Jesus' Son News

There is no good way to give bad news. For most of us, the task of informing a person of a loved one's passing is an unprescribed, terrifying and often bumbling undertaking.

It's hard to recall that Woody Harrelson started out as a lanky, clean-scrubbed male ingnue on Cheers , and that's entirely to his credit.

War is made of many parts, from the reasons for initial conflict to stories from the battlefield to the incongruity of life once soldiers return home.

The Messenger might be the most harrowing Iraq War movie yet, and it doesn't even leave the States.

NOBODY MOVE, by Denis Johnson; Farras, Straus, Giroux; 242 pages; $23. Literary writers often are attracted to genre fiction, mostly, I suspect, because the pay is better and it looks easy.

This is a bit old, from early August, so you might have seen this already. But if you missed it the first time , be sure to check out Malcolm Jones's examination of noir books in Newsweek .

Description : A Belltown dive filled with eccentrics - many of them apparently down-and-out, many of them perfectly friendly.

Oscilloscope is hearing the message. The upstart film distributor headed by Adam Yauch, of the Beastie Boys, has picked up North American rights to Oren Moverman's directorial debut, "The Messenger," which premiered this year at the Sundance Film Festival.

PICK OF THE WEEK "My Dinner with Andr" and "Last Year at Marienbad" : Two archetypes of arthouse cinema get the Criterion treatment this week: the first, a hyper-brainy slice of urban narcissism consisting solely of two people talking; the latter, an inscrutable French puzzle-film full of ambiguous symbols, impossibly crisp visuals, and characters ...

It's a typical day in the life of rambling junkie F*ckhead, whom we'll call FH for the purposes of this review.

Actor Michael Shannon is in talks to join the cast of the Joan Jett movie "The Runaways," The Hollywood Reporter said.

Denis Johnson's latest novel is characterized mainly by its abruptness. It begins abruptly, with a compulsive gambler named Jimmy Luntz getting forced into a copper-colored Cadillac by a large, lumbering man named Gambol.

The Afterword and HarperCollins Canada are teaming-up to mark the release of Denis Johnson's new novel, Nobody Move , with not one giveaway but two! Johnson -- a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and a winner of the National Book Award -- is the author of Tree of Smoke , Jesus' Son , and Fiskadoro .

Noir novel " Nobody Move " was originally serialized in Playboy. We'd make a joke about how you didn't read it because of all the naked ladies, but if you're dumb enough that you're still paying for porn, you probably can't read anyway.