I have owned several copies of this book, and have given away more copies than I can count. It's a book I come back to, at least once a year since 1980, when I first read it. It seems to me to be better and better each time. The times it's about may be long gone, but the issues at the heart of these essays haven't changed much at all.
Much has been made of Didion's take on California, and this book is laden with essays about the place, and the people, and a particular time that - as other reviewers here have noted - has a different resonance in popular culture than the one she presents here. Didion herself recently professed some alarm at the idea that she is an expert on the place (in… Read more
Soul Coughing never made a better album. "Sugar Free Jazz", one of the tracks here, is a pretty good description of the way this sounds. Other people have told me that Irresistable Bliss is more 'pop' and accessible, but the tracks on this CD have more staying power. Some of the standouts are "Is Chicago", "True Dreams of Wichita", and of course the extraordinarily evocative "Screenwriter's Blues". If there's ever been a record that creates a set of emotions in the way a volume of good short stories does, this is it. I've owned it for years, and it's still one of my most frequently played CDs today.
In "Adventures In The Screen Trade" Bill Goldman tells a story about the moment in "The Great Waldo Pepper" where the audience turned on the film, and began to hate it. Once a film loses an audience in a way that makes them hostile, it's impossible to get them back. And so it was with me, and "Identity".
Without giving away spoilers it's a little hard for me to describe exactly what it is about this movie that I disliked so intensely, but at its heart my problem is with the central contrivance of the script, which becomes apparent about 20 minutes into the film. The film asks the viewer to speculate on what might or might not be real. The problem with this as… Read more
