Views from Medina Road

I wish I'd had a chance to post something here last Monday, before the Oscar nominations were announced, so that I could sign in with my opinion that Letters from Iwo Jima is by far the best film of 2006, without sounding like a "yeah me too" response to those nominees. Without exactly planning it, I managed to see three films last weekend: Letters from Iwo Jima, Pan's Labyrinth, and Dreamgirls. Pan's Labyrinth is indeed a remarkable film, more a film about Spanish fascism and a young girl's experience than a fantasy film per se, but then our reactions to films are frequently reactions to what we've heard others say... There's a whole essay here. Dreamgirls is a slick entertaining spectacle, and though my reaction to Jennifer Hudson's singing quickly became please stop!, I do think this deserved to be a Best Picture nominee above Little Miss Sunshine, which managed somehow to prevail due to marketing and little-engine-that-could campaigning for what is really just a cute and charming but little more than made-for-tv type of film... But every year, it seems, something gets nominated for Best Film that five years later you think, what were they thinking..?

There's a draft book editors directory page posted, with content from the couple of respondents to my previous post here. You can find the link; it's not that hard. I'll send out invitations to a fair range of publishers and editors shortly, and announce and promote the page when I've compiled a representative set of data.