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Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin did a snappy banter bit at this year’s Oscars before they presented the lifetime achievement award to director Robert Altman. The whole performance was an homage to Altman and his films. Fast, seemingly improvised dialogue is his trademark. Well, that and having large, talented ensemble casts.

The ony other Altman film I’ve ever seen is Gosford Park, and I enjoyed that immensely. Too bad I can’t give the same praise to A Prairie Home Companion.

The movie A Prairie Home Companion is little more than an episode of the radio show. And not a particularly interesting episode at that.

To be fair, I’m not a fan of the radio show. This isn’t to say I don’t like it. I do. I just don’t go out of my way to catch it. True fans do. True fans know precisely what time it comes on public radio and keep their schedules free so as not to miss it. That’s not me. I’ll listen to the show if I’m in the car and I don’t have an audiobook handy, but not otherwise.

When I DO listen, however, I enjoy it. I find Garrison Keillor comfortably charming and can’t help but smile at his Guy Noir bits or his off handed recollections of growing up on Lake Wobegone.

And I guess that’s why I was so disappointed by the movie. Unlike the radio show, it just wasn’t funny. Sure, it had a few chuckles here and there, but most of it was boring. Garrison Keillor, bless his heart, is a radio actor, not a screen actor. He’s got no film presence. No measure of that special Hollywood … something. No million dollar smile.

In fact, he doesn’t even have a one dollar smile. His only expression is a deep, somber frown. I’m not exaggerating. Happy, sad, remorseful. It’s all the same long face. He’s No Emotion Man.

Kevin Kline, on the other hand, was fun as Guy Noir, although the filmmakers’ decision to use Noir as the theater security detail instead of as his true pulp detective self on some mysterious assignment was a huge mistake.

Woody Harrelson and John C. Reiley as slightly off-color singing cowboys gave the movie its only real laughs. Their song about dirty jokes had Lauren and I rolling.

Virginia Madsen played an angel character that made no sense whatsoever. She could be seen by some people, but not others. And the ones who COULD see her didn’t seem the least bit bothered by her being there. I mean, what stage manager would tolerate a stranger strolling around backstage unescorted? What’s worse, no one batted an eye when they found out she was an angel. HELLO! If someone tells you she’s an angel, you’re going to have a reaction, whether you believe her or not.

The Special Features showed some making-of documentaries, but they weren’t anything to write home about. I WAS intrigued by Robert Altman, however. He died recently, so I wasn’t surprised by his old and fragile appearance. In the documentaries, he was almost always sitting on set, and when he did move around, it was with a slow, measured shuffle, as if he feared falling over with every step.

Garrison Keillor wrote the screenplay, and the plot, if you can call it that. The premise was that the theater had been sold and this was the last performance of the program’s successful thirty-year run. What was odd was that no one seemed particularly broken up about this fact. Only the sandwich lady showed any emotion over it. No one else seemed to care.

And if the characters don’t care, why in the world should I?

Perhaps I’m too accustomed to movie conventions. Or maybe I’m too uncultured, incapable of recognizing the genius that is Robert Altman. Either way, A Prairie Home Companion is a film I’ll soon forget.

Despite getting mixed reviews, The Da Vinci Code made a boatload of money when it hit theaters, with a large portion of the ticket sales coming from overseas, suggesting that the novel by Dan Brown was as big a hit, if not bigger, outside the US as it was within. That’s amazing to me, especially considering how immensely popular the book was here in the grand ole U. S. of A. I mean, how can you get more popular than that? Everyone read it. You couldn’t walk down the street without tripping a copy. It was a cultural phenomenon. (You know you’ve hit it big as an author when people start writing books about your book. And it didn’t stop there either; there were probably books written ABOUT the books written.) The world was Da Vinci crazy. Mr. Brown must have made a fortune to rival that of J. K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series.

The biggest criticism of the movie was that it was too slow. Not enough action. (We movie goers get fidgety, apparently, if something doesn’t blow up every few minutes or so.) Tom Hanks got his share of criticism of well. His Robert Langdon was too passe, they said, too flat, too uninteresting. And on and on.

Oh well, Tom. You can’t win ’em all.

As for me, I enjoyed the film. Richie Cunningham from Happy Days (aka director Ron Howard) did a fine job, I thought. The Da Vinci Code was a difficult book to adapt, and Howard and Akiva Goldsmith, who wrote the screenplay, found a way to present all the historical data and theories of the novel without intruding too heavily on the story line. In other words, it didn’t feel slow to me. History had to be explained. Ideas had to be presented, complex and century old ideas: the Priory of Sion, the theory of the grail, the Templars, the pagan religions which toppled under Christianity, symbols, architecture, and of course Da Vinci himself, a suspected Grand Master of the secret society devoted to protecting the grail.

The DVD also included a teaser trailer for Angels and Demons, the novel written by Brown before The Da Vinci Code and featuring the same hero, the Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon. The trailer showed no footage because none has yet been shot. Principle photography is set to begin soon. When it hits theaters, you can bet your bottom dollar this will rake in the money as well. I found Angels and Demons a much more cinematic story. It has the Hollywood “chase pace” that critics thought Code lacked. Tom Hanks is set to star again, but we’ll have to wait until 2008 to see if critics will be any kinder the second time around.

I tried reading this book awhile ago, but I couldn’t get past the first half, in which King recounts his rise to super stardom. It’s not that I found King vain, which is the fault of many writers’ memoirs (see Nicholas Spark’s Three Weeks with My Brother, or the more appropriate title Why I’m Such a Genius. The segment on how he “cured” his son of autism was particularly galling). It’s just that there are a lot of books out there that I want to read, and a book filled with stories of Stephen King’s childhood just isn’t one of them. So I put the book aside.

Turns out I threw in the towel just before it got good.

A friend of mine at work keeps this book at his desk. I noticed it on the shelf in his cubicle, and so decided to give King another try. This time, however, I’d go with the audiobook. Perhaps another reader could bring life to what I didn’t find terribly compelling before.

That turned out to be the case. The reader was King himself, and I was surprised to find that King can be charming and funny and a pleasant companion, someone you could sit down in your living room with and listen to for hours. The only other authors I’ve found who can pull this off are Orson Scott Card and Bill Bryson.

In any event, I relistened to the first half of the book and found it slightly more interesting, though even King couldn’t charm me through some of the bits. What I did enjoy hearing was how determined King was as a high schooler to write stories and get them published. It’s the best motivational speech anyone could give on the subject. The man was rejected into oblivion. And yet his love of the craft and story creation kept him on course, never deterred. You got to give props to the guy for that.

And I also enjoyed the bit about him selling CARRIE, his first novel. A fairy tale story if there ever was one. Pretty neat.

The latter half of the memoir is the book’s real treat, however. King discusses the ins and outs of a career in writing, answering those questions everyone asks (Where do your stories come from? How do I get an agent?) as well as those questions no one asks but should (What can you teach us about the language, the mechanics of style, dialogue and story construction?).

Like any writer, King has his pet peeves: passive voice and most adverbs, to name two–novice writers like me will find these nuggets of wisdom particularly helpful. He emphasizes grammar, endorsing The Elements of Style as the tell-all textbook on the subject. He lets slip his opinion of literary critics and those who turn their noses up at writers like him whose work must be trash because it’s popular. He discusses plotting, and I found it fascinating to learn that he does little of it. King lets his characters dictate the story, which is how it should be of course, but were I to go without at least a rough outline, I think I’d quickly find myself way off in the bushes. Frankly, I suspect King does a great deal of plotting, just unconsciously. Writing solid stories is second nature to him. He doesn’t even notice himself plotting. It just happens naturally. Like riding a bike.

If only everyone could be so lucky.

He concludes the book telling the story of the terrible accident that befell him during the writing of it. Back in 1999, some crazed man nearly killed King when he ran over him with his van. It’s a pretty gory tale. The man’s lucky to be alive.

And I’m glad he is. Because at the time of his accident, he was still not finished with either this book or his Dark Tower series, which I’m reading vigorously right now.

If anything, On Writing motivated me to get off my tush and get writing. I’ve been doing my best to do just that, but my schedule at work, coupled with my desire to spend every remaining waking hour with my kids and Lauren, makes finding time for writing difficult. Were King to speak to me directly he’d say, “Shut up your whining and get writing! You either love the process enough to make sacrifices or you don’t.” Sadly for me, the only part of my life that I CAN sacrifice is sleep. I can’t quit my job, and I certainly won’t write at the expense of missing my kids’ childhood. So if anything goes, it’s sleep.

Thanks a lot, Mr. King. Less sleep. Wonderful.

George Clooney is a pretty classy guy, the Cary Grant of our generation, if you ignore the fact that he’s an outspoken liberal quick to take a jab at the current administration. As an actor, he’s top notch; I thought he was hilarious in O Brother Where Art Thou, and as a director, he’s just as skilled. I may not agree with his political mind set, but I can’t deny the man has talent.

I haven’t seen most movies he’s in, however.Syrianna, for example, the movie for which he won the Oscar, was written by the guy who wrote Traffic, and I found that script so disturbing and corrosive that I couldn’t muster the courage to sit through Syrianna for fear of experiencing the same haunting yuckiness.

In any event, Clooney is quite the director. Good Night and Good Luck, which chronicles the Ed Murrow/Joseph McCarthy standoff in the sixties, is done seemingly honestly with a nice mix of cinema verite, documentary-esque camera work and real footage of McCarthy at his worst. David Strathairn, who’ve I’ve admired ever since Sneakers was fabulous as Murrows, even though I have no idea how Murrows REALLY spoke or acted; he was long before my time. I just get the sense that Strathairn was right on, from the pattern and music of his voice to that cocked, cigarette-in-finger expression. You can’t make that up. It had to come from somewhere. The fact that he was nominated for Oscar didn’t hurt my analysis either.

I suppose Clooney considers himself an Ed Murrows of sorts. A buck-the-system truth seeker of our time. Maybe this film was nothing more than a vanity project. (Clooney has done the rounds many times in Washington asking questions and making statements before Congress. His campaigning for action in Darfur, for instance, seems both sensible and good.) But I doubt Clooney is being narcissistic. I think Clooney simply respects Murrows and believes that there are similarities between McCarthy and Bush, which frankly I don’t see. But, hey, this is America. We’re allowed to say what we want.

What is clear is that McCarthy was a very naughty dude. If everything I learned about him in this film is true, Clooney is right to put Murrows on a pedestal. Those were dark times, and Murrows had the guts and gumption to draw a line in the sand and say enough is enough.

As for the screenplay, I thought it snappy, well paced and smoothly written. I liked how it included the intriguing people in Murrows immediate circle — from his producer to a fellow and fragile CBS anchor to a man and woman working at CBS who were secretly married to the real McCarthy himself.

Using the footage of McCarthy was a stroke of genius. Nothing is more disturbing than the truth, sometimes, and to watch McCarthy throw false accusations as if they were stainless steel fact was a frightening look into our recent history. The man was a power hungry zealot, and Clooney was smart to let us see McCarthy in the raw. Had an actor portrayed him, I wouldn’t have believed such things were true. I would have assumed that Clooney was being unfair to McCarthy and dictating a biased performance. Not so. McCarthy was a snake. That he could evoke such a following for awhile is unsettling indeed.

All in all I thought the movie wonderful, though the Truman (or was that Eisenhower?) quote at the end was an annoying poke at Bush. It bothered me not because it was obviously a stab at Bush but because it came from out of nowhere. It didn’t belong with the story. It was clearly Clooney making a political statement. And as such, it felt like a departure from the world the film had created, a breaking of the fourth wall. Tsk tsk, Mr. Clooney. You stood atop your soap box for two beats too long. Otherwise, a wonderful flick.

I don’t like horror. Ghosts and ghouls have never been my thing. I don’t read horror books and I don’t see horror movies. I probably couldn’t even eat a horror cookie if there was such a thing. And believe me, I like cookies.

I think it’s all because I’m a fraidy cat by nature, prone to nightmares and mistaking shadows in the dark for hideous alien creatures or axe murderers, all hovering over my sleeping body just waiting to suck the remaining life out of me.

Plus there’s the evil factor. I think most horror is simply evil stuff, bad medicine for the soul, if you know what I mean. It’s just not Sunday reading — not that everything we read has to be, of course, but horror is just bad news. And why fill your head with bad news? The world gives us plenty of that already.

So it should come as no surprise that I’m no fan of Stephen King. The man writes a lot of horror, often gruesome, gory stories of zombies and killer dogs and (worst and most evil of all) little children possessed with some deadly malicious power. I have better things to do with my time than read something that’s only going to keep my up at night.

Then I read The Gunslinger, the first book in King’s The Dark Tower series. Well, actually, I listened to it. Seven months ago when we moved from California to South Carolina, I wanted to have several books on my iPod to listen to during the long, cross-country trip, and The Gunslinger was one of them.

Even though I had reservations about listening to it — it was written by Stephen King remember? — I decided to give it a go, partially because my dear friend Eric Smith, whose opinion of good fiction and all things soul related (He’s LDS like me), had read it, liked it, and suggested I give it a go and partially because it had a picture of a cowboy on the front, and I’m a sucker for Westerns. As it turned out, I enjoyed The Gunslinger very much indeed. It had a gritty circle-the-wagons feel to it mixed with a hearty dose of contemporary fantasy and just a smidgen of what King does best: horror.

I’d recommend it to anyone, except for maybe my Dad and only then because he’s already read it and didn’t like it.

Despite having enjoyed the first volume so much, I didn’t rush out to buy the second one. My reading list is long as it is, and tackling a seven-volume series just wasn’t on the agenda.

Then the second event in this little tale occurred. (The first was my reading The Gunslinger, in case you’re keeping track). I spoke with a friend at work about fiction. Turns out his favorite author is King, a fact I decided not to hold against him; my aversion to King decreased drastically after The Gunslinger.

When he learned that I had, despite enjoying the first book of The Dark Tower series, not continued reading the remaining books, he returned to work the very next day with a copy of the second book to borrow. I thought it a nice gesture, and since it precluded my having to go to the library and check it out or, worse, buy it with my limited supply of real American dollars, I gladly accepted.

And boy am I glad I did! The Drawing of the Three is one of the best works of fantasy I’ve ever read. Dark? Yes. Spooky? Yes. Filled with heavy profanity? Goodness yes! But none of it could keep me from loving the story therein.

The Drawing of the Three is a nothing less than a fast-paced yarn of two worlds colliding — ours and that of the hero Roland, the last gunslinger, as he continues his quest toward that ominous, still undefined Dark Tower.

King is a poet. There, I’ve said it. The man is a genius. He can capture the rhythm and cadence of street speech, ethnic speech, gangster gab, anything, and still make it sound genuine. This isn’t hokey pulp dialogue. This is hear-as-it-comes talk, a believable look into some pretty scary and seedy places. It’s what King is best at, pulling back the curtain of those places we would never dare to visit and showing us what would expect and a thousand things we wouldn’t.

I once heard someone say that King will be remembered from our generation just as Dickens and Steinbeck are remembered from theirs. And I believe it. Critics love to pan the man because his fiction is guilty of that unpardonable literary sin: appealing to the masses. Good fiction can’t be popular, shouts the literary elite. Good fiction is that fiction that only we, the intellectual giants, can appreciate and understand. Well, to them I say poopie. King is a giant. A legend. And will be for many years to come, long after he’s gone the way of the dodo.

So, as you can see. I loved The Drawing of the Three. Loved it immensely, in fact. And I have since decided to read nothing else until I’ve finished the remaining five books of this series. And I will READ them. Audiobooks will be too slow to fill my need for a Dark Tower fix. I want it straight and intravenously. Give me the good stuff, Mr. King, at a speed that fits the craving.

Sure, I’ll listen to audiobooks in the meantime; I have to drive to work, after all. But when it’s time to pick up a book, my next five are spoken for. Sorry, reading list. A new drug is in town. Let’s only hope King can keep the magic alive.

A month or so ago I was browsing through the audiobook collection at the Greenville Library, which I find surprisingly extensive, when a kindly elderly woman approached me.

“Are you looking for anything in particular?” she asked.

She looked like a librarian. “Oh, just browsing,” I said.

“Have you ever read any of the Mrs. Pollifax novels?” She smiled like someone about to divulge a well-kept secret, pulled an audiobook off the shelf, and held it up for me to see.

The cover featured an old woman wearing a silly hat and looked like the kind of book this elderly woman would read and I wouldn’t. “No,” I said. “I haven’t.”

She looked delighted. “Well, they’re fabulous. You’ll love it.”

And before I could object she placed it in my hands. The decision was made. I was checking out The Unexpected Mrs. Pollifax. She was just too sweet and too pleasant to say no to. We talked briefly after that, and I learned that she was not, in fact, a librarian but an audiobook lover like me. I also came to the conclusion that she was a very lonely person and that a random conversation with a stranger in the library — even if that stranger happened to be someone as boring as uninteresting as myself — would be the highlight of her day.

I thanked her profusely for the recommendation, and we eventually went our separate ways. I didn’t get around to Mrs. Pollifax until recently. This polite willingness to accept the woman’s recommendation and listen to her book waned almost immediately after leaving the library; as soon as I got home, I put the book at the back of my audiobook queue and forgot about it. (I rip the audiobook off the CDs, put the MP3 files on my iPod, then erase the files when I’m done. That way I can listen to the book at my leisure and not worry about only listening to it in the car and missing library due dates).

Well I’ve now listened to The Unexpected Mrs. Pollifax and I owe that sweet old lady a warm embrace. The book was as delightful as she had promised. I’ve already checked out the second one.

The story concerns one Emily Pollifax, an aged widow not altogether pleased with her life. She finds her meetings with the Garden Club and her time as a volunteer at the hospital rather dull. Then one morning she reads in the newspaper of a woman similar to her age who was just discovered on Broadway, and Mrs. Pollifax realizes that it’s never too late to pursue one’s dreams. What makes the story unique is that Mrs. Pollifax’s dream has always been to become a spy. And rather compulsively, on a whim, she decides to pursue this end with vigor. She contacts her local Congressman to get a meeting with the C.I.A. and then waltzes into the C.I.A. headquarters in Langley, Virginia to offer up her services. She isn’t taken seriously of course, but by a happy accident of mistaken identity, Mrs. Pollifax is enlisted to be a simple C.I.A. courier on a special assignment to Mexico City. When that assignment goes sour, Mrs. Pollifax finds herself kidnapped by villainous enemies of the state and holed up in an Albanian prison.

What follows is an unexpectedly wonderful novel. Mrs. Pollifax is no super heroin. She knows no marshal arts and only has basic knowledge of handing a pistol. Her greatest weapon is her age. She’s just an honestly nice old woman, much like the woman who suggested this book to be.

The narration by Barbara Rosenblat is wonderful. She brings Mrs. Pollifax to life with an endearing sweetness, capturing that gentle, innocent timbre so often heard in the voice of the elderly. She can also pull of a nice Chinese, Russian, and Albanian accent, giving life to an assorted cast of spies, prison guards, and Albanian goat herders.

I’ve since learned that there are 14 Mrs. Pollifax novels, and while I may not get to them all, I’m certainly excited to follow Mrs. Pollifax on another charming adventure.