The XX Factor: Slate women blog about politics, etc...

Better Than Mr. Big: An Old Guy With Writer's Block

Ellen, that is one gutsy post, and a public service, too. (Maybe Prudie has some suggestions on ways to get the "Clooney it up a little bit'' message out?) No way the big-screen Sex and the City could match last night's Daily Show spoof, in which Jason Jones, John Oliver, Larry Wilmore, and Aasif Mandvi stir their cosmos with cigars and drink a toast to herpes. And anyone on the lookout for something quieter and sturdier—an anti-SATC, set on the Upper West Side—might like to check out the DVD I saw last weekend, Starting Out in the Evening, a movie so carefully made it feels hand-stitched. Frank Langella completely inhabits the role of Leonard Schiller, an aging novelist with writer's block who feels time is running out. When this know-it-all grad student, Lauren Ambrose, barges into his life, full of plans to make her name by resuscitating his career, you keep thinking you know what's coming—will it be this or will it be that?  But then you don't, and it isn't, in a way that restores faith in the kind of writing the lead character demands of himself. (And every writerly kid who says he or she just loves to sit down at the keyboard should see this, too; what a brutal life filling blank pages with fiction is.) The closest it gets to cliché is that it's Lili Taylor (beautifully) playing Leonard's Lili Taylor-like daughter; she fears her most (re)productive years are slipping away as well, while her boyfriend, Adrian Lester, who in my one quibble seems not to have heard of the blogosphere, pours all his energy into starting an online magazine, so his friends will have a place to kick around ideas. Not that we all have the same taste in movies any more than we do in candidates, but I hadn't heard much about this one, and don't know when I've been so floored by a film.