The line is long today at the Complaint Desk. Up first, a man standing by his friend and fellow artist. (Update: This is now, of course, squeaking forth from the letters section of the Valentine’s Day issue.)

Owen Wilson has lashed out at a New York film critic, for lambasting his movie pal Ben Stiller “tiresome” screen presence and for being the “crudest, version of the urban Jewish male on the make.”

New Yorker magazine reporter David Denby wrote a scathing review of Stiller’s latest film Meet The Fockers last month, saying: “Stiller is not a natural comic. He’s not effortlessly funny. There’s nothing wrong with the features, but they don’t quite go together.”

In response to Denby’s critique, American gossip site PageSix.com reports Wilson has leapt to the defence of his Zoolander and The Royal Tenenbaums co-star.

Owen writes: “I read David Denby’s piece on Ben Stiller with great interest. Not because it was good or fair toward my friend, but exactly because it wasn’t.

“I’ve acted in 237 buddy movies and, with that experience, I’ve developed an almost preternatural feel for the beats that any good buddy movie must have.

“And maybe the most crucial audience-rewarding beat is where one buddy comes to the aid of the other guy to help defeat a villain. Or bully. Or jerk. Someone the audience can really root against. How could an audience not be dying for a real ‘Billy Jack’ moment of reckoning for Denby after he dismisses or diminishes or just plain insults practically everything Stiller has ever worked on?

“And not letting it rest there, in true bully fashion Denby moves on to take some shots at the way Ben looks and even his Jewish-ness, describing him as the ‘latest, and crudest, version of the urban Jewish male on the make.’

“The audience is practically howling for blood! I really wish I could deliver for them—but that’s Jackie Chan’s role.”

Would it not be fair to say that a film critic has some business making notes about actors’ looks? As for Jewishness, Denby’s interest is in the movies’ shaping of that urban Jewish male on the make, and Stiller’s willing part in it. If Wilson is really interested in knocking down stereotypes, he’ll do his best to take out Denby himself, and see who’s the real drunken master. After all, Wilson may have acted in 237 buddy movies (or 13, by my count), but I have a funny feeling Denby may have seen even more.

Wilson isn’t the only actor-comedian whose tummy is in a knot about critical injustice:

American comic Rob Schneider has furiously labeled movie critic Patrick Goldstein “unfunny” and “pompous” for his attack on his contribution to cinema. The former Saturday Night Live star has taken out a full-page advertisement in the Hollywood Reporter attacking Goldstein’s article on January 26, in which he blasted movie studios for making lackluster sequels like Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo…. Schneider writes of Goldstein, “Most of the world (has) no idea of your existence. Maybe you didn’t win a Pulitzer Prize because they haven’t invented a category for ‘Best Third-Rate, Unfunny Pompous Reporter.’ I can honestly say that if I sat with your colleagues at a luncheon, afterwards they’d say, ‘You know, that Rob Schneider is a pretty intelligent guy’ … whereas, if you sat with my colleagues, after lunch, you would just be beaten beyond recognition.” On gossip website Pagesix.com, Goldstein responds, “I haven’t received so many congratulatory phone calls since Billy Crystal wrote a letter to the editor comparing me to Roy Cohn.”

In both cases, it seems more effective (and cheaper) to do a better movie and make Denby and Goldstein eat their words. No doubt a little more focused concern could also accomplish more than a blow to the thorax. In The Joy of Worry, occasional New Yorker writer Ellis Weiner endorses, as a reviewer puts it, unleashing the full power of all your misgivings:

“To harness this powerful force, the student of worrying must learn to worry deliberately, consciously, and in a targeted and direct manner,” [Weiner] writes. “Free-floating anxiety, spontaneous hand-wringing, general and uncontrolled not-knowing-what-to-do—these are for the unenlightened.”

With help from cartoonist Roz Chast, Weiner puts readers on a path to angst mastery. He reveals the secrets of worrying to lose weight, to parent effectively, to survive in traffic (become “The Road Worrier”) and to travel well.

“The more we worry and pay attention to it,” says Weiner, “the more self-realized we become.”

The paparazzi have cleared and the Complaint Desk clerk is tired, but someone else is upset about something. Seymour Hersh again—when will he stop grousing? He has a clip from his recent talk in Salt Lake City with him:

My parents came from the old country, and they came to America to get away from that stuff. In America, the same values we hold so dearly in our families—honor, trust, respect—we don’t ask that of our leadership…. We’re just sort of at the mercy, we in the press, of these people running a war…. You’re cut off if you disagree. You either drink the Kool-Aid or you don’t get to go to the meetings.

Those in question might reply with the tagline from Bottle Rocket: They’re not really criminals, but everybody’s got to have a dream.

Ben’s Co-Star Takes on Critic [Yahoo!]
Schneider Blasts “Pompous” Movie Critic [IMDb]
Jackie Chan’s top fights [Fightingmaster]
Discover the humor in worry, facts of life [Indystar]
Hersh harps on Bush policies [Salt Lake Tribune]

Categories: NYer, Denby, Movies, Books, Weiner, Hersh

It’s good to see Hurlyburly—David Rabe’s 1984 play recently revived at the Acorn by Scott Elliott, with Wallace Shawn as Artie—provoking thoughtful commentary. I liked much of the New York Observer interview with Ethan Hawke and Bobby Cannavale (the current stars) about postfeminist male rage and peer pressure, especially Hawke’s blunt comment about exactly what it is about us that makes men angry—I’d never thought about it quite that way before, and it’s very useful. And John Heilpern’s review the same week (both pieces are front-page news—God save the Observer!) is first-rate vivid, thoughtful theater criticism. What’s more, it starts “At three and a quarter hours, Hurlyburly is longylongy.” Ha! Dorothy Parker (“Tonstant Weader frowed up”) would certainly grin. Heilpern on Shawn:

And there’s the older cheeseball producer, Artie, who’s Wallace Shawn in a ludicrous wig. I felt tempted to call out, “Come on out of there, Wally! Come out from under that wig—we know it’s you!” But at first I didn’t recognize him in his sunglasses, and when I did, he made me laugh at terrible things.

Artie enters with a lost teen waif named Donna (Halley Wegryn Gross) whom he found in an elevator. “You want her?” he asks his friends, explaining that he figured he would drop her by and they could keep her, like a care package.

What a cad! Well, it’s reassuring to know that Shawn is a mensch in real life, at least as evidenced by my running into him at the Quad Cinema on my fourth viewing of Lost in Translation. We were in separate lines; I looked at him, he smiled modestly, and I asked “What are you here to see?” (more sharply than I intended). “I’m here for American Splendor,” he said pleasantly, with the requisite ironic garnish. “What about you?” “Oh, I’m seeing Lost in Translation again,” I said. “How many times have you seen it so far?” he said, already looking concerned. Realizing the theness of it all, I mutely held up three fingers, like a sloshed Jack Lemmon. He gave me a not unkind “takes all kinds” nod and half-smile, and we proceeded into our theaters.

Are Boys Still Beasts? [Hawke and Cannavale interview, NY Observer]

John Heilpern review [NY Observer]

John Simon review [New York magazine]

One take on LIT [Cynthia Rockwell]

I haven’t been the same since Lewis Menand’s review of Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation—or rather, his review of its author, Lynn Truss, who seems like a sweet lady who’s outed herself doing what we all do furtively: fix bad punctuation in public. Typos and grammatical errors in a stern (in a Julie Andrews as Mary Poppins sort of way) treatise about punctuation and grammar are not quite the thing, I agree. The publisher ought to have corrected them. But why truss up this good woman so? Menand’s snarling seems out of proportion to its cause, and in this piece—in contrast to, say, his meandering but lucid review of Hollywood histories in the current issue—he entangles himself in sentences that would have Lynn Truss herself sighing and prescribing a spoonful of sugar with his Tums.

But all that has passed; the cut man patched her up, and Truss prevailed. What lingers is the problem of the semicolon. Nation copy editor Judith Long, an expert in most things, is generally against them, but I have always argued for their elegance, their sonic and spacial ambiguity, their polymorphous perversity. (See Nicholson Baker’s hilarious essay “The History of Punctuation” in The Size of Thoughts for archaic combinations in which semis play a part.) But Judy continued to say no. That made me doubt. And then, Menand:

“I am not a grammarian,” Truss says. No quarrel there. Although she has dug up information about things like the history of the colon, Truss is so uninterested in the actual rules of punctuation that she even names the ones she flouts—for example, the rule that semicolons cannot be used to set off dependent clauses. (Unless you are using it to disambiguate items in a list, a semicolon should be used only between independent clauses—that is, clauses that can stand as complete sentences on their own.) That is the rule, she explains, but she violates it frequently. She thinks this makes her sound like Virginia Woolf.

The Virginia Woolf bit is over the top—it appears to be as much a dig at Woolf as it is at Truss—but that aside, is he right? Ever since, I have been backing away from semicolons in nearly all situations, and the keyboard key looks anxious, as though I will never return. I used one (Menand-endorsed) above, and it looks just fine. But it wonders if I will someday turn it into a dash, or just a Puritan period. At my next seance, I’ll consult the Woolf crew and report back with their analysis. In any case, Menand undermines his own argument with this:

The supreme peculiarity of this peculiar publishing phenomenon is that the British are less rigid about punctuation and related matters, such as footnote and bibliographic form, than Americans are. An Englishwoman lecturing Americans on semicolons is a little like an American lecturing the French on sauces.

Come now, that’s not criticism! Does this mean Americans can’t write about Channel-swimming, or bull-running, or guiltless sexual abandon, since we’re not generally known for it? I beg to differ.

Bad Comma: Lynne Truss’s strange grammar [New Yorker]
The war of the commas: Eats, Shoots & Leaves is selling like hot cakes in the US and one eminent New York critic is not happy [Guardian]
New Yorker Lynne Truss review [Transblawg]
There Are Many Reasons to Love Louis Menand [Beatrice]
Shoots, Leaves & Eats: Irresistible Food from Plot to Plate [Amazon UK]
Eats, Shites & Leaves: Crap English and How to Use It [Amazon UK]

Categories: NYer, Issue, Menand, Magazines