Curb Your Enthusiasm, shark, jump?

For a while this season I felt that Curb Your Enthusiasm had jumped the shark.  (No huge spoilers here, btw.) Or probably that’s the wrong phrase in its suggestion of a Rubicon-crossing into sudden badness; more a sinking into repetitive tics and self-indulgence of some of the show’s worst qualities.  Is it possible that every [...]

Where the Wild Things Are as family therapy

Spike Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are is kind of like a long, whacked-out family therapy session.  Maurice Sendak has commented that the monsters in the book are all based on his Polish-Jewish aunts and uncles back in 1930s Brooklyn.  Homage seems to be paid in the Wild Things’ names in the movie: Judith, Ira, [...]

Ballet, rainbows, magic, fairies, and jewelry

Sometimes it feels like we’re continually being hit up for money via the girls’ kindergarten.  What I don’t like about it is the sense that the school or the PTA are using the kids for fund-raising — invoking the nag factor to get us to pony up.  If they wrote directly asking if we could [...]

Torture Porn Lit

Just read Heartsick by Chelsea Cain which I picked up looking for something else because, I think, Amazon named it the top thriller of 2007.
I didn’t altogether enjoy it — it seemed derivative (of Silence of the Lambs, although it does have the wit tacitly to acknowledge the debt when the psycho killer mockingly refers [...]