Hopping on the anti-smug bandwagon...

...I spent a fair portion of the weekend with The Offspring catching up on pop culture phenoms on DVD. Including:

Twilight, which, though not aimed at the likes of me, is impressively crafted for what it is, basically a swoony teen romance with pasty-faced emo vampires. (Did any of Americxa's esteemeed scribes recognize the huge debt the movie owes to shojo manga and anime? I would guess not.) The only real revelation is the lead acress, Kristen Stewart, whose work was well described by David Edelstein: "[Director Catherine] Hardwicke jacks up the stakes with a swooping camera and a romantic-grunge soundtrack, but the most vivid thing in the film is Kristen Stewart. She was the leggy hobo-camp teen in love with Emile Hirsch in Into the Wild, and she’s better at conveying physical longing than any of the actors playing vampires. She alone suggests how this series was born, in the mind of a young Mormon girl who had to sublimate like mad with thoughts of having her blood sucked." Though snobbism reigns supreme in the critical realm to such an extent that I expect the "discovery" reviews will have to wait for the release of Stewart's next one.

Lost, which, though hardly a discovery, turns out to have a degree of re-watchability that I would not have expected. Nora is working her way through season four, and I watched six of them again, almost two years after the fact, with pleasure -- especially a time-hopping prodigy called "The Constant," surely one of the most potent 40-minute chunks of television ever broadcast.

And a somewhat promising prospect, co-written by the notably un-smug Michael Chabon.