bit of a dent in the father-knows-best myth that day

Chaplin, we learn, made his intimate films against the example of D. W. Griffith’s grand productions: “Griffith knew how to create the most ornate spectacles, like ‘Intolerance,’ hours of swinging braziers and slaves banging on gongs, chariots pulled by butterflies, and the audience was fooled into embracing it simply because of its size. Where was the small moment, the flirtatious smile not tiffany notes returned, the cuckold discovering a cuff link and saying nothing, the smile of a baby that somehow chills the bones?” Yet Chaplin teams up with Griffith to combat the film barons who want to crush them. Gold treats this story line as what it is, a sentimental melodrama, and spends most of the Hollywood portions of “Sunnyside” taking us backstage and giving the show away. Combined with crosscut scenes of the war in Europe, these stateside montages yield a vast theater of the absurd whose props collapse as fast as they’re erected.

Gold, whose first novel was the well-received “Carter Beats the Devil,” employs a voice that ranges from ironic omniscience to close third-person narration. His greatest strength lies in his ability to strain his story through a merciless interior monologue that springs from something deeper buy tiffany accessories and more incriminating than sympathy, and bares every turn of his characters’ thoughts and feelings. He accomplishes this with protean, smart and appropriately Chaplinesque writing.

FROFRO. That is a word that describes the motion of a fluffy dog’s tail wagging. Or so my father insisted many summers ago, during a heated family game of Scrabble on our screened porch in Indiana, as we drank my mother’s homemade lemonade and laughed above the roar of neighbors’ lawn mowers. My dad was angling for 36 points on a buy tiffany necklaces triple-word score, and though we loved him, there were standards to uphold. According to the dictionary, FROFRO was not a word! We stood our ground. In the end, I think he won the game anyway. (At 4, 7, and 10, we kids weren’t daunting rivals.) But he did put a bit of a dent in the father-knows-best myth that day.

I can’t remember a time when I didn’t love playing Scrabble. Is there a more perfect game? It has an orderly multicolored board that resembles a crossword grid, 100 smooth and touchable wooden tiles, and 61 magical squares — the triple-word, triple-letter, double-word, and double-letter spaces — that offer the thrilling chance of multiplying your score if you land on them. Unlike other games that also require thinking, such as cheap tiffany chess, Scrabble involves a certain degree of luck, so if you lose, you don’t feel completely stupid. And winning never requires betraying your fellow players. (Yeah, I’m talking about you, greedy capitalist Monopoly and ruthless Risk.) Scrabble’s as social as bridge, but works with players of varying skill levels, even kids with limited vocabularies. And it’s different from most other word games — including Boggle, with that ever-present egg timer — in that it’s highly interactive and proceeds as slowly or as quickly as players choose. There’s no personal best with Scrabble — it’s a group effort, a group joy, and a group gamble. One word feeds another, and even the most skilled players can’t help pouting when they get a tray that contains the vowels I, I, I, I, O, O, and A, or exulting when an opponent lays down a clever, long, or funny word.