The View Finder

I've Moved

2010-12-15T16:21:00.002-05:00

I'm trying something new--something that falls between the length of a full blog post and the brevity of Twitter: a Tumblr blog. It's The Museum Game, named for a way of going through a museum's vast collection without getting overwhelmed. You pick One Thing that's the single favorite or most thought-provoking thing you've seen during your museum visit. Amazing how it sharpens your perceptions to be on the lookout for the thing that will matter the most.

And so, over at The Museum Game, I'm trying to post frequently about the things that make an impression on me and that make me wonder--not just during museum visits but during each day. Sometimes it'll be a quotation from what I'm reading. Sometimes it'll be a response to what I've seen in the news. Other times, it might be something I've caught sight of as I'm driving by. Come check it out.

The Found Art of Getting Lost in an e-Book

2010-08-26T12:21:00.005-04:00

The pros and cons of e-books have been enumerated and discussed frequently enough in the press lately that anyone who thinks reading is on the decline in this country (former NEA chairman Dana Gioia among them) should think again. Unless it turns out that all we ever read are reviews of e-readers.

But here's one thing that I haven't seen anyone writing about when they talk about the relative merits or frustrations of an iPad, a Kindle, or a nook: the way that some of these devices let you truly lose yourself in a book. And I mean lose your place, lose where you are in the story.

Last night, I was reading Simon Mawer's 2002 novel The Fall, on an iPad, using the Kindle app. With the Kindle app, all you see are the words on the page, plus the title of the book at the top. If you tap on the screen, you'll get a variety of menu-type buttons to appear, including the mysterious Kindle-speak marker that tells you where you are in the book. No page numbers, just "Location 6417-6429", in my case, and "97%". Apparently, when I left off last night, I was close to finishing the book. But I'd been reading for a while, and hadn't tapped the screen so I could see these buttons. Which meant that, as I was reading, I had lost track of how much more there was to go in the story.

If I'd been reading a print book, I'd have seen and felt, constantly, the thickness of the remaining pages in my right hand. Holding and reading a physical book, the reader is always aware of where he or she sits in the overall arc of the story. That knowledge is, I'd argue, part of the reading process. As children, we learn the shapes of various stories, and as older readers, we have that sense of the narrative arc hard-wired into our brains. But I think we cheat. We look at how much more there is in the book and that tells us whether what we're experiencing is the denouement or some other preliminary resolution that may well be challenged again before the story's done. We do the same thing with television and movies. If it feels as though something is winding down, we might glance up at the face of the dvd player, or glance at our watch, to double check. (This works will all movies, except the final Lord of the Rings film, which came to an end three or four different times.)

With print books, we process the story itself in some sort of combination with the physical knowledge of the shape of the book. With an e-book system like the Kindle or its app, we can't do that. I'd suggest that it's this lack of page numbers, lack of pages altogether, lack of markers that makes reading on an e-book (some e-books) a radically different way of processing a narrative.

Could I have cheated with the iPad/Kindle? Sure. I could have tapped the screen at any time to see what my percentage was. And indeed, when I first began reading The Fall, I did that fairly frequently, out of excitement to see how quickly I was moving through the story. But here's the thing: as I became immersed in Mawer's book, I forgot to check. I just read, with no sense at all of where the book would take me and when we would get there. I was completely at sea in a way that I would never have been with a physical book.

[A note to iBooks users: Apple's e-book interface does its best to make the experience feel as though you're reading a real book (there are page numbers, the title, and a trompe l'oeil book cover), but it gets one thing wrong: the clock is always visible. You can never lose track of time when reading something from the iBooks store.]

My new policy? I'll try to resist the temptation to check my progress in an e-book. I want to see how well I can do in predicting when a book is ending, without being able to turn that last page.

Q: Do you cheat? Do you like to know where you are in an e-book?

Laces Tied

2010-08-16T20:18:00.002-04:00

I took two weeks off from rowing recently. Coming back to the river today for the first time, my technique was a bit rusty, my hands a bit tender, having lost almost all of their hard-earned calluses. Still, everything was familiar, as it would be after fifteen years at this sport. But I did notice the language we rowers use to communicate about our sport. It’s not the kind of stuff you get to say around the house, the office, or the grocery store. “Weigh enough.” “Hold water.” Huh?

A few years ago, I wrote something up to explain why I cherish these strange words, and why it would never occur to me not to use them, if I had the choice. Here’s that piece, dated by the ages of the children, but still true in many ways.

“Let’s have Laces Tied at 3:00. And Ball Kicked at 3:15.” This is my son the soccer player, sixteen years old and a wise guy, mocking the language of his mother’s sport. “‘Hands On!’” he scoffs. “Why can’t you just say ‘Get the boat’?” I try to explain it to him—the need for choreographed movement, the need for economy—but he brings his father into the game, and now there are two of them doing a call and response of phony rowing commands as we get ready for dinner. “Let’s have Table Set. In Two,” my son says, capturing the coxswain’s beat. “And Forks Raised at 7:00,” adds his father. My daughter mercifully, being thirteen, refuses to join in.

Once we sit down, I take up the challenge again, and try to convey to my resistant family the necessity of using such language in rowing. Of course, isn’t it obvious? That a coxswain who needs her crew to act quickly would rather say “Weigh ‘nough” than “Everybody stop now”? Or that the same cox, perhaps just as breathless with excitement as her crew is with effort, will choose to say “Up two in two” instead of the much sillier “In two strokes, we’ll take the rate up by two strokes per minute”? My family grants me this, though they balk at “weigh enough” which, for them, conjures up images of Admiral Nelson. Their objection lies, most of all, with “Hands On”. There is no need for such a phrase, they argue—no need for such economy or specificity when everyone’s standing by the boat rack or talking on the phone about the plan for race day.

And on one level they’re right. As long as the coxswain bellows loud and clear, the crew will understand that they have to get their hands on the boat and prepare to move it out of the rack. But there is more to it than that, and I lose the thread of the dinner conversation as I prepare a more thorough response. Economy makes rowers adopt this abbreviated language, but beauty makes us hold onto it and use it even when we could get away with what my family would call normal speech. Not the beauty of the words themselves, but the grace of the movements that the words call into being. I am not a military-minded person, nor have I ever worked on an assembly line. But on my very first day at a boathouse, I was seduced by the litany of phrases punched out in rhythm, and the rowers’ synchronized response to these commands. As a novice, I couldn’t yet feel the swing of the boat, but I could already participate in the elegance of the sport by reaching for the gunwales in unison with everyone else, in a perfectly choreographed lift.

Maybe I don’t have to tell my rowing partner “We’ll have hands on” at a certain time. Maybe I could just say “Let’s be ready to go.” After all, that’s what my son’s soccer coach says, and the players all know exactly what he means. But I can’t help it. The speech patterns of rowing, with their unique cadence and lilt, are too much a part of the sport for me to let them go. Here in the Northeast, we spend enough time off the water as it is. Why not bring the poetry of rowing into our lives whenever we can, even if we don’t need to?

Dateline: Paris (Movie Title edition)

2010-08-11T08:23:00.010-04:00

I have absolutely no doubt that we mangle the titles of foreign films when we get them over in the US. (And I'd be delighted if anyone wants to jog my memory about some of these no-doubt howlers.) But I have now seen this from the other side, in two fine examples.

First, Leap Year. A nothing of a film (not great, not offensive either), with a clever premise, as these things go, about a young woman who sees her chance to make a wedding happen by proposing to her boyfriend on February 29th. Apparently, in the wacky world of the movie, a woman can only do this in Ireland and only on that day. God forbid that she could be so bold on any other day, in any other place.

I don't know what the French for "leap year" is, but it must not be evocative enough. The French title is: "Donne-moi ta main." Give Me Your Hand. Is it possible that in French even an imperative command can sound romantic? Am I missing something?

And then we have a translation of a translation. Stieg Larsson's second book in the Millennium trilogy was originally called "Flickan som lekte med elden," which translates to its English title: The Girl Who Played With Fire. The second movie is out in the US with that same title. In France, though, an attempt to be literal turns into this clunker: "Millennium 2: La fille qui revait d'un bidon d'essence et d'une allumette". Just trips off the tongue, doesn't it? The Girl Who Dreamed of a Can of Gas and a Lighter.

So the next time I roll my eyes at the English translation of some foreign film (snob that I am), I'll have to remember that it goes both ways.

Q: Any movie-title howlers you'd like to share?

Dateline: Ljubljana

2010-08-08T09:07:00.007-04:00

DATELINE: LJUBLJANA

I just spent four days in Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia, because of a book. It goes like this: Some time in the late eighties I read an article by Robert D. Kaplan about the break-up of Yugoslavia. When his book Balkan Ghosts came out, I snapped it up. When my son was about twelve and a precocious reader, I gave him his own copy. He couldn't get enough. Born the year the Berlin Wall fell, spending time nearly each summer in the Balkan part of Greece where my family's roots are, and growing up with newspapers full of Slavic names and datelines in small Balkan villages where events of enormity took place, he almost had no choice but to be fascinated by Kaplan's book.

Fast forward to college and his decision on where to study abroad. Still the Balkans, always the Balkans, with Kaplan's flame alive in his thinking. And so, for the skiing: Slovenia. Now I've been there for the second time in two years--and all because of a book.

There are many interesting things about Slovenia, this tiny country with a passel of alps, turreted churches, just enough coastline to hold a town that dates to the Venetians, and an entire population seemingly on wheels (either bicycles or rollerblades).

And about that population: two million. If there are only two million of you, you all learn English.

I don't know any of the great names in Slovene literature. But I do wonder what will happen to that tradition if, as seems to be the trend, no one outside Slovenia bothers to learn Slovene anymore. Even vigorous translation programs might not be enough to stem the tide of evaporation.

And here I am, worrying about Slovenia because of a book I read (and re-read) and admired.

Q: Have you ever made a major to medium-sized life choice because of one specific book? OK, even a small life choice?

Movie Review: Iron Man 2

2010-05-17T17:25:00.005-04:00

Is it a good thing or a bad thing to go with your daughter to see Iron Man 2 on Mother’s Day? The answer isn’t entirely clear. On its most obvious level, Iron Man 2 is a 13-year-old boy’s dream: weapons, explosions, and Scarlett Johansson. But at the same time, this is a movie that not only puts Robert Downey Jr. on screen in nicely tailored suits, but also musses up his hair from time to time and shows us plenty of close-ups of the big brown eyes. Who’s happy now? And let’s not forget that the almost-pointless plot offers us Gwyneth Paltrow as the CEO of an arms manufacturer. Glass ceiling, indeed.

Still, the movie begins with a striptease, albeit not your typical striptease. This striptease takes the Iron Man suit apart, to reveal RDJ fully clothed. Behind him, women dance around in Sexy Cheerleader costumes while fireworks explode. Yup, the man is the attraction, but he’s clearly the one in charge of the display, and he has no intention of taking his suit off.

Iron Man 2 is not exactly the most coherent of films, and perhaps that’s what makes it so entertaining. The actual plot is there only as a sort of pictorial background. The real interest in the movie is all the rest of it—the banter between Paltrow’s Pepper Potts and RDJ’s Tony Stark, the earnest and goofy robots, Jon Favreau bumbling his way through a nebbishy anti-director’s role, and Mickey Rourke reprising his Wrestler style, but looking somehow both disgusting and endearing at the same time. All of this is the filigree that decorates the plot about the Bad Guy who wants to Blow Things Up. It’s the icing on the Iron Man beefcake.

Among the many things that Iron Man 2 is is a riff on George Bernard Shaw’s Major Barbara. Think about it. Shaw gives us an arms manufacturer who believes that his work brings and keeps peace. The play avoids being a diatribe against war and weapons by both terrifying its audience with a grim vision of destruction as well as the hopefulness of the arms-maker’s vision. In the hands of skilled actors (like Simon Russell Beale who led the cast in London two springs ago), it’s an unsettling exploration of violence and creation.

Iron Man 2 doesn’t exactly unsettle, but it does raise the specter of an army of drones succeeding at something humans don’t want to do, and don’t always want to be good at. The movie serves, like it or not, as a position paper against drone use, endorsing an old-fashioned view of warfare as hand-to-hand (or electrified whip-to-iron hand) combat. Tony Stark in his red-and-gold suit, and Don Cheadle in his silver one, are far nobler creatures than the drones whose heads and faces have been replaced with guns by Mickey Rourke’s Ivan Vanko.

But in the end, it’s not the Cold-War replay we’ll be thinking about when we leave the theater. Nor the movie’s staging of the current drone warfare issue. We’ll be thinking about how RDJ talks to the robots, and about the preposterousness of Sam Rockwell’s excellent slime-ball. And about the grace with which Downey stretches, bats, or swats away the electronic images that seem to be an extension of his imagination.

The Story Catcher

2010-05-05T15:07:00.004-04:00

For a writer, I’ve been acting a little strange lately. I’ve been driving around eastern Massachusetts with a pre-amp and a pop screen and other assorted pieces of sound equipment in a large messenger bag, and wielding a folded-up microphone stand in one hand. I’ve been poring over sound files, cutting out extra-long pauses and noticing that I’m starting to recognize the shape that particular words form in the sound waves of Garageband. I’ve been working with short fiction, making editing suggestions, commenting on tone. But none of it has involved looking at actual words.

This past Saturday marked the launch date for my new writing venture: The Drum, A Literary Magazine For Your Ears. The Drum is a lot like other online lit mags, except for one thing: the stories, novel excerpts, and essays it publishes exist only as sound files. This is writing out loud. Literature to listen to.

I had the idea for The Drum some time over the summer, as I listened to audiobooks during long car drives and wondered why there couldn’t be an audio counterpart for short works. I did some research and, at that point, didn’t find anybody who was doing exactly that. I took the fateful step of mentioning my idea to two friends (whose names appear on The Drum’s masthead) who rather than pat me on the arm and change the subject, reacted with enthusiasm and—more dangerously—with names of people I should talk to to make the idea happen. Over the next several months, and with help from lots of people, I gradually put together the magazine whose website will go live on Saturday.

The process has been fascinating. I have learned that, thanks to the truth of six degrees of separation, you already know everyone you need to know to get practically everything done. A lawyer to draft the rights agreements? The mother of my daughter’s castmate knew just the right person. A web-builder? My rowing coach referred me. A logo designer? Two rowing connections led to that one. How to incorporate and apply for 501(c)3 status? A rowing/hockey double-whammy. Sound editing? My neighbor’s son. All fall, I turned all my friends, writers or not, into focus groups for one aspect of the magazine or another. There was no coffee-drinking or hockey practice or dinner that didn’t involve some sort of brain-picking on my part, if only for a moment. (Perhaps the biggest lesson here was: if you want to get something done, ask a rower.)

But despite all the real excitement I’ve felt at getting the project ready, the best part has come these past two weeks, as I’ve begun the actual recording—when the solitude of writing turns collaborative. Grub Street very kindly allowed me to use their space as a central recording location. But that didn’t cover writers like Aimee Loiselle who lives in western Massachusetts. To save her a long drive, I recorded her short story in her friends’ farmhouse midway between our two homes. Last week alone, I recorded in a Back Bay apartment, the Park Plaza hotel, and homes in Franklin, Oxford, and Jamaica Plain. There have been slight occupational hazards, like the train rumble in Porter Square, the dog barking in Annisquam, and another dog chewing loudly on a bone on Commonwealth Ave. All of it, wonderfully, can be edited away.

As I go from house to apartment to office, I joke that I’m the Story Catcher. But it’s kind of true. I go around capturing the American Short Story in its element, like a cross between a lepidopterist Nabokov and the legendary Alan Lomax, who recorded folk music throughout the US in the 30s and 40s. My travels are a vivid reminder that there are stories everywhere, and there are great writers everywhere, eager to hear their words brought to life. To me, the short works to be published in The Drum are the records of a new American folklore—the folklore of contemporary literary culture.

So last Saturday, again thanks to Grub Street, The Drum made its debut at Grub’s Muse and the Marketplace conference. I was busy capturing stories all day both days. Seven of the Muse panelists contributed recordings during their free sessions, and a dozen other Muse participants came to the The Drum's walk-in sessions to record their 500-word pieces of flash fiction that we might include in a future issue. (If The Drum doesn’t take the piece, you get to keep the sound file as a souvenir.) If you missed the Muse, come by the website and hear the first batch of writers aloud at The Drum.

[this post first appeared on Beyond The Margins]

From the Mixed-Up Files to the Midnight Library

2010-04-16T09:58:00.003-04:00

My favorite children’s book led me to break the law. Well, not a real law. A college law. The law that when the library closes, you need to leave the premises, not hide away in the basement with a sleeping bag and a stash of food, so you can spend the night wandering the wood-paneled reference room with is club chairs and balconies. The children’s book that sent me onto this crooked path? From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, of course.

E.L. Konigsberg’s 1968 Newberry Award-winner about a brother and sister who solve a mystery while hiding out in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art captivated me right away. As a child whose upbringing was often confusing and usually chaotic, I loved Claudia and Jamie’s ability to read meaning into the clues they discovered. Their world was a mystery they could solve. And their world was a world of their own making, a home fashioned out of a public place; a public place turned private, safe, and even cozy. Of course I’m sure I didn’t realize all of this at the time. Reading and re-reading the book in childhood, I only knew that I loved the way the children wandered among the artworks at night, how they fished coins out of the museum fountains to spend in the vending machines, how they outsmarted not just the forger of the mystery plot but all the other adults who ran the museum or came and went in its exhibits during the day.

As a young adult, I knew that I wanted to experience that midnight ownership of a public place. I could have spent the night in the science center. The performing arts building would have been an even better choice, since it was the closest thing my small, liberal-arts college offered as a museum at the time. But, no. It had to be the library. The college library offered a perfect combination of 1. Opportunity for mischief and 2. Books. The library, and especially the reference room with its coveted windowed alcoves, was my favorite place on campus.

On the planned night, my college boyfriend and I carried fuller-than-usual knapsacks through the main doors, pulled homework out from beneath our overnight stuff, and settled in to work until the closing warning sounded. We moved to the basement stacks known as the Tombs until the staff had finished its sweep, and then, once the lights went out and the Exit signs provided the only glow throughout the building, we emerged.

The library was a lovely place for me during the day, but at night, in a flashlight’s beam, it became magical: the books at rest, their stories and information seeming almost to breathe deeply in the silence of the space, the shadows gliding over the shelves, the chairs, the balconies as time passed.

I realize how thoroughly geeky this sounds, and I make no apologies. I was engaged in a purely meta moment of the adoration of books. Inspired by a book, I recreated its adventure. Among books. It was perfect.

Have you ever recreated a scene or event from a favorite book?

Sample, Mix, Allude: How to Handle Originality

2010-04-14T16:16:00.002-04:00

I’ve been thinking about plagiarism lately. Not that I’m planning to commit it. It’s not like I’m hoarding quotations in some rooftop bunker and planning to unleash them in a spree of improper citations. It’s just that, as I listen to songs with bass lines borrowed from older hits, or watch movies with scenes structured to allude to classic films, or think about David Shields’ recent manifesto, I wonder about the limits of originality in our creative culture.

I’m a fuddy-duddy about this, I know. In fact, one of my last jobs in academia was informally titled Plagiarism Czar; certain students charged with academic dishonesty were sent to me for re-education. I would show them how to cite and how to achieve the combination of deference and individual assertion that defines the American approach to intellectual sources. Whether my students were bumblers or connivers, I always tried to convey the fact that citing your source properly actually makes you sound smarter than if you simply borrow without telling. You get to drop the name and sound like the intelligent guest at the cocktail party—while still touting your own idea. Originality with the sheen of tradition.

The rules continue to be clear for scholarly work, sure. In music, remixes are so obvious that they announce their borrowings with panache. Imogen Heap is never too far removed from Jason Derülo’s “Whatcha Say”. But music has the benefit of using different sound quality within a song to alert you to a sample. B.B. King is unmistakable in Primitive Radio Gods’ "Standing Outside a Broken Phone Booth with Money in My Hand". Even if you don’t recognize King’s growl, you know it’s Someone Important singing the refrain.

But what about fiction? What kind of borrowing can we, should we, do if we still want to claim to be original?

If we stick something in that isn’t ours, we can give our borrowings the high-falutin name of literary allusions. But allusion requires some sort of wink-wink tone that lets the reader know that you know that they know what you’re doing. The reader who misses the memo is also pretty much guaranteed to miss the allusion, too. Consider the case of The New Yorker reviewer of Andre Aciman’s Eight White Nights who mistook a passage from Keats as an example of Aciman’s style. This would have been fine—except that she didn’t like the style.

What I struggle with is a writer like Helene Hegemann, the German teenager whose novel Axolotl Roadkill (I can’t be held responsible for her title) includes numerous unacknowledged borrowings from a novel by another German writer. Writing, she says, is not about originality. It’s about authenticity. What she was doing in copying from the writer Airen was creating “intertextuality”. I’m sure that makes plagiarized writers everywhere feel all better.

Actually, I don’t struggle at all with this issue. My mind is made up: it’s cheating and unoriginal. It’s coasting on someone else’s hard creative work. In fact, it’s plagiarism. And what makes me, I admit, indignant and Czar-ish about this is the fact that it can so easily be avoided. Want to use something from Ian McEwan (and who wouldn’t)? Just allude to it. It’s a kind of literary two-for-one sale, when you think about it: the words and/or ideas you really like and the points for looking so erudite. The alternative is to kidnap someone else’s ideas (which is what plagiarism literally means). Allusion seems a small price to pay to avoid committing a creative felony.

To go back to Aciman. His letter to the editor clarifying whose line it was anyway explains that unattributed quotations are “more or less standard procedure in my novel”. Interestingly, the letter’s stated purpose is a humble one (that wasn’t me, it was Keats, and it’s also, in other places, Yeats, Arnold, Joyce, Wordsworth). But what it does is signal that Aciman knows his stuff. (He adds another level of allusion-dropping—not a bad thing—by pointing out that his borrowed line from Eliot’s The Waste Land is in itself a borrowing from Spenser).

Is Aciman being elitist, here or in the novel? And, if he is, is he out of touch with contemporary literary life? What if there are only a handful of readers who nodded sagely when they recognized the passages from the Dead White Men of English letters? Should he have handled his allusions differently so as not to mislead his readers who are, as he puts it “uneducated”?

And then the real question: how is Aciman different from Hegemann? One claims she’s mixing. The other is alluding. Are they both right?

Writers, what’s your view? Do you borrow? How do you borrow? What do readers think about it?

This post first appeared on Beyond The Margins.

March Madness: The Movie vs. Book Smackdown

2010-03-19T12:47:00.006-04:00

Why should basketball have all the fun? In honor of March Madness, here is the First Annual Movie vs. Book Smackdown Tournament. You decide who wins--the book or the movie version--and see which two works of art end up competing for all the marbles. You could end up with two books. You could end up with two movies. Or, in a genre-bending final, a book competing against a movie based on a different book!

This is just a small sampling of all the books that have acquired film aliases. It's a mix that offers two Jane Austens--one by Ang Lee and the other by Joe Wright--and two Joe Wrights, for that matter, with his Atonement possibly facing his Pride and Prejudice in the final. And there are two Keira Knightleys, thanks to Wright. The one, to me, obvious omission? W. Somerset Maugham, reportedly the author with the highest ever rate of book-to-movie adaptation among his works. The Painted Veil could have been in the Classics Division. Maybe next year.

Know Your Story: The Rector, The Waitress, and The Lion

2010-03-15T14:18:00.002-04:00

On the refrigerator of the house we lived in in London more than a decade ago was a clipping from the “this day in history” section of The Independent:

1932: Harold Davidson, the rector of Stiffkey, is found guilty of disreputable association with women, after allegations that he made improper advances to a waitress in a Chinese restaurant. He died in 1937 after being mauled by a lion in Skegness.

I saved the clipping, thinking that though you can’t make this stuff up, I might try to make something out of it. For a long time, Harold Davidson’s sordid life was on my mental list of future writing projects. I toyed with possible plots and with various strategies for telling the story. Would it be an omniscient telling of the Rector’s, um, adventures? Would it be a post-modern tale (this was the 90s and I was on leave from a teaching job) embedded in some quirky frame narrative? Or would I use this poor man of the cloth as a vehicle for a commentary on patriarchy and imperialism (see above: 90s, teaching job)?

I did none of these. Because it eventually became apparent to me that while the Rector’s story might be a good one—even an interesting one—it wasn’t my story.

As writers, we’re always taking notes, making observations, clipping articles from newspapers (or printing them from the web). Stories are our trade, so we think we have to gather up every tale we see. And if we’re paying attention, there are stories everywhere. The challenge is to choose only the ones that are right for us, or else we risk the Atalanta Syndrome. Every time Atalanta got ahead in her footrace against Hippomenes, he tossed one of Aphrodite’s golden apples across her path. Dazzled, she’d stop to pick it up, letting Hippomenes get ahead. The punishment for her distraction? She had to marry the guy.

How do writers avoid getting stuck with a story that feels like a bad marriage?

1. Write a lot. Write short pieces, long pieces, notes, stories. It takes time to settle into a voice and a style.

2. Study your own work. You’ll soon see which issues fascinate you, which problems you keep trying to resolve.

3. Work with what fits. Once you’ve established your style and discovered the themes you want to explore, resist the temptation to go with the fancy new thing. I’m interested in identity and in the balance between strength and weakness, and I write most often about Greece. I have no business writing about Harold Davidson, the waitress, and the lion.

4. Know when to change direction. It is possible to have too much of a good thing. You don’t want to repeat yourself or to keep coming to the same conclusions in your stories or novels. If it gets stale, know when to move on.

I plan to keep the story of the Rector in my mental treasury of interesting tales. Along with the shoplifting nun who kept lingerie in the trunk of her car and the divorcing family who pummeled each other in games of floor hockey played in an old ballroom. They’re great stories, but they’re just not right for me.

Have you been tempted away from your true writing love?
How did you figure out what kind of writer you are?

"Jolly Fisherman" image courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/paulpod/ / CC BY 2.0

See You Later: Writing in Two Languages

2010-02-25T12:52:00.004-05:00

Some time in 1958 or 59, my parents moved into their first American home, an immaculate ranch in a suburb of Boston. The neighbors who came to greet them no doubt noticed my father’s excellent English and his strong Greek accent. My mother’s accent was harder to place, thanks to her mother who had thrown her own French Swiss into the Greek mix. What would have been crystal clear was that my parents were foreign. Not from here.

You can hardly blame the unsuspecting American neighbors for finishing their visit with a casual “See you later.” How were they to know that my parents would take this literally? That my parents would sit in their living room, dressed nicely, all the rest of the day, waiting for the promised return of their new friends?

I grew up with the story of “The See You Later.” It became not so much a phrase as a concept: seeyoulater. Or, with a Greek accent: σηγιουλεïτερ. For my parents, it began as a story of embarrassment, of a weakness unveiled despite their steady progress into American life. But when they retold it to me years later, The See You Later had already become a story of success. This, too, they had learned. They had faced this weird linguistic obstacle and they had triumphed. They would tell the story with a bit of a gleam in their eye. You can’t fool us, they said. We understand American idioms.

But the truth is that they never did understand English idioms. And neither did I. The cat that swallowed the pyjamas? Yup. Out of the clear? (In the clear, out of the blue, who’s to say?) Open my appetite? (Not if I’ve swallowed the pyjamas, I guess.)

Which brings me to my ongoing predicament as a writer—a predicament I’d like to think I share with other writers out there who make their creative way in a language that is not fundamentally their own. Writers who are Not From Here.

There are plenty of examples of bi-lingual or self-translating success. Nabokov and the Czech-born Tom Stoppard come immediately to mind. But I suspect most of us are a lot more bumbling than these two. Most of us have to constantly rescue our odd-sounding English with a last-minute realization that the syntax we used is borrowed from another tongue. Usually it’s during the exercise of reading a manuscript aloud when we catch the alien sound in time to correct it. But if we don’t hear it then, woe be to the readers and editors who have to deal (or choose not to) with the convoluted prose.

It took me a long time before I realized that I was frequently writing sentences in my head in Greek and then translating them into English. (My documented insistence on the past imperfect turns out to be me using Greek syntax in English.) Now that I know this is going on, the question is how can I and other bilingual writers make it an advantage?

1. A Built-in Thesaurus

If you can’t think of the right word in English, go to the foreign one and see if that sends you back to a more useful spot in English. The second language adds another layer of subtlety, a new dimension, and sometimes helps you find the better word.

2. An Editing Tool

If you know you have a tendency to write strange syntax, you can teach yourself how to look for those extra words—and you can learn to eliminate all extras, whether they come from self-translation or not. The end result is leaner, more efficient prose.

3. Attention to Diction

For those of us who don’t have English as our first language, it’s always going to be a tool rather than something instinctive. That makes us very aware of what we’re doing to screw it up, of course. But it can also, I hope, heighten our awareness of what a gift language is. Use it properly and it’s a powerful, wondrous thing.

Striving to Get it Right according to an English orthodoxy is just one way to handle the fact of bilingualism. It’s what worked for me, the kid who for a time was so desperate to blend in that she refused to speak English in Greece and Greek in America. (I still find it annoying when my mother throws the occasional English word into her Greek when a Greek one is readily available.)

For others, there is power in doing exactly the opposite of what I’ve described here.

If you’re a bilingual writer, what works for you? How have you drawn on the power of your other language? And what limitations have you found, as you try to formulate your literary style?

Greek Fiction: Is it European?

2010-02-22T16:22:00.004-05:00

As often happens when I go into a bookstore, I emerge with more books than I planned to buy. Or with entirely different books than I planned to buy. Frequently, I go into a bookstore vowing that I will only scan the titles—the way you might take in familiar paintings in a museum—and not buy any more books until the pile on my nightstand, desk, dresser, windowseat (you get the picture) is read. I invariably fail.

Just last week, I went into my local independent to buy Aleksandar Hemon’s The Lazarus Project. I had read an essay by Hemon, or an article about him, several months ago and had been interested to find out more about his Balkan viewpoint. I ended up ordering a copy of The Lazarus Project, but did leave with another Hemon creation: his edition of Best European Fiction 2010, published by Dalkey Archive Press and with a preface by Zadie Smith. The boldly designed cover and the feel of the book in my hand were compelling enough. The content was, I felt confident, sure to intrigue.

I have yet to verify that assumption. But I do have a question. The table of contents is organized by country, beginning with Albania and ending with the United Kingdom. As a testament to the multiplicity of Europe’s nations—and perhaps a reminder that that whole Euro Zone thing might have been an idea against the cultural trend?—there are double entries from Spain, Ireland, and Belgium, covering the main languages spoken in those countries. There are three entries from the UK, recognizing the distinct literary aesthetics of England, Scotland, and Wales. The volume brings together between its yellow and black covers former foes and former countrymen, from within the former Yugoslavia and beyond. Interestingly, the cover manages to evade allusion to any national color scheme. Yellow and black evoke road signs more than anyone’s flag.

As for that question: Where is Greece? (Or the Czech Republic, for that matter, to balance out Slovakia?) Sure, we now know that Greece fudged the numbers to get into the Euro Zone, but I doubt Hemon was onto this information back when the book went to press. And even if you feel like kicking Greece out of the Union now, you have to admit that its geography puts it this side of Europe’s eastern edge.

I ask about Greece’s literary absence only in small part out of ethnic loyalty (as a first-generation Greek/American). I recognize that being the cradle of western civilization doesn’t give a country a lifetime pass on further achievements. If Greece wants to be included in a collection of European fiction in 2010, they should earn that spot.

So what was it that kept them from the roster? Was it a lack of good short work in 2009, leading up to publication? Or was it—as I almost suspect—something to do with the Greek narrative aesthetic and what I’ve found to be its reliance on broad melodrama?

Greeks whose taste in painting, design, architecture, and music I trust often recommend this novel or that as a book I must read in order to appreciate the merits of contemporary Greek literature. And I invariably find these books overwritten and obvious. They can’t hold a candle, in my view, to such writers as Venezis, Hatzis, Mirivillis, or Kazantzakis. These older writers—especially the first two—wrote with a surprising economy, finding their power in the inherently evocative nature of the Greek language. There was no need for over-writing, because they understood the strength of the tool they were using.

I confess to wondering if Hemon wasn’t right to leave Greece out at least for now. I cringe a bit at the thought that today’s Greek writers couldn’t make the cut, and I wonder if that's true.

If you're Greek, what's your thought on contemporary Greek fiction? Greek or not: is there such a thing as a national literary aesthetic?

Movie Review: Percy Jackson

2010-02-15T22:05:00.004-05:00

It may be the only good idea director Chris Columbus ever had, but at least in Percy Jackson and the Olympians, he finds a use for Greek currency: give it to Charon and he’ll take you across the river Styx into the Underworld. Too bad the drachma doesn’t exist anymore in the real world. And too bad (for the Euro) Greece’s current economic situation is taking the Euro down with it. It’s a sad state of affairs indeed when a country’s ancient currency is reduced to a bit part in a Chris Columbus movie.

There are many sad things in this movie, none of them intentional. The camerawork—which seems to consist of switching the camera on and off. The screenplay—which reduces Catherine Keener to wooden declarations of single-mom platitudes. The quirks, shall we say, of the story—which involves the quickest meet-cute trajectory ever recorded on film.

It’s not all a disaster, though. When Charon does take you to the Underworld, you get to see the brilliant comedian Steve Coogan playing Hades as a cross between Ozzy Osbourne and a biker dude. He is one of the few in a roster of fairly well-known actors who seems not only to be slumming but also sincerely depicting a character. (If you don’t know Coogan, rent Michael Winterbottom’s take on Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, A Cock and Bull Story.)

The same can’t be said for Uma Thurman, who makes no attempt at sincerity and simply has a blast. Her Medusa is almost worth the trip to the movie. Wearing a black leather coat with a collar to die for (or turn to stone for), and channels a spa denizen gone to the dark side. And even a head-full of snakes doesn’t overshadow her performance.

Percy Jackson and The Olympians will never, ever be on anybody’s list (except the Razzies?) of top movies. But it does leave us with an abiding mystery. Why, of all the Greek gods depicted on screen, including Melina Kanakaredes as Athena, is Rosario Dawson’s Persephone the only one who speaks Greek? “Go away,” she says, to the Hell Hounds in Hades. Would that we could do the same.

Poems for Valentine's Day

2010-02-11T20:34:00.003-05:00

It takes a skilled reader-aloud to do justice to poetry. Someone like Ian McKellen, or Judi Dench, or Patrick Stewart. Fortunately, these are just some of the readers you can listen to courtesy of The Poetry Archive and The London Times Online. If you're in the UK, you can even select one of the recorded poems and send it to someone--for Valentine's Day.

@Harold Davis

It's not all roses and rainbows at the Times, though. They interestingly offer Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach" (read by Romola Garai), a poem tinged with anxiety over the coming of a modern and faithless age, in which "ignorant armies clash by night". "Ah, love, let us be true to one another," Arnold says. But it's not easy. For this new world "Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light/Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain." Would you like a chocolate strawberry with that?

And Rosamund Pike is assigned as dark a pair of love poems as anyone could choose: Rupert Brooke's "Oh! Death Will Find Me" and Christina Rossetti's "Remember"--both works trying to assert love's permanence in the face of the inevitable.

Of course that's how it is with the best love poetry. It never loses sight of the inherent folly of romance.

Take a tour through what The Poetry Archive has to offer--and go to their website, where more recordings are available. For contemporary American poetry, visit Poetry Speaks.

What's your favorite Valentine's Day poem? And is it satirical or sincere?

Children's Books

2010-02-08T17:13:00.002-05:00

“Oi, get off our train!”

It’s a great line. Subtly British with its “oy”, collegial (it’s “our” train), and just feisty enough to signal that something exciting is about to happen. The book of that title sits somewhere on a shelf in my basement (I hope), set aside in a small pile of favorite volumes I read to my son and daughter when they were small. The son turned twenty-one in the wee hours of today, so I find myself thinking back to the stories—and specifically the phrases—that have become a part of our family language over the last two decades.

For me, besides the “oy” of John Burningham’s book, there’s A.A. Milne’s “Bisy Backson”, the cryptic phrase that so puzzled Pooh when, unknown to him, Christopher Robin headed off to school each day. Who was this Backson, Pooh needed to know? And why was he keeping Christopher Robin so busy? It’s a handy phrase, when you want to tell someone you’re going out to do errands but you’ll be home in time to get to the soccer game, or the office. Busy Backson. Speaks volumes.

Bendamalina. I can remember nothing from that book except the cadence in which I used to read its comic formula aloud. “Bendamalina, Bendamalina, go home and tell your sisters to put the soup on to heat.” And Bendamalina, because she was wearing a pot on her head (of course), would hear it all wrong. A perfect analogy to a child’s occasional bewilderment in the world of grownup language—and to my own, as a non-native English speaker occasionally foiled by idioms.

And finally: “Ooh, said all the little crocodiles.” Bill and Pete Go Down the Nile. Not exactly a classic, but somehow ever-present in my family vocabulary. When the twenty-one-year-old son shows me his diploma in a couple of years, I’m likely to exclaim “ooh”—and to follow it with a reference to those crocodiles.

Writers and readers are always being asked about their favorite book. What about your favorite children’s book? Which books stuck in your head? What were the stories from your childhood or your children’s childhood whose language became part of your very own?

Happy Birthday, Eoin!

Movie Review: Up in the Air

2010-02-01T23:33:00.003-05:00

The sight of George Clooney’s dapper form is almost enough to distract viewers of Up in the Air from its essentially conservative outlook. The movie has all the trappings of the Exploration of the Modern Predicament: the rootless man and the rootless woman, the detached career, the alienating urban environment, the even more alienating space of airport terminals and hotel rooms, the sex without commitment.

But the real tone of the movie is signaled right from the start by the chicly retro credit sequence. We’re in the twenty-first century—by way of the fifties.

Everything in Up in the Air tends towards marriage. That’s the movie’s prime law of physics: all bodies in motion tend to hope for married life. Some of that we expect. We expect that Anna Kendrick’s young trainee will voice the earnest rebuttal to Clooney’s soulless philosophy. We expect that Clooney’s life will be shown up for its emptiness. We expect him to have A Revelation that he wants more out of life. We even expect that there will be a twist involving his relationship with Vera Farmiga’s equally rootless and commitment-free Alex.

What we don’t expect (stop reading here if you don’t want to know) is that the surprise is not that the woman is just as much a player as the man. Jason Reitman is not going for a gender commentary here. Instead, he’s going for an affirmation that marriage is the correct state in which people should live. That’s what Kendrick’s Natalie wants, that’s what Alex has (it’s not another man in her bed, but the even more scandalous husband in the kitchen that provides the movie’s final frisson), and that’s what Clooney’s stranded Ryan Bingham wants.

In the end, though, Up in the Air is cleverly just what its title says. In the final sequence, we see Clooney standing in front of a giant departures board. We know from an earlier scene between him and Farmiga that the board is where you go when you can choose to go anywhere in the world. You just take your frequent flier miles and pick a city. Now Clooney stands with the names of cities behind him and an exit sign directly above his head. Off he goes. But it’s a Sartrian huis clos. There’s really no way out.

B-Movie Classics

2010-01-28T21:05:00.004-05:00

Ever heard of the Roger Corman classic The Saga of the Viking Women? Would you recognize it if I gave you its full title: The Saga of the Viking Women and Their Voyage to the Waters of the Great Sea Serpent? Not ringing any bells? Well, maybe it will after you've had a chance to view it for free at BMC, a website dedicated to B-movie classics.

That's where you'll find about thirty gems of second-rate cinema, categorized by genre for easy searching (though versatile B-films like Saga show amazing crossover ability, turning up in both the Sci-Fi/Fantasy and Action/Adventure categories).

I owe it to the clever people at the New York Observer's Very Short List for alerting me to BMC. The Observer's List is indeed Very Short: one item every day, sent by email newsletter to subscribers. Sometimes it's a book you'll want to read, sometimes it's a website worth checking out (the guy who speaks Dadaist paragraphs in his sleep; the photographer whose black-and-whites of starling flocks rival anything Hitchcock could do). It's almost always worth taking a look at. Just like BMC's movies. Like Fiend Without a Face. Or The Crawling Eye. Or Wet Asphalt. You get the picture.

Movie Review: A Single Man

2010-01-25T23:13:00.003-05:00

Tom Ford’s A Single Man offers up plenty of gorgeousness—in everything from architecture, to automotive design, to the male form—but also a striking problem of visual storytelling. Ford has taken Christopher Isherwood's novel as the basis for his first directing assignment. But while Isherwood knows how to craft a fluid narrative out of even disconnected pieces, Ford, a fashion-shoot veteran, lacks, for now, the ability to put images together into a story.

Ford lets his camera occupy two extremes: it’s either immobile or incessantly mobile. We’re either staring at an eye or a nose in super-tight close-up, or we’re jumping around in quick-cutting shots, skipping seconds here and there in what would otherwise be a straightforward sequence. Or we’re panning across a scene in super slow motion. Or we’re shifting into a quasi-handheld mode as we follow Colin Firth’s George Falconer through his day as he grieves for the loss of his lover of sixteen years. This is all very well, and demonstrates Ford’s willingness to experiment with the many things a moving image can do. But it leaves the viewer with a sense of incoherence. Yes, George Falconer is struggling, and let’s just say (without giving anything away) that time’s passing is important to him. All the same, Ford’s camerawork has the unwanted effect of making the moviegoer frequently check her or his watch.

Really, A Single Man is many movies. It’s a highly saturated 60s reverie. It’s a black-and-white magazine ad for Calvin Klein Eternity (see the movie and you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about). It’s yet another entry in the architecture-porn category, this time leading us to marvel at the pay scale of English professors at second-rate Santa Monica colleges. A Single Man is also an expressionistic tone poem, a satire, an homage to Life magazine. You get the picture.

Thankfully, it’s Colin Firth who makes the picture. Not only does he look good in twentieth-century clothes, but he gets a chance to demonstrate an enormous range of emotions all in one performance—without at all making us think he’s showing off. It’s a testament to the power of Firth’s acting that his George does not get lost in Ford’s camera flourishes. Where the camera is often extremely heavy-handed, Firth is subtle and restrained. Ford gives him a slow-motion panning shot of his own at one point. But Firth doesn’t need a camera trick to command our attention.

Guest Blogger Part Two: Tarantino and Peckinpah, Auteurs of Revenge Violence

2010-01-21T13:29:00.004-05:00

The following is part 2 of Monday's post. Here inaugural guest blogger Dell Smith discusses violence in Quentin Tarantino's movies.

Pupil Tarantino tweaks Peckinpahís vision of revenge ethics so that dilemmas are never black and white. Tarantinoís rogue characters operate in a contemporized moral gray area. In his first movie, Reservoir Dogs, a band of robbers is hired by a third party to pull a heist.

After the robbery, the band meets in an abandoned L.A. warehouse where each character introduces personal codes that fuel his behavior. For example, Michael Madsonís Mr. Blonde likes to torture cops, and Harvey Keitelís Mr. White is an old-school criminal in it for the money. Mr. White also has a gooey moral center that does him in by the end when he discovers the robber heís been protecting turns out to be an undercover cop.

In Pulp Fiction's moral universe, Butch the fighter (Bruce Willis), through a series of random events, helps his nemesis, Marsellus Wallace (Ving Rhames), out of a tight spot. Butch and Marsellus are tied together by double-cross and revenge: Butch was paid to throw a fight which he did not. Marsellus lost big money and wants Butch gone. Saving Marsellusí from the clutches of a couple of L.A. racists will more than square Butch. Butch is generally honorable, so watching him liberate Marsellus is entertaining and satisfying.

In Kill Bill 1 and 2, Tarantino serves revenge as the main course, and turns in over three hours of Uma Thurman's wronged Bride as an ass-kicking samurai warrioress bent on completing the titular task. Itís almost a let down when Bill is finally killed with a low-key martial arts blowótame compared to the mayhem that precedes it.

With Inglourious Basterds, Tarantino revises WWII for a new generation, this time as a revenge-fueled fantasy pitting American and French Jews against Nazis in German-occupied France. Audiences gave two thumbs up to the movieís hard R-rated violence, perhaps suggesting Americans are collectively tired of fighting unwinnable wars and amorphous foes. Maybe we want to relive Americaís last genuine win.

The opening scene of Inglourious Basterds extends for about 20 minutes. Presented in real-time, the scene sets up many things: weíre in Nazi-occupied France and are in the company of feared Nazi Colonel Hans Landa, nicknamed the Jew Hunter. During an extended dialogue scene in a farmhouse where he sweats a farmer for information, Landa determines that the cellar below them is the hiding place of a Jewish family. When German soldiers kill the family, a girl escapes.

This sets up what must be the most outrageous revenge fantasy ever filmed. Tarantino revises history to suit his purposes of conflict, tension, and revenge. Seeing a theater-full of Nazis, including Hitler, Goering, and Goebbels, die at the end of the movie was a little bit of heaven on a rainy September afternoon. For decades the Holocaust has been the subject of movies that were sometimes of questionable taste. Finally a filmmaker cuts to the chase and shows us what audiences have wanted all along.

Where does violence in movies go from here? What else is there for these aging outsider anti-heroes and their directors to do? Peckinpah, for his part, tackled oncoming old age by asking the macho old-man question: how do you grow old without getting done in by modern ways? The essence of Peckinpahís aging moral outrage can be reduced to a moment, a sentence, when during The Wild Bunchís opening bank robbery William Holden shouts to one of his Bunch: ìIf they move, kill ëem.î

Tarantino, now in his mid-to-late 40s, shows no sign of changing gears. As he said in the August 2009 GQ, he has already made his character-driven, mature work about getting old, Jackie Brown. ìAnd itís as much of an old-man movie as I ever want to make.î Tarantino will eventually pass the torch to another generation of revenge-violence filmmakers, but it sounds like heís not going quietly out without a cinematic fight.

The opening bank robbery from The Wild Bunch:

Need more? To see an 30-second distillation of Reservoir Dogs performed by animated bunnies, click here.

Guest Blogger: Tarantino and Peckinpah, Auteurs of Revenge Violence, Part 1

2010-01-18T12:35:00.001-05:00

This is the first of two guest blog posts by Dell Smith, on loan from his blog the Unreliable Narrator. (Note: the following discussion on revenge violence in contemporary cinema contains movie plot spoilers. But that's no reason not to keep reading...)

Watching onscreen violence can be a release, a harmless thrill; we watch murder most vile so we wonít actually perform the acts ourselves. Today, PG-13 movies show blood-soaked bullet holes and hungry vampires/zombies in action. And America loves it.

Quentin Tarantinoís Inglourious Basterds which includes scenes of intense violence was on many criticsí 2009 top ten lists. The January 8th issue of Entertainment Weekly chose the movie as an expected Best Picture Oscar contender. Reviews skewed mostly to the B, B+, A- range. While itís not the best movie of last year, it is certainly one of the most entertaining ones. And itís not just critics who think so: the movie is now Tarantinoís biggest box office hit.

Most of Tarantinoís movies exploit violence, and especially violent revenge, for entertainment. But years before Tarantino watched his first exploitation flick, director Sam Peckinpah released a string of visceral action movies, starting with The Wild Bunch in 1968, which helped usher in a new generation of movies that didnít have to shy away from realistic gunplay. In The Wild Bunch, and later with The Getaway and Strawdogs, Peckinpah staged action scenes as an extended slo-mo catharsis of revenge-fueled violence.

His movies donít just build to a violent ending; they start violently and continue relentlessly until the bloody finale. Peckinpahís anti-heroes live by an ethical code of conduct that ultimately places them in deadly confrontations whose outcomes are certain death. But the protagonists continue in the face of incredible odds because they know they are doing the right thing within the construct of their world view. For Peckinpah, codes are often forged from money, friendship, and revenge, forking into sub-code tributaries like honor, pride, and shared history.

His scenes of violence cultivate a universal feeling of us-against-them. The aging gang at the heart of The Wild Bunch is screwed by a Mexican general when he kills a member of the Bunch after promising to let him go. In turn, they kill the general in his compound and go down in a blaze of guts and glory. The Bunch knew their way of operating was displaced in the new west and would probably get them killed. Why not go on their terms?

Peckinpah was always attracted to outsiders and what happens when theyíre double-crossed. As David Thompson says in The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, ìThroughout Peckinpahís work, there is the theme of violently talented men hired for a job that is loaded with compromise, corruption, and double-cross. They strive to perform with honor, before recognizing the inevitable logic of self-destruction.î

The Getaway starts with Steve McQueen as Doc McCoy leading a dangerous a bank heist. When heís double-crossed, the movie continues as a chase movie, ending with a brutal, inevitable shootout in the hallways, stairwells, and elevators of a Mexican border town hotel. We know whatís coming, the movie telegraphs it an hour beforehand.

But this foreshadowing ramps up the conflict and tension leading to McCoyís final retribution. Peckinpah is a master at building tension. Even after a dozen viewings I still get a jolt when I pop in The Wild Bunch. The title sequence alone is textbook Peckinpah: cross-cutting between the interior and exterior of a bank during a daring robbery.

Tune in next time as we discuss Tarantino's films, and how he has updated revenge violence for a contemporary audience.

Meanwhile, check out this trailer for Peckinpah's Strawdogs:

Come back on Thursday for Part 2!

Coming this week: Guest Blogger Dell Smith

2010-01-16T19:34:00.004-05:00

Coming this week: a two-part essay on violence in American movies by inaugural guest blogger Dell Smith. Find his posts about books, film, the writing life and the Boston-literary scene at his blog The Unreliable Narrator. Tomorrow, Dell starts the conversation with a post about Sam Peckinpah. Thursday, he wraps it up with a piece about the Peckinpah legacy in Quentin Tarantino's work.

Dell's posts will come hot on the heels of Malcolm Jones' recent Newsweek article about what Hitchcock's Psycho did for violence and horror in American films.

Movie Review: Sherlock Holmes

2010-01-14T20:11:00.006-05:00

Half-way through Sherlock Holmes comes the question: why is everybody picking on Freemasons these days? First there’s National Treasure—in which merely the presence of Nicholas Cage before a camera lens is worth an apology to the mysterious Order. Then there’s Dan Brown and that gruesome Angels and Demons business. And now even Guy Ritchie, who surely has better fish to fry, has worked the poor Freemasons into his new vision of Conan Doyle’s detective. To paraphrase the Pet Shop Boys, what have they done to deserve this?

I confess ignorance regarding what crimes the Freemasons may have committed against either Ron Howard or John Turtletaub. But for why they turn up in Sherlock Holmes, I may have an answer.

You don’t have to have read “A Study in Scarlet” or “The Sign of Four” to know that Holmes can identify a man’s profession, his physical condition, and what he had for dinner simply by looking at his hands or the hem of his trousers. (Reading Conan Doyle provides a clear and unapologetic window on Victorian culture. Prejudices and stereotypes are vividly drawn in Conan Doyle’s character descriptions.) That’s one of the many fascinations of a Conan Doyle story. The world may be full of mysteries—one per story—but it is eminently solvable. The answers are all there in code, and Holmes has the key.

But for better or for worse, our world offers no such certainties. A man with a thick neck could be a brick-layer or a professor who works out a lot. So if you’re recasting Victorian Holmes for the twenty-first century, you need to find something the audience can recognize as both familiar and mysterious. Voila the Freemasons! They come with pentagrams and triangles and eyeballs and crosses, and we can watch as Holmes draws patterns on a dusty floor and points out how the pieces all fit. Freemasons! An ancient order here to solve your modern-day movie woes!

And if following along with the Masonic symbols doesn’t work, you can always trace the semiotics of Robert Downey Jr.’s hair. Tousled, smooth, beneath a fedora. What does it all mean?

Call Me Curious: the Moby Dick Marathon

2010-01-11T21:38:00.017-05:00

There’s something compelling about the coming together of a white whale, sleep deprivation, unappealing food, harpoons, and lots of hoarse voices. At least Ahab thought so. When you put all of that in New Bedford’s Whaling Museum in Massachusetts, along with a roster of two hundred volunteer readers, you’ve got the Tenth Annual Moby Dick Marathon—compelling enough to make me drive an hour each way last Sunday just to catch a few chapters read aloud from that doorstopper of a book.

It’s not that I’m a particular fan of Moby Dick. I neither liked nor understood the book when it was assigned in high school. But the chance to witness such an extreme combination of literature, performance, and endurance was too intriguing to pass up. I imagined it as a literary do-over of They Shoot Horses Don’t They, with readers staggering up to the podium, slurring their words after hours on their feet. I figured the museum’s reading room would look like the sidewalk after a camp-out for Coldplay tickets, littered with food wrappers and sleeping bags and coffee cups.

No such luck. The Whaling Museum is a modern building tucked among the colonial houses of the old city, and the atrium lobby where the reading marathon took place was sleek and full of light from the enormous windows along the back. No one was having trouble staying awake. Three whale skeletons hung from the ceiling above a space divided into two sections: readers to the right, spectators to the left. I found a place on the stairs down to the lobby, on the readers side, but nobody sent me away.

Everyone had a copy of Moby Dick, some loaned by the museum, but most looking like much-loved and much-read volumes pulled from home shelves. Barnes and Noble was there, offering nooks on loan. Here was a fusion of the very old and the very latest: a nineteenth-century classic, available in digital form, read aloud by people from Melville’s very own part of the world. Interestingly, virtually everyone was following the spoken reading along in their books. I didn’t have a copy, so I simply listened, which seemed to me to be the point.

I heard a woman read not as distinctly as I would have liked, a man read with lovely theatrical aplomb, a woman read in Portuguese—in which the few words I understood included “Ahab,” “Pequod,” and “melancolia”—and then just before I had to leave, the actual great-great-grandson of Melville himself. A tall man with glasses and a short gray pony tail, he had the privilege of reciting the moment when Moby Dick bites the whaling boat in two. I’m guessing he gets to pick his favorite part.

Who goes to an event like this? Mostly people with gray hair, mostly people wearing LL Bean-type clothes. But also a young man in skinny jeans and a deerstalker; a kid in a Marblehead Badminton t-shirt; and a handful of grad-student types who must have been there in homage to Melville, the post-structuralist. What I expected to see more of I saw only one of: a man in work pants and Jason Bourne’s red down jacket, with a watch cap and mutton-chops. A sailor.

Maybe Melville isn’t your favorite book. Maybe twenty-five hours of recitation isn’t your idea of fun. But there’s something to be said for sitting in a room beneath the bones of a whale, listening to people say things like “There she blows!”

Curling up With a Good Audiobook

2010-01-07T18:48:00.006-05:00

Would I be ruining my reputation as a writer and reader if I revealed that, lately, I’ve been fascinated by audiobooks? I hope not. But it has come as a bit of a surprise to me to realize that not only do I emote more when I’m listening to a book, but I feel more engaged in the narrative than I do even when I’m curled up in a comfy chair with a good book on a rainy day.

Listening to the excellent audiobook of Kathryn Stockett’s The Help, I found myself gasping, or laughing, and even saying “oh no!” to my empty car. Occasionally, I’d say something to Aibileen or Skeeter, as if they were sitting in my passenger seat, telling me what had just happened to them. I finished the book while in the middle of a long row on my rowing ergometer. When the Audible folks came on to tell me they’d hoped I’d enjoyed the book, I came to a dead stop, aghast that there wasn’t going to be more to the story. For several days afterwards, I missed hearing the voices I had come to know so well (and they are superb). Where were Aibileen, Skeeter, and Minny who had cast a fascinating and moving parallel world out into mine?

I can imagine your objections. What I’m describing, you’ll say, is what happens when we read a book. It’s not about the listening, you’ll say. But I’m not so sure. Like many avid readers, I have always felt completely immersed in the writer’s fictional world I’m recreating in my head. And I’ve often, if not always, had that odd dream-wakened feeling of displacement when I finish a book and have to return to my actual present. But there is something about listening to a book read to me that is very, very different. Read well, that is. There are, as many would agree, few worse things you can do to a book than have it read by someone whose voice or attitude are all wrong.

So what is it about listening that makes it so pleasant? Listening certainly has nothing to do with the coziness we often associate with reading. Listening to The Help—and before that to actress Emma Fielding’s wonderful performances of Rebecca and Jane Eyre—I was never particularly comfortable. I was either exercising or cooking or driving. And while I do love to drive, New England traffic doesn’t always make for a pleasant experience. So it wasn’t about the comfort. But it was about that imagined person, sitting in the passenger seat, telling me a story. I could no more ignore Aibileen than I could ignore my husband, my kids, or my best friend if they were regaling me with their latest experience.

Of course we are all listeners before we are readers. Taking in narrative by hearing the words must be hard-wired in our brains. We have to adapt to the printed word, in a process that neurologists say is not natural. In a way, in the long history of narrative, the period of the Silent and Solitary Reader is a relatively short one. It’s only with the late-nineteenth-century advent of cheaper books and better light that readers could take a book to a corner and read it alone. Even Jane Eyre who takes her book to the curtained-off window-seat would have had the novel of her life read aloud in a gas-lit drawing room.

It’s possible that audiobooks signal a return to a “truer” way of reading, rather than a new departure. Not that I can imagine the printed (or digitized) word ever being supplanted by the sound file. Still, it’s a seductive thought, don’t you agree? Imagine all those drivers soothed by elegant prose, home cooks uplifted by an engaging story. Commuting could turn into communicating—all from listening to a book.

Which are you: listener, reader, or both? What are your favorite audiobooks? Which books would you love to hear read aloud?

Z (1969)

2010-01-04T16:46:00.014-05:00

[Read below, or listen here]

Z: a perfect place to start the New Year. Why the last letter of the alphabet? Because it’s also the sound (zee) of the Greek word for “he lives”, a cry of new or renewed life. This doubling of meaning is exactly what Greek filmmaker Costa-Gavras had in mind when he gave his 1969 political thriller this famous one-letter title.

Z follows the return to an unnamed country of a political leader known only as the Deputy (Yves Montand). As his entourage arranges for him to address his supporters on the topic of peace and freedom, an opposing mob gathers and threatens to kill him. One man clubs the Deputy in the head, sending him into a coma, and sending a range of authorities into action. The doctors analyze his still-living brain; the Magistrate examines the case; the rulers obfuscate; and the crowds riot. Once the Deputy is dead, his supporters insist that he and his cause still live. “Zei”, they cry, speaking the only Greek word in the movie.

Z was filmed in Algeria and acted in French, with Irene Pappas as the Deputy’s wife standing out as the lone and noticeably Greek figure among the cast. (Pappas’s ethnicity is hard to mistake: she has the dark eyebrows and hair and the long straight nose of a classical statue. When she played Clytemnestra in Michael Kakoyannis’ 1977 film Iphigenia, it was like looking at the ancient queen come to life.) Z could never have been made in Greece. Two years into what would be the seven-year rule of a military junta, Costa-Gavras’ overt criticism of the police state would have been extremely dangerous.

Besides that one word cried out by the Deputy’s supporters, the only signs that the film is a thinly veiled reference to the junta are clever glances at Greek lettering here and there. Pappas holds a copy of Ta Nea (The News), the left-leaning newspaper. Medals shown in the beginning of the film are from Greek campaigns. And, most appropriately, a close-up of a reporter’s Selectric typewriter ball shows Greek characters, with the Z popping up front and center. But everything else, from the dark-glasses-wearing leader of the police state, to the murkiness of due process, to the reaction of the mob, rings utterly and explicitly true of Greece.

I saw Z in mid-December, and applauded Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts for picking that moment to screen a film about Greece’s struggle between anarchy, independence, and authoritarian rule. Z is full of scenes of police standing by while mobs threaten to take over, and then entering the fray too late and too forcefully. How prescient of the MFA to synchronize Costa-Gavras’ film with riots going on in Athens and other major Greek cities during most of December 2009. Or was it?

The sad truth is that riots in Greece—between a mob that rejects the very notion of authority and a policing force that doesn’t know how to assert authority without oppressing—these riots have become an unremarkable occurrence in Greek life. The MFA’s scheduling was pure luck; they could screen Z any day of the year and it would be timely. Costa-Gavras’ film has had a much longer life than perhaps he could have hoped for—and for, sadly, all the wrong reasons.

Armistice Day

2009-11-17T08:25:00.004-05:00

[Read below, or listen here.]

This post is late in coming, but then so was the Armistice Day I’m writing about. Last Wednesday was indeed Veterans’ Day, but it was also the 91st anniversary of what the Commonwealth countries have long called Armistice Day. November 11 marks the end of what I suggest may be the most self-conscious war ever fought. The First World War took on the characteristics of a narrative, despite—or maybe because of—the fact that the experience of its murderous new technologies, mixed with the banal cruelty of mud, was so difficult for civilians to comprehend.

From the very beginning, this war was invested with literary qualities. It had more than one title—the Great War, the War to End All Wars. It had its writers —Sassoon, Owen, Rosenberg, Blunden, among many others, sending prose and mostly poetry home from the trenches. These poets gave the war its own graphic: the poppy, an emblem movingly used to this day as a symbol of remembrance.

Most importantly, the war had an ending date and time that were consciously chosen for their symbolic resonance. The ending dates of other wars before and since have become symbolic for us after the fact. In the Great War, the Allies identified a symbol and fit the war to match it. The Great War came to an end precisely at the eleventh hour on the eleventh day of the eleventh month. Has there been another war whose history was shaped to conform to an English idiom?

Among all the blunders and worse committed by the military in the prosecution of the Great War, the manner of its ending might have been one more. Might a few more lives have been saved if the German, French, and British leaders had met at Compiégne on even November 10th or 9th? In one respect, though, the Allies knew what they were doing. They were ensuring that, though their war turned out to be neither Great nor final, it would never be forgotten. And that is as it should be.

More WWI narratives:
Pat Barker’s Regeneration, The Eye in the Door, The Ghost Road
Sebastian Faulks’ Birdsong

What would you add to the list?

Reading and Listening

2009-11-15T20:05:00.004-05:00

There's a new feature on The View Finder! Starting today, most if not all posts will be available in audio format as well. Don't have time to sit at the computer and read the post? Go to the blog on your phone and click on the link to listen instead.

Literature is changing, and the way we take in ideas should expand to accommodate that change. Besides, reading aloud is too much fun to be left to bed-time stories alone.

John Baldessari
Beethoven's Trumpet (With Ear), Opus 127 2007
Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery, New York © John Baldessari
Resin, fibreglass, bronze, aluminuim and electronics
Tate Britain

New Formats, New Literature?

2009-11-05T14:56:00.013-05:00

[Rather listen to the post instead?]

I take books for granted. Not individual books. I treasure individual books. I hold onto them; I refuse to give them away or, truth be told, even lend them unless I’ve practically screened the potential borrower as carefully a nominee for the Supreme Court. But I take for granted the fact of the printed book, with its generally three hundred pages, its soft or hard binding, its black-and-white author photo, and its cryptically intriguing cover illustration. This form of narrative is more or less all I have known—even before I could read the words myself.

That’s all changing now. And I’m surprised to find that I’m not bothered. Yes, there are numerous forms now in which to experience a novel or a short story or a poem. But the existence of digital books doesn’t, I think, require the disappearance of the printed book. It’s not, as I said in a recent comment, a zero-sum game. I have yet to encounter an e-reading devotee who now refuses to read books in print. (Speaking of Books in Print, what will they title that reference volume now? Books Published? Books You Can Buy?)

What will change, though, is something about fiction itself. The technology of narrative inevitably affects the prose or poetry it’s designed to disseminate. The oral tradition gave rise to the epithet. Which one’s Athena again? The gray-eyed one. Right. You couldn’t sit through successive nights listening to stories with hundreds of characters without the crutch of labels like that. Then—I’ll skip willfully over centuries of literature—the Victorian novel had its own tricks. If you serialize a story in a monthly magazine, you’d better be sure to build in ways to remind the reader about what happed last time. Hence those long chapter titles “in which our hero discovers he is the son of a nobleman”. Hence the cliffhanger ending and the scene-setting beginning.

These literary devices haven’t gone away. It’s just that now they might turn up more often on television. In fact, television keeps bringing us closer and closer to these older literary forms. Where we once used to have (and still have vestiges of) the sitcom with its stand-alone episodes and perfect closure, we now have complicated serials that create suspense week to week and that require and, in many cases, reward a viewer’s dedication. We’re now used to that “Last week on” preface to many byzantinely-plotted shows like Lost or Gray’s Anatomy. And shows like the numerous anagram spin-offs rely on predictable moments, like visual epithets, to help individual characters stand out from the crowd of law-and-order professionals. We really haven’t left the Victorian novel or the epic very far behind.

The question is what will be the literary devices of the new generation of narratives? If we’re reading a novel on our cell-phones, as we could do in Japan, surely the form of the narrative has to be different. And if we’re reading a short story on a website or on Twitter, or listening to a book that’s been written exclusively for audio distribution? How will the structure and the language of these new forms reflect the technology we use to take them in?

My own experiences with iPhone literature have so far been fairly limited to what I have stumbled on through Stanza and Classics, where there is a prevalence of Jane Austen (actually, I defy someone to tell me where, besides perhaps a Monster Trucks rally, there is not a prevalence of Jane Austen). Which raises the question: besides the superhuman Jane, how well are older more traditional forms of narrative surviving on these new technologies? How is Dickens faring on a digi-book? How is Shakespeare on a cell-phone?

What’s your experience been with new ways of reading? Embracing them? Keeping them at arm’s length?

Bright Star: The Body of Poetry

2009-10-27T03:12:00.010-04:00

Jane Campion has succeeded in making a hyper-physical movie about a Romantic poet whose body is failing him and a woman whose art consists in sewing elaborate garments to cover nearly every inch of the human form. That she has done so is testament to her intelligent filmmaking and to the consistency of her vision for Bright Star, the story of John Keats’ relationship with Fanny Brawne. Every aspect of the film—from its opening hyper-close-up of a needle piercing fabric, to the astounding performance of Abbie Cornish—works to convey the idea, or rather the feeling, of poetry. Campion has made a movie about poetry that unwinds Wordsworth’s famous definition. If poetry is emotion recollected in tranquility, Campion takes us back through the poetry to the raw emotions that produced it. (read an interview with Campion here)

Those emotions find their superb voice in Cornish. There is nothing histrionic about her performance. In fact, she carries herself with a stillness that somehow manages to focus the viewer’s attention all the more on her physical presence. She has the ability of the best actors to register subtle shifts of feeling with tiny changes in expression. But more than that, she presents love, sadness, grief as physical sensations so palpable that we can’t help but share them. Since it’s common knowledge that Keats died at twenty-five, it isn’t spoiling the plot to refer to the scene in which Cornish’s Fanny learns of his death. This scene alone, which includes some lovely acting by Kerry Fox, would be enough to make Bright Star worth seeing.

In writing the screenplay, Campion had the challenge of how to represent the writing of poetry, and how to work the text of that poetry into the film without making it seem artificial. Unlike the scenes of Shakespeare’s mad writing frenzies in Shakespeare in Love, or Jane Austen’s ecstatic all-nighter in Becoming Jane, Campion gives us images of Ben Whishaw as Keats doing a variety of things that actually resemble acts of writing. Sometimes with the supervision of his protector Charles Armitage Brown, Whishaw’s Keats sits and stares, he jots notes, he composes aloud, he pores over scraps on which parts of a poem are scrawled out of order, and he recites a new poem from memory, seeming to form it even as he recollects it.

As naturally as the poetry is created, so too is it spoken—either within the narrative of the film or as voice-over (notably with the film’s final credits, which it is worth staying for). When Keats and Brawne take turns reciting lines from La Belle Dame Sans Merci, it isn’t as if they’re reciting at all. They’re taking the poetry back to the passion that lies beneath it.

Though Bright Star finishes with the sound of Whishaw’s voice reciting a poem over the credits, the film opens with an image that signals its central concern. We see an extended shot of a needle and thread filmed in such tight close-up that the needle looks like a pike and the thread like a hawser. This is Fanny Brawne’s art—fashion—and while she creates distinctive and intricate garments for herself, there is nothing delicate about her or her art. Assertive and confident, she makes no apologies for her dedication to what she herself calls the superficial things (along with flirting and dancing). She is an innovator, proudly announcing that hers is the first dress in two counties to feature a mushroom collar. A lesser film-maker might have allowed this story to become a quasi-feminist equation between the famous poet and the unsung designer. In Campion’s hands, Bright Star is instead an exploration of Fanny Brawne’s experience of making, quite literally, her place in the world—through her clothes, her curiosity, and her emotions.

If there is one weakness in Campion’s film, it is in the puzzling absence of artist’s errors. We never see Fanny’s scissors waver; we never see her tear out a hem. Nor do we ever see Keats labor for a word as we certainly see him (and later Fanny) labor for breath. It’s an odd depiction, actually: artists for whom art seems to come easily, whose ideas all seem to make creative sense. With her camera’s emphasis on the concrete materials of her protagonists’ arts—fabric and paper filmed in extreme close-up—it’s as if Campion wants to insist that art is nothing more than the diligent execution of a fluently conceived idea.

Then again, this is what Keats was describing when he coined the term "negative capability," the ability to reside in uncertainty, to forego "any irritable reaching after fact or reason." An artist experiencing this state of mind is content simply with beauty and with what Keats called half-knowledge. Could it be, then, that Campion's film is true to Keats not only in evoking his life's great love, but also by replicating the conditions in which he wrote his greatest poetry?

When is a Book not a Book?

2009-10-21T20:36:00.009-04:00

Yesterday’s New York Times ran a photograph that made me stop and stare. It wasn’t, thankfully, an image of war’s horrors or a natural disaster. It was a photograph of the young Walter Cronkite, a pipe in his mouth, reading a book. I glanced at the picture, scanned the article, which explained that Cronkite had bequeathed his papers to his alma mater, and then began to turn the page. But Cronkite’s pose was so startling that I turned the paper back, and stared.

There was such contentment in the way he sat, legs propped up on a desk, holding the book loosely in his lap—a sense that his mind was firmly on the words written on the page before him. Now, when we see people reading in public, they are usually negotiating between competing information sources all contained on one screen. There are plenty of readers out there—even readers of actual physical books—but our image of what it looks like to be reading has changed. It’s the ready-for-anything one-handed hold on a smartphone.

Not so long ago, I decried this cultural slide into what I saw as a devaluing of literature. How can you immerse yourself in someone else’s imagination—and sink into your own imagination—if you can’t sit quietly with just the story in front of you, printed on actual paper? Surely there’s something about the technology of ink on paper that shapes the way our brains interact with stories. (See the Times' Room for Debate blog post on the subject.) Now I know that there are numerous reasons to see the explosion of electronic books—and, before them, audiobooks—as not a threat to literature but an expansion of it, a blossoming of the art form to embrace multiple technologies. And who better to spur my thoughts on all of this than Walter Cronkite, a man famous for his role in what was once the new and misunderstood technology of our time? (How many households had televisions in the first years of the Sixties? How many don’t have at least one now?)

Still, old habits die hard. Note that I was turning the actual page of a physical copy of the New York Times. And know that just last week, after finishing my fourth reading of Tom Drury’s fine novel The End of Vandalism, I held the book in my hands for a moment, and—I confess—caressed the cover before setting it carefully down in my pile. The book as loved object is a powerful thing. I suspect I am not alone in viewing my library as a treasured chronicle of my intellectual and emotional history.

And here is where things become complicated. Barnes & Noble has announced their new e-reader, the Nook, and it is a thing of beauty. On the Nook website today, I was dazzled by the object itself as much as by its abilities. I began to muster reasons why I should own one. The technology creates the use and then the need, doesn’t it? I even clicked on the accessories page to see which cover I might purchase for my very own Nook. Among the selections was one cover so meta that it would make post-structuralist theorists weep with joy: in “100% cotton canvas with painted polyurethane coating,” the cover is designed to look just like the first page of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (whose title they get wrong). It’s the equivalent of a brown-paper wrapper, giving the Nook the legitimacy of ink and paper.

The tongue-in-cheek of this cover appeals to me. It’s a kind of anti-Magritte. He painted a pipe and captioned it “ceci n’est pas une pipe”. Barnes & Noble makes an electronic device and effectively captions it with “yes this is a book”. But my bookstore-haunting, book-buying, book-hoarding self retorts: it isn’t a book. And it's name even says so (or else what's the N there for?) The Nook is the same object whether you’ve purchased and are reading Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next, G.K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday, or Tuesdays with Morrie. The Nook doesn't know, doesn't care. Oh, sure, you can see the cover art in a kind of iTunes-y cover flow screen, but all three of these books will feel the same, smell the same, weigh the same. I think this a bad thing. Or is it?

I was just at the point of determining to resist the blandishments of the Nook and of electronic readers in general when a thought from the other part of my life—the rowing part of my life—rushed into my mind. Every February, Boston holds the World Indoor Rowing Championships, a regatta conducted entirely on rowing machines (ergometers). When I first saw the ranks upon ranks of ergometers at the 1996 CRASH-Bs, as they are called colloquially (for Charles River All Star Has-Beens), I knew I was witnessing a truly post-modern moment. But at no point did I worry that all this virtual rowing would damage the sport of actual rowing on actual water.

The inaugural CRASH-Bs took place in 1982, with ergometers made of bicycle wheels and odometers. The digital revolution that would bring in the Nook was already on its way.

Verb Tenses: A Revelation

2009-10-06T23:58:00.004-04:00

For a few years now, I’ve had a running disagreement with my writer friend Randy Susan Meyers.* I’ve learned a great deal from her: the importance of adding misery to your characters’ lives, the need to keep the plot moving through a series of “little wants”. But I confess to mostly ignoring Randy’s comments about my verb tenses. The problem? She finds fault with what she calls my overuse of the word “was”—as in “she was sitting,” “the wind was blowing”. Change them to simple past, she says. She sat. The wind blew.

I do see how cutting out “was” after “was” can streamline a narrative. It’s like a sprinter tweaking some small element of posture to cut milliseconds off his stride. Add all those saved milliseconds up, and you’ve gained some speed (and brought down your word count). Still, I resisted making this change in my style because I could never see why it was wrong. How could you start a paragraph, or a chapter, by saying “she sat”? You needed a verb form that implied a more general state of being, a pre-existing condition, in a way. Hence, “she was sitting”. If you said “she sat,” that was like saying she had decided to take a seat in a chair at that very moment.

Then it hit me. All this time—years and years—I have been writing in English but thinking in Greek, which is, in fact, my first language. In Greek, to say “she sat” (E-ka-tse) is to describe a specific and finite event: the moment the woman takes a seat. If we Greeks want to describe a condition (to explain, for instance, a woman’s location in a room), we use a different verb form—one that says, in effect, “she was sitting” (ka-THO-ta-ne). English takes the all-you-can-eat approach. One verb tense to accomplish two things. All this time, I could have been using the Swiss Army knife of verb tenses and having that woman just sit. Instead, I kept hearing the English words through a Greek filter. In a languorous Mediterranean way, the woman was sitting, and sitting, and sitting.

Randy, I concede partial defeat. I won’t change them all, but I’ll change the ones I really should change.

It would be nice to think of myself as in the company of Stoppard or Nabokov—writers who have made lasting marks on the literature of a language not their own. I bet if I looked again at Speak, Memory, I’d find some extra verb forms, or some Latinate diction where none is needed. And doesn’t all of Stoppard’s incredible oeuvre prove his foreignness? Who but an acquirer of English could wield it with such delight and precision?

But who am I kidding? Nabokov and Stoppard produced masterpieces and I just keep getting idioms wrong. It’s the elephant in my closet.

*Randy's novel The Murderer's Daughters out in January 2010 (St. Martin's Press)

Incandescently: More Frequently

2009-08-27T13:37:00.004-04:00

At the end of Joe Wright’s 2005 Pride and Prejudice—in which he turns Jane Austen into Charlotte Brontë but nobody seems to mind—Lizzie tells her newly-wedded Darcy that he should call her “Mrs. Darcy” only when he is “completely and perfectly and incandescently happy”. Incandescently.

The word doesn’t appear in Austen’s text. This is easy to imagine, since incandescent only took on a secondary meaning of passionate or intense in the second half of the nineteenth century (according to the OED). Of course, the whole implicitly post-coital scene is absent from Austen’s novel. Not even the Brontës would stoop to such coarseness, never mind Our Jane!

Deborah Moggach, who wrote the screenplay, made a decent choice of words here.* Beneath its posh and old-fashioned sound, incandescently hints at the passion that hangs over so much of Wright’s physicalized retelling of the novel.

Still, incandescently is a weird word. And it seems to be cropping up in more and more places. In Tatiana de Rosnay’s novel Sarah’s Key, published two years before Wright’s adaptation, a character’s face is “beautiful, incandescent with joy and excitement.” De Rosnay is French but of English and Russian descent. Is it possible that incandescent is more commonly used in French? Or Russian? Somehow, I don’t think so (but I would like to know if any native French or Russian speakers feel differently).

Then recently, on the popular blog Jezebel, a critique of Caitlin Flanagan’s Atlantic article on infidelity finds that “Flanagan has some incandescently insulting things to say about [Rielle] Hunter.” I am happy to stay out of the argument over John Edwards, his sex life, and Helen Gurley Brown (yes, Flanagan weaves it all together). But I can’t help noticing that word again. It’s used just the way it was used in the second issue of the Edinburgh Review, in 1803: “More incandescently wrongheaded than any body else.” Maybe the Edinburgh Review editor was chastising some Scottish politician’s mistress?

What is it about incandescent that is making people (admittedly, only three people in four years) want to use it? Is it its length—the four syllables seeming to draw out and emphasize the passion or fury the word is intended to signify? Is it all those vowels? Or is it just me?

*Emma Thompson is listed as an uncredited writer of some of the dialogue. Perhaps we owe incandescent to her? And if so, are we inclined to like the choice better—because she can do no wrong?

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid: Waiting for Lefors

2009-08-24T14:44:00.006-04:00

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid possesses the mixed blessing of the iconic film. We know and admire it as a series of greatest-hits moments, but we’ve lost the feel for the entire movie. Stumbling across it on cable, we might watch a moment or two, savor a beloved line, and then move on. It’s an old movie, after all, and we already know all the best parts: “who are those guys?”, the jump from the cliff, Katharine Ross riding on Paul Newman’s handlebars, the goofy Bacharach music.

But watching the 1969 film again in its entirety is a revelation. It begins slowly, sadly, with an extended faux vintage newsreel. It goes on with long stretches in which virtually nothing is said. Minutes pass in which we have only the sound of hooves and tackle and feet scrambling over dry ground. The generally languorous pace of this film fails to hide that it is nothing more than one long pursuit with a grim outcome.

Yes, William Goldman’s dialogue is witty throughout, and Newman and Redford bring true élan to their portrayal of the two bandits. But what emerges from a re-viewing of the film is its underlying melancholy, signaled right from the beginning by the mournful pianola sound that accompanies the sepia shots of robbers and trains.

While George Roy Hill made a name for himself as the director who played with the camera—using peephole and window-frame effects both here and in 1973’s The Sting—it’s his static, wide-angle frames that lend Butch Cassidy its unique look and give it its serious undertone. Time and time again, Conrad Hall’s cinematography contain two elements, one near, one far, their distance collapsed by a flat depth of field. Hall’s camerawork provides a visual correspondence for the theme of the film: connection and entrapment, and always the effort to get away.

George Roy Hill plays with the dualism of the western—here, the bad guy (who is actually a good guy, a lawman) wears a white hat. He turns the classic opposition into a partnership, and not just between Butch and Sundance but also between the two of them and the authorities who pursue them. As we watch frame after frame of the two bandits in the foreground with their pursuers a dust-cloud in the background, we come to see the two sides not so much as opposed but linked. It’s a stranglehold that none of the parties involved can escape.

Watching the whole film for the first time in many years, I was struck by the inexorability of this pursuit. No longer the starry-eyed adolescent who first came across the film on television or in some secondary release, I could see the worry, the fatigue in—especially—Newman’s eyes.

This time, the famous line “Who are those guys?”, repeated as the white-hatted Joe Lefors tracks Butch and Sundance to a dead-end cliff, seemed to me to echo the desperation of another well-known iteration: “Let’s go.” “We can’t.” “Why not?” “We’re waiting for Godot.” Yes, Beckett’s Vladimir and Estragon famously stay in one place, waiting for a mysterious figure who never arrives. Yes, Butch and Sundance are always on the move. They’re neither hoping nor waiting for the man they know is coming to kill them. But they are expecting him. And in that, they’re not so different from Didi and Gogo.

Aren’t all four men waiting for death and trying to stave off death at the same time? Aren’t they all bantering their time away, slipping occasionally into the despair that underlies their situation? “Who are those guys?” is, in a way, saying the same thing that Didi and Gogo say when they simultaneously propose departure and quash all hopes of it.

It’s easy to see Butch and Sundance as a sixties counter-culture movie only thinly disguised as a western (and that is how its trailers pitched it back then). Coming out just two months after Woodstock, the film has us rooting for the outlaws—and against the authorities—from the very outset. At times, with their sideburns and boots and corduroy, Newman and Redford seem to have wandered in from San Francisco or Harvard Square. But the movie is richer than that, more complicated, like the Sixties themselves, I suppose. Beneath the charm and the devil-may-care attitudes of its good-looking heroes is the sad fact that they are set on a course that will kill them.

Summer Reading

2009-08-16T23:41:00.004-04:00

In today’s New York Times, commentator Verlyn Klinkenborg raises the essential question every avid reader faces, for some inexplicable reason, the moment school ends and blockbusters fill the multiplexes: what to read. He answers it in characteristic Klinkenborg fashion—thoughtfully, without sure conclusion, but with insights that are as true as they seem familiar. Here is what he says about choosing the last book of the summer.

The book I want is a vortex. When I lower my eyes to it, I’m sucked deep into a place more plausible than the one that surrounds me. When I look up, I want the actual life around me to look strange and original, like a brand new page in a pop-up world.

This is asking an awful lot of a book, I know. Or it would be, if readers weren’t such willing collaborators, if we weren’t so susceptible to the power of suggestion. And yet there’s a practical, skeptical vein in most of us, too — even when seeking an August escape. There’s no such thing, for instance, as a placebo book. All the recommendations of friends and critics will carry us only so far. Ultimately, a book has to meet the test of our own experience, which is a reminder of just how much we live books out as we read them.

Nothing “about” a book can tell you whether this will be true love. Only the book itself can say. For the first few pages, my reading feels provisional, probing, just as it always does. But soon that feeling dissipates. The traces of uncertainty vanish. So, somehow, does the ink on the page, and I realize that I’m looking through the book as if it were translucent. This remains, after a lifetime of reading, a mystery and a joy.

“How much we live books out as we read them.” Indeed. This is why the choice of what to read during this slowed-down time of summer is so important—because we’ll remember those books long after we’ll remember a book we read, say, in October. We’ll remember those books in a different way, too. Not just as stories we liked or were disappointed by, but as lives that became woven in with our own—events that colored our thinking in the way that a dream can affect our moods long after we wake up.

One summer, my studies required me to read the collected works of Charles Dickens and a handful of other Victorian writers. I began with Dickens in June, certain I would hate him and determined to get the worst over with. The Brontës would be my reward in August. Something tells me I began not with The Pickwick Papers (because if I had, I would have been tempted not to continue), but with Oliver Twist, next in the chronology. I read every evening after work and virtually all day on Saturdays and Sundays, managing to finish a 900-page Penguin Classic each week (I was then, and remain, a slow reader), going through the familiar Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby; gagging on the maudlin Old Curiosity Shop; thankful for Sairey Gamp who showed up to brighten the otherwise dry Martin Chuzzlewit; and marveling at the four great novels that came almost in straight succession: Dombey and Son, Bleak House, Little Dorrit, and Our Mutual Friend. A more sustained reverie on the darkness of human nature—and the comedy that survives it—doesn’t exist, in my opinion, in English literature. Decades later, that reading of Dickens remains my most treasured reading experience. The fact that it occurred in summer is, I think, no coincidence.

By the time I reached The Mystery of Edwin Drood, sometime at the end of July, I was distraught. The world I had lived in for ten or so weeks was shutting down, closing its doors, and leaving me on the wrong side. I remember that time in my life vividly—the rattan chair I sat in for all my reading, the gypsy moths outside chomping the leaves that year, my absent-mindedness as I went to work after a night of Sairey Gamp putting drinks on her “manklepidge” or Flora Casby mincing about her drawing room or Bradley Headstone and his spontaneous nose-bleed. What happened then, and what happens with some regularity with most books I read, is what Klinkenborg describes as the disappearance of the ink on the page. He’s absolutely right: it’s that experience of “looking through the book as if it were translucent”. It is, as he says, a mystery and a joy.

My Bleak House, however, and my Little Dorrit are now a little less translucent than they used to be. So are my Atonement and my Sense and Sensibility, thanks to their film or television adaptations. Dorrit was slimmer before I saw Matthew McFayden; I always saw Jo’s street crossing from the other side of the street. Even in cases where the casting gets the character’s looks right—as is the case, I think, with Gillian Anderson’s Lady Dedlock who looks just like George Cruikshank’s Victorian illustrations—the movie image is just too overpowering, too vivid.

I suppose I could have refused to watch when these novels turned up on the screen, or on PBS via the BBC. But like many of us, I couldn’t resist another chance to inhabit the world I knew so well. It’s a small-scale Faustian bargain, though: hand the man your ticket, but the place you’re going to will never be the same. Or, more accurately, it’s Eurydice and Orpheus: look back one more time, and you lose the ability to inhabit that world without reservation or limit.

Am I making too much of this? Of course. It’s not life and death, after all. But it’s narrative, and that is a very powerful thing. The good news is that we have it better than Eurydice. We can pull the book down from the shelf and—as long as it doesn’t have the movie-tie-in cover—sink back into the fictional world as we first and then again and again imagined it. Our pictures of the books we read don’t stay the same, after all. They change with us, from one reading, one summer, to the next.

Julie and Julia: Bittersweet

2009-08-10T10:58:00.009-04:00

When people stay in their seats to watch the credits of a movie, they generally do so in silence, feeling slightly embarrassed about their need to know which stately home stood in for the heroine’s abode, or who sang that vaguely familiar song at the end. And when the relevant information is relayed on screen, these determined credit-watchers nod to themselves, murmur something thoughtful, and shuffle out, barely avoiding the teenaged boy who has come to sweep out the empty popcorn bags.

With Julie and Julia, this is not the case—at least it was not the case in the Greater Boston theater where I viewed the film on its opening day. With Julie and Julia, nearly the entire audience remained in their seats while the credits rolled. But they weren’t paying attention to the credits. Instead, they were all in animated conversation, torsos twisted towards each other in little clusters, talking about cooking, about the movie, and about memories of the movie’s protagonist Julia Child. The thought of leaving the convivial space of the movie theater was far from everyone’s mind until the hiss of the white screen forced people to leave.

Like a good meal shared with good friends, Julie and Julia makes people happy. It is not a complicated entertainment. In fact, it’s more of a Perfect Omelet of a movie than a Duck en Croûte sort of film. It doesn’t aspire to challenge its viewers with too much contemplation, but it succeeds utterly in the very straightforward mission it sets out for itself: to regale us with the life of a beloved icon, and, through the character of blogger Julie Powell, to make us feel better about ourselves for having known or learned about her.

How could Julie and Julia not succeed? It has Nora Ephron’s hilarious dialogue; it has Meryl Streep adding Child-ese to her quiver of accents; it has the lovely pairing of Streep and Stanley Tucci who were so well-matched in The Devil Wears Prada; it has Jane Lynch in a role that finally makes the most of her forceful physical presence; and it has Amy Adams doing a nice job in a role that sadly doesn’t require very much of her at all. This last is not Adams’ fault, of course, but rather has to do with the one flaw in the film—about which more later. Most of all, Julie and Julia is the antacid to Nora Ephron’s much earlier film about food and marriage, Heartburn. Never mind that montage of all four protagonists popping Tums. In Julie and Julia, the two marriages are happy and loving. Paul and Julia Child’s especially is joyful and robust (though we do wonder at times whether the filmmakers brought in Peter Jackson to work some Frodo/Gandalf magic with Tucci’s and Streep’s heights.) And though Powell’s marriage undergoes a slight hitch when food and cooking seem to push the husband (Chris Messina) out of the way, the problem is resolved quickly and without trauma. The night (or two or three?) that Eric Powell spends living in his office handily serves as the obstacle to be overcome in the film’s modified romance structure.

There is no question that part of what led my Greater-Boston audience to linger in the theatre was the movie’s depiction of two success stories. Julia Child gets her twice-rejected manuscript published as Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and Julie Powell gets her blog made into a book, made into a movie (which the film cleverly jokes about in the credits). Both women’s husbands share in their successes without visible envy or bitterness. But here is where the film presents a problem. For what it seems to say quite clearly, if you look past the supposed evenness of its structure, is that we live in a fallen world. And by “we” I mean those of us cooking and eating in twenty-first century America.

The film’s title is rendered Julie & Julia but it might as well be Julie < Julia. The soufflé in Powell’s kitchen stays up, but everything else about her world is a fallen copy of that better world inhabited by Julia Child. Compare the two women’s lives: Child has French doors, French windows, France. Powell has a cluttered Queens apartment above a pizza joint. Child has markets where she can buy gleaming fish and glistening produce. Powell has Gristede’s. Julia and Paul Child enjoy their meals with good manners. Powell’s husband can’t stop talking with his mouth full. And most of all, Julie Powell aspires to Julia Child’s life. Julia Child lives it.

What does it say about twenty-first century existence that it can be considered a triumph to follow someone else’s life? Obviously, we live in a virtual time. But do we live in a derivative time, too? Child’s road to success was to follow something she loved passionately and to push and push until she was able to pursue it. Powell’s road to success was to imitate. When we watch the film, we have a choice, I suppose, to consider Powell as Child’s equal partner: they are two women who find themselves through cooking—and, in so doing, rescue the endeavor from its “little lady at the stove” image. But to choose this interpretation is to ignore the film’s underlying message. Powell is our equal, not Child’s. Like us, she comes home weary to cramped and imperfect real estate; she takes on more than she can always manage; she multi-tasks. Like Powell, no matter how skilled we are with our skillets, the vast majority of us will never have Child’s impact on a culture.

Ephron is a master of hiding sadness in the center of an otherwise lighthearted movie (Heatburn, or even When Harry Met Sally). She has done the same here. Her movie lets us keep our icon on her pedestal and tells us all the while that we don’t have to aspire to anything particularly grand in order for our lives to have meaning. It’s a consoling vision—and a bitter one.

Free Association Reviewing: The Bourne Identity

2009-06-13T01:38:00.005-04:00

The DVD of The International is now out (my review coming soon), which leads me to think of its director, Tom Tykwer, which makes me thing of his earlier film, Run Lola Run, which makes me think of its redhaired star, Franka Potente, which makes me think of another film she appears in in which red again plays a prominent role: The Bourne Identity.

Doug Limon’s taut version of the Robert Ludlum thriller does numerous things just right: the casting of Matt Damon for the combined innocence and cruelty of his face; the editing (which went to pot in the second Bourne film when excessive quick cuts confused the action); the setting in a drab European winter; the music, from Moby’s closing theme to the relentless push of Oakenfold’s "Ready, Steady, Go" for the car chase; and actors like Chris Cooper and Brian Cox and Potente to round out the strong cast. With all this cinematic excitement telling the story of a man who does not know who he is, we might overlook a small detail that, in my mind, elevates The Bourne Identity to the level of an art film: Limon’s use of the color red, which appears in some object in nearly every single scene.

We notice the red in the film’s very first shot. A body is floating in the open sea at night. The image is a range of grays and blacks, except for one dot of red from a beacon on the man’s clothing. The color is more than incidental to the shot, and more than just a plot point telling us Bourne’s body will be found. It signals the kind of world we—and Bourne—have been immersed in: a world in which the essential elements exist in relation to technology, in which Bourne’s search for his identity will be compromised and defined by the gadgetry of espionage.

From there, the red goes on: Bourne’s sweater, his puffy jacket, the bag in which he dumps the contents of the safe-deposit box, the flowers in the otherwise gray CIA lunch room, Marie’s Mini, and of course, the red streak in her hair. This is only a partial list. I guarantee you that nearly every shot of the film contains something that doesn’t have to be red but is.

The question is why? Did Limon begin with the beacon or red bag and then build in the rest of the objects because he thought the red looked cool? Is the use of red nothing more than a visual motif, just because? It’s tempting to think that, after casting Potente as Marie, Limon decided to make a film-length in-joke about her previous film and Lola’s famous blaze of bright red hair. But there has to be another reason. Otherwise, we would either have to believe that Limon is the only filmmaker to adopt a quirk like this or that this kind of superficial Motif With No Meaning is going on in countless other movies and we simply haven’t noticed.

I’ll admit that for me, watching The Bourne Identity, which I seem to do with some frequency, does turn into a game of Where’s Waldo as I note with pleasure each instance of something red in the grays and browns of Limon’s wintry Europe. Other viewers are probably happy to watch Matt Damon search for his identity without noticing the color of his bag, his jacket, or his borrowed car. And failing to notice the red does nothing to diminish their appreciation of the film.

But after watching the film on a plane recently, when my attention was less than complete, I was struck with what I think explains Limon’s use of the color. The red is there, all the time, whether we notice it or not. We are likely vaguely aware of it on some subliminal level. It is a detail that doesn’t generally alter the course of events or shape people’s reactions. It becomes a constant in the film nonetheless.

The red objects that punctuate the film give us a sense of what Bourne himself is experiencing. Like Bourne, we go from the open ocean, to Marseille, to Paris knowing there is meaning out there, often close at hand, but never close enough for us to pin it down. It’s the notion of identity itself as the amnesiac Bourne experiences it. If Limon has done this on purpose, it’s a stroke of genius, and it explains why The Bourne Identity is so much more resonant than the clunky novel it is based on, and so much more powerful than just another fast-paced action film.

Up: Good

2009-06-07T23:09:00.006-04:00

A Boston-area moviegoer headed for the Dedham Community Theatre this weekend had a choice of two movies that could not be more different: the execrable Angels and Demons, and the perfect Up. (The moviegoer would also be able to visit the fabulous Museum of Bad Art, located near the men’s room in the basement of the theater, but that is a story for another day.) It’s an odd pairing, but I assume the theater managers were planning to hedge good taste against bad.

Up and Angels and Demons have only one thing in common: they both feature, to varying degrees, a man borne aloft by an aerial device. But while the parachute from which the priest dangles in the Dan Brown movie is just one more agent of the destruction of goodness (cinematic and otherwise), the balloons that tug Mr. Fredricksen’s house off its foundation are agents, emblems, and reminders—all in one—of unbounded hope and loyalty. The rainbow colors of the balloons appear like visual grace notes in Pete Docter and Bob Peterson’s film—in a little girl’s rug, in the badges on a wilderness explorer’s sash, in the wooden bird that sits on Mr. Fredericksen’s mantle piece as a reminder of his life with his beloved Ellie, and in the plumage of a comically expressive exotic bird. It’s a bit of a cliché idea: the rainbow as a sign of goodness and innocence. But it works here—largely because Docter and Peterson bind their symbolism up neatly in a plot that keeps the viewer deeply engaged.

It bears repeating: Up is perfect. (Not everyone agrees with me. Click here.) And it is an unusual movie, as well. Suitable for older children (the PG-13 rating is well earned), it is at the same time a thoroughly grown-up film. Its concerns are the concerns of adults: the loneliness of advancing age, and the combined burden and release of memory. Wonderfully voiced by Ed Asner (loveable curmudgeon to a generation of television-watchers), Mr. Fredricksen illuminates for us the fine line between loyalty and stubbornness as he eventually realizes he must let go (quite literally) of the past. Up doesn’t repudiate the power of memory, but it leads us—laughing and crying—to see the beauty and the joy in forming new bonds and new dreams.

As for that laughing and crying. Plenty of movies generate either tears, or tears of laughter. Few—and in this reviewer’s experience, no others—can generate both. I suppose it helps to be a dog owner, and to understand how true it is when a dog—thanks to his master’s invention of a speaking collar—says something like: “I was hiding under your porch because I love you” (the last two words drawn out in utmost sincerity). But even a dog-avoider will laugh at the wonderful mix of pomposity and shame, goofiness and rote obedience that Up’s large pack of speaking dogs demonstrates.

And it’s not just the dogs that are funny in Up. There is that exotic bird, and the wilderness explorer voiced by Jordan Nagai, and perhaps most of all, the clever visual language of Pixar’s animators, who constantly delight and surprise us with the ingenuity of their images. (Poker-playing dogs find their movie home here in a brief flourish.)

The tears. They need no further explaining than a reminder of what the film is about: loneliness and loyalty. An old man desperate to fulfill his and his beloved’s lifelong dream. A little boy eager to Assist Someone, and to fill the hole in his sash full of badges. A bird determined to protect her babies. A dog eager to be loved. Have I said enough? When you go, bring tissues.

Run Pee: Don't Want To Miss Anything

2009-05-27T10:38:00.005-04:00

This may be the most ingenious movie-related invention since cupholders in cinema seats. Dan Florio (hear him on All Things Considered) has created a website that identifies the precise moments in a movie when getting up to go to the bathroom won't cost you much in terms of significant cinematic moments. The name of the website? Run Pee. It's simple, it's straightforward, it's brilliant.

Who among us hasn't experienced that terrible ambivalence as we weigh a full bladder against the risk of missing the Big Revelation or the Big Kiss? Run Pee makes it so we will never have to endure this crisis again. As long as the movie we're interested in has already been screened for "pee times" by the Run Pee community, we need never agonize in a movie seat again.

Here's how it works: you go to the site and click on the movie you want from the list of screened films. This opens a page that indicates where exactly, in the time-line of the movie, the peeing moment occurs. You needn't worry about spoilers. Run Pee gives you the cue to get out of your seat, and then provides scrambled text that will tell you what's happening while you're in the bathroom. If you don't want to know ahead of time, don't click to de-scramble.

It won't be long before pee times become a form of the most basic movie criticism: the more awful the movie, the longer the pee time.

Angels and Demons: Stay Away

2009-05-19T21:44:00.005-04:00

Mindful of the Obama enormity/enormousness kerfuffle (thankfully clarified by William Safire in March), I feel I should be careful before I use the word heinous for a movie. But if there was ever a movie that deserved the word, it is Ron Howard’s Angels and Demons, which sets a new standard for cinematic hateful evil.

It seems to me that the mini-furor (in comparison to the Da Vinci Code outcry) about the second Dan Brown film is entirely misplaced. Anyone who decries the film’s portrayal of the Catholic church hasn’t noticed that Howard’s depictions of violence are straight out of medieval representations of Christian Hell. There is more than enough fire and brimstone—not to mention unmentionable things done with rodents, brands, and weighted movers’ dollys—to go around. And for what? To spin out the story of a corrupt church embroiled in high-level conspiracy? When you put it this way, it’s not even a new story. Vatican conspiracies have been around as long as there have been Swiss Guards in Disneyland-style outfits. And so, at the film’s two-hour mark, faced with the imminent appearance of a scene of yet another symbolic branding, I had enough. Angels and Demons can claim the title of First Movie I Have Ever Walked Out Of.

Just before this breaking point in the movie, Howard and his screenwriters (if not Dan Brown himself) seemed to be saying something potentially interesting. In order to rescue the Vatican, Rome, the Church, and maybe even the world, the Camerlengo, a seemingly humble priest played with polished civility by Ewan MacGregor, takes a capsule of anti-matter up into the heavens in a helicopter (conveniently, in his youth, he trained as a helicopter pilot). Earlier in the film, someone mentions terrorists—of the suicide-bombing sort. When we see the heli-bound Camerlengo praying as the anti-matter’s timer counts down, we know we are about to witness a suicide bombing of a completely different sort. The explosion takes place, filling the night sky with lurid mauves, blues, and oranges—and quite neatly resembling the Sistine ceiling Howard has made sure to show us earlier. We are watching the self-immolation of one man so that he can save, not kill, thousands.

Or so we think. Because actually, the Camerlengo emerges from the still-throbbing explosion, dangling from a parachute. He is alive! If it is possible for a movie to jump the shark, Angels and Demons does it right here. Brown’s perverse instinct for the grotesque and the macabre—and his thoroughly deaf ear to the rhythms of narrative—compel him to keep the story going. Onwards, to another twist, to another branding, and to Tom Hanks’ rueful assertion that science and religion must coexist (I’m guessing on that last part. Did I get it right?).

As for Tom Hanks—at least we can say it’s nice to see him looking fit. Has he been working out? His character, Robert Langdon, is a fascinating creation in today’s world. A “symbologist”—I defy you to find a scholar anywhere who identifies him or herself this way—Langdon inhabits a world whose certainty hasn’t been seen since Sherlock Holmes could parse the life habits of an individual by looking at the polish of his shoes. Even a passing acquaintance of Photoshop tells you nothing is necessarily as it seems in the 21st century. And yet, for Langdon, everything is exactly as it seems. Statues’ arrows point in only one direction; maps can be read only one way; when carvings are considered sculpture, the assessment proves to be spot on. Even when, as in the case of the Bad Men of the church, no one is who he seems to be, everyone cooperates by being exactly his opposite. It’s amazing! Robert Langdon has escaped from Marvel Comics. The Symbologist! Surely the Riddler’s arch-enemy.

Angels and Demons is a movie full of wannabe symbols and real-life (or CGI) images of some of the world’s most famous art. But all that beauty, the movie is engulfed by images of detestable violence. You leave the cinema, alas, not thinking of the beauty of the Sistine Chapel (or even of Howard’s lovely nighttime explosion), but of scenes of cruelty that, like the movie itself, you’d prefer to forget.

Ghosts of Girlfriends Past: Humbug

2009-05-06T14:27:00.007-04:00

There is a moment near the end of Ghosts of Girlfriends Past (GOGP) when a single tear rolls from Jennifer Garner’s right eye as she listens to Matthew McConaughey’s Big Speech of Wisdom and Repentance. The instant the tear falls, Garner makes a little twitch and it looks for all the world as if she has genuinely surprised herself. I would be surprised, too. For there is not much that is surprising in this remake of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol by way of Hugh Hefner.

In fact, the makers of GOGP seem to have gone to unusual lengths to produce some of the unoriginality that appears in this film. Some degree of unoriginality goes with the territory here. This is a chick flick, and as with any established genre, it is practically required to offer up a standard list of narrative elements. In this case: the adolescent and unrequited romance, the pining young woman, the secretly unhappy object of her affection, the epiphany, the reconciliation. There is even the montage of relationship scenes, displayed to the soundtrack of Cyndi Lauper’s Time After Time—though writers Jon Lucas and Scott Moore try to have their cliché cake and eat it too by making Emma Stone’s Ghost of Girfriends Past alert us to it.

But especially in the little things, Lucas and Moore have been downright lazy. Need someone to play a young Jennifer Garner? Easy: get the kid from 13 Going on 30. Need a setting for a romantic revelation? No problem: a swing set worked wonders for 13 Going on 30. Looking for a potential romantic partner for Garner’s character? How about Daniel Sunjata (The Devil Wears Prada)? He’s nice to look at, and he’s already played Garner’s would-be lover—on a Broadway stage in last year’s Cyrano.

There’s a laziness to the filming, as well. Much of the movie is shot indoors, in a mansion that is supposed to be on Long Island but that exists in real life in suburban Boston. I understand that it’s a winter wedding, but don’t these people get stir crazy? The interior scenes give the movie a murkiness that we associate more with a thriller. And no matter how widely Matthew McConaughey opens his eyes as he reads his lines, there is not much thrilling here.

The winter setting does provide the film with one of its handful of pleasing moments—and there are a few. Towards the conclusion of the film, McConaughey’s Connor Meade opens a window and does a perfect, word-for-word recitation of certain famous lines from Dickens’ Christmas novella (no, not those lines, thank god). It’s a nice touch—unnecessary, and a little clunky, but a sweetly humble hommage to the 19th-century writer who managed to be always original. Other appealing scenes involve a precariously balanced wedding cake and the flexibility of McConaughey’s left foot; Stone’s raucously sincere ghost; and Garner’s quietly funny and warm performance. She isn’t given much to do as Jenny Perotti, Connor’s childhood almost-sweetheart. It’s the Wry But Hurting character that she’s played, in variations, in Catch and Release and Alias (with kickboxing in place of wryness). But what she does, she does well. Garner needs to be given (or to choose) better roles fast. With a face that can go, Janus-like, from severe gorgeous to dimply sweet in nothing flat, she has the wherewithal to register a wide range of emotions and the restraint to make them appear sincere.

The same cannot be said for McConaughey, who doesn’t act so much as move. He speaks his lines—almost no matter what the situation—by fingering the air before him, as if searching for the teleprompter, all the while balancing himself with an arm outstretched behind him. He has spent too much time surfing. While GOGP demonstrates a moment of humility by citing Dickens’ text near its conclusion, McConaughey is always arrogant on screen. With one key exception: Tropic Thunder, in which, as Ben Stiller’s agent, he abased himself to hilarious effect, just to make his client happy. That trademark arrogance is in full force here. And even in the Big Speech that makes Garner cry—as well as certain audience members who were annoyed by their susceptibility—he just can’t play it straight; there’s the twinkle, the drawl, that draw attention to the actor and away from the role. Maybe someday someone will cast McConaughey against type and we will see what he can really do.

A review of GOGP would not be complete without comment on its status as a chick flick. Maybe a better term is romantic comedy—that’s certainly how Netflix is going to categorize it in a few months. But it’s difficult to know who Mark Waters and writers Lucas and Moore are trying to appeal to here. The release date in early spring confirms that it’s a light film, an entertainment. But the winter setting belies that notion, giving the movie not only those darkened, wood-paneled rooms, but also its theme of repentance. Not exactly breezy rom-com fare.

Then there’s McConaughey’s character. I won’t go so far as to describe the film as misogynistic (like its cousin Made of Honor), but Connor Meade is certainly an unappealing man who treats women badly. Ah, people will say, but the women like him that way; they seek him out; he is a legend. And what’s wrong with women having enormous sex drives, anyway? Can’t women enjoy a movie that shows other women trolling for wedding sex? Sure. But then why the infinite past girlfriends, arrayed in a reproachful line-up? Why the criticizing assistant who gathers three exes together like Furies pre-gaming revenge on Bacchus? Has Connor Meade behaved badly, or not? The director can’t make up his mind. Garner’s character tells McConnaghey he looks like a gay pirate (and this is not a compliment), and she works to reform him, but all along the way, GOGP expects its audience to have a grand time with Connor The Unreformed.

GOGP is that rare hybrid: the May/December movie. It tries to combine the darkness and self-questioning of a December movie with the tipsy, gauzy hedonism of a May flick. Unfortunately, this marriage doesn’t work.

Aguirre, The Wrath of God (1972)

2009-05-01T10:55:00.010-04:00

Like most writers and serious readers I know, I have a collection of favorite opening and closing lines of novels. Like most people with a scattered memory, I tend to remember the Big Ones—the last line of The Great Gatsby, the first line of Anna Karenina, or Pride and Prejudice, or, heaven help me, Hard Times, that most known and least characteristic of Dickens’ novels. Or a new favorite opener, from Tom Drury’s excellent, moving, and funny The End of Vandalism: “One fall they held the blood drive in the fire barn at Grafton.” Every word but the last is a monosyllabic tread in a laconic march of fs, bs, and ds.

(Have your own favorites? Add them here.)

Of course, as a lover of film, I have favorite scenes from that medium, as well. And the first that come to mind are always the same: the opening and closing scenes of Werner Herzog’s 1972 film Aguirre, the Wrath of God. I returned to that film recently, eager to be excited and slightly terrified by the eeriness of the synthesized music and the opening long shot in which we see a march of people, ant-like, winding down the steep jungle face of an Andean pass. The scene didn’t disappoint, though the first shot didn’t linger as long as I remembered over the mist-hidden mountain. Herzog’s second shot sustains the mood of the first, presenting us with a disorienting angle, as a ridiculously steep cliff cuts down from the left-hand side of the frame. We notice, again, the line of tiny people on a zig-zag path, surrounded by a vast expanse of jungle. Then the camera moves in just a little, and holds there to take in the marchers as they come towards us up another ridge. We see the tips of spears and pikes, and maybe the very top of someone’s Peruvian-hatted head, as the line of poncho-clad Indians passes just beneath where the camera is stationed. Eventually, Herzog switches to a sequence of shots taken from the path itself, and we see the artifacts that give us a grounding for the unease and dread that have been building: soldiers in Spanish armor, helmets among the Peruvian hats, chains binding Indian slaves together, a basket of chickens plummeting down the mountain, a sedan chair in which a velvet-gowned woman is ferried by more Indians. This is an attempt at mastery—Pizarro’s attempt to find El Dorado, as we later learn—and an exercise in folly: outsiders heedless to the power of a world that will inevitably destroy them.

As if that weren’t enough, by the time we reach the end of the film, we have only Aguirre and his dying daughter, felled by an Indian arrow that has pierced her brocade. Played by Herzog’s muse Klaus Kinski, Aguirre stalks about his decrepit raft like a drugged-up rock star (as if Johnny Depp had chosen Jagger not Richards as the basis for Jack Sparrow), driven mad by the failure of his conqueror’s ambitions. The camera follows Kinski as he roots around the raft’s cannon, dispersing a pack of small monkeys, while a voiceover offers us his plans to repopulate his own new world by marrying his daughter (Kinski’s daughter, Nastassia). Kinski snatches up one of the monkeys and holds it up to his face, baring his teeth at the animal. For a moment, we fear Kinski will imitate another rock star, but he tosses the creature aside. Herzog knows that the desolation of the raft, the dead bodies scattered upon it, the torn remnants of the sedan chair, and Aguirre’s own obvious delusion are sufficiently unsettling without such a gothic flourish.

The film’s final shot is a masterful counterpoint to the opening scene. Where the first images are static, the final shot is full of motion. Linear progress has given way to the circling of madness, as the camera makes a slow revolution around Aguirre’s raft. In the film’s opening sequence, Herzog offers the striking image of a cannon wheel strapped across the back of an Indian porter. Now the cannon is on the raft, and the raft is headed slowly but inexorably to the more turbulent water that we can glimpse at the very edges of the frame.

As I watched this marvelous scene, I pondered the mechanics of it. I imagined a giant boom protruding from a speedboat of some kind, with the camera thus hanging over the still water ahead of the boat. I rejected the idea of a helicopter, since the water bore no signs of propeller wind. In fact, Herzog did use a boat or motorized raft, and the surprising thing is that, as the camera circles Aguirre, the raft begins to be rocked by the boat’s wake. The rocking fits in with what we have already concluded from the plot of the story: that Aguirre is headed to some unseen waterfall (we have had an earlier long shot of rapids in the beginning of the film, and we have seen a raft trapped in a whirlpool). But it is quite clearly produced by the act of filming.

While Herzog likely had few other options, what is interesting is that Herzog held to this idea for the final scene, even though we would see the traces of its making. But then, in the opening shots of the Peruvian porters, we notice that a handful of the porters wear, beneath their ponchos, something that looks suspiciously like rolled up tracksuit bottoms. Herzog is a careful filmmaker. If he allowed for these slight intrusions of the outside, contemporary world, he did so mindfully. These tiny piercings of the film’s illusion remind us, after all, of the folly of yet another expedition to a mythical place: Herzog’s own filming expedition mounted with hundreds of Indians from the Cooperative Lauramarca, at 21,000 feet in Amazonian Peru. As in 1982’s Fitzcarraldo (again with Kinski), and the recent Grizzly Man, Herzog is fascinated with men who refuse to listen to the messages of the natural world around them, and who cling—in combined hopefulness and delusion—to the idea that they matter. As Roger Ebert eloquently puts it: these are “Men haunted by a vision of great achievement, who commit the sin of pride by daring to reach for it, and are crushed by an implacable universe.” Herzog does, of course, matter. And the arrogance of his characters is matched by a strange humility on the part of the filmmaker who has the sense to include himself among them.

From the Vault: Carefree (1938)

2009-04-27T22:56:00.004-04:00

In 1938’s Carefree, the world’s first—and likely last—dance movie about psychoanalysis, Ginger Rogers performs a trick rivaling anything she ever did while going backwards in heels: she manages to make hypnosis and anesthesia sexy.

As Amanda Cooper, she allows her fiancé (a young Ralph Bellamy) to sign her up for psychoanalysis with his friend Tony Flagg (Fred Astaire), to rid her of the issues that are keeping her from getting married. Of course no one says “issues”; instead, Tony tells Amanda about her “two minds”, one of which is located somewhere in the air behind her head. Later in the movie, Tony tries hypnosis, and later still, he tries an anesthetic that allows her a surprising amount of both consciousness and mobility.

In other hands, the plot of Carefree would serve up the standard passive female. In more contemporary rom-com hands, we would see a woman’s adherence to pop stereotype masked as empowerment. But Carefree is ahead of its time—in a strange way. Granted, Amanda is taken to the psychoanalyst by her fiancé; granted, fiancé and analyst decide how to treat her—and there is no waiver or consent form in sight. Granted, she is rendered out of control by the scientific methods these men employ. But throughout the film, Rogers’ Amanda asserts her independence, in whimsical and also in more determined ways.

In one sequence, the “anesthetized” Rogers walks along a city sidewalk intrigued by a truck loaded with an inviting sheet of plate glass. Her attempts to hurl things at the glass are thwarted by a balletic sequence of random acts from passersby, but she finally uses a policeman’s baton to accomplish the deed. During this extended scene, Rogers is both gleeful and sly—to the extent that one wonders whether director Mark Sandrich is playing with the notion of the conscious and subconscious mind. Rogers’ Amanda begins the film playing a trick on Astaire’s Tony, and later, after she has fallen in love with him, she strings him along with a dream full of analysis-ready images and events. It’s not too great a leap to consider the possibility that Amanda uses her anesthesia as license for unruly behavior (including firing a skeet-shooting rifle at the men who have been trying to control her).

(Amanda is not the only woman asserting herself in Carefree. The character actress Luella Gear is in fine form here as Amanda’s Aunt Cora, always telling Judge Travers to “Sit down, Joe.”)

When it comes to the romance that we know is coming between Amanda and Tony, it is Amanda who declares her love, not Tony. (He does love her, but doesn’t come to understand it until later in the movie. Psychoanalysis, indeed.) She turns out to be a woman who knows what she wants and doesn’t hesitate to go after it. Interestingly, she makes her announcement of love while wearing a dress that puts appliqué to innovative use: as a Valentine/Rorschach combination. The dress features a large cartoon-style heart with multiple arrows piercing it from various directions. Tony misses the cue. Where did he get his degree, anyway?

Carefree was the last of five films Sandrich made with Astaire and Rogers, and he already seems to be making a transition away from song-and-dance to straight comedy or drama. Carefree features far less dancing than, say, Top Hat or Shall We Dance. But what there is is full of the grace, athleticism, and originality one expects from Astaire and Rogers. Rogers’ steps are hard to follow beneath the flowing fabric of her gowns, but what is easy to see is the high speed with which she gets whipped around Astaire’s center—without ever giving up any lightness and precision in her dancing. (For a commentary on Rogers’ dancing, see here.) And as for Astaire, Carefree draws attention to an unlikely source of his grace: his unusually large hands. Every time he reaches into the air behind his head to signify the “inner mind”, we are struck by the elegance of the gesture.

By 1938, the Hays Code had been in effect for eight years and enforced for four. It prohibited depictions of various sorts of immorality, including safe-cracking or the taking of illegal drugs. Adherence to the Code is likely the reason why we never see Rogers’ face with a mask over it as she inhales the anesthetic that gives her such freedom. The camera moves to a spot behind Rogers’ head, which is then obscured by the figures of Astaire and another doctor who hover over her as she is drugged. Surely, this is the image the Code enforcers should have found troubling. But they miss the unsettling disappearance of Rogers in this moment. That police baton that Rogers tosses at a plate of glass? That’s what the Hays people should have worried about.

Language Rant 4

2009-04-16T12:42:00.004-04:00

Verse vs. Versus

Judging by the usage heard around the playing fields and backyards of my town, I'm guessing there are a lot of kids out there who think they've seen "Monsters Verse Aliens". There is an entire generation, it seems, that thinks that that tiny abbreviation for the Latin versus (against) is actually supposed to be pronounced like the genre that has even fewer readers than short fiction: verse. You can see how this starts. "OK, it's them versus us". "Right. Them verse us." That second "us" can seem like an extra syllable after a while--if you're seven.

I tried to fix this problem many years ago, but there's a limited amount of Latin pedantry a pack of seven- or eight-year olds wants to hear when they're watching their little sister pick up one of the goal markers and turn it into a house for her stuffed animal. They'd really rather get playing. And so I failed.

Is it too late? Or is this latest DreamWorks movie a chance for linguistic improvement at the multi-plex?

Sunshine Cleaning: Sundance Marring

2009-04-13T10:21:00.008-04:00

A film whose center is revealed to be the memories shared by two sisters, Christine Jeffs’ Sunshine Cleaning gets better if its viewers forget a lot. Forget Alan Arkin’s presence as the crankily affectionate grandfather. Forget the word “sunshine” in the movie’s title. Forget these indicators of indy-film credibility—and consign to oblivion the hokey use of a CB radio in a rusty Econoline van—and you are left with a beautifully acted study of the relationship between those sisters as they struggle on the edge of financial and emotional stability.

Anyone who saw Enchanted or Junebug knows that Amy Adams can sell any role. Especially in Enchanted, where it would have been easy to play the part of the wide-eyed Giselle with a dash of insincerity and a wink to the audience, Adams brought an unassailable conviction to every scene. What else is there to be in life, she seemed to say, than a princess stuck in Manhattan eager to return to the kingdom?

Or, in the case of Sunshine Cleaning, who else is there to be in life but Rose Lorkowski, a single mother starting a crime-scene clean-up business with her irresponsible sister Norah (Emily Blunt)? Here, Adams is well paired with Emily Blunt who overcomes the difficulty of an American accent to portray Norah’s interesting mixture of vulnerability and defiance, cluelessness and shrewdness. Whenever the movie is dealing with just these two—either in the same scene or through cross cuts to paired solo scenes—it is very strong indeed.

Jeffs must have cast these roles with an eye to her actresses’ appearance. For though they look nothing like sisters, they each seem to fit their roles perfectly. Rose is all eyes, big blue ones, willing herself to see only the good that might come her way if she can manage to convince herself of it. It’s as if the wider she opens her eyes, often fighting back tears, the less of the rough world around her she will admit into existence. Blunt’s Norah, on the other hand, is all lips, eager to consume things—to take everything in, even to the point of excess—but also pouting like the abandoned child that, at heart, she is. Jeffs brings her camera in to a pore-revealing closeness throughout the film—beginning with the film’s otherwise throwaway shot—no doubt because she knows that we will watch Adams’ and Blunt’s faces with fascination.

In one scene filmed in the milky white of a restaurant bathroom, Rose and Norah move from confrontation to an exchange of memories that gestures towards the film’s core. But the scene actually offers much more than that. Not so much exchanging memories, the two sisters are creating a shared memory for each other, with each other. They begin with different perspectives on the same event: Norah remembers pain, while Rose fittingly remembers dedication. Then we watch mesmerized as they lob bits of their past back and forth, their faces revealing more and more about who they are and about what ties them together.

Later on, Jeffs and screenwriter Megan Holley orchestrate a moving sequence of cross cuts between the two sisters, intercut with a third element that ties them together beautifully. It’s a lovely piece of filmmaking and, if it is a bit over-sentimental, we are inclined to grant Jeffs, Holley, and their actors some leeway here.

Other aspects of the film shouldn’t, however, get such a free pass. (See Slate's Dana Stevens' review for more on this.) That business with the CB radio, and the wide-eyed child whose only imperfection is a precocious intelligence that makes him unfit for the mainstream world, and other trappings of the Sundance aesthetic weaken the film. (And was there really no one else available for an almost cameo role than Robert Redford’s daughter?) Generally restrained, even when conveying the appealing slapstick of the sisters’ clean-up efforts, Jeffs occasionally overdoes it with her camerawork—either through an extreme wide-angle shot of southwestern desolation, or through an overly lyrical sequence involving sparks from a train.

Sunshine Cleaning is a film about people trying to stop circling the drain. They go over their one important memory over and over again, or they shut another memory out completely—whatever works to keep them in this barely sustainable limbo. All around them are signs of mobility: the Porsche of one of Rose’s high school classmates; the squad cars that are never far from the clean-up jobs Rose and Norah go to. Meanwhile, Rose drives a beat-up hatchback to her pre-crime-scene job at Pretty Clean; and her father drives an old Caddy with its trunk full of whatever it is he’s desperate to deal. It’s a stark contrast, and Jeffs makes sure we notice it. From the film’s opening sequence to its final overhead shot, we know that the agents of change in these people’s lives are also what can trap them. When we see that final shot, with its straight line of movement, we are glad to know Rose and Norah have stopped circling and have found a way to go forward.

Monsters vs. Aliens: Kids vs. Adults

2009-04-07T21:47:00.005-04:00

Whether in two dimensions or three, Rob Letterman’s Monsters vs. Aliens plays furiously with perspective. Numerous sequences are designed with distant vanishing points, dramatic foregrounding, and a very shallow depth of field that seems to suspend faces or objects in mid-air. Even in 2-D, the movie’s visual impact is powerful. Not only are the images beautifully and marvelously detailed (heat waves shimmering off a pavement, blades of grass, individual hairs on the belly of a gigantic mutant grub), but the thrusting forwards and backwards of blocks of color, and the film’s swooping point of view give you the strong impression of being inside the images. Even the surround sound seems to be ratcheted up a notch—almost to the point of being as clunky as a poorly set-up home speaker system—as if the visual jolts and jabs were throwing sounds into the back corners of the theater.

Playing with perspective is an important part of children’s entertainment, starting from the 1952 Borrowers books, in which a minuscule family lives among the thimbles, buttons, and teaspoons of a normal-sized house, and going on through Stuart Little and The Cricket in Times Square. If books tend to explore the child’s sense of smallness in an adult world (with the exception of Gulliver’s Travels, which really shouldn’t be read by children at all, anyhow), movies tend to go the other way, playing with a child’s bafflement at the threat of growing up: Big, Thirteen Going on Thirty, and the forthcoming 17 Again are just a few examples. When Letterman’s own Gulliver’s Travels film is released in 2010, it will surely express his interest in the comic and alienating potential of shifts in size and perspective.

Monsters vs. Aliens builds on this size-shifting tradition, capturing the mischief and the misery of distorted size at both ends. Susan (voiced by Reese Witherspoon) becomes the mother of all Bridezillas by expanding to enormous size after being hit by a meteor. (Interestingly, she goes from meek bride to something out of Barbarella as she pops out of her human-sized clothes.) She is soon imprisoned along with three other monsters: Hugh Laurie’s exasperated-scientist cockroach, Will Arnett’s lizard-fish strongman, and Seth Rogen’s gurgle-voiced B.O.B. whose confused eagerness is one of the best parts of the movie. These three become Susan’s Lion, Scarecrow, and Tin Man as the story warps into The Wizard of Oz, complete with its demonstration that the heroine’s strengths lay within her all along. While Susan/Ginormica ingeniously uses cars as roller skates and the roof of a gas station as a sitting stool, her trio of buddies, wriggles and crawls and blobs its way through small spaces. Watching the film, we are always following the point of view of someone who is the wrong size at the wrong time.

But interestingly, adults watching Monsters vs. Aliens are always the right size. We always have the right perspective, catching all the jokes that sail over the heads of the children on booster seats in the next row. This makes sense. After all, Letterman hasn’t forgotten that children don’t drive. Someone has to bring them to the movie theater, buy their candy, and smile benignly when they address the characters on screen (e.g. the little girls at a 2007 screening of Enchantment who answered Amy Adams’ Giselle by assuring her that she looked pretty). And so, Monsters vs. Aliens has a general named W.R. Monger explain that the imprisonment of the monsters is a diversion to keep people compliant with the I.R.S. (Surely this is the first children’s movie to use the tax code as its premise.). The prison is a textbook image of Jeremy Bentham's panopticon, complete with its central tower from which all the cells are visible to ever-watchful eyes. And when the President of the United States, voiced perfectly by Stephen Colbert, attempts to communicate with the alien robot, the adults will recognize the music as a pastiche of alien-encounter theme songs. The B-52s’ “It Came From Planet Claire” as background music is just icing on the cake.

The movie is so full of allusions that it risks coming across as a bit of a mess. There is no central theme here—other than, I suppose, the trite and played-out story of the stranger accepted for just who he or she is, and the band of strangers that comes together. (We’re only a small step away from “Don’t make fun of my differences,” an expression that even kids have been mocking for years.) For kids, the whole show is no doubt fun. The monsters are funny, the action is exciting, the images are surprising. For adults, the movie is a bit like a Wikipedia page, chock-full of links that take our thoughts in different directions.

Ah, but then there’s Insectosaurus, aka Insecto. A grub the size of an upended zeppelin, with stubby, comic antennae, and enormous placid eyes, Insecto has the unchanging happy face of an amusement park toy, without the creepiness. Like a giant baby, he doesn’t do much. When they need him to go somewhere, they hang a bank of stadium lights from a helicopter and use it to lure him away. He is a bit reminiscent of Totoro, the magical creature from the children’s anime films of the same name, and in a way, he performs a similar function here.

More than any other monster fighting the legion of Rainn Wilson’s aliens, Insecto saves the day and saves the movie. I won’t go into detail here, lest I ruin the well-prepared for surprise. Suffice it to say that, in a movie at least partly about one’s sudden transformation into something else, about the bewildering distortions of one’s body, Insecto, with his imperturbable eyes and his infant smile, brings the movie’s allusiveness together and organizes it around a rather sweet conclusion.

The Review-Reading Double Standard

2009-04-01T18:14:00.006-04:00

Reading a review of Matthew Pearl’s new novel The Last Dickens yesterday, my eyes performed their standard leapfrog dance over the newsprint: read the first paragraph or two, scan about one third of the way down to find the tag of information about the author, then skip all the way to the last paragraph for the reviewer’s summation. (In the case of Pearl’s book, I confess that my eye was caught by a series of sentences quoted from the book—clearly fodder for some future Language Rant.)

It’s not that I don’t enjoy reading book reviews. It’s that, when it comes to novels, I can’t abide knowing where the story is going to go before I have a chance to follow it there myself. Sure, I read enough reviews to be able to tell you the author and title of many of the new novels people end up talking about on the sidelines of their children’s games or over an Esperanto-named coffee drink. Like Pierre Bayard, I could probably pretend I’ve read most of these books. Aren’t there only two stories in the world, anyway? (Man goes on a journey. Stranger comes into town. And the latest: Woman discovers family secret.) But when it comes to the specifics of a particular version of those three stories, I absolutely need to be in the dark before I turn each and every page. Even in the most domestic of Quiet Books, I must have my suspense. Contrast this to my daughter whose leapfrog reading dance makes my review-reading habit seem downright demure: first paragraph, last paragraph. Then she decides if the book is worth spending time with. I shudder at this transgression of the Rules of Narrative Escape.

Then there are movie reviews, where all bets are off. I experience not a moment’s hesitation in reading right through every twist and turn of the latest thriller, or learning every detail of the romance. The very concept of a spoiler is, in a way, alien to me. No revelation about a movie’s plot can spoil my enjoyment of its story.

So the question is: why? Why my double standard? What is it about movies that makes them, for me, impervious to reviews that destroy suspense? Are books and movies so fundamentally different?

They used to be. Movies were necessarily communal where the novel was a solitary experience. Movies could only be enjoyed in a particular place, while the novel could be taken anywhere. But these distinctions were blurred years ago. And what the book club phenomenon started, the Kindle and other electronic readers have only accelerated further. Now you can watch a movie in your lap, and books are, once again, agents of a sociable life (just as they were 150 years ago when people gathered to hear someone read the latest installment in a Dickens serial).

For me, though, books and movies continue to exist in different worlds. I am still fairly solitary with my reading—partly because my selections are often driven by a problem I am working on in my own fiction (or by a desire to get entirely away from something in my own work), and partly because I read too slowly to keep up with everybody else’s consumption of new novels. (To wit: I have only now purchased Bel Canto.) Having started a book club years ago, I was the first member to flunk out.

Maybe my slow reading is the source of my movie/book double standard. When I read, I hear the words as if someone is reading them aloud to me (I must have a vestigial Victorian brain, eager for an evening’s recitation). I abhor interruption, and tend to treat the words on the page as if they are streaming by me once and once only; if I stop to answer the phone or the husband, the narrative train will leave me at the station. Thus, knowing ahead of time what is going to happen ruins that sensation of being carried along by the writer’s words. Reading the review is like traveling the distance beforehand with a foggy window and someone’s iPod playing too loudly in the next seat. Then when I do settle in for my actual journey, the trip’s familiarity breeds, if not contempt, then disappointment.

Reading a book will take me anywhere from one week—if the planets align, if the book is more Breakfast at Tiffany’s than War and Peace, and if I am more caffeinated in the evenings than usual—to a month. If I’m going to live with a novel for that long (and what better pleasure is there than an extended sojourn in someone’s imagined world?), then I want to be able to invest myself in it. And that means not knowing more than the vaguest outlines about the book. The production of that story in my own imagination, through reading, depends on my being in suspense.

But if suspense elicits from us a sense of heightened anticipation or even anxiety, even a racing heart, then movies have an advantage over books. For watching a movie is a brief and intense affair during which we are hit through almost all channels of our limbic systems. Our physiological responses to suspense will appear anyway, whether we know the story ahead of time or not. The music, the dark, the camerawork, the acting: faced with all of this, surrounded by it, we can’t help but get carried away by the story whose elements we may have already read about in the paper or on a blog. Consider the situation on a quieter, more finely etched scale. A written account of, say, Emma Thompson’s lovely moment at the end of Last Chance Harvey can’t diminish the experience of watching Thompson produce that emotion—in herself and in us.

In fact, I hadn’t planned to go see Last Chance Harvey at all until I read Ty Burr’s review in the Boston Globe. The movie seemed “small” enough for a DVD viewing later on. Burr writes:

"the scene toward the end, by the banks of the Thames, where Thompson takes her character from certainty to tears in the space of a sentence, and you sigh in gratitude at the emotional whiplash."

Rather than spoil the movie for me by giving away an aspect of the film’s conclusion, Burr’s observation compelled me to go and see for myself. If anything, the review generated more suspense in me than I might have felt had I not read it. I don’t recall ever turning the pages of a book to reach a paragraph I’ve seen quoted in a review. But I knew the moment was coming in Last Chance Harvey, and I was waiting for it.

Duplicity: Second Best

2009-03-30T20:04:00.009-04:00

Tony Gilroy’s Duplicity keeps reminding us of its competition and coming in second. Julia Roberts and Clive Owen? We’ve seen them in Closer, where the manipulations of their hate-filled affair were palpable and electric compared to their tepid interactions here. Gilroy’s screenplay? His Bourne movies prove that you don’t have to sacrifice clarity to achieve suspense and complication. Two spies in love and at play? Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman managed both the passion and the deception much better in Notorious.

Perhaps the only area where Duplicity comes out even is in comparison to Gilroy’s own Michael Clayton. Like that earlier film, Duplicity deals with the corporate world—but this time, it’s the light side of corporate corruption. Gilroy wittily paints the competition between rival cosmetics companies as a kind of Cold Cream War, complete with product spies fresh from MI-6 (Owen) and the CIA (Roberts). In keeping with his light approach, he opens the film with two extended sequences that pair its two concerns. The first is a garden-party seduction between Roberts’ Claire Stenwick and Owen’s Roy Koval that ends in a hotel bedroom; the second is a super slow-motion fight between opposing CEO’s Tom Wilkinson and Paul Giamatti, each one backed by his private jet and a posse of trench-coat-clad lackeys. The meaning is clear. Love and business: both are clumsy, no-holds-barred struggles for supremacy.

The best bits of Duplicity are those scenes in which we watch Roberts and Owen engaged in that struggle, sizing each other up like fighters in a ring. We see mistrust and hopefulness flicker across their faces, and we get glimmers—as they do—of the life they might lead if they could simply believe in the words that they say. Appropriately, Duplicity’s neat trick is a scene of repeated dialogue from that opening garden-party sequence. Over the course of the film—and afterwards, as we try to figure out what just happened—we come to realize that Stenwick’s and Koval’s words are always shifting in and out of performance, always swinging back and forth between truth and lies. In a darker movie, this would of course be tragic; the characters would destroy each other with vituperations and pain. Wait: that’s what happens in Closer. Duplicity plays its deception for laughs, and so we leave the theater confident that neither Koval nor Stenwick is terribly torn up about the fact that they can’t trust each other.

Unfortunately, the scenes between Owen and Roberts are also the source of the movie’s unresolved confusions. A significant portion of their scenes together are taken up with one chunk of dialogue that is repeated in different settings. It’s an interesting idea—what is real and what is performed—but for it to work in the movie, we need to be able to figure out the answer, certainly by the time we leave the theater. With a jumbled timeline that Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu would be proud of, Duplicity never makes us completely understand how the pieces fit together. Rather than create suspense from within the plot—as in, say, a Bourne movie—Gilroy does it by simply not showing us things in the right sequence. We enjoy it, but it’s ultimately a kind of cheap trick.

With its double, triple, and quadruple-split screens, and its domino-effect revelations, Duplicity is The Sting for the twenty-first century, a tale of a couple of con artists teaming up against The Man. And interestingly, while it has a couple of stars whose power is almost as great as that of Redford and Newman, Duplicity resists glamour. Not everything in Duplicity is clean and shiny. For every five-star hotel room, Gilroy gives us a drab Cleveland condo or a dark and cluttered office. Not everything works out the way you’d like. In fact, if Wilkinson’s speech early on about his theory of corporate evolution is right, we’re already as good as we’re going to get. It’s up to the corporations now to struggle against each other for the chance to be the fittest and the best.

The Lucky Ones: the Iraq War in a Road Movie?

2009-03-24T22:53:00.008-04:00

Six years after the start of the Iraq War, no movie with the war as its subject has drawn much of an audience. In one weekend alone, more people saw Bride Wars than saw Rendition, Stop-Loss, and Lions for Lambs put together. Then there’s The Lucky Ones, whose audience in theaters was truly miniscule. And that is a shame. For though The Lucky Ones is not a great movie, it has a few things going for it—chief among them, the three strong performances of its mini-ensemble cast.

The movie (out on DVD since January) follows three soldiers returning to the US who band together after landing in New York in the middle of a blackout. They are a demographer’s dream: Tim Robbins’ older white guy, Michael Peña’s young Hispanic man, and Rachel McAdams’ southern naïf. Robbins’ Cheaver is done with his soldiering—and, like Odysseus, he is the one returning, in theory, to a wife—while the other two are on leave, Peña’s T.K. to see if his “upper thigh” wound will matter to his fiancée, and McAdams’ Colee to see if the family of her dead war buddy will accept her as their own.

Before we know even this much about the three soldiers, we get a nifty sequence of scenes that seem designed to remind us of the innocence of Stateside life now that the war has taken the fighting Over There. An airport packed with stranded passengers; LED screens announcing a full slate of cancelled flights; rental-car desks mobbed by grounded passengers. But it’s nothing to worry about: the only emergency that has caused this chaos is a blackout in New York. Later on, these soldiers from a conflict known for its roadside bombs (one of which has caused T.K.’s injury) drive around in a rental mini-van like a new-formed family. And when they lock themselves out of the van, they bushwhack through marshy grass to a Hummer dealership and get driven back to the van in the civilian version of their Iraq ride. An accident in the van a few miles later is just that: an accident. Again, these are the innocent iterations of the facts of war. The marsh grass isn’t in Baghdad, the Hummer is high-viz yellow, not camo, and the accident has nothing to do with an IED.

But Burger’s message here is unclear. Is he saying that by taking the fighting out of the United States, the Iraq War allows us to drive our Hummers without worrying about armor plating and to face a grounded fleet of planes with only the normal amount of aggravation? I’d be surprised if Robbins would sign on for a movie with a message like this. So then, what? Is Burger (who wrote the screenplay with Dirk Wittenborn) trying to suggest that in fact the war is always present in our lives now? Viewers of The Lucky Ones can’t help but notice the dangerous versions that lurk in every innocent scene, every military echo in a civilian moment. But again, the movie’s altogether jovial tone undermines this darker view. We can’t be too gloomy about what is, in so many ways, just a road movie. In the end, The Lucky Ones can’t decide what kind of story it wants to tell: an innocent adventure or a tale of cynicism and sorrow.

Fortunately, there is more to the movie than a policy paper about the Iraq War. The connecting lives of T.K., Cheaver, and Colee are full of stories and lies—benevolent lies that each one tells to him or her self, and that they tell to each other. As they drive from New York to St. Louis and eventually to Las Vegas, they form shifting pairs whose job it is to sustain the lie the third soldier insists on telling. It’s a kindness they perform for each other, and to watch it over the course of two hours is quite moving.

McAdams doesn’t quite get the Southern accent to shade beyond stereotype, but her performance as the gullible but at times insightful Colee is nicely nuanced (there’s a fine moment on an airport sidewalk towards the end of the film that’s what DVD scan buttons are for). Robbins has a harder task, with a character whose motivations aren’t always clear, but he conveys those mysteriously-motivated emotions with subtlety. Then there is Michael Peña, whose storyline in Crash was the only one not burdened with self-righteous obviousness. Robbins and McAdams have had plenty of exposure, but it’s a particular shame that The Lucky Ones’ tiny audience and its fleeting moment in theaters will keep Peña from getting more praise.

In the interview that is part of the DVD package, Burger says that, with The Lucky Ones, he wanted to create a portrait of the country as it is at this particular moment in history. I’m not at all sure that this is what he’s done. But where he fails to provide a large, realistic picture of the states his three soldiers travel through, he succeeds in illuminating the tiny world of their momentarily intersecting lives inside a maroon minivan. Not a bad accomplishment at all.

Natasha Richardson

2009-03-19T14:49:00.006-04:00

I will leave it to those who have already done admirable jobs summing up--as much as is possible--the career and life of actress Natasha Richardson. Instead, I offer you a review from a theater performance of hers from sixteen years ago. I never saw Richardson's performance in Eugene O'Neill's Anna Christie, but I never forgot Frank Rich's review in the New York Times. Rich seemed to me to be describing something truly extraordinary, the kind of performance one should change schedules and cross oceans to see. On top of all the sadness in the sudden death of a young and, by all accounts, kind and lovely person, there is the sadness that we will now have no new chances to be amazed by what Rich called her "astonishing" gifts as an actress.

From Review/Theater; A Fierce View of Tragic Lives
By FRANK RICH
Published: January 15, 1993, Friday

Rich has this to say:

Following the example of his peers, Mr. Leveaux seamlessly mixes actors from both sides of the Atlantic in his company. The astonishing Natasha Richardson, who was also brilliant in "Suddenly, Last Summer," gives what may prove to be the performance of the season as Anna, turning a heroine who has long been portrayed (and reviled) as a whore with a heart of gold into a tough, ruthlessly unsentimental apostle of O'Neill's tragic understanding of life. Yet Miss Richardson could not triumph without the sensitive partnering she receives from both Liam Neeson, the Irish actor recently seen courting Mia Farrow in "Husbands and Wives," and Rip Torn, an actor's actor in the gritty New York style.

And this:

Miss Richardson, seeming more like a youthful incarnation of her mother, Vanessa Redgrave, than she has before, is riveting from her first entrance through a saloon doorway's ethereal shaft of golden light. Her face bruised, her eyelids heavy, her slender frame draped in the gaudy fabrics and cheap jewelry of her trade, she is the tattered repository of a thousand anonymous men's alcoholic lusts and fists. But the actress does not make Anna a victim deserving of abject pity. She forces the audience instead to see this woman's fiercely held point of view.

To read the full review, click here.
[there is some phrasing in Rich's review that is unfortunate, given the cause of Richardson's death]

Rachel Getting Married: Everyone's Invited

2009-03-16T13:12:00.010-04:00

Late in Rachel Getting Married (now out on DVD), Anne Hathaway’s Kym lashes out at a group of musicians playing in the next room. “Are they going to play all day long?” she cries—and some viewers surely share her sentiment. The whining and vaguely Middle Eastern tone of a violin backed by African drums, Russian balalaikas, and rock guitars plays constantly through Jonathan Demme’s film—and plays fast and loose with a host of ethnic musical traditions. It’s a multi-cultural feast of melody, and it doesn’t always sound very good at all.

But anyone who wishes Demme would silence the constant jamming is missing the point of his excellent film (and forgetting that his work with music started with his 1984 Talking Heads film Stop Making Sense). The incessant music that fills the Buchman house signals the family’s intense and dangerous self-indulgence. It’s easy for them to be open to everything and to look good doing it. What’s harder is for them to examine or even acknowledge the wrenching truths that hum through their lives like a low drone.

Rachel Getting Married anatomizes this dysfunctional and wounded family without offering them a too-easy forgiveness. And it succeeds in large part thanks to Jenny Lumet’s skillful and insightful screenplay. Lumet is a master here of revealing character through just a few lines of dialogue (dialogue which is occasionally hard to hear in Demme’s Robert-Altman-like naturalistic approach). In the film’s first scene, we learn that Kym’s father Paul played by Bill Irwin is half an hour late to pick her up from rehab so that she can attend her sister’s wedding. He introduces himself to Kym’s aide—a woman we learn he already knows from a previous visit. With two strokes, Lumet has told us almost all of what we need to know about Paul’s character and his relationship to both his daughters. It’s his combination of solicitude and neglect that will turn out to be a key emotional element of the film.

Lumet’s portrait of the Buchman family unfolds like a game of psychological whack-a-mole. Just when we think we’ve identified the One Great Manipulator among this well-to-do Connecticut brood, another character steps up to take his or her place. The easy first choice is, of course, Hathaway’s Kym, who brings self-indulgence to a peak of achievement only Kim Jong Il could rival. Her supposedly concerned questions about her sister are barbs against an invented eating disorder; her toast at the rehearsal dinner is a phony attempt to make amends; her insistence on being maid of honor has everything to do about her competition with Rachel’s lifelong friend Emma (another perfect study in passive-aggressive personality). It’s widely known by now that Hathaway shed her princessy persona for this role, but she has done far more than paint on too much eyeliner and wind thin scarves around her heavily tattoo-ed shoulders. Always on camera (even when edited out), given Demme’s hand-held filming strategy here, she gives a nuanced and utterly believable performance as a damaged soul.

We reach a point when we almost can’t bear to look at Hathaway’s petulant face or to hear her self-righteous complaining about the injustices done to her (the greatest of which was the handing over to Kate Winslet of the Best Actress Oscar). But the more we see of her father, the more we realize that the trouble with Kym has a source other than the tragic secret that the film reveals little by little. And the same is true for Paul’s ex-wife Abby, played in a miniature tour de force by Debra Winger. Each of these people is intent on sustaining the stories they want to believe about themselves and about each other. Even when to do so is to put someone’s life at risk.

Demme doesn’t leave us completely at sea. Perhaps the film’s twin loci of sanity are Anna Deaveare Smith’s Carol and Rosemarie DeWitt’s Rachel. By virtue of her outsider status, Carol is immune to the Buchman brand of mindless mindfulness. That Rachel turned out so well is a testament to her efforts to get out—to Hawaii, to a new marriage, to a new family.

Back to that mindfulness. The Buchmans are a Connecticut family in a wainscoted and book-lined home with musical instruments hanging on the wall and Persian rugs on the floor. So why do they wear saris to a wedding in which not a single South Asian appears as either a guest or a participant? Why the saag korma at the rehearsal dinner? Why, later, the samba band, and the reggae dj? Oooh, they would want us to say: look how open they are, these Buchmans. Look how mindful they are of the world’s traditions. Instead, we feel that, just as Bill will remember to shake a person’s hand but forget he’s ever met her, these people’s minds are so open that their brains fell out.

So does this mean that Kym is the film’s monster in the old tradition of the word? Like Frankenstein’s monster, does she de-monstrate for us the flaws in the family and reveal their culpability in making her an outsider? Probably not. Demme’s film is, after all, a more complicated enterprise. He manages to elicit our sympathy, in varying degrees, with all these people, monsters or not. Still, while the wedding looks like a lot of fun, I’m glad to leave the Buchmans behind—without ever getting a taste of that turmeric-flavored wedding cake.

John Banville and Benjamin Black

2009-03-13T08:05:00.005-04:00

In an alternate universe, John Banville would be everybody’s teen crush. He’s like the high-school quarterback who gets a starring role in the spring musical. The man can write a Booker-Prize winning novel full of dense, serious prose about deep metaphysical questions, and then pull off two excellent noir novels under the cheeky pseudonym Benjamin Black. Throws the touchdown; aces the finale.

To be fair, neither Christine Falls nor The Silver Swan is exactly a traditional noir or detective novel. Sure, the characters are a bit outsized and vividly drawn; sure there are the noir requisites of dead young women, mysterious parentage, and corruption, lies, and money. There is even, in Christine Falls, a crushing kiss. “When he kissed her he crushed his mouth on hers and tasted blood, whose, hers or his, he was not sure,” Black writes. It’s a scene from a movie: the copper and the broad, then a close-up of the bloody lip.

But though you can take the Banville out of the literary, you can’t take the literary out of the Banville—even when he’s using his other name. In fact, both Black books share Banville’s persistent exploration of the murkiness of identity and history. It’s a twist on the detective tradition of Conan Doyle and Christie (to name just two). Like them, Black is concerned primarily with knowledge. But while Conan Doyle and Christie allow the satisfaction of the slow progress towards knowledge, Black’s books offer no such certainties. With Black, it’s about the impossibility of knowledge. “I don’t know,” Quirke is in the habit of saying.

Then there’s the prose. In his literary novels (the distinction is, quite clearly, less and less workable), Banville writes self-conscious and elegant passages like this one from The Sea, in which his narrator Morden describes his reactions to his wife’s fatal illness:

“My life seemed to be passing before me, not in a flash as it is said to do for those about to drown, but in a sort of leisurely convulsion, emptying itself of its secrets and its quotidian mysteries in preparation for the moment when I must step into the black boat on the shadowed river with the coin of passage cold in my already coldening hand.”

In The Silver Swan, Black doesn’t skimp on the artistry. There is this, to describe Quirke returning to his flat: “there was the usual atmosphere of tight-lipped stealth, as if something vaguely nefarious had been going on that had ceased instantly at the sound of his key in the door.” Or this, in the middle of a dialogue between pathologist and inspector: “Off to their left a herd of deer stood in the long grass amidst a shimmer of heat; a stag lifted its elaborately horned head and eyed them sideways with truculent suspicion.” The novels of Gardner, Hammet and Deighton are full of truculently suspicious people. But I’ll bet not many of them are described that way—or in sentences with semi-colons.

At the end of the day, the experience of reading the Benjamin Black books (The Silver Swan was released in paperback just a month ago) is just what you want from a book. An intelligent mind behind the language and the construction of the narrative, and a plot that makes you eager to read more. As Ron Rosenbaum put it in a recent article in Slate, on Black and two other new detective writers, “It just has to mean that nothing you’re doing (alone anyway) can possibly be as important as getting it done with and getting back to the pages that have you spellbound”. And yet, serious writers still cringe a little when someone calls their books page-turners.

The question arises: is Banville writing as Black better than, say, Raymond Chandler writing as himself? Banville didn’t win any prizes, after all, for the Black novels. (Though his publishers are doing what they can to establish a sort of street cred: the most prominent blurb on the back cover of the Silver Swan paperback features a quotation by none other than Entertainment Weekly.) Of course the real answer is that, Banville’s own professed attempts to imitate Georges Simenon notwithstanding, Black’s books are simply different from a traditional noir novel.

My own view is that, if I had to choose between slightly overcooked high-style sentences combined with noir plots and, on the other hand, the noir plots in the telegraphic, whiskey-shot prose of Chandler, I’d probably take the former. But only if I couldn’t have both. Banville writing as Black seems to me to be, like the intellectual athlete, the perfect combination.

[quotations from Christine Falls, The Sea, and The Silver Swan, copywright Henry Holt and Vintage International]

Language Rant 3

2009-03-11T12:41:00.004-04:00

The question has famously been posed: it depends what the meaning of "is" is. What about how many "is"es there are?

Listen carefully and you'll hear people throwing in an extra "is" in certain places. As in: "The problem is is that the car makes a terrible noise when I put it in gear." Or: "The sad thing is is that I really wanted to make the balcony sturdy." Those "is"es are extra. Don't squander them! You never know when a scandal-trapped politician might need them.

I've Loved You So Long

2009-03-08T14:19:00.007-04:00

If we were French, we would find Jerry Lewis funny. If we were French, we would know how to wear a scarf, and our lips would exist in a perpetually pursed state, always ready to say things like “Tu as bu mon vin cru.” (You have drunk my wine.) If we were French, we would, I hope, be pleased that Kristin Scott Thomas is able to speak our language without the perverse pronunciation of her British countrymen. As Frenchmen and women, we would immediately understand the meaning of the title of I’ve Loved You So Long, the superb and moving film, starring longtime French resident Thomas, that many say should have been this year’s Oscar selection from France. (released on DVD on March 3)

French schoolchildren know the song “Á la Claire Fontaine” from which Philippe Claudel’s movie takes its title (Il y a longtemps que je t’aime). Hundreds of years ago, the song was the nostalgic anthem of French settlers in Quebec and then the favorite of the Voyageurs who paddled their canoes to its rhythm. The verses of the song tell a fairly typical (for a folk song) story of a respite by a fountain, a lingering sadness, and a lost love. But the refrain seems to exist in another register altogether, expressing a profound and universal sentiment of love and longing. In its entirety, the refrain translates roughly to: I’ve loved you for a very long time. I will never forget you.

It’s this longing and commitment tinged with nostalgia that serves as the undercurrent of Claudel’s film. I’ve Loved You So Long tells the story of Juliette Fontaine (Thomas), released from fifteen years in prison to the home of her younger sister Léa (Elsa Zylberstein). There she takes up an uneasy place among Léa’s two young daughters, her husband, and her father-in-law who is mute since suffering a stroke. The film reveals its several mysteries, large and small, little by little—partly through halting conversations between the two sisters, but largely through the extraordinarily subtle changes in Thomas’ expressions as she makes her way in this new world. This fall in Chekhov’s The Seagull, Thomas pitched her emotions perfectly for the New York stage (I attended the Oct. 21 performance). A maximalist where it was necessary for the manipulative Arkadina, here, she is a minimalist, registering every slight shift in Juliette’s emotions with minute clarity.

Life in the university town of Nancy is joyous and warm—Léa’s mute father-in-law provides some quiet comedy as he exchanges post-it notes with his granddaughters—but is never free from an undercurrent of pain. Claudel doesn’t shy away from this sadness, nor does he make it melodramatic. Watching the American trailer for the film, you might get the sense that it is a thriller almost on a par with the 1992 movie Damage. This is, suffice it to say, not the case.

In fact, much of the film has to do with things that are never shown or that can’t be shown at all: memories—suppressed, cherished, newly-formed. At times, memory ties the two sisters together, but as often, it keeps them apart, as when Léa is dismayed to find she has no memory of Juliette’s bringing her to weekly dance lessons. One woman’s nostalgia is the other woman’s painful longing. And this is where the song comes in. For what the sisters both remember is playing the piano together—specifically, playing "Á la Claire Fontaine," a favorite for its echo of their family name. As they make their tentative approaches towards each other—and towards the events that put Juliette in prison—the song weaves through their lives, providing the leitmotif for that Gallic mixture of love and pain.

I’ve Loved You So Long is quite clearly a French film. As my teenager daughter put it, “They’re not doing anything.” And this is true: Claudel lets the camera rest on Thomas’ face, or on Zylberstein’s, for long shots during which they do nothing but think and remember. Complaint notwithstanding, my daughter did not leave the room. Either she had nothing better to do, or she could see that Claudel’s approach was paying off. He wisely trusts his actors to communicate the story without saying a word. (Another French element? An American movie would have shown us scenes of Léa taking Juliette shopping for new clothes. Claudel skips these scenes. His register of Juliette’s thawing is sex with a stranger.)

I’ve Loved You So Long isn’t the only recent film to use "Á la Claire Fontaine" as a theme. The excellent and overlooked The Painted Veil uses the song to surprisingly powerful effect. In a remote Chinese town, French nuns have taught the song in the orphanage they run. Kitty Fane, played by Naomi Watts, accompanies them on the piano. She is English, so it’s not her song; it’s not the children’s song either. But they share its lonesome refrain as a melody for their displacement and dislocation from the people and the places that they love.

It’s sad to think of those first French arrivals in the new world, singing about what they loved and would never forget, even as their memories of the France they had left behind must have grown dimmer and dimmer. At the end of the day, that’s exactly what Claudel’s film is about: our attempts to hold onto people as our connections to them grow frayed and thin.

Tilda Swinton: The One (or Two) and Only

2009-03-03T15:17:00.006-05:00

Nobody looks like Tilda Swinton—besides, maybe David Bowie, who shares her androgynous, fashion-forward persona. She was the best thing in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, and is generally the best thing in any movie she appears in. As part of the star chamber that awarded the Best Supporting Actress Oscar to Penelope Cruz, Swinton did not disappoint. Her outfit was puzzling and unusual, and her handling of the whole thing seemed to say: Right, let’s just let Tilda keep the statuette, shall we?

Seeing her in the Oscars telecast reminded me of what might be the quintessential Swinton role, that of Orlando, in Sally Potter’s eponymous 1992 film. Based on the novel by Virginia Woolf, Orlando spans four hundred years as it tells the story of a young man born into wealth in Renaissance England. Yes, that was four hundred years, and yes, Swinton plays a man. But, if you’re keeping track, sometime around 1700, Orlando turns into a woman.

Potter’s casting of Swinton is an inspired choice. No one else could possibly have played the role (except, again, David Bowie--but Bowie’s acting chops are a bit below Swinton’s level). Even though Potter’s film is far from naturalistic—Swinton’s performance includes a handful of moments when she twitches her head imperceptibly towards the camera and delivers a one-line commentary on the action—Swinton deserves enormous credit for so thoroughly seeming to inhabit the skin of both a male and a female character. When Orlando is a young man, Swinton’s walk and movements—even the way she holds her head—are somehow clearly male. When Orlando is a woman, everything changes, softening, becoming somehow fuller. Swinton doesn’t simply reproduce stereotypes; this is the same individual rendered in two genders.

Potter plays around with gender—as she must, if she is to adapt Woolf’s novel for film—through the film. Quentin Crisp is creepily good as a long-haired Queen Elizabeth. Later, during the nineteenth-century portion of the story, Potter tweaks the Victorian trope of the injured female to be rescued by the man. She anticipates Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility by three years, as Orlando rescues Shelmerdine (easily the strangest name in all of literature) from his broken ankle. Billy Zane’s hair is almost as long as Kate Winslet’s Marianne’s.

But see for yourself. And read Woolf’s odd 1928 book. Though I first read Orlando more than twenty-five years ago, Woolf’s description of the Little Ice Age that allowed for festivals on the Thames during the Renaissance has remained vivid in my memory. Potter does a nice job recreating the scenes on film, though Woolf’s evocation wins the competition.

Orlando is indeed a writer’s movie. Orlando’s final incarnation is as a single woman, a single mother, and a writer. Taking the manuscript of her life’s story into the steel-and-glass office of a publisher, she runs into the characteristic writer’s experience: rejection. As the editor puts it:

“It’s very, very good. Written from the heart. I think it’ll sell. Provided you rewrite it. You know: increase the love interest, give it a happy ending. By the way, how long did this draft take you?”

Orlando’s reaction? Another one of those glances at the camera. The next shot shows her kick-starting her motorcycle and driving away with her child. Revision be damned!

Slumdog Millionaire: Worth the Wait

2009-03-01T10:32:00.003-05:00

If I didn’t know the box-office numbers, I’d think I was the last person in America to have seen Slumdog Millionaire, Danny Boyle's multi-Oscar-winning movie. Judging by the size of the crowd at a Saturday afternoon showing outside Boston, I guess there were a fair number of us who waited until after the Academy Awards. I don’t know about all those other people, but I for one had been wary of the movie’s relentless hype until the goodwill became too much for me to ignore. All those happy people in their seats—but mostly at the podium—at the Oscars, and all those people who voted for the film and cheered for its success: so many people can’t be wrong, can they?

Well, they can, but not in the case of this movie. There are many reasons to like Slumdog Millionaire, and to have chosen it the best picture among the Oscar nominees—and some of these reasons even have to do with what is actually on the screen. First, the camerawork: it is sure of itself and it has something to say, and that is a combination that we don’t always find in a movie. In some films, we get a camera that is more full of itself than sure, moving around in artsy ways that have no relation to the content on screen. In others, we get a camera that just doesn’t do much of anything at all. It’s as if no one was actually making the film—and I’m not talking about auteurs who are trying to make a statement about unmediated reality. Slumdog Millionaire gets it right.

Anthony Dod Mantle uses quick cuts and tilted angles, emphasizing at one moment the angular geometry of a world (trains, empty skyscrapers, and highway underpasses) that doesn’t bother to accommodate the people in it, and at another the jumbled and cramped spaces that have been fashioned by the people themselves, as they pile shack upon shack to create their homes amid the squalor of Mumbai. But his talents don’t stop there. To set a different mood, he gives us an extended sequence of the young brothers Jamal and Salim aboard (but more accurately atop) trains after they escape from a Fagin-like impresario of beggars. I’ve seen that whole Guy on a Train thing many times before (even in Get Smart), but nothing beats the wide-angle shots of two tiny figures on the train’s roof as it crosses the Indian countryside.

Actually, something does: the very first chase scene, in which the two brothers and a crowd of other children are chased away from an airport-runway cricket game. There is something about the way that Mantle films the two children in motion, interrupting an action-film style of cuts with overhead or wide-angle shots, that sets the boys as insignificant in the larger context while at the same time intensely connecting us to them as individuals. I would argue that it is the most moving set of images in the film.

There are other reasons people like the movie, though, and they have very little to do with what is on screen. First of all, we love underdog stories. And this is an upbeat version of the classic type. Jamal Malik is the underdog who has picked up enough intelligence and information along the way to make himself a success in a world he is not a part of. He’s not unlike the character played by Isla Fisher in Confessions of A Shopaholic, or by Reese Witherspoon in Legally Blonde. These are all outsiders whose unconventional route to insight and information allow them to win over the hearts and minds of the people in power.

Jamal’s underdog run at the big prize mimics the brilliant career of the film itself. Doyle shows us crowds gathered in Mumbai, outside the Taj Mahal, in the slums, cheering Jamal on as he faces his final question. Substitute the Oscars broadcast with the movie’s game show and you have the same scenes: people gathered around television screens, hoping for the success of the Indian underdog. (And who doesn’t want to like India these days? Even before the terrorist attacks, it had become our favorite developing country.) You could say that Boyle’s movie contains the instructions for its own viewing: Love the Underdog.

At the end of the day, does it matter whether the appeal of Slumdog Millionaire comes from the movie itself or from the circumstances of its viewing? On an intellectual level, the answer must be yes. Years from now, when people aren’t awash in the goodwill generated by this particular Oscar season, the movie will have to stand on its own. The thing is, it does. When the movie ended, I was momentarily surprised to find myself in a cinema on a brisk New England evening. Thanks to Danny Boyle, I had been very far away indeed.

Last Chance Harvey: Thompson's Do-Over?

2009-02-25T22:36:00.017-05:00

To paraphrase Jane Austen, it should be a truth generally acknowledged that Emma Thompson can Do No Wrong. Whether hidden under layers of disfiguring make-up in Nanny McPhee, or beneath a ridiculous mop of hair in one of the Harry Potter movies, or even as a thinly-veiled Hilary Clinton in Primary Colors, Thompson always produces a subtle and nuanced performance. The quiet intelligence of her acting elevates the mundane to the meaningful, and turns any meaningful scene into a truly remarkable work of art.

Thompson’s performance in Last Chance Harvey is no exception. But what does it mean that, in an early scene—in which Kate cries in a pub bathroom—is a near-duplicate of a scene in another Thompson movie: Love Actually? Does Our Em have feet of clay? Has she taken a shortcut and copied earlier work in a kind of self-plagiarism? Or has she tapped into something fundamentally true about a woman crying, and is her do-over just a repetition of that truth?

The bathroom scene occurs fairly early on in the film, before she meets Dustin Hoffman’s Harvey Shine whose last chance—and surely best—she is. Thompson’s Kate Walker is suffering through a double date gone wrong: the other couple has left her with a man younger enough than Kate to seem from another generation. He runs into friends at the pub and, over the next few moments, during which Kate answers another one of her mother’s frequent telephone calls, he gradually pairs up with one of the women, leaving Kate politely and quietly alone. She escapes to the bathroom and begins to cry—or, rather, not to cry. She holds it together just in time, and then reaches over to tinker with the toilet-paper roll, setting it straight. Then she gathers herself further. All the while, you can see the struggle in this woman between her awareness that she has unintentionally been made a fool of, and the pride that won’t allow her to acknowledge that fact. It is the kind of moment that only the best can pull off with such transparency.

The killer is that gesture with the toilet paper. It’s that momentary concern with order—as if one’s life is not going down the toilet—that gives Thompson away as a copier of her own earlier work (and suggests that what she brings to the screen has little to do with whoever is directing her—in this case, Joel Hopkins). In Love Actually, the relevant scene appears towards the end of the film, when Thompson unwraps a Christmas gift from her husband (Alan Rickman) only to realize that it is not the gold bracelet she knows he has bought. Rickman has bought the bracelet for another woman, but he has given Thompson something genuinely thoughtful and kind: a cd of Joni Mitchell, “the woman” Thompson says earlier “who taught your cold English wife how to feel.”

She escapes to her bedroom, puts the cd on, and tries to hold herself together. It’s a beautiful scene. Mitchell’s smoke-and-wisdom deepened voice (another do-over, with an orchestra replacing the young Mitchell’s steel-string guitar) is the perfect score for Thompson’s suppressed emotional collapse. And it turns this moment in Richard Curtis’ music-laden movie into a kind of opera.

But, as in Last Chance Harvey, once again Thompson’s character has been unintentionally made a fool of, and she struggles with pain and pride and simple grief. Once again, as she pulls herself together, her attention goes to setting things in order: she bends down and straightens the blanket on the bed before suppressing the new wave of sadness that the domestic gesture evokes in her.

Does this doing over make the scene in Last Chance Harvey a kind of actor’s cheating? Is it unfair for Thompson to mimic her previous performance if both iterations make perfect emotional sense? What do you think?

Oscars Oscars

2009-02-23T09:57:00.007-05:00

Some new award categories!

Best Pavlovian parenting moment: Mr. Winslet's instant response to his daughter's plea for a signal.(watch from 1:30 on)
Best Singing Performance: Anne Hathaway, beating out Beyonce and Queen Latifah
Best Bored Face: the redhead sitting in front of all the Slumdog people (he turned out to be part of Melissa Leo's posse)
Most Sincere Reading of Scripted Lines: Shirley MacLaine praising Anne Hathaway
Best Tux (Besides Daniel Craig): Zac Ephron (sue me, I liked the clean look)
Best Dress: Marisa Tomei, and Taraji P. Henson tied with Amy Adams
Most Mystifying Dress: Sophia Loren, who seems to have missed the memo that she is culturally obligated to be stylish

What else? Got any other awards? Disagree with some of the winners here?

The Two Kates: a Winslet v. Winslet Smackdown

2009-02-21T14:47:00.009-05:00

Some tricky maneuvering allowed Kate Winslet to win in both categories at the Golden Globes, creating a 1-1 tie between her performances in The Reader and Revolutionary Road. As a tie-breaker, I have developed the TIBT Acting Rating System (TIBTARS). The TIBTARS rates actors in four categories, as follows:

Transparency: (10 points max.) actor's ability to convey emotion clearly
Invisibility: (10 points max.) actor's ability to disappear into the role
Bravery: (8 points max.) risk-taking (ie. playing ugly or unappealing people)
Transformation: (7 points max.) (ie. weight gain or loss, bulking up)

Here are Winslet's and Winslet's scores:

As you can see, if you are reading this blog with a magnifying glass, the winner is Winslet! Holocaust Kate beats Suburban-Angst Kate, 30-28!

The Reader: Everyone’s a Critic

2009-02-21T12:39:00.005-05:00

A rare moment of levity in Stephen Daldy’s Oscar-nominated The Reader appears on screen so quickly we might miss it. Learning to read and write by listening to Ralph Fiennes’ recordings of books from his library, Kate Winslet’s Hanna Schmitz writes him a note, commenting on his latest delivery: “Schiller needs a woman.” Barely a reader, she’s already a critic—and it is one of the few likeable things we see her do in this generally ponderous and mystifying film.

What we know about The Reader is this: Ralph Fiennes, Kate Winslet, and the young German actor David Kross put in fine performances in this adaptation of Bernhard Schlink’s novel. But there is so much here that we don’t know. What motivates Fiennes’ Michael Berg, at a particular moment among all others, to begin remembering his youthful affair with a tram conductor nearly twenty years his senior? What motivates Winslet’s Hanna to begin the affair? And what are the odds that this particular horny teenager, played by Kross, and this particular needing-contact-in-some-obscure-way older woman would be equally amenable to the affair in the first place? These people start out unknown and unknowable, and unfortunately are no clearer to us when the film ends.

Daldry and his screenwriter David Hare are less interested in character than they are in the Large Issues of the holocaust: responsibility, the possibility of absolution, the limits of understanding. They explore the ways in which the war folded innocence and guilt over on themselves—and not only in the odd morality of obedient Nazis. Here, a shower is both the murderous ruse from the concentration camps and a means of seduction between a young man and a former Nazi guard. Reading is both foreplay and lesson. Hanna’s relationship with Michael, whom she calls Kid, flickers between the maternal and the sexual.

Then there is the reading itself. The film plays with the idea of Scheherazade from the Arabian Nights who won herself a stay of execution every night by telling the sultan a story. Here, Michael is the Scheherazade. But while the original Scheherazade tells stories to stay alive, we sense that Hanna makes Michael tell stories because she is alive and others are not. Or does she? It seems more likely that she is slightly unhinged and utterly criminal. At her trial, we learn that she has forced prisoners to read to her before selecting them to be sent to death. Telling stories has not saved them.

But the film implies that reading stories has saved Hanna. The Reader has an uncomfortable way of reminding us of an Oprah story (which the novel once was, many years ago), complete with a Woman’s Triumph Against Adversity. But before we make plans to give Hanna Schmitz posthumous membership in Oprah’s Book Club, let’s consider that this is an Auschwitz guard whose empowerment we’re asked to consider. Daldry emphasizes this point, in case we missed it, when Hanna almost literally hoists herself by her own petard, climbing on a pile of the books she can now read, as she prepares to commit suicide before her release from prison.

In the end, as in the beginning, it’s not clear what Daldry wants us to make of his characters. Should we feel sympathy for Hanna because she kills herself? Does she kill herself out of remorse, or because she’s afraid to live outside the prison? Or (and this is not impossible) because she no longer has an excuse to receive Michael’s tapes? Now there’s a twist on Scheherazade: the listener kills herself when the stories run out. There are more questions. When Hanna refuses to admit that she is illiterate, does she do this out of a sense of shame? Or out of responsibility, knowing she is giving up the chance to exonerate herself? Does she even feel guilt?

When she answers Michael’s question about whether she learned anything from her time in prison, she answers, as if it should be obvious, “I learned to read.” Lena Olin’s Auschwitz survivor says virtually the same thing at the end of the film, in different words, telling Michael that “The camps weren’t therapy.” Nothing came from the camps, she says; you can’t learn anything from the camps. So, if there is no Big Emotional Payoff from the camps, is learning to read the only thing you can do? Should we admire Hanna for her honesty?

If there is nothing to be learned from the camps, what does it mean that we have just sat in a movie theater to watch and learn from a movie with a Holocaust theme? I doubt that Daldry and Hare telling us to stick it. Perhaps they’re implying that they’ve caught us being voyeurs. Now that would be a truly interesting thing for The Reader. Because who doesn’t feel a bit the voyeur watching the camera lovingly follow every curve of Kross and Winslet’s bodies? It’s a provocative notion—though not a new one. Still, I can’t believe that that’s what the film has all been about. The notion is offensive—to think one would use the Holocaust as a vehicle to say we can learn nothing from the Holocaust, but why not watch some nude bodies for a while.

As for the other possibility, that nude bodies in a Holocaust film must always remind us of the dead of the camps, and tell us that our world is perpetually corrupted by the fact that such evil existed—well, if that’s what Daldry wanted to say, he should have done a better job saying it.

[For other views on The Reader, click here.]

Title Change!

2009-02-19T12:53:00.006-05:00

Yes, the old title of "First-Person: Limited" is gone. Why? For starters, because there is no such point of view as first-person limited. There is third-person limited, but that doesn't quite have the right ring, does it? (Isn't the first person always, by definition, limited, anyway?) Even my addition of a face-saving colon could not hide the fact that I was making up a quasi-literary term. This Language Curmudgeon couldn't bear the thought of being subjected to one of her own Language Rants.

And so: The View Finder. Because a large part of this blog concerns itself with narrative viewed through a viewfinder at some point in its creation. And because readers can come to this blog to find views on current and older movies, on books and writers, and on language.

Read on, and enjoy it!

Revolutionary Road: Going Nowhere

2009-02-17T23:05:00.021-05:00

It’s usually the action-filled movies that leave us humming a few measures of their theme music as we walk through the multiplex parking lot. Movies like Superman, with John Williams’ soaring brass, or Pirates of the Caribbean, with a melody so distinctive that it just might start a new genre: Pirate Music. Then there is Revolutionary Road. Sure, there is action in Sam Mendes’ film: a husband clears a dresser-top in fury, he slams his fist into the roof of a car; a wife runs into the woods across the street, she whirls like a bacchante on a dance floor. But the fundamental condition of April and Frank Wheeler—and of all the other suburban women and their men who come and go on Westchester trains—is restlessness. And perhaps the best evocation of their trapped lives is Thomas Newman’s score. (listen here)

Two days after I walked out of the movie theater, I am still hearing in my head the simple, open piano chords that sound at numerous moments during the film. I will leave it to others who know more about music to analyze and explain exactly what is going on. Suffice it to say that, with its restless movement and the elusive resolution of its chords, Newman’s score captures what Kate Winslet’s April says to Leonardo DiCaprio’s Frank: “I can’t stay and I can’t go.”

April says this in a discussion of whether to abort the child that might keep the Wheelers from escaping to Paris. But she might as well be talking about every aspect of a woman’s life in Mendes’ and Richard Yates’ 1950s suburbs. After an argument in one of the film’s early scenes—an argument in which Frank almost hits her—April gets back into the car’s passenger seat. She likely can’t drive, and she certainly doesn’t even consider taking responsibility for her own motion. Mendes’ camera work emphasizes this idea. Nearly every time we see April outside either her home or the home of a neighbor, she is filmed alone, in tight close-up. Even in the American Express office as she prepares for their trip, the camera frames her tightly enough that we can barely make out the map behind her.

Frank is no better off, though the men in this movie have the advantage of getting out of their houses and into shots with a wider frame than those that depict the women. Still, though Mendes gives them two elegantly filmed set pieces, the men’s movement is lemming-like—on train platforms, on the steps in Grand Central. Like the music, they move while not seeming to move at all. The grandness of these scenes underscores the self-delusion of both characters who are, as April says in a moment of clarity, no different from anybody else.

What is a shame about Revolutionary Road is that Newman’s music outshines Kate Winslet’s intense but ultimately disappointing performance. While she utters the line that expresses the Wheelers’ emotional situation, her acting doesn’t quite access the depth of April’s despair. The performance is a very stylized one, as clearly articulated and unnatural as Winslet’s thorough American diction. (This makes sense from the stage director whose first foray into film was the highly stylized American Beauty.) While I am willing to grant Winslet and Mendes the possibility that this was what they were after—the mid-century American woman so desperate that she either rages grandly or bites her emotions back into a surreal calm—this approach doesn’t mesh with the much more naturalistic performance of DiCaprio. If there is an Oscar performance in this film, it is his. (Coming soon: The Two Kates, a comparative review of the two Winslets on current screens.)

One of the watchwords for Revolutionary Road among movie-goers is: don’t go see it if you’re in any way familiar with a bad marriage. In an odd way, I wish this had been true. This movie should be devastating, not just upsetting (and make no mistake, it is certainly upsetting). Still: go see Revolutionary Road. You’ll admire its technique and its craft; you’ll feel deeply sorry for Leonardo DiCaprio’s Frank. And I’m guessing you’ll come out of the theater trying to remember how exactly that music goes.

Language Rant 2

2009-02-17T13:44:00.001-05:00

I admit it: I sometimes watch America's Next Top Model--but of course only if it's already on when I walk into the room. In the ritual that concludes each show, Tyra Banks stands solemnly before the dwindling (in number; they've already dwindled in size as far as they can go) contestants and intones: "The next name I'm going to call is Gloriellana"--or some equally unusual moniker. And that's it. The woman in question steps up and receives Tyra's wisdom and then falls back into line.

But Tyra still hasn't called the woman's name! When is she going to? I'm still waiting.

Valentine Special: One Woman Walking

2009-02-13T19:20:00.005-05:00

When men walk in movies, they are searching, exploring, striving. Think of the rather martial strides of Jason Bourne and the latest James Bond. Or of Ralph Fiennes’ determined staggering in The English Patient. Or perhaps best of all in recent cinema, James McAvoy’s five-minute walk through the destruction of Dunkirk, led, for almost all of that five minutes, by Joe Wright’s single tracking shot in Atonement.

But when women walk in movies, they are most often doing one of two things: showing off clothes, as in various montages in The Devil Wears Prada, or walking down the aisle, for which there are too many examples to list here. Every now and then, walking women are simply being passionate. Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility gives us a scene of Kate Winslet as the soulful young woman striding through nature, alone and wild. But for this scene, in which Marianne wanders a hillside in a storm, Lee is drawing on an old literary convention that connects the unpredictability of nature with the force of vague and unnamed emotions. Winslet’s Marianne does not desire anything or anyone in particular (she is seconds away from meeting Willoughby, when desire will commence on schedule). She is simply Being Emotional.

Very rarely, and quite strikingly, a woman walking in a movie appears purely as an emblem of female desire—specific, targeted desire for someone. The clearest example I have seen of this is a scene from Peter Weir’s 1982 film The Year of Living Dangerously. It’s a tracking shot of Sigourney Weaver’s Jill Bryant walking slowly, eyes cast down. The camera leads her, in medium-angle, through a Jakarta market until she reaches the door of Guy Hamilton’s office. She knocks on the door, steps back, and, when Hamilton emerges from the room, pulls him back against the opposite wall and begins a slow, passionate kiss. (Hamilton is played by Mel Gibson in his heart-stoppingly blue-eyed and handsome days—as good a reason as any for a passionate kiss.) The scene cross-fades to Weaver in a post-coital bed, and takes us quickly back to the 1960s Indonesian political crisis that forms the subject matter for the film.

The kiss takes nearly a minute. But Weaver’s walk accounts for fully half of the scene’s duration, and for all of its passion. Why? Because, unlike the women of the clothing montages we’re used to seeing, Jill is oblivious to an observer as she makes her way through the crowd. It’s not about what her body looks like, not about her clothes. It’s not really even about the man we come to realize she’s walking towards. It’s about her sexual desire.

Weir overlays this scene with a Vangelis-written melody that serves as the leitmotif in this opera-filled film. (Linda Hunt’s character, the photographer Billy Kwan, listens to Kiri Te Kanawa, among other things.) We hear it a bit earlier in the film, in A Scene of Kissing Dangerously, as Jill and Guy drive away from an embassy party, through a roadblock, presumably to bed. When the music starts up again, as Weaver looks up from her work, and the camera cuts to the tracking shot in the market, we know what to expect.

I admit that The Year of Living Dangerously forms the basis for my theory because I have seen the film so many times. Fascinated by it and by Weir’s direction, and intrigued by the films coming out of Australia in the 80s, I made a point of returning to it once a year for more than a decade after first seeing it in the theater. It became a kind of It’s a Wonderful Life for me, minus the ill-timed holiday grimness.

But surely there are other examples of the Walking Woman. In the near-final scene of Wright’s Bronte-ized Pride and Prejudice, Keira Knightley and Matthew Macfayden lope towards each other across a dawn field, clearly with one object in mind. Still, the scene is a different animal. Cross-cuts to Macfayden’s Darcy give Elizabeth Bennet’s desire a specific target, and dilute the woman-centered nature of the emotions on display. No, Weir’s scene stands alone.

Or does it?

Language Rant 1

2009-02-11T22:31:00.001-05:00

Every curmudgeon, even the Friendly Curmudgeon of this blog, needs a rant. And so I offer you the first in a series of Language Rants. From time to time, when I encounter a crime against the English language that is so glaring—or just so persistent—that muttering at the offending television, radio, or newspaper is not enough, I’ll post a brief commentary here.

Today's criminal is a phrase we have probably all heard many times before: Paula Cole, in "I Don't Want to Wait," singing "So open up your morning light/And say a little prayer for I." It pains me even to write it. Sure, Cole was going for the rhyme of "light" with "I". But when we all know it should be "say a little prayer for me," rhyme is the least of our concerns. (And really: who opens up a light? My parents used to say “open the light,” but they had the excuse of being non-native English speakers.) I ask you: couldn't Cole have revised the line to come up with something that would not be the grammatical equivalent of nails on a blackboard?

I invite suggestions. How would you rewrite the line to keep the gods of grammar happy?

The Problem of Benjamin Button

2009-02-09T18:46:00.002-05:00

Virtually all the press about The Curious Case of Benjamin Button presents the film as a story of triumph and uplift. As reviewers and advertisements would have it, the film offers us the satisfyingly chastening reminder that love can transcend time—and, more importantly, can overcome the normal and gradual aging of the human body. Of course, we say. How shallow we have been to forget this truth (or, god forbid, not to believe it). How lucky that David Fincher has come along to remind us of it.

The problem with Benjamin Button—and there are several—is that the film that Fincher has put together does exactly the opposite of what he has set out to convince us of. Rather than show us how the mind and heart can defy the limitations of the body, Benjamin Button suggests that the body determines and defines us.

The poignancy of Benjamin Button’s situation is supposed to come from the dissonance between his chronological and physical age. He is a child who cannot walk or run, then a young man whose back and knees ache, and then an elderly man with the smooth face of a boy. But besides a fairly workmanlike voice-over, we never see Benjamin’s thoughts, except for one lovely moment that shows that Brad Pitt is a better actor than anyone has ever asked him to be (about which more later). We are left with a story of looks—and here is the trouble.

When Brad Pitt looks twenty, dancing the twist in a 60s apartment, we should be aware that he possesses the wisdom of a seventy-year-old man. It’s an interesting conundrum: what would you do if you had all that knowledge and the body that allowed you to act on it? But we look at the young man and can’t help but notice that the woman he loves has crow’s feet and a pre-Botox-era forehead. Scene after scene—on the motorcycle, on the sailboat—Fincher shoots Pitt in glamour poses bathed with golden light. Pitt’s youth is what we long for, not Benjamin Button’s wisdom. The film reinforces such a typical Hollywood fantasy that it almost seems unfair to point it out.

I went to see Benjamin Button with my eighty-four-year old mother—a woman who is in amazing shape for her age, but who would trade experience and wisdom in a heartbeat for the chance to look twenty. As the film began, with the unnecessary frame narrative of Julia Ormond reading Benjamin Button’s diary to her dying mother, I could hear my own mother grumbling about the unpleasantness of the scene. She would watch Ormond, but kept turning away from the sight of Cate Blanchett made up to look old (but still blessed with high cheekbones). I was sure my mother would ask me to take her home, but I needn’t have worried. She turned out to be the perfect audience for the film, audibly sighing with relief when Brad Pitt appeared at his youngest incarnation, late in the movie.

Granted, who can blame an old woman for longing for the time when her skin was unlined and her body was at its most vigorous? And surely, at her age and widowed for five years, the sight of a death-bed can only remind her of my father’s time in one. But if The Curious Case of Benjamin Button had done its job, my mother and I would both have walked out of the theater reassured that the body is just the vehicle for the far more valuable thoughts and feelings it contains.

There is some triumph in the movie, all the same—and it’s in Tilda Swinton’s too-brief appearance, and in Fincher’s technical abilities. But most of all, it’s in that scene that shows what Brad Pitt can do as an actor. Blanchett’s Daisy lies in a hospital bed with a body broken from a car crash when Benjamin comes to see her, looking roughly like a forty-year-old. “God, you’re perfect,” she says to him, with a tinge of spite. He doesn’t respond, but the look on Pitt’s face—or, rather, the series of looks—says it all. It conveys all the sadness, isolation, pleasure, and wistfulness of a life in which the mind and the body have never been at peace. That is something to make a movie out of.

Watching The Wrestler: or How I Learned to Stop Cringing and Love Mickey Rourke

2009-02-09T17:03:00.001-05:00

More uplift. In this case, it’s not the story of Randy Ramzinski, the aging wrestler in Darren Aronofsky’s eponymous movie, but the story of Mickey Rourke. Here is a man whose promising career descended so low that he shared a category with Jerry Lewis (American Performers Most Loved By The French), and now he has won a Golden Globe and a BAFTA and may go on to win more.

Maybe I wasn’t paying attention, but I had the impression that The Wrestler was a superb movie with a story that somehow told you everything would be all right. I was only half-correct. The Wrestler is indeed a superb movie, but it makes you want to watch hours of Winnie-the-Pooh afterwards to cancel out its bleakness.

What’s bleak can be itemized quickly enough: the trailer home with the power cut off; the beaten-up body; the dingy strip club that passes for community; the tiny audiences; the autograph-signings that look like bingo at the nursing home. What’s superb requires a longer list. Aronofsky’s movie does everything right—from the script, to the un-annoying hand-held camera, to the portrayal of its two main characters, Randy the Ram whose real name is Robin, and Marisa Tomei’s Cassidy whose real name is Pam.

The similarity of their names is no accident. These two are through-the-looking-glass versions of each other, and each is a distorted mirror-image of him or her self. Both of them are performers, selling their bodies for a simulacrum of attraction and acceptance, and, in the case of Randy, confusing the simulacrum with the real. Pam understands all this, muttering her real name as she leaves the club for good, as if it were the password to a new life. But for Robin Ramzinski, the persona of the Ram is a trap he does not want to get out of—or considers himself undeserving to escape.

Perhaps the saddest scene in this very sad film takes place in neither of the two main spheres of its story (club and ring), but in a bar near the second-hand store where Randy meets Pam to buy a gift for his daughter. (Even here, there’s the hint of self-delusion: Pam’s “vintage” store is another person’s thrift shop.) When old-fashioned rock and roll comes on the bar’s speakers, both characters glory in the music, and Randy dances for Pam in a neat reversal of their usual roles. But their usual roles make Pam and Randy utterly out of place in the daytime bar. After they kiss, Pam hurries to get out of there—and we should thank Aronofsky for that. In one of the movie’s saddest scenes, he gives us the first sign that at least Pam gets it: you can’t live the role in the real world. Get out or die trying.

No spoilers here, so I leave it at that. Except to say that the people making Benjamin Button need have looked no further than The Wrestler if they wanted to talk about bodies that defy old age. Rourke is in surprising shape and Tomei looks like a twenty-five-year old, except for her realistically and beautifully expressive face.

As for Rourke? I cringed twice during The Wrestler (not counting the horribly violent wrestling scenes and the bloodletting Mel Gibson would be proud of). Once during a close-up shot of Rourke’s butt, and once during the heartbreaking scene in the bar. The rest of the time, I was marveling at Rourke’s creation of such a vivid, sad, and moving character.