I’ve never watched that and never will, though casting Doherty would have been an amusement at the time due to the then-controversy over her leaving Beverly Hills 90210, which made her a sort of edgy celebrity at the time. TV-movie biopics did that sort of thing a lot; I also remember Jennifer Love Hewitt playing Audrey Hepburn and Lindsay Lohan playing Elizabeth Taylor. I didn’t know Doherty was from Memphis; I guess she wasn’t like Reese Witherspoon who never shuts up about it. I also forgot until reading Mallrats reviews that she’d died.

I’m pretty sure that’s from the same year as the GWTW sequel Scarlett which had Timothy Dalton playing Rhett Butler and which was based on a book by someone named Alexandra Ripley and authorized by Margaret Mitchell’s estate, that got absolutely trashed by critics. I’ve never read the book nor seen the movie. As for GWTW the book, if you don’t really love the movie, definitely pass on the book.

I saw a few minutes of the Separate Peace movie in high school when we were reading the book but I don’t think we were ever shown the whole thing. Starred Parker Stevenson, one of the more famous celebrity $cientologists. I don’t feel like ever watching it but the Ebert review said that it’d be popular with the high school crowd who are assigned the book because it’s easy to take it apart and put it back together (something like that.) Which was hilarious to me because I absolutely abhorred that book in high school; re-reading it as an adult, I liked some of it.

If Delany weren’t a skilled writer, the porn in Hogg would just seem like exactly that, porn for porn’s sake. Delany’s skills as a writer are the only thing that would lend the porn in Hogg any artistic merit at all, it’s all disgusting stuff cranked up to the max from the beginning. Of course you may remember that I didn’t get into Dhalgren very much at all, partially because next to nothing seems to happen in it, and it’s like 900 pages long. And of course, the reason I read those two books and not Delany’s sci-fi is because they were on lists. I plan on re-reading Gravity’s Rainbow before I die and probably all the other Pynchon stuff too, but aside from that I no longer have any curious-young-person’s stomach for “postmodern behemoths.” Sorry, William T. Vollman, I ain’t gonna be readin’ ya.

Oh yeah, Mark Knopfler playing on STC. All the reviews mentioned how he and Jerry Wexler didn’t know anything about the Christian aspects of the album until well into recording and then they just kept quiet about it because…it’s Bob Dylan? Something like that?

I’m listening to Saved right now, on my third spin. Yeah, it’s obviously pretty weak tossed off gospelly shit that you wouldn’t know was written by Bob if he weren’t singing it. So that’s an album of stunningly well-recycled melodies followed by an album of poorly recycled melodies. It’s to Bob what Mardi Gras is to CCR, though it’s probably better than that.