Holes. Where have I been?

Missed the entire “Holes” phenomenon, until Saturday. Miserable, rainy April Saturday, so we hit the Madison (“Perpetually under new management!”) for a matinee of “Holes”. When it was over, my reaction was “Greatest. Movie. Ever.” I’ve come down off that a little, but man what a movie. Layers and layers, and stories that come full-circle. Like onions. And peaches. Sigourney is still hot by the way. By chance last night I saw a clip of Jon Voigt in “Midnight Cowboy,” and having just seen his excellent performance in “Holes,” I could only wonder what the hell happened to him. 33 years barely explains it. Tim Blake Nelson plays a different kind of creepy in every film, but it’s always creepy.

So on the way home, we stopped and got the book, plus “The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants,” another phenom I somehow missed. Not only is this the True Golden Age of Cinema, where all your imaginings can be made real right up there on the big screen, but children’s literature has made a stunning leap as well. At the same time, I picked up a new book of short stories under the McSweeney’s imprint, “McSweeney’s Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales,” edited by Michael Chabon, who laments that the short story has slipped into a Twilight Zone where only one form (the Carver form, though he doesn’t call it that) is accepted. He dares, through this collection, to bring back stories with plots and points. Well, good for him. And I bought it even though Stephen King contributed, which was a tough nut to crack. It’s not that I hate Stephen King, I don’t, it’s just that I think he was derivative when he started and that he peaked on about his fifth book, and I felt like saying, “Enough already! A bad number of Weird Tales has more original thoughts!” Of course, he was only ever ripping off the classics, anyway. So, point being, I don’t support his career and wouldn’t be able to sit in the airport reading a book with his name on it lest someone start some conversation about how much they love Stephen King, and I would have to withhold my tongue and say how much I loved “Salem’s Lot” when it came out. And “Stand By Me,” though the movie was endlessly better than the story it was based on.

Somebody get me out of this conversation….