Sometimes a rainy Sunday is perfect for revisiting favorite movies, and Gus Van Sant's black comedic true crime satire, To Die For is definitely a favorite of mine. The cast is at their peak. Matt Dillon is radiantly slovenly and Nicole Kidman still looks like a blooming real human being and, in a career of very few bright spots performance-wise, she's brutally excellent as a psychopath. She is the blond, perfectly coiffed personification of a certain fame seeking, ambitious, and broken part of our culture. Ileana Douglas also shines and look out for cameos by David Cronenberg and the films screenwriter, Buck Henry.
While the film satirizes the searing ambition that can lead people to kill, and points out our insatiable lust for the torrid tabloid tales that follow, it's also one of the best examples of true crime entertainment. Any fan of Joaquin Phoenix would also agree that it's one of the steamiest as well. (Which is a little creepy considering the story's of a teenager seduced into murder by a grown woman.)
Here, as the seduced teenage burnout, Phoenix is pretty much the embodiment of my teenage desires: he's off-kilteredly handsome, blindly lustful, denim and leather dirty, very dumb and a little bit sad. One can't help but feel a pang of sympathy for the kid as he sits in a junk yard looking off in the distance, walleyed and slack jawed and calls his polka dot and manicured mistress “clean” with longing.
The film is based on the novel To Die For, which was itself inspired by the true, sordid, tabloid sensation crime of one Pam Smart. Also a call in show called Metal Madness), Pamela also seduced a boy (Billy Flynn) and convinced he and his friends to kill her husband. She is currently serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole and Flynn, having served more of his life in prison that outside, recently asked for (and was denied) a reduced sentence.
As anyone in my office can tell you, we've had precious little home time as of late. Long hours, working weekends, it can make you appreciate the little pleasures and comforts of home all the more. To my surprise, I've recently found the oft rerun 
Shania basically represents everything that I find unholy about the direction of modern country music. I like my pop music in my pop music but when it comes to twangy heartbreak I like it old timey Loretta Lynn style and nearly faint with grouchiness at the thought of modern country.
While 
Amusing with lively wit and humor, a very charming adaptation of the 
This was the first Belle and Sebastian album I bought. I really hadn't listened to it from beginning to end for years until a few weeks ago on a long drive. They could have called it “If You're Feeling Sentimental” because this took me right back to my 21st birthday in Providence, which actually kind of sucked–which is probably why I was listening to a lot of Belle and Sebastian at the time.
On the other hand, if you don't want to actually enjoy the holiday, you should read this brutally honest portrait of an asshole during his final breakdown. This is an extremely well written novel and the best I've read in a long time.
This book takes place in the future (the future Wallace envisioned in the mid 1990s, the future we envision today is a bit different, there's really no place for the Clean Party in the coming years), in the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment, which I think is 2009. Set in the Metro Boston area, about half of the story takes place at the Enfield Tennis Academy, an elaborate campus atop a scenic hill offering a view of the massive catapults that hurl waste north to the Great Concavity, while the other half of the book (it's a massive tome, 1000 or so pages including the copious foot notes, which you really can't skip) focuses on a halfway house half way down the same hill. A number of unforgettable characters populate the pages, the entire Incandenza family (including the long departed patriarch, the “Mad Stork” James Orin Incandenza, who visits Don Gately in wraith form after Gately gets shot by the Canuck with the “Moose” shirt after the coke addict who kills the dogs… it gets complicated.) The book is excellent, the first fifty pages or so may not be exactly easy going, but soon the book opens right up and you< do not want it to end. Which it does, eventually. Kind of. Oh–and there's Eschaton and the wheelchair assassins and the Madame Psychosis radio program and the Whataburger invitational and Pemulis buying that DMZ...