Criticism

Does this scenario sound familiar? Movie studio bets the house on a beloved epic fantasy trilogy, filling fans of the novels with as much breathless anticipation as dread. The studio is the same: New Line Cinema. But adapting "The Golden Compass" -- the first in Philip Pullman's complex and heady series "His Dark Materials" -- is far trickier a gamble than "The Lord of the Rings."

FEW writers can write stirringly about both Johannes Brahms and Sonic Youth. But New Yorker music critic Alex Ross, 39, has spent much of his career fighting the idea that classical music exists in an airtight room high above the rest of the culture. Which makes his hefty new book, "The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the 20th Century," published this month by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, a welcome arrival.

Daniel Cariaga, who died suddenly and unexpectedly from heart failure at age 71 last week, wrote about music for this paper for 34 years. He wrote, as many have remarked, modestly. He was old school and never made himself the subject. He chose his words well and with great care. He was concise to a fault. He was a master of understatement. He was content to be read between the lines. He might have been, in other words, the Raymond Chandler or Samuel Beckett of music criticism.

Chicago reviews of "Monty Python's Spamalot" and "All Shook Up" finally appeared last week -- the fourth week of five-week pre-Broadway tryouts the musicals are having in the city. Critics are kept out of tryouts at commercial Chicago venues until late in the runs so that producers can tweak the shows as much as possible before any appraisals are published.

For years, conservative commentators of all stripes, led by critic-turned-radio host Michael Medved, have noisily bashed Hollywood for mocking religion or ignoring it entirely, contending -- and this is a big issue with Medved -- that the entertainment industry is largely made up of left-wing Beverly Hills dilettantes and unbelievers out of touch with the real moral values of the country.

Well, not everyone loves it. "The Gates," Christo and Jeanne-Claude's temporary, mammoth installation in New York's Central Park -- 7,532 plastic gates hung with orange fabric panels -- opened Feb. 12 to some rhapsodic reviews. New York Times art critic Michael Kimmelman called it "a work of pure joy, a vast populist spectacle of good will and simple eloquence, the first great public art event of the 21st century."

After delivering a lecture at Yale a few years ago, art historian and critic Donald Kuspit strolled through the university's art studios, as is his habit when traveling, to see what students were up to. One encounter that day summed it up: "I went into the studio of a young woman and asked to see her work," he recalls. "She said: 'I have no work. I'll show you a tape of my professors criticizing me for not working. That's my work. They came to my studio and asked me why I wasn't doing anything.

Former Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev says Russia's government should be fired because of bungled social policy changes. Gorbachev, who came to power 20 years ago and presided over the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, criticized an attempt to scrap Soviet-era social benefits and replace them with cash payments. The steps sparked protests by pensioners angered by the comparatively small sums they were to receive. The ministers aren't following policies set out by President Vladimir V.

Playwright John Patrick Shanley says he was "incredibly weary of the standard bios in programs." So in his biography in the programs for his "Doubt," at the Pasadena Playhouse and in New York, Shanley recounts his less-than-illustrious academic career and then invites theatergoers to send their reactions to his play to an e-mail address he provides. Some of the e-mails may have made a difference in "Doubt."