Sherry Chandler

Blogalicious offers a handy-dandy list of print magazines that accept e-mail submissions.

As Diane points out, postage is going up, so these magazines are doing us a considerable courtesy.

Thanks, Diane.

Julie of The Human Flower Project will stick with roses but proves she has some thorns:

Before it arrived in Austin, the Coen Brothers’ film No Country for Old Men was taking shape as a pop culture necessity. Must see… Best of…etc. To miss it would leave you somewhere between never having heard of Bob Dylan and failing to get the polio vaccine: in that wasteland a.k.a. No Country for Cool People.

Still, we refrained, until several of our most trusted movie buff friends highly recommended the flick, too. There would be No Uncool Country for us, damnit! Today we feel suckered, and worse than that, completely confused. What is praise-worthy here? The movie is an expensive horror flick. There are a lot of grim faced men with stubble. There’s a villain with a Prince Valiant hairdo. Mainly, though, there is non stop killing…

We hope we’ve provided enough details so that all our readers can skip the movie but not look uncool. If the subject comes up, here are some comments to make with confidence.

“This is the Coen Brothers’ best film since Hudsucker Proxy.”

“Javier Bardem was superb, so much more virile than Hannibal Lecter or Hillary Clinton. Hah-hah!”

“The Woody Harrelson role was a bit redundant, didn’t you think?”

“All the little border towns were so evocative.”

“No. I did not think Tommy Lee Jones bore the slightest resemblance to Barney Fife!”

Meanwhile, Eyewear does Atonement:

On the one hand, I admire the mise-en-scene, and the lush “hottest day of the summer in the Manor House” section, which comprises roughly the first 40 minutes of the film (more, in flashback, especially the diving-drowning scene). I am tempted to call it a “tromp lawn” film - for it plays with the mind’s eye, surely, as much as it does on the filmgoer’s easy sense of genre. I suspect, though, the film tries to have its Eton Mess and eat it, too - with a silver spoon.

By this, I mean, it is all very well to try and throw prisms and postmodernity at Brideshead Revisited type visual tropes (languid beautiful young things, army fatigues) - and, like The French Lieutenant’s Woman - “offer” different endings - with a knowing wink that, well, you know, this Upper Class Porn (the tooting yellow car, the Remains of the Day decor, the flappers, the elegantly lit fags in every scene) is being twisted, exposed, for the shallow surface of things it is. Vile Bodies for vile body’s sake. Possibly - but director Joe Wright has managed to evoke a plausibly desirable Utopia that is the Tallis home, with its Chariots of Fire lawns and servants (as he must to establish the postlapsarian descent into France) - and so deliciously conveys the love in the library (Paolo and Francesca, doomed Dantean lovers, reading no more that day), with its erotics of sinewy backs, slim napes, thin collar bones, and parted knees (as if this was Emmanuel At Cambridge) - that it is hard to see this as a deconstruction of anything, so much as a loving collage of all the best of that Merchant-Ivory realm.

The British always do Irony except when it comes to trying to win an Oscar; there is no I in Hollywood…