The Stars and the Cookie Jar

I'm not Jewish, but I think that Munich did a fantastic job of portraying the situation in such a way that doesn't force you to see one side or another. It leaves it very ambiguous and let's the audience make up its own mind.

I think it's, at the least, worth a viewing. I really enjoyed it and thing it honestly should win over Brokeback Mountain.

I really liked The Constant Gardener. (Keep in mind that I'm biased toward John Le Carre, not to mention Ralph Fiennes and Rachel Weisz, but I think I can still claim a certain degree of objectivity.) Not at all in cinematography or style, but in the feel of its characters and story, it reminded me of a certain kind of film made in the 1940's and 1950's—if it hadn't been for all the vivid color and the unambiguous importance of the African landscape, so much so that the scenery was practically a character in its own right, The Constant Gardener could have been a film noir. There was something of that labyrinthine kind of plot, the characters whose loyalties and even true selves are uncertain, and the lone protagonist who is forced to change to survive—either into someone more suited to this new environment, or someone whom he might have been all along—as he navigates all the tangles that even the audience can't necessarily riddle out.

None of this is criticism. I really like film noir; and I did not find The Constant Gardener predictable, although it did offer the fun of trying to figure out where the story was headed next. I just realized a few days after viewing it that, in fact, it hadn't been as alien a kind of film as I'd first thought. But Rachel Weisz completely deserved her Oscar. She has to play a character who's initially as impenetrable to the audience as to her husband and yet she can't be a cipher, a blank—the film fails completely if she is. You have to believe in her three-dimensionally and still not be able to figure her out. That's damn tricky, and she made it work.

Also also, I think the film version of my book will be brilliant. When it happens. Because some smarter, more talented person will purge it of all the silly errors that impede and encumber it as a book, and just distill it to the talking and the pretty pictures.

I happen to think that one of the great virtues of A Verse from Babylon is its writing style, but I still really want to see it as a film. Just don't ask me to write the screenplay.