Headlines are my weakness

1. Tony Takitani: At first I thought this short movie could be retitled Tony Take-a-nap-i, as I fell asleep twice. But I recovered fully, and recommend this concise adaptation of a Murakami story, as calm as a high-end car commercial and stubbornly sad. (S. said: "It looks like a West Elm catalog.") After watching this and the Setagaya/Complicité's staged version of some tales from The Elephant Vanishes, I wonder if Murakami is one of those rare writers who might be better served by adaptations of his work. (These are the only two that I know of.)

1.1 Tony's wife buys so many clothes that they convert one of their rooms into a wardrobe; another good Voice film poll comment would have compared this space to that in (naturally) The Lion, The Witch... and perhaps the futuristic, sliding-box closet in Oldboy.

2. Dizzyhead Jen leads us to this amusing bit of ersatz hip-hop, by one of the Chronic-wha?-clers, in the surprise-ending mode of Eminem's "Stan."

3. At a New Year's Eve party, I noticed my friend Art had two copies of Pam Houston's Cowboys Are My Weakness. I quipped that that would have been the perfect headline for an article about Brokeback Mountain, but there was some discussion about whether people would get the reference. Lo and behold—Larry David's op-ed in yesterday's Times was thusly headlined! And a trawl through the litblogosphere also turned up this, at Old Hag.

4. Ricky Gervais fans—check out his podcast at The Guardian!