Movie links for a snowy day

John Updike left a huge literary legacy, as our Mark Feeney ably points out in today's Globe obit, but his work in the movies was minimal to the point of curiosity. "The Witches of Eastwick" is the adaptation everyone knows, mostly because director George Miller and stars Jack Nicholson, Susan Sarandon, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Cher (Cher?!) turned the book into a splattery, over-the-top multiplex experience. (I can still picture Veronica Cartwright puking endless cherries, and I don't want to.)

Updike was arguably better served by TV than the cinema. I have fond but fuzzy memories of "Too Far To Go," a 1979 NBC movie that starred Michael Moriarty and Blythe Danner in a teleplay cobbled together from several Updike New Yorker stories about feckless WASP marrieds. (A very young Glenn Close also appears; you can buy the DVD at the link above.) Other Updike short stories made it to PBS, and then there's the case of "Rabbit, Run," one of the author's signal works. It was made into a 1970 film starring James Caan that tested so poorly Warner Brothers opted not to release it to theaters, selling it instead to NBC for a "Movie of the Week" playoff. I've never seen it and neither have you, probably, but turns out that Amazon is offering it as a video-on-demand rental or sales item. It's nice to know that Rabbit Angstrom is still running somewhere.

Other items of note: "Slumdog Millionaire" has inspired a lot of love and, as expected, a good amount of backlash. One of the more cogent examples of the latter is from Dennis Lim at Slate. Choice quote: "If Slumdog has struck a chord, and it certainly seems to have done so in the West, it is not because the film is some newfangled post-globalization hybrid but precisely because there is nothing new about it." My point exactly, although I think that's a plus in getting such an exuberant film to a nominally unwilling US audience. But Lim's larger point, that the movie's politics are muddled and unexamined, is on-target. Of course, Danny Boyle isn't interested in politics here; the film's detractors would say that's just irresponsible.

One thing I didn't report on at Sundance was the fisticuffs/sissy-fight between Variety critic John Anderson and legendary publicist Jeff "The Dude" Dowd at a Park City bruncherie. Roger Ebert offers his take on the imbroglio with input from Dowd and imagined feedback from Anderson. For those of you who like deep inside baseball; otherwise, it means close to nothing at the end of the day.

Finally, a lovely online installation of movie end-titles called (what else?) "The End," courtesy of Flickr, along with a meditation on "the end" by esteemed writer and my old film professor David Thomson, whose "Biographical Dictionary of Film" remains essential and whose new theme park of a book, "Have You Seen...?" I'm still coming to terms with.