Random Notes

• That was the title of my favorite section in Rolling Stone in the days of Ralph J. Gleason and Hunter Thompson and Ben Fong-Torres and John Mendelsohn and Lester Bangs, so I'll happily steal it for here.
• My mind has finally recovered from the after-effects of finishing Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. The emotion was akin to the come-down after a sugar-high, or the sadness a child feels on Christmas afternoon, knowing that that state of ultimate expectation that Christmas excites will not return for another year. Did the novel meet the hype? Mostly yes, although Rowling almost swamped the novel with again more exposition about a mythology that she invented. At least by the middle of The Return of the King, for example, you don't find out that the fellowship maybe should have gone out and discovered Sauron's technicolor dreamcoat.
• Criterion keeps making excellent choices in the movies it is selecting for its editions. In October, these will include Godard's Breathless and a personal favorite I've written about before, Terence Malick's Days of Heaven. Not to mention Robinson Crusoe on Mars in September (big guilty pleasure).
• More reviews are appearing of Warner's Film Noir Classic Collection, Vol. 4, and it looks better and better each time I look over the inclusions: films by Fred Zinneman, Don Siegel, Anthony Mann, Andre de Toth, Nicholas Ray, and John Sturges, with commentary tracks for each film, including one by James Ellroy for Crime Wave: all this for about $4 a film.
• The Frodo Franchise, a book on Peter Jackson's films of The Lord of the Rings by Kristin Thompson, an academic film critic who actually writes readable, interesting English prose worth reading, has been released early, and I'm looking forward to reading it.