I've been busy revising my prospectus and writing a paper for the MMLA conference which is in Columbus this weekend, but I had the time to see the latest James Bond movie, Spectre, last night. I'm not sure why it's getting panned so severely, except that the movie's roles and attentions are a little too distributed -- there are two villains, with insufficient connection between them; there are two love interests, one purely sexual and the other almost too chaste (at least in what we are allowed to see). But in another way, this is interesting, because even an intensely plot-driven genre film is finding itself drawn to the minor characters and to multiplicity, to destabilizing our generic expectations that it will invest all its energy into the one woman, the one bad guy. Bond's friends also get a remarkable amount of screentime, with Q going into the field and Ralph Fiennes looking excellent in a double-breasted suit. And the film is also about fashion, with lots of incredible suits, sunglasses, some incredible Danner boots in Austria...and long lapels?? What's up, Tom Ford? But it's a good thing that there was so much style, because we went classic with minimal technology.

But the most ridiculous and incredible thing was the convergence of the film with DFW keywords and phrases..."The Pale King" was an important figure that Bond had to seek out, and he rides in a Rolls Royce "Wraith" in Tunisia. WHAT.

Other notes on the film: odd use of comedy; threat of neurosurgery; a little camp; very weird and over-stylized opening credits scene with octopuses, tentacles, fire, Daniel Craig's exposed chest, and writhing ladies.

Back to Infinite Jest, Bakhtin, syntax, voice, and more. My paper title: "David Foster Wallace's Scientific Style."