Alexandra Frackin' DuPont

I'm just saying that if you were to find yourself at work, trying desperately to avoid writing, you could do worse as a distraction than sifting through the Alexandra DuPont archives. DuPont is what people pretend Pauline Kael was. Only smarter. And funnier.

Favorite tidbits include:

From a review of The Mummy:

The plot is straight out of an old Hollywood serial: A ragtag bunch of adventurers in 1930s Egypt accidentally unleash an undead, nigh-invulnerable, utterly evil Egyptian priest. Then they spend the rest of the movie trying to kill him.

And there's this, from a review of the first X-Men:

THINGS I LIKED ABOUT "X-MEN": . . .

The interplay between Logan, Cyclops (James Mardsen) and Jean Grey (Famke Janssen). A romantic triangle, just like in the comics -- only without the I-speak-in-pseudo-erudite-paragraphs-even-as-I'm-flying-across-the-room-to-hit-you stylings of writer Chris Clairemont.

(Parenthetical remark w/r/t geek purists and C. Clairemont defenders: I'll try to resist a profound urge to swing a Fungo bat at anyone who tells me that Magneto's mutant-conversion-machine in this movie is dumber than anything in the comics. I read me some "Classic X-Men" comics in preparation for this film, and in one of them, our heroes found themselves aided by leprechauns. That's right, leprechauns.)

That's right: THAT JUST HAPPENED.