Credit:  The poster for the movie Carol

For film buffs, there are three kinds of movies: the artsy ones (aka “cinema”), the YA ones about dystopias, and the rest. The new movie Carol is definitely in the first group.  Unfortunately, Carol is only playing in New York and LA, so chances are most of us haven’t seen it yet. Instead, movie theaters outside those two cities just have the poster for Carol. I’m sure the movie is great, but boy, that poster is pretty darn amazing on its own. In the poster, Cate Blanchett looks to the left on the top while Rooney Mara looks to the right on the bottom. It suggests they’re staring deep into each other’s souls when in reality they couldn’t be facing in more opposite directions. They both look very cold—not unfriendly, just chilly—and the font is a crisp, yet non-threatening sans serif. The whole package miraculously distinguishes the title “Carol” from a Melissa McCarthy comedy where she goes on a road trip with her accountant to the Grand Canyon, the very thing any thinking person should assume a movie called Carol would be about. Carol has been getting a lot of Oscar buzz, but looking at that poster, it seems the best picture of the year isn’t even a movie.

D: Christmas Carols

Thanksgiving’s over, the turkey’s digested, and Mariah Carey’s back on the radio.  It must be the holiday season. Starting Tues. Dec. 1, it is illegal to tell someone to stop playing Christmas music, which might be too much power for one genre of music to have. Don’t get me wrong, a handful of these Christmas classics deserve to be played on repeat until Santa comes to town and commits a mass home invasion, but too many of them are nothing special. Like one of those middle reindeer (Dander? Xander?), these songs don’t have much purpose and are only there to fill the airwaves. Does anyone really hear, see, and know what it is that Bing Crosby hears, sees, and knows?  From the mildly amusing Chipmunks ditty to the truly heinous “Christmas Shoes,” are these songs, whether or not they’re technically “carols,” adding anything to your holiday season? For a little less than a month, one set of music rings loud in almost every public space.  There’s an opportunity to build up a solid collection here, but instead, we keep listening to a song about a Christmas donkey.

Fail: Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates, prolific author and high-fiber cereal waiting to happen, tweeted last week, asking if there was “nothing celebratory & joyous” in ISIS. If not wholly offensive, this tweet reads as painfully out of touch, especially since she signed off by pondering, like a relatable human, “or is query naive?” I mean, first of all, she obviously hasn’t heard about Starbucks’ new ISIS cups, but that’s beside the point. The tweet basically came off as, “ISIS are people too. Too soon?” Oates is an intelligent person, so what ISIS celebration does she think the media is hiding? The Islamic State Fair?  My theory is that this tweet was a publicity stunt for her upcoming novel The Man Without a Shadow. So to Oates I ask, is there nothing dark & shady on the ground beside this man? Because I don’t know anyone who just doesn’t have a shadow.