Speeding from Baghdad to Falluja, Mr. Filkins’ unflinching reports have granted renewed immediacy to the coverage in a war where street violence and carnage teeter on becoming the normal, not the news. Here he is, Dec. 18: “Surveying the bloody scene, it might be tempting to conclude that Iraq is violent and little else; that the cycle will come around again. Such a judgment would miss the heart and complexity of the place. In Iraq today, every reality seems to have its own countervailing reality, in equal measure and equal force. Less than three years ago, Iraqis lived in a state of near-permanent terror. Today, Iraqis live in a society that is free but anarchic, full of hope and full of death …. ”

Playing Butch Cassidy to Mr. Filkins’ Sundance Kid: Old Testament–looking, grizzled Times Baghdad bureau chief John F. Burns, his white beard and Anglo-fro setting him apart from the beauty boys who drop in to look around the Green Zone and depart. Mr. Burns and Mr. Filkins have focused the world on the ground in Iraq even as much of the media became distracted by sideshows, “Plan for Victory” banners, good-newsathons.

Mr. Burns’ coverage this year has been distinguished, but particularly his dispatches from Saddam Hussein’s trial: “[P]itiable he has not been. Tragic, perhaps, in the sense of a man incapable of the repentance that might lend him at least a glimmer of humanity in this, the extreme passage in his life; wildly deluded, too, in his insistence that he is Iraq’s legitimate ruler …. But of a reduction like Eichmann’s, to a figure so commonplace, so insignificant, that he seemed inadequate to his grotesque place in history, there has been no sign.”

Mr. Burns and Mr. Filkins are hardly alone: There are hundreds of American journalists working in Iraq, including some 60 reporters and local staff in the Times Baghdad bureau, and much important reporting in American newspapers, broadcast correspondents, in books and on Web sites.

But Mr. Burns and Mr. Filkins, close friends, are a real-life duo, a buddy film even William Goldman couldn’t have come up with. Mr. Burns, stately, tough, eccentric, born in England, educated at McGill; Mr. Filkins, the flak-jacketed speedster from Coco Beach, Fla., known to jog through the streets of Baghdad at night. Michael Caine and Jake Gyllenhaal!

“For us, it’s been a long journey, as it has been for the American people,” Mr. Burns said by phone from Cambridge, England, on break from Baghdad. “It’s been a journey into shades of darkness.”

As for Mr. Filkins: “It’s been hard to stay here this long,” he said from Baghdad on Jan. 2. “I’m totally burned out and exhausted. Because I’ve been here two and a half years, I’ve been able to see the whole arc of the enterprise. I have a certain perspective. I drove in in March 2003, and I’ve seen—boy, I’ve seen a lot. I’ve see this gigantic enterprise go up and down and go up again. Nobody can be entirely sure about where things are headed here. Anyone who claims to know doesn’t know what they’re talking about. There are so many things in play, and so many things beyond anyone’s control.”

“John and I will be friends forever,” Mr. Filkins said. “We’ve been through quite a bit together. I pretty much go where my curiosity takes me, and John encourages me to do that.”

“Dexter is the most energized and questing reporter I know,” Mr. Burns said. “He’s the complete foreign correspondent—he is absolutely undaunted by risk and is tireless.”

“It’s the essential question: whether this gigantic enterprise will succeed or fail,” Mr. Filkins said. “I ask myself that question every morning when I get up and when I go to bed. It’s this gigantic thing, and it’s so ambitious and the stakes are so high. So many lives are riding on it. It’s what you think of every day.”

“We have to remember we’re writing for Americans,” Mr. Burns said. “For Americans who send their sons to war, who pay their taxes. It doesn’t make us cover it more negatively; it keeps us on our toes for what Americans care about.”

Because they covered Iraq brilliantly and with great integrity, brought New Yorkers close to our national conflict on the other side of world, reminded other reporters what great print reporting looks like, Dexter Filkins and John F. Burns of The New York Times are The Observer’s Media Mensches of the Year. Their prize: Our regard, gratitude and lunch anywhere in town—less the wine, which we can get for you wholesale.

Suicide is one of those societal ills everyone feels comfortable looking down on: It's a cop-out, a death for wimps, the unnecessary result of insanity or self-absorption. Even the utterly unreligious will speak of it as a sin.

Still, there are some who find suicide a rather comforting thought (you know, should things get really bad), and regardless, the whole business, the idea of ending your own life, is fascinating. As Nick Hornby proves in his fourth novel A Long Way Down, suicide-in this case, flinging oneself off a building to the concrete below-also takes a lot of guts. Up there on the roof, living starts to look sort of easy. It's pretty hard to do, letting go.

It's especially hard when other people are up on the roof with you, vying for a spot on the launching pad. In Mr. Hornby's brazenly contrived conceit, four Londoners find themselves on New Year's Eve gathered on the roof of Topper's House, one of the most popular venues for self-offing in the whole metropolis-the Golden Gate Bridge of Britain. Ostensibly, Mr. Hornby is teasing out whether someone's life is awful enough that, actually, they're better off dead. It's a great idea.

Up for consideration: Martin, a talk-show host who shagged an underage girl, spent some months in jail and lost his family (not that he minded that part of it, really); Maureen, an older woman whose son was born a vegetable; JJ, an American, a pizza-delivery boy and a failed musician (O.K., real quick: Men on failing to "make music" is never, ever interesting); and Jess, an 18-year-old spoiled brat who complains of a broken heart.

That's in order of their bearability. Martin is the classic Hornby character, the witty Hugh Grant variety, and most of the author's cleverness naturally goes to him. Bitchy, stupid Jess, on the other hand, seems to have been stuck in to be obnoxious and keep the book from becoming too, too saccharine. Or to serve as the attractive young woman who'll be played by Keira Knightley in the film.

It's boring but unavoidable to note the blandly cinematic quality of Mr. Hornby's novel. Plenty of authors write novels hoping to spin Hollywood gold, but it's less forgivable in someone who's talented and has already seen three of his books on screen (get over it!). There's a feeling of inevitability in this book, a weary sense that no matter what Mr. Hornby does-whether he labors over a particular paragraph or not, whether he fiddles with some flat dialogue or lets it alone-the book will still be a hit and he will reap the rewards. (As will Johnny Depp, who bought the film rights-and thank God: That guy might actually render suicide with the darkness it deserves.) This isn't to suggest that Mr. Hornby seems happy or triumphant about all this. On the contrary, he's faint of heart. The thrill is gone.

"Even though we had nothing in common beyond that one thing," Martin, the pedophile, explains, "that one thing was enough to make us feel that there wasn't anything else-not money, or class, or education, or age, or cultural interests-that was worth a damn; we'd formed a nation, suddenly, in those few hours." Yikes. And Martin's the most skeptical of the bunch. It's worse than laying out the obvious in plain, cheesy terms; Mr. Hornby is pleading with his reader, and he would do better on Oprah.

The morbid foursome abandon the roof of Topper's House to go searching for Chas, the man who broke Jess' heart-clearly the least of anyone's problems, not to mention the silliest reason for suicide. (Jess and Chas slept together once or something.) Still, it's Keira Knightley! When Maureen, the old biddy, punches out Chas-all of which reminded me of The Daytrippers or some such odyssey-in-a-station-wagon flick-all is lost. Then Jess takes a whack at Chas too, and Mr. Hornby cuts to the next scene.

More plot developments: The quad-four strangers bonded by their desire to die-tell a journalist they saw an angel who looks like Matt Damon; go on vacation together and have no fun; form a book club, forgoing Virginia Woolf; and share in an intervention at Starbucks, staged by Jess, in which everyone's loved one shows up and they all stand around and drink lattes and attempt to talk about their issues. At this point, all I could think of was the hospital scene in Parenthood, at the end, with all those weepy characters standing together, gazing at … a baby.

Mr. Hornby has always come dangerously close to too cute, but he's generally sharp enough to rescue the whole thing from gooiness. That wit is still here, and when it strikes, it's deadly. "We passed a ghastly-looking bar called New York City," he writes, when the group is on vacation. It's a completely random line amid vigorous dialogue, an instance of Mr. Hornby's brilliant and unpredictable timing. In another scene, when JJ's about to partake in the requisite fight with his former bandmate, his girlfriend accuses them of having a Butch Cassidy thing. Out of nowhere, a homeless man standing nearby pipes in, laughing: "Did you ever read Pauline Kael on Butch Cassidy? God, she hated it."

Mr. Hornby is most reliably funny when writing about Martin, the dry, jerk-trying-to-make-good type that Mr. Hornby does best. What was so remarkable about High Fidelity was that it wasn't all zing and lightness. Unexpectedly, it could turn serious and insightful-with real, quirky depth. Here, Mr. Hornby turns on the funny first: "I once drove a new BMW into a wall," he has Martin, who's talking about infidelity, say, "simply because I needed to explain a four-hour delay in getting home from work. Cindy came out into the street to inspect the crumpled bonnet, looked at me, and said, "You're seeing someone else, aren't you?" And then, with just a few careful lines, he describes that look of hurt on the wife's face, the one that cuts Martin so deeply that he would say anything to try and avoid it. Lying about infidelity never made so much sense!

But the good bits get lost in a lot of other lazy stuff. Mr. Hornby knows he needs to serve up a happy, glowy cheap ending, and he can't even bring himself to make his characters' journey to choosing life remotely tortuous or daring. Whereas in his earlier novels, the lengthy interior dialogues were lovely and entertaining, in A Long Way Down, the soliloquies come off as purposeless. Too boxed in by his own conceit, Nick Hornby can't block out the big-screen version of his ideas, even as they're unfurling. What he needs is an intervention, but-despite a great riff on the wondrous anonymity of chain stores-let's hope it's not in Starbucks.

Suzy Hansen is a senior editor at The Observer.

Why would young females want to go to this über buddy-buddy flick that pointedly excludes them? It even blames single mothers for the emasculation of their sons and muses that perhaps, at the moment, "women are not what we need." I'm wondering if this ties in with that apparently masochistic impulse that has pubescent girls dragging their parental overseers to R-rated teen pictures in which they are treated as way stations in the male rite of passage, objects of scorn or desire or revenge, obstructers or facilitators in the Holy Grail of guys getting laid. Movies like American Pie and Cruel Intentions .

We know the conventional wisdom-and, if we forget for an instant, Hollywood know-it-alls will remind us-that girls will watch movies or television shows about boys' adventures but the latter will flee from Little Women or anything smacking of the dark continent of girlhood, as if it were a toxic waste designed to extinguish the vulnerable Y chromosome. At least in the high school gross-out genre, the boys want girls, even if what they want is more on the level of tutors or pets, a phase to be gotten through rather than an encounter with a full-fledged human being.

The tag line for American Pie is "There's something about your first piece." Trojan War details the search for a proper condom by a nerdy boy so that he may accomplish coitus with the blond babe who has summoned him to help her with her math homework. In Can't Hardly Wait , a boy and a girl who detest each other are locked in a bathroom. A half-hour later, they are having sex. In real high schools, according to yet another anxious mother friend, a Presidential distinction is made between "sex" and fellating, with the latter being acceptable. She worries that girls, with their more hesitant and winding sexual development, are taking their cue from the behavior males project onto them, becoming-in their own desperate desire for attention-the service functionaries men want.

Actually Fight Club , David Fincher's adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk's blisteringly sharp, satiric novel, is very funny for half of its overlong running time, until it goes into apocalyptic mode and directs the heavy artillery at everything from credit card capitalism to fat women with cellulite to private property as architects of the World Gone Wrong and ripe for destruction. Although all of these targets are to be found in the book, a witty if scattershot meditation on the alienation of men, they pass by swiftly, served up with a kind of deadpan irony so that even when the novel is being thoroughly repellent, its light tone mocks the maudlin tendencies of male self-pity and victimhood. What's repellent in a book is at one remove-it's in words-whereas the scatological excesses of the screen are viscerally creepy and ugly.

Is there something kinky about good girls that attracts them to bad boys? Or is it simply the appeal of two for the price of one, Edward Norton and Brad Pitt as cool male icons with little interference from poor Helena Bonham Carter, as a witchy chain-smoking wraith, skin the color of nicotine, who hovers over the proceedings like a stale cigarette. Made up and lit to accentuate her already sallow complexion, dressed like a bad day at the thrift shop, her wan presence seems only to confirm the contention that another woman is just what guys don't need.

Back in the 70's, when male pairs dominated the screen in movies like M.A.S.H. (Elliott Gould and Donald Sutherland), The Towering Inferno (Steve McQueen and Paul Newman), Midnight Cowboy (Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight), Papillon (Mr. Hoffman and McQueen) and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (the duo of the decade, Mr. Newman and Robert Redford), it gradually became clear that far from losing the female audience, these films actually profited from offering not one but two charismatic males. Helen Gurley Brown praised Butch Cassidy and The Sting as her favorite films of the 70's (and I'm sure the pulses of many Cosmo girls beat in sympathy-so much for championing women's roles).

About this time, a male friend was writing an article on soft-core porn films that required endless "research" in the theaters of 42nd Street. One of the staples of soft core, which precluded male nudity, were spectacles of women bobbing up and down playing volleyball or having sex. How could this appeal to men? I inquired, to which my informant reported that he and the solitary patrons of the genre actually preferred it: You got two for the price of one, and no competing male figure. In The Sting , there was no female to obstruct the view of Newman-Redford, and in Butch Cassidy , Katharine Ross' schoolteacher was more a lovely token (or beard?) than a vibrant protagonist.

I called Caroline, whose mother, an old friend, has been increasingly vexed by Hollywood's presentation of casual sex as the norm among the younger set. This mom is also dismayed that her smart 13-year-old, once a fan of Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice , now wants to look at teen movies and nothing else. In fact, Caroline was in the midst of watching the film of Buffy the Vampire Slayer ("it's good but not as good as the TV show"), but she was adamant that most of the movies were not the horrors of her mother's imagining.

She maintained they had spirited female characters and the "players" ("boys who make out with lots of girls") were rare and not particularly attractive in the end. She especially liked Ten Things I Hate About You (a modernization of Taming of the Shrew ) and She's All That ("It's My Fair Lady "(Shakespeare and Shaw sneaking in through the back door?) As to the message of free and easy sex: "My mom and I have a difference of opinion," she said, an edge creeping into her voice. "She thinks these ideas are accepted as reality. They most definitely are not!"

Of course, Caroline is still in the protective bower of a girls prep school, but maybe things aren't so bad after all, and the next generation is not going to sexist hell in a handbasket. Maybe little girls have more gumption than we give them credit for.