Carnival of souls

My New Plaid Pants blogger and longtime ADDTF chum Jason Adams insists that Mike White’s Year of the Dog is a tragedy rather than a feel-good film. But like Reihan Salam (and as opposed to my uninformed concern, derived from what in retrospect was a misreading of Salam), he thinks White is fully aware of this, and that the critics who are getting it wrong are doing so all on their own.

Rue Morgue’s blog, the Abbatoir, has a pretty bitchin’ mini-interview with Hostel director Eli Roth on how he got his fake trailer for Grindhouse, Thanksgiving, to look so awesomely decrepit. Am I the only one who didn’t realize it was shot in Prague, by the way?

Matt Zoller Seitz’s weekly Sopranos recaps/reviews/analyses remain second to none. I was particularly taken with two passages from this week’s post:

[Tony’s] back to being beat-up-’em, bed-’em-down Tony, except more of an automaton, a bad boy reverting to type but not really reveling in it.

I think that might be overselling his return to his old self a bit, but the part about not reveling in it is astute. Even better:

…was [this week’s episode] “Remember When” really that muddled, or have the show’s writers just gotten more confident, more inclined to let scenes and lines of dialogue complement each other obliquely, without the Playwriting 101 symmetry that many TV series (even The Sopranos) equate, often speciously, with Art?

Yes, yes, a thousand times yes. This is what makes The Sopranos brilliant–and, incidentally, why I’ve always enjoyed but never loved that “College” episode from Season One wherein Tony balances taking Meadow on a tour of prospective colleges with murdering a rat he happens across; it always seemed a little easy for me.

I’ll tell you, I wish I had this passage to hand a few weeks ago when I was trying to explain to a coworker why my appreciation for the work of Alan Moore has dimmed somewhat over time. If one were in an uncharitable mood, “Playwriting 101 symmetry” would feel like an appropriate way to refer to an awful lot of his ostentatiously writerly and artifice-ial work, wouldn’t it?