Let me tell you, if your marriage is in trouble, skip the therapist and find a psycho. Nothing brings people together faster.

Some reviewed 'The Master' on their knees, and while I respected its distinctive discordancy - can a movie be at once feverish and glacial? - I was unmoved.

What can you say about a man who leaps from a helicopter over Manhattan without a parachute in the hope that by increasing his heart rate he'll transform into an iridescent lime-green behemoth so he can take on an even bigger behemoth? That he knows he's living in a computer-generated universe in which gravity is a feeble suggestion and nothing is remotely at stake, and that when he hits the ground he'll be replaced by a special effect. The Incredible Hulk is weightless-as disposable as an Xbox game.

Every year, I'm depressed that so few of the documentaries I've loved break through.

Well, the movie isn't bad. For a while, I even told myself I liked it, even as it missed one mark after another. But in the end, it's shapeless and blandly apolitical, apart from its watered-down feminism. You see, Fey's Kim Baker - changed from Barker - transforms herself from a neophyte reporter, condescended to by male war correspondents, soldiers and Afghan officials, into a hard-charging political animal who speaks the language fluently and parties as hard as men. That's about as edgy as a sitcom.

Still, you can't complain about the number of movies being made. Never have the means of making movies been so accessible to so many. The problem is getting bodies into seats.

My fears are the obvious ones: that marketplace-minded publishers - all four of them - will shy further away from literary fiction, international authors, poetry, and the other marginal but hugely important regions of the book world.