BRIDESHEAD REVISITED
RUNNING TIME 135 minutes
WRITTEN BY Jeremy Brock and Andrew Davies
DIRECTED BY Julian Jarrold
STARRING Matthew Goode, Ben Whishaw, Emma Thompson, Michael Gambon, Greta Scacchi, Hayley Atwell

Here it is at last: the intelligent movie filmgoers have waited for all year. The film version of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited transforms one of the quintessential novels of the 20th century into one of the grandest, most enriching films of 2008. The 11-part 1981 miniseries was such a milestone in TV history that purists who watch the four-volume DVD set might squabble about the merits of reducing so much artistry into an almost two-and-a-half-hour film.

BRIDESHEAD REVISITED
RUNNING TIME 135 minutes
WRITTEN BY Jeremy Brock and Andrew Davies
DIRECTED BY Julian Jarrold
STARRING Matthew Goode, Ben Whishaw, Emma Thompson, Hayley Atwell, Greta Scacchi, Michael Gambon

Julian Jarrold’s Brideshead Revisited, from a screenplay by Jeremy Brock and Andrew Davies, is based on the seductively class-ridden novel by Evelyn Waugh. This literary masterpiece has, strangely, never been made into a movie, though it was the source of a popular 12-hour television miniseries that aired in 1981, with Jeremy Irons, Anthony Andrews and Diana Quick in the lead roles now assigned to British newcomers Matthew Goode, Ben Whishaw and Hayley Atwell.

It was quite a Bat-tacular weekend, wasn’t it? Not surprising us in the least, but apparently still shocking to some, was that everyone went bat#@$% over The Dark Knight, which raked in a massive amount of moulah last weekend (158.3 million), setting all sorts of records—best first night, best three-day non-holiday-weekend, best performance for a movie with the word “Dark” in the title, etc.—and in general charting its course to world domination. Isn’t it nice to see this happen with a really good movie for a change?

THE BATMAN WILL no doubt take No. 1 this weekend (and the next, probably, too), but if it’s nonfantasy cinema you’re looking for, you’re in luck, as everyone seems to be releasing their documentaries right now.

The Marriage of Bette and Boo, Christopher Durang’s dark 1985 comedy about his own nutty family that has received a sparkling revival at the Laura Pels Theatre, is a peculiar pleasure.

Mr. Durang has furtively written a tragedy disguised as mad farce. His famously absurdist comedy is good-natured and grotesque, and awfully sad, especially when it becomes alarmingly clear that his apparently adorably eccentric family is more or less insane.

That we might easily find ourselves identifying with Mr. Durang’s lunatic cast of characters is all to the good. The Marriage of Bette and Boo is the modern comedy about dysfunctional American family life (predating by a generation the excesses of August: Osage County).

In Edward Albee’s The Occupant, a play about the American sculptor Louise Nevelson, a nameless interviewer quizzes the artist on her fame and critical fortunes. He mentions the name “Louise Bourgeois.” Nevelson reacts with dismissive hauteur. The implication is clear: The Nevelson character feels threatened by Ms. Bourgeois.

Why, exactly, is left unanswered. Envy over critical status or contemporary relevance might play into it. Maybe it has something to do with image—the “grande dame” thing—or with competition, Ms. Nevelson being one of the few dames to gain a measure of renown. Given that Mr. Albee knew the Nevelson character’s real-life counterpart, it’s fair, I think, to assume that the Bourgeois snub has some basis in fact, and it set me to thinking about their artistic commonalities.

Ten years ago an Englishman, Keith McNally, opened a fake French bistro in Soho. Every detail had been carefully researched, from the red leather for the banquettes to the Gauloise-smoke patina on the ceilings and the shellfish display, where names of the oysters du jour were scrawled in soap on distressed mirrors. From opening day, the place looked as though it had been around for a hundred years. When you walked into Balthazar, you entered another world.

So there was much anticipation when Alain Ducasse announced he was going to open a New York branch of Benoit, one of the last authentic bistros in Paris, dating from 1912, and which he took over two years ago.

The Park Avenue Armory, that massive Victorian hulk situated between 66th and 67th streets, is well known for hosting the Annual Winter Antiques Show, where a well-heeled crowd enjoys its elegant preview parties, Young Collectors’ nights, and other pleasant rituals. Earlier this month, however, its cavernous Drill Hall was transformed for an event that demanded a rather different sort of ambiance—more like a Dantean circle of hell: The Lincoln Center Festival used it to present five performances of Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s 1965 opera Die Soldaten (The Soldiers).

If you haven’t heard of this opera, then you haven’t heard of its composer, either.

What do we expect from something called Romeo and Juliet—or, as in the case of Mark Morris’ new version, Romeo & Juliet, On Motifs of Shakespeare? We’ve all read it, seen it, heard the operas, watched the movies, enjoyed (or not) West Side Story. And then, of course, there are all the dance versions: Lavrovsky, MacMillan, Cranko and, if we’re lucky enough to have seen them, Ashton and Tudor. It’s embedded in our minds—and in ballet. The two roles almost all young ballerinas most eagerly hope to dance are Giselle and … Juliet.

Why? The scintillating verse of the young Shakespeare doesn’t explain this story’s grip on the world’s—or the dancer’s—imagination.

Homes is where the suburbs are! But first: Empty restaurant tables and Batman on IMAX be damned—get us out of this hellhole! We’re tired of maintaining our pedicure, and to top it off, we smell … funny. Meanwhile, if we have to read one more thing about Megan McCain’s dinner with Heidi Montag (John McCain’s shameless ploy to align himself with skin tone) or The New Yorker’s “brave” Obama cover, we’re moving to Daytona to be a cocktail waitress at the Holiday Inn! Leave it to Joyce Carol Oates to keep the intellectual torch burning here through the long slog of summer, reading from her latest—and, at our count, her 638th—book, My Sister, My Love: The Intimate Story of Skyler Rampike, at the Bryant Park Reading Room.

Furious Improvisation: How the WPA and a Cast of Thousands Made High Art Out of Desperate Times
By Susan Quinn
Walker, 325 pages, $25.99

Imagine a country where the president uses the full faith and credit of the government to put people to work in hard times. Imagine a country where artists are not regarded as expendable froufrou, or as dangerous provocateurs, but as crucial contributors to a nation’s psychological and moral health.

Imagine, then, a country like the United States in 1935, when desperation impelled a government to do things that no American government would do today no matter how desperate.

Susan Quinn’s Furious Improvisation—a great title for an excellent book, a model of narrative history—tells the story of the Federal Theatre Project, an offshoot of F.

How Fiction Works
By James Wood
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 265 pages, $24

James Wood is in relax mode. That doesn’t mean he’s lost his edge, or that he can’t get excited—enthusiasm is still his best party trick: He gushes like Old Faithful. But these days he’s got nothing left to prove, no one to elbow out of the way. He’s the undisputed champ. If the poet laureate had a critic laureate to keep her company, James Wood would be he—why else would Harvard have appointed him professor of the practice of literary criticism? Why else would The New Yorker have poached him last year from The New Republic?

Of course, he still needs an audience—readers willing to read about reading and writing—and perhaps relax mode is Mr.

Stop Me If You’ve Heard This: A History and Philosophy of Jokes
By Jim Holt
W. W. Norton, 160 pages, $15.95

The eponymous shaggy-dog story is about a boy who enters his dog into a local "shaggy-dog contest." When the dog wins, the boy enters him into a larger regional contest, and then, when the dog wins that one, too, into still another, until finally, after a tortuously narrated series of trials and triumphs, the dog makes it into the quadrennial World Shaggy Dog contest—which he loses badly, prompting the boy to remark, "Well, maybe he wasn’t so shaggy."

Depending on how it’s delivered, a shaggy-dog joke can be either a cruel prank at the listener’s expense, or a sort of joyous exercise in silliness, in which the punch line, a joke’s nominal destination, serves only as a pretext for the journey.

Central Park in the Dark: More Mysteries of Urban Wildlife
By Marie Winn
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 295 pages, $25

Ten years ago, Wall Street Journal reporter Marie Winn told the story of her enchantment with a pair of red-tailed hawks nesting on the ledge of a tony Fifth Avenue co-op in clear view of the Central Park boat pond. Ecstatic birdwatchers kept vigil, generously offering use of their expensive-looking binoculars to all who passed. The story had legs (wings?) and her book, Red-Tails in Love, was a hit. Aside from making Pale Male and Lola (as they were dubbed) into posterbirds for the resurgence of New York’s long-depressed hawk population, Red-Tails did something akin to setting down an oral tradition for the first time.

Slackonomics: Generation X in the Age of Creative Destruction
By Lisa Chamberlain
Da Capo, 212 pages, $25

In Slackonomics: Generation X in the Age of Creative Destruction, Lisa Chamberlain examines the changing cultural and economic landscape that has defined—and been defined by—Generation X’s reluctant, late-onset adulthood. The elusive subtitle is the first hint of the economic vagueness to come. (After 188 pages I was still unsure of the precise meaning of "creative destruction," which—and I am frantically thumbing through my copy of the book here—was used by the economist Joseph Schumpeter to refer to the process by which a capitalist economy constantly destroys and reinvents itself.

The last word on Christopher Hitchens’ ludicrous Vanity Fair waterboarding caper, Leon Wieseltier’s magisterial put-down in The New Republic (www.tnr.com):

"There are many things that might be said about such a stunt—that moral understanding is not arrived at by means of the senses, or by personal acquaintance with evil; that ordinary intelligence and ordinary imagination are quite sufficient to establish the foulness and the folly of such procedures, which is why judges who have not dressed up in Guantánamo drag have been able to rule persuasively against them; that the victims of waterboarding do not commonly towel down and head for the Waverly Inn—but I have no intention of dignifying this high clowning with serious reflection.