Esquire (November 2009) has been on stands a quare while now, truth be told...

This month's ish rejoices in no fewer than four guest editors: Nick Hornby, Evan Davis, Rankin, and Ricky Gervais, who bags the cover. My film column is about Terry Gilliam's The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus, of which I note, "Parnassus could have been a great role for Christopher Plummer, who recently played Lear on Broadway and has always excelled at a certain kind of blue-blooded devilry." I also out myself as "a diehard fan of the fairytale, and hate to see this form dismissed out-of-hand as artless or childish. Bruno Bettelheim told it right when he argued (in his seminal The Uses of Enchantment) that such stories address our core existential anxieties: ‘the need to be loved and the fear that one is thought worthless; the love of life, and the fear of death.’"