Corporate irony not only ridicules the thing it is selling but the very act of selling it. In the process it disarms critics by making anyone who goes against the flow of commerce seem clueless.

You might learn as much about how to write by reading Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Wallace Stevens, Raymond Chandler, Saul Bellow, Paul Muldoon or a hundred other good novelists or poets than by seeing another round of John Ford revivals.

Trivial details have been summoned, in part, to make a satirical point about upper-middle-class marriage-that the whole thing can slip away between the white wine and the arugula salad.

Entertaining the reader is a good function.

Corporate irony not only ridicules the thing it is selling but the very act of selling it. In the process it disarms critics by making anyone who goes against the flow of commerce seem clueless.

The action comes at us through a buzz of nattering remarks.

The problem of criticism is not judgment but evocation - conveying the particular emotional and visual feel that the movie has.