Cormac Mccarthy

Cormac McCarthy's novel The Road has not only been a best seller. It has also won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. It's even an Oprah's Book Club pick. Not bad, considering what a lousy book it is. Let's start with the style, an off-putting blend of the numbingly simple and the highfalutin. Take the second sentence: "Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before. " Makes you almost yearn for Bulwer-Lytton's good old "dark and stormy night.

THIS WEEK, instead of "Alien Vs. Predator," we have Nicholas Sparks vs. Cormac McCarthy. In the form of "Dear John" and "The Road," movies adapted from books that represent, shall we say, different strata of American literature. Still, each story seeks to arrive at the same place - neither succeeds unless, at the end, you're bawling like an infant. Sparks' "Dear John" is your classic three-hanky weeper, whereas in McCarthy's "The Road," all hankies have been destroyed in some cataclysmic holocaust, so you wipe your tears on your sleeve, unless your arm's been torn off by a roving band of cannibals.

  Also Opening Fame Update of the 1980 movie musical about the School of Performing Arts students who want to learn, performance-wise, how to fly. (Sept. 25) Surrogates Bruce Willis in the futuristic thriller where humans employ cyborg surrogates to socialize for them. (Sept. 25) A Serious Man Set in 1967, Ethan and Joel Coen's black comedy centers on a physics professor whose life unravels when his wife leaves and his children challenge him. (Oct. 9)

New York writer-director Spike Lee captured - with arresting wit and stylistic aplomb - a neighborhood and a city's attitude toward race, sex, and the American family in his 1989 breakthrough hit Do the Right Thing , about a series of conflicts that break out during a long, hot summer day on a block in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. Released three years later, Malcolm X , which featured an electric, charismatic Denzel Washington in the lead, saw Lee further explore his reigning preoccupations - the role of racism in modern American culture, and the power of sexuality to make and unmake communities.

Probably the best way to describe the western novel "All the Pretty Horses" is to excerpt it: "He thought the world's heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world's pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower. " That, folks, is one helluva sentence. There are more of them in Cormac McCarthy's novel, whose singular language and rhythms and poetry earned it a National Book Award and legions of admiring readers.

Nobody can set you to trolling the depths of the soul like Frank Muller can. The veteran narrator of more than 70 titles for Recorded Books, Muller has a voice and a delivery that speak of distant, if darker, places, where life somehow takes on a greater significance. For Hamlet, he read every part, from the distraught young prince of Denmark to the unctuous queen and mad Ophelia. In Moby-Dick, Muller was at his absolute best, describing the light playing on the faces of Ahab's crew as the three harpooneers filled the sockets of their weapons with liquor and drank their pledge to kill the great white whale.

Of all the movies coming up, the following five could really be something. No guarantees, though; last year at this time, I thought "The Thin Red Line" would, at least, keep me awake. 'Anywhere but Here': Susan Sarandon and Natalie Portman sound perfectly cast as the dysfunctional mother and daughter from Mona Simpson's brilliantly observed novel. And director Wayne Wang made one of the best parent/child movies of all time, "The Joy Luck Club. " (April). 'Cradle Will Rock': The story behind Orson Welles' almost-aborted staging of a controversial play in 1930s New York.

"We'll get rid of the crap food and the Guatemalan wrist bracelets. " - Ted Gardner, promising to bring back Lollapalooza in '99 Discovering that singer Joni Mitchell is her birth mother has been a mixed blessing for Kilauren Gibb. Gibb was reunited last year with her birth parents, Canadian folk-rock icon Mitchell and Toronto photographer Brad MacMath. At first the experience seemed like a fairy tale for Gibb, 33. Overnight, she acquired an extended and loving family, and she spent long weeks in Los Angeles, leisurely getting to know Mitchell, sitting by the pool, hanging out with rock stars and celebrities.

Steven Rea has been blogging from the Toronto International Film Festival since last week. To read his complete dispatches, go to http://go.philly.com/onmovies . T hursday, Sept. 6. First film: Slingshot , or Tirador , part of the Contemporary World Cinema program. And jeez, this is part of the contemporary world I don't really want to see: Shot with a jumpy, hand-held digital camera and set in the grim squalor of a Manila shantytown (open sewers, open sex, open shooting-up, open thievery, babies lying unattended on the ground)

A couple of contemplatin' cowpokes lie beneath the starry Texas sky chawin' on some Big Thoughts. "You ever think about dyin'?" one of them says to the other. "You think there's a heaven?" the other wonders. Then they climb back onto their ponies and the music starts playing, and soon they're galloping across the wide-open range like a couple of Marlboro Men. All the Pretty Horses, director Billy Bob Thornton's adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's exercise in Lone Star lyricism, sure is pretty.

New York writer-director Spike Lee captured - with arresting wit and stylistic aplomb - a neighborhood and a city's attitude toward race, sex, and the American family in his 1989 breakthrough hit Do the Right Thing , about a series of conflicts that break out during a long, hot summer day on a block in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. Released three years later, Malcolm X , which featured an electric, charismatic Denzel Washington in the lead, saw Lee further explore his reigning preoccupations - the role of racism in modern American culture, and the power of sexuality to make and unmake communities.

By Denis Johnson Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 116 pp. $18. Reviewed by Dan DeLuca Denis Johnson's Train Dreams is like a long out-of-print B-side, a hard-to-find celebrated work treasured by those in the know that's finally become available to the rest of us. The novella is being published Tuesday in book form after appearing previously only in the Paris Review and the PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2003 edition. The question is: Does it live up to its reputation?

THIS WEEK, instead of "Alien Vs. Predator," we have Nicholas Sparks vs. Cormac McCarthy. In the form of "Dear John" and "The Road," movies adapted from books that represent, shall we say, different strata of American literature. Still, each story seeks to arrive at the same place - neither succeeds unless, at the end, you're bawling like an infant. Sparks' "Dear John" is your classic three-hanky weeper, whereas in McCarthy's "The Road," all hankies have been destroyed in some cataclysmic holocaust, so you wipe your tears on your sleeve, unless your arm's been torn off by a roving band of cannibals.

  Also Opening Fame Update of the 1980 movie musical about the School of Performing Arts students who want to learn, performance-wise, how to fly. (Sept. 25) Surrogates Bruce Willis in the futuristic thriller where humans employ cyborg surrogates to socialize for them. (Sept. 25) A Serious Man Set in 1967, Ethan and Joel Coen's black comedy centers on a physics professor whose life unravels when his wife leaves and his children challenge him. (Oct. 9)

Carter Burwell, composer with the Coen Brothers since their first feature, Blood Simple, gets the same credit again on No Country for Old Men. But for most of this black sagebrush yarn about the grim reaper, you'd be hard-pressed to hear anything on the soundtrack but the whoosh of a ghostly wind - and the hard crack of gunfire. An eerily quiet, bracingly bloody, and expertly laid-out adaptation of the Cormac McCarthy novel, Joel and Ethan Coen's No Country for Old Men takes place in 1980 Texas.

Carter Burwell, composer with the Coen Brothers since their first feature, Blood Simple , gets the same credit again on No Country for Old Men . But for most of this black sagebrush yarn about the grim reaper, you'd be hard-pressed to hear anything on the soundtrack but the whoosh of a ghostly wind - and the hard crack of gunfire. An eerily quiet, bracingly bloody, and expertly laid-out adaptation of the Cormac McCarthy novel, Joel and Ethan Coen's No Country for Old Men takes place in 1980 Texas.

THE DOOMED folks in "No Country For Old Men" struggle to find words to explain the relentless embodiment of evil who stalks them across the Texas plains. But it's not so hard, really - any dude who can reach adulthood with a haircut that bad has to be one mean SOB. You'll meet him in this riveting new movie from the Coen brothers, brilliantly adapted from the award-winning novel by Cormac McCarthy. Set in 1980 in South Texas, it opens when a good 'ol boy named Moss (Josh Brolin)

Steven Rea has been blogging from the Toronto International Film Festival since last week. To read his complete dispatches, go to http://go.philly.com/onmovies . T hursday, Sept. 6. First film: Slingshot , or Tirador , part of the Contemporary World Cinema program. And jeez, this is part of the contemporary world I don't really want to see: Shot with a jumpy, hand-held digital camera and set in the grim squalor of a Manila shantytown (open sewers, open sex, open shooting-up, open thievery, babies lying unattended on the ground)

Saw the news on how much men and women talk. Seems some scientists toted up the oral output and got the same number of words from each gender. Find it hard to believe. To tell the truth, would rather not talk about it. Better to cogitate for a couple of days and then dismiss the whole business nonverbally, with a derisive snort or an exasperated sigh. But boss says I owe him a column on something, so it might as well be this. Facts as follows: James Pennebaker, chairman of the psychology department at the University of Texas at Austin, rounded up some colleagues and outfitted 396 students with portable digital recorders to capture their conversations.

Cormac McCarthy's novel The Road has not only been a best seller. It has also won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. It's even an Oprah's Book Club pick. Not bad, considering what a lousy book it is. Let's start with the style, an off-putting blend of the numbingly simple and the highfalutin. Take the second sentence: "Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before. " Makes you almost yearn for Bulwer-Lytton's good old "dark and stormy night.