The chief person in “Sail Shining in White,” by Mark Helprin, is an old man of the sea—he is 82—who knows “[a]s if by some magic” that a ferocious storm is coming.

Saying yes to one’s own destruction (engineered by nature), as the old man does, is the subject. Aboard a boat, he knows he cannot survive the storm. There is no capriciousness here, however. The old man seeks an epiphany. He wishes “to see in nature some clue to the mystery to come [death] and the mysteries he would be leaving behind.” What can nature—or nature’s God—do for us? Helprin, I should mention, takes God seriously (“On the sea the only law was God’s law”).

“Sail” does not ignore the Wound in the human condition, but it is a defiantly positive short story. And there is nearly a politesse in its intelligent prose.

The 2006 film, The Devil Wears Prada, is a puny crowd-pleaser about a young woman (Anne Hathaway) who goes to work for a tyrannical fashion magazine editor (Meryl Streep).

Based on the Lauren Weisberger novel, the picture tries to convince us that Andrea, the Hathaway character, is naughty for being seduced by the “shallow” world of fashion, and it’s a silly misfire. But at least the piece has in its favor the non-feminist refusal to give its female characters a pass on all their moral choices. Miranda Priestly, the editor, is a cold and insulting jerk. One of her assistants (“Em”), played by Emily Blunt, is a bitchy snob. Both are essential to the creation of an unkind corporation.

This is what Andrea is doing—for a limited time, trying to keep her head above water in an unkind corporation. She isn’t naughty. Though nice to look at—and with Streep’s expertise—The Devil Wears Prada is, finally, a touchy feely fraud. Somehow, even Andrea’s hairy boyfriend seems fraudulent.

An alcoholic wants to end his life, through drinking. He starts a love affair with a very tolerant prostitute.

The Mike Figgis movie, Leaving Las Vegas (1995), is hardly a masterpiece. Even so, it can be appreciated, I think, as would-be Edvard Munch on film, a flashy cinematic Scream.

I said flashy: the film’s artiness works against it—the slow motion, the many fades to black. Moreover, when Ben the alcoholic is discovered by Sera the prostitute having sex with a strange woman, the plot element seems rather cheap, rather implausible. As Ben, Nicolas Cage is good. As Sera, Elisabeth Shue is perfect, and both clothed and naked she is beautiful. I never saw her in such flicks as Cocktail and The Underneath, but I suspect that American cinema has underused her. Probably she ought to be cast in some important roles now.

Some would call Monte Hellman‘s The Shooting, from 1966, an absurdist Western but whether it is or not, it is decidedly unusual and, in its own way, entertaining. A woman, Adrien Joyce, wrote the script, in which “a mysterious woman persuades two cowboys to help her in a revenge scheme” (imdb.com). The woman in question (Millie Perkins) is pretty but waspish, and her boyfriend is a detestable gunslinger (Jack Nicholson) she has hired, as she hired the two cowboys, to do the killing she wants. Cowboy Willett Gashade (Warren Oates), however, opposes and fights against the killing.

In the film, the past is unrevealed and motivations unknown. The woman, who may be pregnant, keeps mum about everything, even her name. What we do know is that two mostly ordinary men, the cowboys, are quite stultified by peculiar evil, even if the gunslinger ends up stultified as well.

Joyce also wrote the screenplay for Five Easy Pieces. Dead in 2004, she had gifts. Hellman, who died in 2021, provides some impressive long shots.