November 1, 2005

People say ‘God is dead.’ But how can they say that when I show them the devil?”

So asks Emily Rose in a note read after her death in The Exorcism of Emily Rose. Emily explains from beyond the grave that the Virgin Mary appeared to her and offered to end her demonic possession by taking her life. But Emily chose to suffer in order to show the world that demons are real—and teach us that we’d all better behave.

My husband and I have acquired the somewhat embarrassing habit of settling down on the couch to watch reruns of Sex and the City. Despite having aired its final episode on HBO a few years ago, SATC continues to intrigue Americans, who are buying the series on DVD and watching episodes on cable TV. This is perhaps unsurprising, given the way the show trades deftly on contemporary anxieties about being single, looking perfect and growing older.

Based on Gerald Clarke’s exhaustive biography, Bennett Miller’s Capote covers the six years that Truman Capote spent working on In Cold Blood. The film begins at a noisy New York cocktail party where Capote is the center of attention, regaling his friends with humorous anecdotes and observations. Then he runs across a newspaper article about the murder of four members of the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas. He calls William Shawn, editor of the New Yorker, to say that he wants to go to Kansas to write about this story.