A weird but good weekend--the autumnal equinox, Yom Kippur, Penn State at Michigan, my final weekend at "the other restaurant," and I just found out that a a guy I know in Iraq returned safe and sound! I think the one down-side must have been Brett Somers' passing (first Charles Nelson Reilly and now this!). RIP, Brett.

 Zoey Dean, Some Like It Hot: An A-List Novel (2006): I dimly remember a personal pledge made at the beginning of the year to venture outside my literary comfort zone a little, reading Tim LaHaye and Larry Jenkins' "Rapture" thriller Left Behind in January. The pledge fell into abeyance (not necessarily because of Left Behind; once you get past the absolutely ludicrous premise, it's actually pretty not-all-that-bad in certain places), until I was in the Borders entrance on day and noticed this thing sitting deservedly on the bargain shelves. I figured a bit of trash was just what I needed--the A-List series appeared to be the saga of ridiculously wealthy Beverly Hills teens, and a fitting successor to my Left Behind adventure. "It's prom season, and no town does prom like Tinsel Town. Ben is back for the summer--" oh, for God's sake, there are romantic complications and shocking revelations about various characters' parents' pasts, much of which can only be found after wading through an avalanche of detailed clothing, furniture, and various other consumer goods descriptions, generally focusing on designer names. There are three main characters--Anna, Cammie, and Sam. Anna's beautiful and good, Cammie's beautiful and bitchy, and Sam is beautiful and... well, sassy, which is unsurprising in this context, as she's also worried about her weight (not-"perfect"=sassy). Insofar as the story's involving at all, it's usually in the company of Sam, whose plan to make a documentary about the sorry losers at her high school who actually want to have something as declasse as prom becomes a kinder, gentler one towards the end. Cammie's also surprisingly entertaining, especially after accidentally burning down a classic Hollywood hotel and feeling mildly guilty about it. Anna is boring and pretentious, having a boyfriend whose idea of playful fondling is to hit her with pillows and make her say "Ben is the king!" three times in French. Quel dommage! There were moments when I just had to put the book down and look around in astonishment at the prose. It's breathtakingly awful, but often amusingly so (certainly enough to keep me reading, obviously). The one genuinely sore spot I found was the "fun" they have with a dorky clinical intern who has to chaperone one of their friends, on leave from rehab, to prom, which probably results in his losing his job. Tee hee. Zoey Dean apparently "divides her time between Beverly Hills and several small islands in the Caribbean" and "is currently working on her next juicy A-LIST novel, at an undisclosed location." All several of her, apparently. Some highlights:

"The words [to Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet] had struck her in their simple profundity. Not only had she memorized the verse, but she'd also hand-lettered the words on an index card and put the card inside the top desk drawer in her private study. (That year, her mother's designer had redone Anna's bedroom and adjoining study suite in Chinese antiques from the late Ming and early Qing dynasties. Anna's new desk had been made from priceless huanghuali hardwood whose hand-carved pieces fit together without glue or nails.)" (50)

It's terribly, terribly important that we know this about Anna's bedroom, "adjoining study suite," and desk. In fairness, it's not so much the description I mind as the furniture catalog style in which it's rendered.

"Her eyes searched his. 'I really think... if we're honest with each other, we can be...' She searched for the right words. 'Far from the madding crowd.'

"He pointed at her playfully. 'Thomas Hardy. You thought I wouldn't know.'

" 'The sky was clear--remarkably clear--and the twinkling of all the stars seemed to be but throbs of one body, timed by a common pulse,' Anna half-whispered. 'Isn't that amazing, that one man could write something like that?'

"Ben's strong hands circled her slender waist. 'I think you're amazing.' " (52)

This scene conjures up a mental image of a harried, down-on-her-luck English graduate component of "Zoey's" probable gestalt desperately trying to rustle up enough money to take the GREs, scribbling frantically in a 6-by-6 cubicle provided by Alloy Entertainment (the book's publishers) on her portion of the story, later confronted by an angry, cigar-chomping editor with "Thomas Hardy? What the fuck is this???"

"Sam was a Hollywood kid who knew every Hollywood trick in the book. And now she new something else; the truth about making love for the first time feeling beautiful in the eyes of a boy who adored you. Compared to this, drunken sex sucked ass." (185)

Actually, that was pretty funny, but the "you" after "adored" is pretty jarring.

"As for Amy, Twilla, and Heatherly, they were a triumvirate of blond, redhead, and brunette, but each with at least one facial feature that would knock them off the pretty list. Ben hated to admit this, but it was true. Twilla's eyes were too close-set; Amy's lips were almost painfully thin; and Heatherly's nose resembled a snowball that had been thrown at her face and smushed on impact. Ben was, of course, polite and friendly, complimenting their dresses, etc." (237)

That's just in case you thought you could make the "A-List." Ben's the "sensitive" one, incidentally (although he's also Anna's boyfriend, which explains much).

" 'Careful of your heads, ladies and gentlemen,' [the pilot] called over the sound of the engine, and offered a hand to help them into the copter, a commercial version of Marine One, the official helicopter of the president of the United States." (249)

I don't know what I found funnier--the fact that Sam and the gang took a chopper to prom (because limos are so gauche) or that "Zoey" found it necessary to bring in and slowly describe "Marine One, the official helicopter of the president of the United States," though an opportunity was missed, I think, to go the whole hog and identify "Marine One" as a "noun." Sometimes Some Like It Hot (come to think of it, "Zoey" had a lot of nerve naming it after one of the funniest movies ever--and unexpectedly the second Billy Wilder reference in as many entries; he and Peter Graves are starting to usurp this thing wholesale) reminds me of an Encyclopedia Brown adventure with sex, booze, drugs, and plastic surgery (regrettably, a delightful alternative, the Modern Humorist classic "Encyclopedia Brown and the Case of the Pirated MP3s" seems to have gone off-line). 

If I had the choice to read it again, I wouldn't.

Overlord (1975): I first read about this in Entertainment Weekly, probably about the time it was released on DVD for the can't-thank-them-enough Criterion Collection, having never heard of it before. Using archival Second World War footage from Britain's Imperial War Museum for what seems like half the movie, filmmaker Stuart Cooper portrays the journey of Tom Beddows (Brian Stirner) from callow, dreamy army recruit, through training and the inevitably short wartime romance, to his eventual fate at the beaches of Normandy on D-Day. While aiming for a kitchen-sink realism that it mostly achieves, Overlord also has a faintly hallucinatory patina, due to the bucolic nature of the countryside filming, the eerie calmness with which the soldiers face potential death in combat, and Paul Glass' pastoral, Vaughan Williamsy score. Stirner is excellent as a young man both utterly heedless of his situation and accepting of it at the same time. The very good cast is pretty much entirely made of unknowns, although Davyd Harries, as the wisecracking Welshman Jack (his explanation as to why he was never made an officer is one of the film's highlights), went on to a pretty decent career in British TV and films (among his roles was Shapp in the controversial 1979 Doctor Who story "The Armageddon Factor"). Overlord's a haunting movie, but a weird mix--both behind and ahead of its time, combining the anti-Establishment bitterness of 60s flicks like How I Won The War with the nearly Zen stasis of 90s productions like The Thin Red Line.