Over at Teekay’s

One of the great things about living in the third world the Balkans South-Eastern Europe is that TV programming is as unpredictable as it is eclectic. (I imagine it goes something like this: “Eh, Mujo, we have an hour to fill tonight — hajde, check in the basement what’s lying around!”) You get to see the occasional great movie, and you get to see the original (usually minus the credits…) with subtitles, none of that dubbing crap they show in Germany and France. (Heck, the French even dub their own movies!)

So I saw Wonder Boys last night, for the second time.

What a wonderful movie!

I’m not a critic, and this isn’t a review. But I thought the acting was great, and I don’t particularly like Michael Douglas. It’s all about very grown-up stuff, even though none of the characters (other Frances McDormand’s) is particularly grown-up. In fact, I think they all missed a development stage or two, what with Grady Tripp, the creative writing prof at the center of the story who’s rarely seen without a fatty, or his editor, a hilariously inane Robert Downey Jr. who’s chasing Tripp’s charge, a young student who’s in all sorts of trouble. (The sort of trouble that leaves dead dogs in its wake.) It’s hard to imagine such an adult mixture of motifs — adultery, gay sex, sex with your students (or at least the strong intimation of it), drugs, abortion — in a mainstream Hollywood movie, but of course it does happen every once in a while. (Last time I saw it was in Mike Nichol’s Closer.)

The movie is based on a short novel by Michael Chabon, of whom I’ve only ever read his great, comic (?) novel Mysteries of Pittsburgh. The director is the dude that did L.A. Confidential before, another movie I watched at least three times and liked almost as much as Chinatown.

I should stop before this totally degenerates into a laundry list of books and movies I like, but if you live in a more civilized place, run out and rent it.

Oh, and if you saw the trailer and got turned off by it, ignore it. The screenwriter told Salon.com,

And you couldn’t have gotten me to the movie they [Paramount] seemed to be promoting if you put a gun to my head — and I am this movie’s target audience. Look, it’s their job to sell the movie. I know it can be a hard job, but, hey, our jobs are hard, too.