..."homegrown Anti-Americanism."
Thursday, March 11, 2010
Wednesday, March 10, 2010
Regression
Harking back to a youth that could/should have been misspent a little more often, on the verge of my momentus 39th birthday. "Runaways" movie opening. Cautionary bio pic about a fake, producer-created jailbait pop band, which is being portrayed, typically, from the POV of the band member who fell apart and barely survived. Much more interesting, but less knee-jerk nihilistic, to consider the tough cookie who turned a gig in a fake band into a real career: Holding onto music rights to hits like "I Love Rock 'n' Roll" to build a foundation under a satisfying and ideosycratic career.
She's featured in this video for a Paul Schrader movie I barely remember seeing and didn't much like. Song by Springsteen that holds up quite well.
And then there's this. Open question how guilty we should feel even watching it, much less digging it. I have no answers. Only questions.
It's also about vulnerability and weakness as a turn on, and the fact that there's a clear alternative built into the story is reason enough to be suspicious of this project, IMHO. "Cherie is the one who has the arc," is the way it was stated by one Person Close to the Production. She can be impacted by events and create drama. The character who enters the situation with personality already formed, and with a clear agenda, can't be at the center if you want to turn these events into a Story. You could create obstacles for her to overcome, but they would be external. That's the argument, anyway: Extra difficult to build good drama around stable, focused characters.
David Foster Wallace: The Early Years
The New Yorker's book blog has an article this morning (by Meredith Blake -- Who she? Talk about a deep bench) about the acquisition by the University of Texas of David Foster Wallace's papers and books.
I admire Wallace almost as much as my co-blogger does Russell T. Davies..... What is fun here, though, are not his drafts of "Infinite Jest" or the couple of hundred heavily annotated books, but this poem by a very very young writer, a facsimile of which is above.
I find particular promise in the concluding couplets:
If you were to see a viking today
It's best to go some other way
Because they'll kill you very well
And all your gold they'll certainly sell
For all these reasons stay away
From a viking every day.
UPDATE: Even great, death-haunted novelists are prone to a bit of buffoonery sometimes.... Wallace's copy of Suttree:
Tuesday, March 9, 2010
Davies sifu Part 3
Realized that clip was too tiny to read and...clipped it.
I'm keeping the Davies book at my bedside like a family Bible. The key to its impact is its underlying (scary) honesty about the day-to-day realities of the writing process. I can't imagine any writer, in any medium, failing to recognize the groping, day-dreamy, chaotic mental "soup" Davies describes himself swimming in, with usable ideas occassionally bobbing to the surface like...well, never mind. (Readers who don't write may feel there's too much information for comfort here about what gets packed into the sausage.) Reading this stuff makes me feel better about what an awkward fit I am in my increasingly corporatized & cubicle-filled workplace -- though it would probably be a good idea to stay alert and not act too "creative." No future in that.
UPDATE: "Christmas with my blind dad. I sit and describe to him what's happening on TV. 'The Host have hooked arms with the Doctor and they're flying him up, up, up through the ship...' I have a laugh doing that. I make things up. 'They're on fire!' There's no budget when you're blind."
Monday, March 8, 2010
Blinders off
T.O.H. posted these clips in Spanish, presumably to make a point about the command of space and color and movement -- above and to my mind beyond any reservations one can justly have about derivative plot, cookie-cutter dialog and anti-corporate propaganda. The first one makes the point especially well, because it's just a guy addressing a crowd: no monsters, no tech, no swooping crane shots. I finally saw The Hurt Locker a couple of days ago, and it's very much my kind of movie. Touchstones are guys like Sam Fuller and Don Siegel: classic American genre films. But it doesn't have this, the gift that Kael used to call "film sense." It's right there. You either see it or you don't.
Sunday, March 7, 2010
Silent disco...
New-to-me concept, mentioned in the Davies book: the dancers get the music through headphones. Why on earth has that never been used in a movie? Cutting back and forth from the booming subjective version to the silent wide shots, with some kind of chase/suspense sequence snaking through it.
Reading Davies, I'm starting to think like him. (If only.)
Saturday, March 6, 2010
Davies sifu Part Two
How do you make audiences care about your characters? … It’s pictorial. It’s a visual medium, but visuals don’t have to mean landscapes, long lenses, stunts, hundreds of extras; it’s the ordinary pictures, the sheer existence of people on screen, the fact that I’ve chosen to put them there and that you’ve chosen to watch. I realized this on The Second Coming, when we spent a million drafts on Steve and Judith’s backstory… All that work was to establish, simply and fundamentally, an attraction between them. When I watched it back … I realized the most crucial thing: none of that was necessary. The fact that Lesley Sharp and Christopher Eccleston were on screen, at the same time, together -- especially late at night, outside a city centre club – did all the work. You could lose the sound and still realize what was happening between those two. Put a man and a woman of roughly the same age on screen and you're telling a story. That’s a love story. … The choice to put those two characters together on screen, in a story, is the crucial thing. Everything else is just detail.”On Robert McKee-style "rules" for screenwriting:
-- Russell T Davies, The Writer's Tale.The whole formality about structure has really evolved from the movies, and sometimes, I suspect, it just doesn't fit television. Television can ramble, and pause, and deviate, and accelerate. It really is a different art form. With the soap opera we've a brand new form, and it's still evolving. We've had 47 years of Ken Barlow's life . Forty-seven years! [On Coronation Street, Barlow has been played by the same actor continuously since 1960.] Like it or not, no fictional character has ever existed in such everyday detail. Not ever. Brand new form of fiction! And utterly shapeless -- a couple of dozen different production teams, with different agendas, over all those years, with no overall plan -- and yet time is going to impose on Ken Barlow a Beginning, a Middle and an End, as we move from his youth, through his adult life, to his death one day. Fascinating, isn't it? Structure imposes itself, just through the passage of time. There has never been a fictional form like the soap opera before. It's hugely underrated and underconsidered.
Friday, March 5, 2010
Time Has Come Today
Classic and somewhat forgotten.... Although the song shows up in a fair number of ads, it deserves better -- especially in its full 22 minute glory. The poster for the show is above. Forty-two years ago. My goodness.
Soon, the world will be Tulkinghorn!
As the Tulkinghorn aesthetic spreads.... Wm. Hocker of Berkeley, California, manufactures sets of tin soldiers picturing scenes of the Victorian military and the American Western Expansion. I'm thinking about a set of Sepoy Mutineers, myself (as an expression of my anti-Imperial beliefs).
Men and horses of the 17th Lancers are pictured above.
Thursday, March 4, 2010
Green Zone: early warning
From Kyle Smith:
I can’t believe what I just saw, so I’ll think about it some more before I go into detail. But if I were the kind of excitable guy who believes in boycotts, I’d say “Boycott NBC-Universal” for its appalling new anti-American flick “Green Zone,” an absurdly awful would-be actioner that stars Matt Damon as a US warrant officer in 2003 Baghdad. ..... a $100 million war film in which American troops are the bad guys. There are moments that we’re supposed to cheer because our soldiers are getting shot down- but it’s okay because they’re evildoers at worst or stooges at best .....
UPDATE: I've been asked to give Smith's bona fides so that those who don't follow these things can figure out whether he's just another knee jerk right-winger. He's a staff film critic for the New York Post, a sometime writer of humorous novels, and a Persian War veteran. Although he's pretty reliably right of center, he's no patsy for the easy controversy, as far as I can tell.
At any rate, if this movie becomes an issue, then he's a bellwether... If it doesn't than he's a thin skinned vet with a hard-on for denouncing Hollywood bluster. I have my guess.
Wednesday, March 3, 2010
Lovecraft and his circle
There is deep pleasure in reading Lovecraft and the Lovecraft-derived stories by people like Clark Ashton Smith, Frank Belknap Long, and August Derleth.
I have been thinking all day about these two sentences from Derleth's story "The Dweller in Darkness", which strike me as particularly fine:
Who was the Blind Faceless One but Nyarlathotep? Certainly not Shub-Niggurath, the Black Goat of a Thousand Young.
Certainly not!
Monday, March 1, 2010
Saturday, February 27, 2010
Davies sifu
I'm thinking about Donna, Martha, Rose, Jack, Sara Jane and Mickey as a team, and the tagline: "ONE OF THEM WILL DIE!' I'd watch that! Trouble is, I don't want to kill any of them. Rose Tyler was never created to die. None of them was. They were all created to show off Doctor Who's central premise: the world and the universe is wonderful, ordinary people can do great things, and the human race survives.
...
Did I ever tell you that Zadie Smith once wrote me to say that Bob & Rose is her favourite drama ever, and she watches an episode once a week -- and this was years after its original transmission -- in the hope that she'll create a character as real as Rose someday? Zadie Smith!!.
-- Russell T Davies, The Writer's Tale, pp. 100-101.
Friday, February 26, 2010
Adam Roberts on Bolaño
2666 still rattles around in my head. And the sf writer, critic, and blogger Adam Roberts hits that spot on the venn diagram where 'agrees with me', 'is amusing and smart', and 'is witty and quotable' intersect. So I was especially pleased to read him blogging 2666, with some wise advise for writers:
The most striking thing about Bolaño’s style is what you might call its egregious twitting of the Chekov principle. If Bolaño were to have a character hammer a nail into the wall at the beginning of Act 1 not only would the character not hang himself upon it at the end of Act 3, but he would spend Act 1 hammering nails all over the place, selling his hammer to a character who never appears again, describing elaborately detailed but wholly oblique dreams, observing, doing and thinking a blizzard of things that seem to have no relationship to the larger pattern.....
The problem with Chekov’s nail is that, once you’re aware of the principle, it constrains the audience’s response: like a whodunit in which there are only two characters, it closes down your interpretive options. Bolaño works hard against that. So, which of his details matter, and which are just window dressing? The British painter who crowned his career by cutting off his own right hand, mummifying it and incorporating it in his last canvas—is he ‘important’ to the novel? Or is he just Poe-like garnish, only there to establish a vaguely guignol-y mood? What about the scene where Moroni suffers hysterical blindness, only to recover his sight a little later? What about the young English teacher, Pritchard, who hangs around Norton, and tells Pelletier and Espinoza that she is the Medusa? The scene where Morini recites an Italian restaurant menu as if it were poetry, ‘slowly and with an actor’s intonation’? The interlude when, temporarily rejected by Norton, the two men take up with a succession of prostitutes, Pelletier getting involved with ‘a girl called Vanessa’, going so far as to visit her home where she lives with her complaisant Moroccan husband and blonde son? What about Amalfitano, an effete Chilean academic who works at the University of Santa Teresa, and who befriends Pelletier, Norton and Espinoza when they stay there? Is he important? The fact that the second section, which I shall read next, is called ‘The Part About Amalfitano’ leads me to believe he will be; although it’s also possible that this chaff-blizzard of detail is all misdirection, and that in the end nothing will be.
He got that right.....
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
Snooty critic seems to get this one right
Richard Brody doesn't much like a movie called "Lourdes", which I will probably never see. Interesting reasons, though, especially from a guy who practically owns 'snooty' these days:
“Lourdes,” with its overtones both of religion and of hypocrisy and its insight into neither, is the sign of an intellectual pose that offers neither analytical thought nor emotional insight nor practical wisdom. It is the cinematic version of an elegant, generic accent.Which, come to think of it, explains much about why it gets released.
Monday, February 22, 2010
Should I actually go to the movies?
I am completely floored by this quote from Anthony Lane's review of Shutter Island. But I wonder: Is the pleasure that I would take in the movie merely the same as the pleasure I take in this image?
In a celebrated riff on “Casablanca,” Umberto Eco wrote, “Two clichés make us laugh but a hundred clichés move us, because we sense dimly that the clichés are talking among themselves, celebrating a reunion.” “Shutter Island” is that reunion, and that shrine.
Sunday, February 21, 2010
Mankell ready for stardom in the US?
Knopf is giving "The Man from Beijing" an amazing balls-to-the-wall two page advertisement in this morning's New York Times Book Review (in fact, pages two and three -- better than prime territory).
Here's hoping it works.
Saturday, February 20, 2010
More whining from the Guardian: Now Banks
Talk about a meme...
Two days following the Martin whine-fest, the Guardian's resident sf blogger and (sometime Cinerati commenter) Damian Walter baits Iain M.Banks about finishing a Culture trilogy started thirteen years ago.
I assume it's somewhat tongue in cheek, but still.
I'm waiting for The Giant Rat of Sumatra, the fourth Millennium novel, another Uncle Fred book, and the rest of Kubla Khan myself.
Friday, February 19, 2010
Wolf Hall
In most circles, it's become unnecessary to recommend Wolf Hall: I even think it's becoming a mainstay of that ninth circle of hell called the 'book group'. Since this little community is fonder of heartier stuff, you may have thought to pass it by, but you shouldn't.....
Christopher Hitchens, when he's not being otherwise provocative, is a splendid book critic, and writes perceptively about Wolf Hall here. (He even, as the village atheist, notes something that I didn't know -- that "hocus pocus" is an irreligious alteration of "hoc est corpus") I love this:
Three portraits by Hans Holbein have for generations dictated the imagery of the epoch. The first shows King Henry VIII in all his swollen arrogance and finery. The second gives us Sir Thomas More, the ascetic scholar who seems willing to lay his life on a matter of principle. The third captures King Henry’s enforcer Sir Thomas Cromwell, a sallow and saturnine fellow calloused by the exercise of worldly power. The genius of Mantel’s prose lies in her reworking of this aesthetic: look again at His Majesty and see if you do not detect something spoiled, effeminate, and insecure. Now scrutinize the face of More and notice the frigid, snobbish fanaticism that holds his dignity in place. As for Cromwell, this may be the visage of a ruthless bureaucrat, but it is the look of a man who has learned the hard way that books must be balanced, accounts settled, and zeal held firmly in check. By the end of the contest, there will be the beginnings of a serious country called England, which can debate temporal and spiritual affairs in its own language and which will vanquish Spain and give birth to Shakespeare and Marlowe and Milton.
On the other hand, if you're the kind of guy who only reads the good stuff, I can offer this from Adam Roberts, which cracked me up:
...one of the most impressive things about Mantel's book is precisely its worldbuilding: the creation of an immersive, believable 16th-century England. This is a core skill of SF and fantasy writers. If Mantel had tossed in a dragon or two, she'd have been a shoo-in for the British Fantasy Award. Now that's an award she could have been proud to win.
Thursday, February 18, 2010
Does George R.R. Martin owe us anything?
Amusing article in the Guardian about the endless wait for Volume 5 of "Song of Ice and Fire", which includes the fake Tory election poster attached above.
Was it Patrick Rothfuss, similarly situated, who simply said "I'm not your bitch"... (UPDATE: Assiduous reader Steven Till knows better: It was Neil Gaiman speaking on behalf of George Martin -- and thereby linking up at least two recent blog posts. Patrick Rothfuss is mostly amusing on the subject on his blog.)
At any rate, Martin is less pithy:
"Some of you are angry about the miniatures, the swords, the resin busts, the games. You don't want me 'wasting time' on those, or talking about them here. Some of you are angry that I watch football during the fall," the author wrote. "Some of you don't want me attending conventions, teaching workshops, touring and doing promo ... After all, as some of you like to point out in your emails, I am 60 years old and fat, and you don't want me to 'pull a Robert Jordan' on you and deny you your book. OK, I've got the message. You don't want me doing anything except A Song of Ice and Fire. Ever.""Pull a Robert Jordan" is a cool phrase, though.
Still more updates:
Commenter to the original article "Werthead" has this analysis, which I think should be interesting to all you fans of process and structure:
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
Reitman fils and Ebert
Here:
The blogosphere outdid itself with "Avatar," [Ebert] noted. It declared the film dead months before anyone had even seen it. Then there were all these articles saying, "Gee, it's good, once you see it."
...
I asked Reitman how, as the director of "Juno," he might approach filming Salinger's "The Catcher in the Rye."
"Oddly," he said, "the trick to 'The Catcher in the Rye' is not making it. It is the perfect experience within itself. I don't know how you make that experience any different or any better."
Monday, February 15, 2010
Berlin Bollywood
Meredith Brody files from Berlin after watching Karan Johar's My Name is Khan in a theater full of shrieking SRK fans:
It was the right crowd to see the movie with, but not, alas, the right movie. Khan, who famously was recently detained for questioning at Newark Airport because his name turned upon a computer alert list, plays an autistic man. Despite a disclaimer, the performance is awkward and offensive – Khan, a pleasure to watch exposing his chiseled abs and dancing in the rain in Om Shant Om’s delirious “My Heart is Breaking From the Pain of Disco,” largely creates the character by avoiding eye contact, and he isn’t helped by a script that alternates halting speech for him with florid articulation. The film, a rather simplistic piece of kitsch that sends Khan on a years-long mission to tell the President (Bush or Obama) that his name is Khan and he’s not a terrorist, would have elicited boos at Cannes, but Berlin gave it credulous applause, especially after painful sequences set in a Song-of-the-South-worthy black sharecropper-village where Khan is serenaded by “We Shall Overcome” by a church full of characters with names like Funny Hair Joel and Mama Jenny. Khan later returns to single-handedly rescue the inhabitants of Wilhelmina from a hurricane-induced flood. Oy.
The rapturous applause afterwards led Khan to declare “you get unconditional love from your mother and German fans.” I could only agree.
Sunday, February 14, 2010
The real death of the Doctor
A little told story about the sad tail end of the initial twenty-five-year run of "Doctor Who" -- the Sylvester McCoy years, with which I am completely unfamiliar.
“The idea of bringing politics into Doctor Who was deliberate, but we had to do it very quietly and certainly didn’t shout about it,” said McCoy.
“We were a group of politically motivated people and it seemed the right thing to do. At the time Doctor Who used satire to put political messages out there in the way they used to do in places like Czechoslovakia. Our feeling was that Margaret Thatcher was far more terrifying than any monster the Doctor had encountered.
......The following year Cartmel (the series script editor at the time) wrote an emotive speech for the Doctor about the evils of nuclear weapons. It borrowed heavily from material obtained from the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, which was a persistent thorn in the side of the government.
A spin-off Doctor Who children’s novel called Turlough and the Earthlink Dilemma, which was published under licence by the BBC in 1987, featured a despotic villain called Rehctaht — Thatcher spelt backwards.
Sophie Aldred, who played Ace, the Doctor’s feminist companion, said a shared contempt for right-wing ideology had inspired “a real bonding process” for cast and crew.
The point can't be made too often about the way that this series manages to reflect its times. But here idiotic politics were met with hostility and indifference.... The series tanked soon after and went into a fifteen year hiatus. Once again, thank god for Russell Davies.
Friday, February 12, 2010
Sunsets
Anthony Lane on "The Red Shoes:"
I’ve seen the same version on DVD, but watching “The Red Shoes,” whatever the quality, on the small screen is like drinking champagne, whatever the vintage, through a plastic straw. The movie should fill one’s vision no less comprehensively than a sunset, and Powell, like Turner before him—another hearty, romantic Englishman, whose eye gloried unashamedly in a given world—knew that reds, even at their most flaming, are never the whole story of a sunset. ... “The Red Shoes” is both suitable for children and beyond their ken: it treats art not as sedative or diversionary but as hard and supercharged, quite lethal to the danceless rhythms that most of our lives obey. No wonder Britain, still rationed in color, food, and feeling in the wake of an exhausting war, could not cope with what the movie proposed. Catch it here now, and you will not just be seeing an old film made new; you will have your vision restored.Nice.
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If we consider the three big epic fantasy series of our time as George RR Martin's SONG OF ICE AND FIRE, Steven Erikson's MALAZAN BOOK OF THE FALLEN and Jordan's WHEEL OF TIME, all three have run into significant mid-series timeline/structural problems. The three authors have taken different approaches to overcoming it.
Erikson's solution is to ignore the problems and press on, which means the books continue to be published but on the downside with increasingly prevalent timeline problems and continuity errors that occasionally reduce storylines to total nonsense (particularly in the eighth volume, where young characters conceived in the earlier books are years older than they should be, even in relation to one another). This solution has some merit but also means that there are jarring bumps in the books you have to basically overlook to continue enjoying them.
Martin's solution was to rewrite, rewrite, re-edit, rewrite, delete half the book and rewrite again. This solution is preferable since that when the book is done, the problems are reduced or eliminated entirely, but does add years to the writing time of the affected books (in the case of both A FEAST FOR CROWS and A DANCE WITH DRAGONS, more than doubling the writing time of the third volume, A STORM OF SWORDS, which was written far more straightforwardly), which is extremely problematic when you've just suggested that the next book will be done in a year or two tops.
Jordan's was to introduce some filler storylines for some characters and put other characters on ice for a book or two whilst he brought other characters up to speed. This resulting in approximately the eighth through tenth novels in the series degenerating into chaotic messes before he pulled together all the story threads in the eleventh volume and set things up for the grand finale, which Brandon Sanderson is now executing with fine form (the recent twelfth book being the best in the series for some time).
Of the three solutions, Erikson's is the most economical, Jordan's is the most sprawling and Martin's is the most artistic (assuming it works).