On the whole, I think I’m grateful. I know I’m amused. But mostly, I’m pleased to encounter a piece that bitingly manages to balance the gently controversial with the insightful and fun.

Daniel B. Smith’s “The Very Grouchy Daddy”’s indignant thesis, that Eric Carle’s works, most famously, The Very Hungry Caterpillar, are somnolent, formulaic and cloyingly torturous books that only wear thinner with repeated exposure, is as refreshing as it is—in the children’s book-reading-world—heretic.

While it may at first be difficult to discern what is funnier, Smith’s snark-laced asides, or the fact that Carle so offends him, the piece makes keen observations in a form clever and ultimately persuasive.

Smith’s success lies in his ability to argue a provocative point in a way dryly (and hilariously) malicious (“Each [book] proceeds along the same monotonous line: Animal No. 1 perceives Animal No. 2, who perceives Animal No. 3, and so on and so forth until the sequence ends, more or less arbitrarily”) without succumbing to one of a rant.

Moreover, he wisely acknowledges the artistic merits behind Carle’s vivid illustrations while admitting the creation of a children’s book is no mean feat.

What I appreciated most, then, was how carefully he addressed the “why” behind his vehement reactions to what would seem at least harmless, if not adorable. He explains how in order to be successful, a children’s book need contain the dual-pronged ability to both engage the child and the adult, a nuance he says Carle’s works do not possess.

I must admit that as a child, I found Carle’s books, with their colorful images of insects, delightful, while long finding the collective obsession with Maurice Sendak’s works capricious and overblown. But a post-Smith glance at both authors’ works for the first time in 20 years has sold me on the idea that the first may be charming, but, indeed, bloodless and linear, the second, innovative and intriguing.

So I’m grateful to Smith for showing me a point of view with which I now generally agree in a riotous form that elegantly, if perhaps subconsciously, mimics Sendak’s: that of the leave-taking and the return.

Of course, he’ll tell you up front that half plus one died.

But you need not wait for his report: the back cover will supply the same one before you read a single page.

That the number of Mexicans crossing the border illegally continues to soar is an understatement. That 26 attempted to do so in 2001 is not news. That 14 of them failed as a result not of deportation but of death is not a surprise—a tragedy, but not a surprise.

No reader should approach Luis Alberto Urrea’s The Devil’s Highway in order to discover those facts for the first time. Yes, those facts matter. Of course they matter. They are the first heartbreaking answer to a series of complicated questions.

Yet those questions—the to whom did this happen, how did this happen, why did this happen and how can we keep this from happening again—as well as the corresponding responses they elicit, matter as much as that initial answer does itself.

It is to those questions, those deceptively simple queries that consume every journalist out on assignment and every reader who later looks it through, that Urrea devotes his novel.

And that novel is a fantastic achievement.

The Devil’s Highway follows 26 men through their agonizing journey north from southern Mexico up through the U.S.’ back door, the searing wastes of Arizona’s desert.

Known to the Wellton Border Patrol who rescued them as the “Wellton 26,” or to most others as the “Yuma 14” for the party’s 14 who died in Yuma sector, these men endure one ordeal after the other in the hope that their efforts will allow their sweethearts or children to eat better (or at all), live under stronger roofs and attend school with the funds earned in a richer country.

Stunningly thorough, Urrea admits that in reporting the story, he filled five journals (144 pages each) with notes. And it shows. He weaves bits of history into a narrative that shifts back and forth in point of view as well as from the distant past to the present, to the events leading up to the voyage and to the catastrophic journey itself.

In a literary move equally agile, he visits Veracruz on one page, reaching Altar or Tuscon, San Luis or the desert, on the next.

Urrea writes with such terrifyingly vivid detail that with it, he shuttles the reader to the times and places he has described. Moreover, never does the reader feel that Urrea is judging these individuals, the people who have become characters in his story.

That seeming lack of judgment manifests itself not as a neutral portrayal of folk for which he apologizes, but as ruthless accounts of the actions of the entrants and the Border Patrol, the two governments and the coyotes, bigoted minutemen and crime lords.

Because he baldly presents chronological facts and physical descriptions while infusing those passages with inherited thoughts, impressions and quotes, he manages to cast even those most flawed or potentially reprehensible in a human light.

We cannot sympathize with an adolescent dealing in human traffic, who can lead those smuggled to death while leaving them to face it alone. But with the aid of details and letters, we can almost empathize with the kind of desperation wrought from living in a country that has forsaken him, adjacent to another for which he does not exist.

Rare are those who look on the Border Patrol with friendly eyes. But Urrea, who has no stake in their reputation, allows the reader a different glimpse into their monotonous existence, their lonely worlds, their rough compassion and their endearing idiosyncrasies.

Though he often writes with a dry tongue-in-cheek that irreverently mocks both governmental hypocrisy and Mexican machismo alike, his prose also reads like poetry.

At one instance he sums up the desert’s equal opportunity danger to and derision for its visitors by saying that “in the desert, we are all illegal aliens.”

In a later vignette, he poignantly portrays the 26 as they sit on the bus en route to the border, and for some to their burning death:

They utter “some small prayers, muttered in discreet whispers, the sign of the cross ending in kissed crossed fingers. ‘Journey mercies. Let us arrive safely. We need to get to the border. Help get us into the desert. Make us strong.’ It was more comfortable than the chairs in their homes, but the air conditioning was too cold.”

Urrea loses no opportunity to highlight the painful irony behind finding that AC uncomfortable not long before cooking in the cruel, unforgiving sun of the States’ southern desert.

And that desert is in this case an enemy. It destroys all who outstay their brief welcome. Urrea makes us viscerally aware of the effects of that prolonged stay. Clinically, he outlines the manner in which those caught there can for awhile subsist on their urine until that too will poison them.

He personifies the desert, calling it, like others before him, “Desolation,” running through the ways in which that spirit makes men crazy before gruesomely baking them in six separate stages.

While his chronology is, at times, confusing, and the end, the devastating “so what now” epilogue is slightly truncated and hard to follow, those shortcomings appear minimal in the face of this literary feat.

Yes, we understand from the outset that only 12 of the 26 will survive. But as we read about a father dying next to his young son, or the fictional thoughts projected onto the dead by Urrea, illuminating the Mexican’s ethos, that each man would be so insulted at the indignity of smelling—even in death—or the manner in which those harboring hyperthermic hallucinations would stumble to oblivion naked, having first neatly stripped and taken the time to fold their clothes, we begin to see those numbers as individuals, as human beings.

Half plus one died. But the novel allows us to understand how something so loathsome could have transpired. We experience, by proxy of Urreas words, the hell of that highway, and the more we learn, the more we can honor those 14 as more than simply coordinates on a map, or look for recourses to help the many others stumbling through Desolation each day.

And what a cause, indeed.

American poet Theodore Roethke once wrote that “In a dark time, the eye begins to see.” Well. I’d say the Depression counts as a dark time, wouldn’t you? And oh what audience eyes were able to see!

Perhaps they nearly popped out in shock (I could be exaggerating).

Nevertheless, I can’t help thinking those viewing Busby Berkeley’s 1933 film Footlight Parade for the first time must have been surprised (delighted) at what that brazen (outlandish!) director had to show them.

A pioneer of the mobile camera, Berkeley felt shooting straight on was limiting—a surrender to the logistical constraints the theater should have to deal with, not film. So it should come as no surprise he granted his viewers glances of lithe young bodies slithering around sensuously from the unprecedented—if unspecific—angles of “below” or “above.”

Add the camera’s new positioning to a bleak-era’s collective need for vicarious extravagance to the zany vision of a heterosexual choreographer-director, and you’ll have quite the show.

Reading a bit on the plot will illuminate the fact that the musical number, “By a Waterfall,” takes place in order to impress both audiences and a theater owner with the power to make or break a director’s career.

What ensues amounts to a possibly gratuitous display of ultra meta (we’re talking show within show within show within the original show itself—the film—here) performances. Dick Powell’s slightly emasculated and overpowering vibrato share an idyllic call-and-response singing scene with Ruby Keeler’s unexpectedly deep voice as the two commence the song, “By a Waterfall.”

The charming strains worm their way into your consciousness until you find yourself humming it on a walk or hearing it—complete with ‘30s era chorus—replaying in your head in a twilight zone-esque descant to the rest of your thoughts.

Looking appropriately like the time’s Bettie Boop-like ideal (tiny mouthed and delicate, short haired and pointy faced), Keeler implausibly transforms into a sort of long-haired dryad. The grassy patch on which she and Powell have been sitting (all along a stage) gives way to grotto, and—voila!—a group of lovely, body-suit clad, near-naked, nipple-less women appear, languishing on wet rocks…by a waterfall…while singing along to…“By a Waterfall.”

And here’s where the fun begins.

The women, indistinguishable from one another, subside into a meticulously choreographed aquatic number in which they splash about (some wearing metallic hair reminiscent of the recent Art Deco or a Gustav Klimt painting), eventually landing in gymnasium-sized pool!

At this point, the unfortunate individual rigid enough not to have suspended disbelief long before will have to relinquish all claims to it now, as what follows is nothing short of fantastical.

Women collectively dive into the large basin from great heights, as their leader, presumably Keeler, cuts through their scissor-formation in a move that from above appears animated. And suddenly, these modern-day mermaids bend into water-bound shapes that filmed from the bird’s eye view look geometric, kaleidoscopic and impeccable.

It would, perhaps, be unwise to ask the foolish question “why?” when Berkeley could just as easily respond with “because we can!” Who knew humans could be capable of such synchronized movement? (No, no, please don’t answer that.) The figures bend to and fro in a large unified snake that at one point resembles an autocratic intestine.

We get the impression no individual really matters here. What’s more, any weak link, any woman desiring to stand out at an inappropriate moment (i.e. in the midst of creating the tangled-limb-formed-human-

wheels) would be excommunicated from the Berkeley family and its disciples.
And maybe that’s what’s called for. Berkeley hands the film’s eager theater owner, its audiences and the real audiences (today’s viewers and those originally paying the meager fare for a matinee and a moment’s respite from the day’s drudgery and grim landscape) an escape. He hands them proof that magic could exist—women could band together to make intricate shapes or a man could fall asleep to the tender whisperings of a panoply of goddesses.

Footlight Parade is the real Purple Rose of Cairo—the valium to the Depression era housewife, the romance novel to a spinster, the hastily hidden and sneekily-procured porn mag belonging to the lonely teenaged boy—and, possibly a propos to today’s events, the bright spot (crotch shots and all) on which the eye may focus in what is, at the end, a dark time.

James Mangold’s 3:10 to Yuma is about redemption, self respect, and… pistol-packing, Stetson-wearing, leather-vested bad apples and their nefarious deeds. It’s also about bringing back the western as a more hardcore and less ridiculous genre. Mangold (of Walk the Line and Girl, Interrupted fame) is not the first to use the Elmore Leonard short story as a jumping off point. This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the release of the original movie-version of3:10 to Yuma, directed by Delmer Daves and starring Glenn Ford (“Ben Wade”) and Van Heflin (“Dan Evans”) in the roles played in the latest version by Russell Crowe and Christian Bale.

Although Daves worked within the confines of a cowboy-flick tradition widely hailed as the essence of masculine cool, Mangold has produced a piece in an era when most filmgoers eye westerns as feeble, ludicrous, and unrealistic products that should be approached with the wary suspicion of the previously disappointed. My generation has grown up hearing the “truth” regarding the cowboy’s bravery as one that led to widespread Native American massacre and suffering. It’s also hard to find long-johns and high waists sexy. Unforgiven was perhaps the last western twentysomethings can remember relating to in their lifetimes.

With its drama, gritty dialogue, and Marco Beltrami-composed soundtrack— acoustically driven and tinged with Texican trumpet, reminiscent of the archetypal soundtracks of Ennio Morricone and Luis E. Bacalov—3:10 to Yuma brings back all the allure of 1960s spaghetti westerns like Django, A Fistful of Dollars and The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly.

Ben Wade (Crowe) is a sociopath. (“You’re not all bad.” “Yes I am. I wouldn’t last one minute out there if I weren’t rotten as hell.”) He shoots and stabs bystanders and robs stage-coaches as calmly and as often as he sketches the animals he spies and the people he interacts with in his journal or in the pages of a bible. He’s a smooth-talker who utters such dry absurd beauties as “I don’t mind skinny girls [to a waitress he’s wooing] as long as they’ve got green eyes to make up for it. [Vinessa Shaw, “Emmy,” turns around to face him with her brown eyes] That’s alright… they don’t have to be green.” Dan Evans (Bale) is beaten down by the system, Job-like. He lost a leg in the Civil War. He’s hard up on cash and about to get kicked off of his land by the railroad company. His wife (Gretchen Mol) is unsatisfied. His younger son has tuberculosis. And his older son despises him as a weakling.

When the police capture Wade, Dan volunteers to be one of the escorts paid to accompany the outlaw to Yuma prison. Sound simple? As plans go, it’s not too bad, but throw in hostile Apache, a crazed Luke Wilson and Wade’s cadre of faithful minions headed by Ben Foster as Wade-obsessed psychotic Charlie Prince, then the journey is tantamount to playing five-bullet Russian roulette. As obstacles mount, Dan’s mission becomes less about the money and more about sticking to a promise and his principles. His wife tells him that “no one will think less of [him]” if he says no to the venture. He replies that “No one can think less of [him].” But by the end he, like the new western, become badasses worth applauding and worth emulating. All I can say is, thank god the cows have come home.