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Or we didn’t care—same thing. Apparently we didn’t miss much: Everyone who was expected to win, won.

How to make the Oscars more thrilling (or just thrilling, period):
1. Don’t announce the nominees until the actual ceremony.
2. Make the nominees pick out their own clothes. Stylists take away all the fun and replace it with correctness. The trashy should be free to be trashy.
3. If Ben Affleck is a sure winner anyway, have Matt Damon present the trophy. (The surprise appearance of Michelle Obama as presenter confirmed that ZD30 had a zero chance of winning. Heyyy no separation of cinema and politics.)

In Sally Potter’s film adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, Tilda Swinton played the character as female and male. Because she’s Tilda. She should star in the David Bowie biopic.

If you were a person of the opposite sex, what would you be like? How would you dress and behave, what kind of job and relationships would you have? How would your life be different?

We think that if we were a boy, girls would be hurling themselves at us.

* Oops, it’s a long weekend if you’re a student, but not if you have a job. What do we know about official holidays, we’re freelance.

You must have a dvd lying around.

We can’t believe Pulp Fiction is 20 years old. Sign of age: saying things like, “We can’t believe Pulp Fiction is 20 years old.” The first time we saw it our brain was divided between “What the hell is going on!” and “This changes everything.” It did change the movies, though not the Academy, which gave Best Picture that year to Forrest Gump. It certainly changed the way we think and talk about burgers, foot massages, Samuel L. Jackson, cleaning cars, and watches.

Harvey Keitel discusses car-cleaning procedures with John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson. Photo from VF.com.

In late 1992, Quentin Tarantino left Amsterdam, where he had spent three months, off and on, in a one-room apartment with no phone or fax, writing the script that would become Pulp Fiction, about a community of criminals on the fringe of Los Angeles. Written in a dozen school notebooks, which the 30-year-old Tarantino took on the plane to Los Angeles, the screenplay was a mess—hundreds of pages of indecipherable handwriting. “It was about going over it one last time and then giving it to the typist, Linda Chen, who was a really good friend of mine,” Tarantino tells me. “She really helped me.”

“It began with calls where he was just reading pages to me,” she continues. Then came more urgent calls, asking her to join him for midnight dinners. Chen always had to pick him up, since he couldn’t drive as a result of unpaid parking tickets. She knew Tarantino was a “mad genius.” He has said that his first drafts look like “the diaries of a madman,” but Chen says they’re even worse. “His handwriting is atrocious. He’s a functional illiterate. I was averaging about 9,000 grammatical errors per page. After I would correct them, he would try to put back the errors, because he liked them.”

Read The Oral History of Pulp Fiction in Vanity Fair.

Infographic of the death toll in Tarantino movies from VF.com. They misspelled Inglourious Basterds.

A Good Day To Die Hard is so terrible, if it hadn’t been for the gunshots and explosions we would’ve fallen asleep. And we speak as a fan of the Die Hard movies. Okay, the first three.

When Bruce Willis and his “son” go to the abandoned nuclear plant in Chernobyl, we just tuned out and re-viewed Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker in our head. It also happens in an abandoned nuclear facility in Russia. Yeah we’re a nerd. We cannot claim to have understood Stalker but we can replay scenes in our head. We forget this Die Hard even as we’re watching it.

Bruce Willis’s career isn’t over—recently he’s done good work in interesting projects like Rian Johnson’s Looper and Stephen Frears’s Lay the Favourite. He can go on without Die Hard. The Die Hard series needs to have its obituary read to it by Alan Rickman.

(Damnit WordPress, the videos in the scheduled post disappeared again!!!)

In 1988 Bruce Willis had hair, the Japanese and not the Chinese ruled business, the villains were German. In 2013 Willis is bald and all Russians are evil.

If Alan Rickman is not available, Benedict Cumberbatch could do it.

This is the first in a series of reviews by balqis.

Found them!

I introduced the Patrick Melrose quintet to my friend and made a mistake of contrasting the family in it to the Crawleys of Downton Abbey.

One can’t just summarize Edward St Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose novels in a half-minute conversation over a holiday dinner. What I tried to tell my friend then was that the familial premise of the novels is similar to that of the TV series—the marriage of the ultra-wealthy American to the highborn English. But the comparison with the beloved English soap stops there. The characters and events in the books are so infuriatingly unpleasant, there were times I wanted to wrench some people off the page and throttle them to death with their tongues. That’s how effective St Aubyn’s style is. And the conversations are not the only parts that induce hostility and grief in the reader. There are paedophilia, drug addiction, adultery, disinheritance, alcoholism, euthanasia, and marital rape as well, and other things for which “self-destructive” is a mild euphemism, according to Francine Prose.
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At the end of Deborah Harkness’s A Discovery of Witches, the 21st century witch Diana and her 1,500-year-old lover the vampire/ex-Crusader/geneticist Matthew travel back to the year 1590 to seek out the mysterious book that’s caused them so much trouble in 2009. What better way to solve the mystery than to find the book before hostile witches, daemons and vampires get to it?

We were so charmed by A Discovery of Witches that right after we speed-read it we rushed to the bookstore in search of its sequel, Shadow of Night. By chapter one the spell was broken, and by chapter two we had done what Dorothy Parker recommends for certain books: hurl it across the room with great force. How did our fascination end so fast?

A Discovery of Witches had a whimsical nerdiness that distracted us from its main flaws, breathless prose and meandering to the point of randomness. This whimsical nerdiness, expressed in amusing historical detail, long passages about the correct way to prepare tea, and annotations on Darwin’s Origin of Species pertaining to vampires, daemons and witches, is gone from the sequel. It has been replaced with a self-conscious nerdiness that feels defensive, viz. “This isn’t just another tale of vampire lust, it’s an entertainment by a scholar of Elizabethan history and science.” It is crammed with so much exposition, so many digressions, and unnecessary historical cameo appearances that our soul left our body and traveled to the publishing house in 2011 to bludgeon its negligent editor with the 584-page trade paperback. Pass!