It isn’t like time dulls the effectiveness of a film about the foremost American boogeyman. Though it’s been a generation-and-a-half since a British game show host took on the man with phelbitis-infused mouthguards to an anticlimactic end, and almost 15 years since former president Richard Milhous Nixon died, Nixon hasn’t eroded from infamy all that much. Never here, we imagine we told ourselves before he took office. Never again, we imagine we told ourselves after. The single most fascinating character of the American presidency is still its surest pariah.

Nixon is sort of a touchy subject.

British commentator David Frost knew it, and decided to take advantage. In 1977, he sat down for the first post-presidency interview with Nixon. It in many ways cemented Nixon’s image as a calculating, stonewalling dissembler just when he was angling for a comeback, and launched Frost into the realm of respectable television journalists.

British screenwriter and playwright Peter Morgan knew it, and decided to take advantage. In 2006, his play about the Frost/Nixon interviews premiered in London to critical acclaim.

Mayberry-runt-cum-Hollywood-director Ron Howard knows it, and so he decided to take to chances.  Howard shot his film in the same carefully generic manner as his anemic The DaVinci Code; he asked Frank Langella and Martin Sheen to reprise their acclaimed Broadway performances as Nixon and Frost.

The frequently unremarkable Howard has long since mastered the long shot, the medium shot and the closeup for dramatic effect, and how to moderate the three. Fortunately for the film, Howard’s unremarkably Christopher Columbus direction suits it; there’s no place for Tim Burton’s visual pizazz, or Oliver Stone’s ridiculous historical sophistry, because the drama itself, bolstered by reprise of a Tony-winning performance, should be enough.

It isn’t. Though Langella won that Tony for his gravelly-voiced, jowl-less Nixon and by all accounts deserved it, but on the big screen he’s almost bipolar. This Nixon abruptly switches between the extremes of odd excellence and cruel caricaturist with a heartbeat’s notice. There are more moments of the former, but that there are so many of the latter prevent Langella from having offered a great performance.

That said, Langella’s Nixon is still the best this film has to offer. There are the familiarly bland plotlines of trust and betrayal within Frost’s staff. The adequate supporting cast add little more than a framing device to the interviews. Sheen’s Frost works, and that’s the best that could be said. None of it compares to shining few moments Langella’s good Nixon dedicates to laceless men’s shoes.

Frost/Nixon pulls a Good Night, and Good Luck by exaggerating the success of a courageous journalist against a menacing political foe, but this overdramatic ending feels particularly like a cheap cop-out from reality — knowing that Frost didn’t really offer such a last-round knockout the film shows spoils the fun, and negates its effectiveness.

Like the original 1977 bout, all players involved try their darndest. Like the original 1977 bout, it goes the full 12 rounds without landing a satisfying punch.

• While “Harry Potter” is fun to read — excepting the fifth book — its colorful characters and whimsical settings are bogged down by weak writing.
• “His Dark Materials” has similar strengths and flaws, and was worsened even further by the author’s tendency to proselytize.
• “The Wheel of Time” cribs liberally from Tolkien — an author who wrote his books solely because he liked making up languages.
• The worst of all of them is that “Eragon” series; it reads like it was written by a 19-year-old homeschooler from Montana. In part because it was.
• Among good modern fantasists, Neil Gaiman tends to exhibit the same self-indulgent fascination with multi-pantheon crossovers in whatever he writes, leaving Terry Brooks alone above reproach; it helps that Brooks doesn’t take his fantasy settings seriously.

It’s become a rule, therefore, that fantasy as a whole is a thin, shallow genre of fiction with especially egregious pretensions that it has meaningful depth and that it’s romanticism profound rather than transparent. Science fiction, unfortunately, is much of the same. Fortunately, because the overall crappiness of fantastic literature is a rule, there are going to be exceptions. I just spent the better part of two days — almost spilling over into three — reading one of the most important and, dare I say, literary exceptions in recent memory.

“Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell” 2004 had interested me ever since I first saw it on the discount bookshelves and bestseller lists, but I decided against bothering with it. I didn’t have the money to buy it, and it was too contemporary to be in the school library, besides. Having recently graduated to the local library, I saw it Thursday last and, on a whim, checked it out.

Though buying this book in its native Britain would set me back a good 7 pounds, I’d call it an even trade: the hardcover weighs almost that much. There are nearly 800 pages in the hardcover version I spent a weekend reading — that makes it roughly the size of a King James Bible after a begat-ectomy.

Despite that it reads like Jane Austen and the humanity of its title characters are straight out of Dickens — if you’re sure I exaggerate, you’ll appreciate this book more than I did — I enjoyed every moment.

I shouldn’t make my admiration seem so unlikely — I was bound to like “Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell” from the very start. It has the flair of a finely researched history, and more footnotes per page than “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich,” a history in which the author, for whatever reason, apologizes for including as many footnotes as he does.

It’s no criticism of the novel to say that these footnotes were my favorite part of the 7-pound blunt object that is “Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell,” and I suppose quite a few readers came to the same conclusion. Indeed, the footnotes were enjoyable enough, and added so much to the world of the novel, that when the author decided to make her second book an anthology of stories, at least a few of these stores were inspired by her first novel’s footnotes.

There’s a lot of story in the book, and it would be difficult to summarize it without unbecoming spoilers and lengthy exposition, but, given fantasy these days, that depth is one of the great charms of “Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell.” Suffice it to say that the whole of it focuses on the careers of two British magicians of the Regency period, and is full of charmingly fleshed-out characters.

The early 19th century is the such a refreshing setting for fantasy. Rather than a world where dwarves and elves and orcs are the face of the fantastic, one of the great squabbles between the two title characters is over the status and usefulness of fairies, creatures that had once encompassed the whole of British fantasy before Tolkien injected high fantasy with his mish-mash blending of Old Norse mythology and Anglo-Saxon epic. However well-written “Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell” is, and however well it stands on its own merits, that it ignores the 50-year-old precedent of swords and sorcery, a subgenre that might as well be mimeographed from the worst parts of “The Lord of the Rings,” is one of the greatest strengths that author Susanna Clarke chose for her world of British magic.

After reading so much of dwarves and elves and orcs, a reprieve was due; we needed a reprieve into densely imagined real literature from dense-minded pulp literature, even if that it lasts only a weekend.

But what a weekend.

Attaching the silencer to a gun his boss got for him, he approaches his partner from behind. There aren’t any children around the playground, and his partner is oblivious to the rustle of grass behind him. The hitman pulls out his silenced pistol, his index finger on the trigger — just as his partner brings out his own revolver to his head. Instead of shooting, the hitman shouts:

What the fuck are you doing, Ray?

Suicide averted, but Ray sees the silenced pistol slip behind the hitman’s back.

Oh, my God. You were gonna kill me.

You were gonna kill yourself.

Well, I’m allowed.

No, you’re not.

What? I’m not allowed, and you are? How’s that fair?

It’s at the moments of high tension in In Bruges (2008) that the comedy really shines, and because we’re dealing with professional hitmen, the comedy is never darker. Writer and director Martin McDonagh almost cheerfully fills the film full of these moments, perfectly balancing tense comic relief and the overarching drama, all the while spiraling toward the inevitable climax. That there is a climax is the only inevitable thing about this film, as all of the main characters live to undo the machinations of the others, whether or not they mean to. 

In the finest performance of a movie full of fine performances, Ralph Fiennes (Schindler’s List) is the demanding, inhuman boss who orders the hit on the rookie hitman played by Colin Farrell (Minority Report) — yet Fiennes is no mere McGuffin. Rigid principles — you don’t kill kids — define his life as a hitman, and he expects everyone to see it his way. Farrell killed a kid; he needs to be killed. It’s as simple as that, Fiennes tenderly explains to Brendan Gleeson (Braveheart). That’s just the way things are.

Gleeson grudgingly follows his orders at first, until the wholly in-character crisis of faith. Farrell needs help, not death, but even Farrell doesn’t agree with him. Even as Gleeson packs Farrell on a train to nowhere, Farrell demands his gun back so he can finish his own job.

Its in the more madcap moments of Monty Python-esque absurdity that In Bruges draws comparisons to the other great underworld farces, swapping out the silliness of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels with a lingering dread. Someone’s going to die.

The fun is in guessing who; there’s plenty of opportunity to be wrong the first time you see In Bruges.

If you liked Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, you’ll abide In Bruges.

If you think you dig it, simply sit back in your clothback swivel chair and prepare yourself for the Belated Reviews experience.