Brideshead to Bill Murray

I'm not going to waste a lot of space here dealing with the new Brideshead Revisited movie. I haven't seen it, and I have no plan to do so. From all accounts, at least from people whose judgment on such matters I trust, it sounds like it augered in at the start, and I'm not at all surprised.

Indeed, my Schadenfreude centers lit up when I heard that the movie wasn't going to be fighting for an Academy Award. I just couldn't bear it.

I'll just say this: It is something approaching a sad commentary on modern life that a straightforward, relatively facile read like Brideshead, which spawned a pretty darned good miniseries (from what I saw, which wasn't much: I refused to watch it on other grounds), has to be made into a movie. The book can be read, if one doesn't do much else, in a weekend or maybe three days. Who has time for that, these days? Certainly not the target audience of this movie, this attempt at having Evelyn Waugh do script work on a remake of Howards End, which seems to be the thrust of the posters.

So very, very wrong. Oh, well, Schadenfreude ist die schönste Freude.

Quoting Caddyshack, then, "I've got that going for me."