For a long time I was resistant to the idea of making a point of reading novels that were being made into films. If a noted filmmaker's reading list intersects your own, then fine -- but I'm generally more interested in the film qua film than I am in its relationship with the source material, unless said source material is uncommonly fine. I found complaints about changes made by Peter Jackson to the Tolkien mythology to be tediously petty, especially since the films turned out so well (and also because the books bored my pants off as a youngster), and although I suppose I'm grateful when a talented critic nutshells the vagaries of a particular book-to-film adaptation, I seldom feel the need to do the kind of homework required to elucidate that process myself. At the end of the screening, after all, the film needs to stand on its own.

The New Yorker has an interesting story on 24, real-world torture, and the politics of series creator Joel Surnow (hint: he has a big ol’ American flag under glass in his office). I still watch the show religiously, although I liked it better when Jack Bauer’s antics were so far over the top (“I’m gonna need a hacksaw!”) that it was obviously set in a world that bore only superficial resemblance to Planet Earth. The more earnestly the show trots out water-cooler debates about abridged civil liberties vs. the threat of overstated catastrophe, or wallows in alleged psychological gravitas (can Jack’s heart get any harder and still keep the blood pumping to his fists?), the more it seems to move away from the great, very dark joke(s) at the heart of its sociopolitical fantasia. Anyway, while I guess I can understand the concern in some quarters that 24 is sending the wrong message to the world about how America settles its ideological conflicts, I find it absurd and/or unspeakably disturbing that we would ever have to worry that real soldiers in a real war — and their military bosses — would take their cues vis a vis the physical treatment of the alleged enemy from a fictional television character. Is that really what it’s come to?

Sure, he's old. But I'm so very happy to see Christgau's Consumer Guide return to the Web (at MSN Music, a site I never knew existed until Christgau showed up there) in the wake of his dismissal from the Village Voice earlier this year. And I guess I need to buy that Dylan record.

USA Today has a bloggish article on some of the ordinary people who were suckered into appearing on camera with Borat in Borat. Me, I think everyone involved actually came off pretty well -- except those three drunken, swillish fraternity brothers near the very end of the picture. And, OK, the rodeo guy who offered him advice on not looking like an ay-rab. (And there's no way Borat got a potato sack over Pamela Anderson's torso without getting permission in advance, although those security guards who slam him to the asphalt afterward really don't seem to be in on the joke.)