It’s no mystery why Stephenie Meyer’s romantic vampire saga, Twilight, gets under the skin of so many young readers — and why the movie, although nowhere near as penetrating, will be the occasion for mass public swoon-a-thons. It’s the biochemistry angle. See, the gorgeous vampire, Edward, is driven mad with desire by the high-school heroine Isabella’s scent. She has just arrived in their remote Pacific Northwest town to live with her chief-of-police father. Edward smells her while they’re peering through a microscope, and his eyes become a feral yellow-black; and she soon loves him hungrily, too, in her ordinary teenage, raging-hormonal way, which is powerful enough. But in this universe, the vampire’s appetites cannot be controlled. One taste of her blood could trigger carnage on an operatic scale.
Robert Pattinson, Kristen Stewart, oh my! 
It’s funny how Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? in its sundry languages and cultures gets under the skin of so many writers and filmmakers. Yes, it’s the enticement of easy money, but there’s something even more insidious: the fluky mixture of tackiness and grandiosity; the questions that mischievously drift from history to science to the most ephemeral of pop-culture ephemera; the option to “phone a friend” — who might well let one down with a thud, as friends often do. A cruel god puts fortune just within reach — and just out of it. A sense of divine mockery is at the heart of Slumdog Millionaire, a galvanic coming-of-age saga constructed around the show’s Hindi incarnation. The movie, directed by Danny Boyle (Trainspotting, 28 Days Later), borrows the ingenious premise (but only a few specifics) from the novel Q & A by Vikas Swarup: A poor young Muslim, Jamal (Dev Patel), wins millions of rupees on TV and is promptly arrested on the grounds that an ignorant “slumdog” who serves chai to better-paid workers must somehow have cheated. Via flashbacks, Jamal explains to a cop (Irfan Khan) how he knew the right answers — how each question, as if by fate, connected with some event in his violent, tragic life.
The hyperkinetic filmmaking that many attempt and few bring off.
On the death of John Leonard at 69 after a long and tireless fight with lung cancer, it’s tempting to reach into those dense whirlwinds of prose and pluck out sentences that evoke his greatness. That’s certainly doable. There are thousands. He wrote a ton. But it’s not so much the individual phrases as the voice itself, its rhapsodic cadences, its ebb and flow (and flow), its opening of doors and blowing out of walls, that sweeps you up and changes how you think, how you think about thinking. The transcendentalism is contagious. You can hear Leonard’s voice rippling through Emily Nussbaum’s e-mailed reminiscence: “John's signature move was what my friend Laura Miller called ‘the cascade,’ a wild, ramshackle, electrical spill-off of references to everything on earth, from Freud to Darwin to literary allusions to political idioms — a poetic and outrageous technique that imbued a Whitmanesque enormity to any art he was exploring.”
Why was Leonard a wonderful TV critic? Because a man who used art to delve so deeply into the recesses of his own imagination knew enough—and wasn’t afraid—to celebrate surfaces.
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