf of gay Californian couples, he sat down for this interview with the L.A. Times. Olson, who argued Bush v. Gore before the…