Owen Roberts

The metaphor is simple, but then so is the movie.  Your “Cyrus” could be your girlfriend talking in her sleep all night, saying “I hate you”, or something; it could be your girlfriend spending all her time with her ex-boyfriend; it could be your chronic unemployment.  It could probably be all of those things at once.

When I found Nothing Happened on the new books table I was, I think, justifiably skeptical: the subtitle, “A Chronicle in Fact and Fiction,” immediately suggested a publishing industry gimmick; and the cover with two pictures creating a sequential narrative, one of a barren desert landscape, the second that same landscape now dotted with red balloons, suggested something unbearably corny.