When faced with certain death or survival, how far would you go for survival. Susanne Bier presents the impossible alternatives, in this award winning and searing post-traumatic stress meltdown of a movie. Michael (Ulrich Thomsen) is lost in the skies of Afghanistan, and pronounced dead. Rather too quickly and conveniently, in order to move the story along. This is one of a few flaws that mar the movie, but do it no irreparable harm. As life goes on without Michael, his family embraces his brother, again rather too quickly and conveniently.

Eventually, Michael is rescued after having survived captivity – but only after committing a horrible act. The guilt follows him back toi civilian life, to his family (his wife, two daughters and his brother). Back in civilization, the ‘good’ brother has become the troubled one, and the troubled brother has grown up a lot while Michael has been away.

Michael’s wife, Sarah (Connie Nielsen) copes with her damaged husband as best she can, but when unable to break through to him (he has shut down), she has no alternative but to force the issue herself. His loving daughters want nothing more to do with this damaged man. The man who went away to war, did not come back. That man rarely does, though children cannot understand that.

Supported by wonderful ensemble performances, Bier lays bare the heavy burden of sacrifice, and blots out the blurred line between honor and dishonor.

♦♦♦½

Though Catherine Hardwicke’s film errs on the manipulative side, it nevertheless has the pleasures of superb performances by three actresses. First, Holly Hunter as Melanie Freeland, trying to raise her thirteen year old daughter and her siblings on a shoe string budget, estranged from her husband and coping with an in and out relationship, all the while trying  to get through her days as a recovering alcoholic. Hunter has rarely been better – she’s certainly been much worse (unfortunately).

Evan Rachel Wood plays her daughter Tracy. In Tracy’s quest for popularity, she’s forced to grow up way too fast. Unfortunately, she makes a poor choice for a friend. Nikki Reed plays the amoral Evie Zamora (sure her home-life is a horror show, even when not gilded up by far-fetched stories). Reed also co-wrote the screenplay with director Hardwicke.

Emotional family drama that proves that love does not conquer all. At least not in this film.

♦♦♦

I’m scanning down Al Pacino’s IMDB pedigree. Once one of the great actors, AP seems to have descended into a permanent and personal night of the living dead. What happened? There’s a few good ones in the ’90’s (Glengary Glen Ross, The Insider, Donnie Brasco), but really, you need to go all the way back to the “Godfather” era to see AP at the top of his game (I and II, the great Dog Day Afternoon)….and I have to see Scarecrow again. Click to me queue. My darlin’!

This one really though, is not as bad as some of his films. It’s mildly entertaining, and AP holds himself in check for the most part. Sure, there are enough misdirections and red herrings to choke a horse, but that’s not Pacino’s fault. Unlike some of his clunkers (where he plays down to the lowest common denominator), here at least, he rises – if only a bit – above the script.

So I just don’t know what happens to these actors: DeNiro and Nicholson to name two. Brando at least made it interesting by his obscure takes on some of his roles. Even with his over the top performances, there was a method to his madness. Pun intended.

♦♦♦

The images of the twin towers coming down and people falling and jumping from them is touched upon only briefly early on in Michael Thomas’ coming of (middle) age novel. This is not post 9-11 fiction, but it’s out there as a metaphor, make of it what you(the reader) will. The unnamed narrator sets out to tell his difficult story: the trails and tribs of a mixed-race black man in America, wedded to a Boston Brahmin white woman. Their family consists of three kids of various shades and hues.

Tough story. Tough road to hoe. All of which elicited very little sympathy from me. I’d say I feel his pain, but of course I can’t. Which doesn’t mean that I can’t say: Get over yourself. There’s too much of the ‘I’m really above all this muck’. The need to make a living and sell himself in this society, and being a man of color only adds to the complexity. Of course. Why me? Why any of us, really? 

Michael Thomas seems to be a good and careful writer. But he’s no Ellison. He’s no Baldwin. Would that he were. Perhaps then the spaces between the good bits and the slightly whining, self-pitying bits would have been more bearable. More palatable. I can be a forgiving reader. Give me something, I’ll let something else pass.

The strict linear time-line of the story itself is four days in the life of. But “his” story extends well beyond that, all the way back to his childhood (absent father, abusive mother). While his marriage seems to be falling apart, I can’t for the life of me figure out why: his wife seems a saint, a loving and supportive, beautiful woman from all accounts. All the doubts are self-doubts, and it’s hard to fathom how he seems bent on throwing this all away. He’s 35 and busted and the drink can do him in, but he’s talented and bright and could, if not ‘have it all’, at least have a good life. A comfortable life. This is the 21st Century, he’s in New York….things could be worse.

In 1965 I was attending the University of Florida. The largest and cheapest cafeteria that most everyone ate at (right across the street from the campus) was de facto segregated. This was at the same time that there was a guy up in Georgia who became quite infamous for chasing black people out of his chicken restaurant with an axe handle. Anyway, Jim was a tall, skinny, good-looking white kid with a black girlfriend. Jim was an activist, and was organizing for the March on Selma. Jim never made it. He hung himself one day. He had two sisters that attended the UofF at the same time who I had a passing acquaintance with. We ran in the same circles at least. Mutual friends. We never knew what drove Jim to that final act. Yet we did know. We knew very well. It was a sad time for us all. For the country. What I mean to say is, that was then. This is now. Nearly 40 years later. No, I can’t walk in Thomas’ shoes, but I did follow Jim’s path in memory to Selma. Well…..

Thomas’ protagonist is surely marginalized, as are many men and women of color in this society. Seems to me that Thomas’ character acts to further marginalize, revel even in his otherness. Why not take a different route? Fight the odds? Perhaps this is the place to which Thomas’ character finally comes. It took an awful while, and a lot of pages to get there though.

But I mentioned some good bits. Thomas’ poet-writer protagonist is also a musician. Here he talks bout getting a play list together and picking up some gigs to make a few bucks. A pretty good riff on how the blues touches the soul, if you ask me.:

It has to be the blues. I want to make people sad, sad for me and sad for themselves, and then sadder still that they never realized that there are people so sad – that they have a connection to that sadness. I want to let them know what they’ve missed, to mourn it, then, in the booze-haze and their collective sorrow, have it reborn. I want to make them happy, then have them see and feel the gap between  the two emotions – have them see that the distance they assume is an illusion, a lie told to them, but not have them feel guilt or shame but celebrate the other half – the blues.

Writers who write of characters who are writers, generally (if they’re any damn good) have some interesting things to say about the craft, the process. This here by Thomas captures the desperations of a writer nicely. Very nicely:

I don’t remember all of my desperations: desperate to publish before this author died; desperate to record before that singer passed – either to have them validate me or for me to tell them that they were wrong….I was desperate to have writing do things, to contain transformative powers, but writing has never done anything for me. It has never been cathartic or therapeutic. It names things, locates them, or at least when I’m writing. I can pretend to be involved in some kind of management of my netherworlds. I start with a feeling, perhaps even more substantial – an image attached to that feeling. I write something, even finish. Sometimes I think it is good. But the feeling is still there, unchanged, but now with a name and a reason for being, legitimized and calling for a permanent place in me….I push a pen across a page, gesturing at symbol, metaphor – pasting a collage of willfully mute and deaf images beside each other within some self-conscious vehicle that masquerades as story. But I get sidetracked in the production, ambushed in my own head. I trick myself for a moment, believe the words arranged just so will metamorphose into a balm. Part of me doesn’t believe. It tries to conceive the minds of unknown agents, faceless editors, and book review consumers. But part of me goes with it, chasing the words that follow the image as it moves up like braiding smoke offerings of ritualistic purification. It will never sell, I scribble a line across the page beneath the last jumble of words to signal I am done.

But it did sell. Michael Thomas won the coveted International Impac Dublin Literary Award for 2009.

♦♦♦½

I’ve been watching this silly sci-fi series on ABC, called V . It’s just different enough to hold my interest, but not different enough to really separate it from most other network tv shows. There is one thing that’s slightly disturbing though, cynical even. Just an episode into the story, there was a cheap shot against the health care debate. I did a double take. It was obvious enough to catch anyone’s attention. Then in ther latest episode, we’re served full-frontal paranoia, H1N1 style.

V is for Visitors.

They have come to Earth unexpectedly to either (a) share with us their advanced knowledge, or (b) colonize us and take over. It depends on your P. Predilections or Politics. In (b), you are the right thinking, we must stamp out the intruder to save our freedoms type. In (a), you are the weak kneed bleeding heart sort. You know, the kind who avoids confrontation until it is too late. Quislings. Appeasers. These people really do believe that the Visitors want to help us. That the  additives being put into a supplement will boost our immune system and make us disease free. What the script writers have had the Visitors do though, is secretly add something (we don’t yet know what – we can only speculate) to the flu vaccine. The plot is foiled, but we are in danger from managed health care and authority tampered vaccines.

V is for Vigilance (public beware)

V is for Vaccines (don’t you dare)

V is for Vacuous (warping my brain)

V is for Victor (squashed under a train)

American Heart has it. Heart that is. And it wears it on its sleeve. Petty hustler-thief Jack (Jeff Bridges) is being paroled with a little less than a year left on his sentence. Guilty as charged, though he also took the fall for his partner. But Jack is determined to leave that life behind. His young son Nick (Edward Furlong), who has been staying with relatives, shows up in his life. At first, Jack wants no part of him, at least for the time being, though one suspects that the right time would never come.

Jack and Nick slowly form a bond as their relationship grows. In the beginning they have no relationship, but they know they should. Jack, haunted by the knowledge of how he’s lived his life, and the lack of a relationship with his father, does have some wisdom to pass along, if mostly of the don’t make my mistakes variety. The movie excels in showing that growth, though it’s by no means a smooth path. Placed in the hardscrabble sections of Seattle, Jack convinces Nick that their salvation lies just a ferry ride away – in Alaska. They make this their common goal. Many obstacles and temptations are put in their path. Ultimately it may be too late for Jack to make it to the promised land, but there’s the slim hope that his son can break the pattern and change up his life.

Fine performance by Jeff Bridges, reminding us that, when he has the right role (The Big Lebowski), he can be very, very good. Furlong, on the other hand has range of bad to mediocre.

♦♦♦½

This movie came recommended to me by Kat Warren. You can follow Kat’s ever so excellent book recommendations on Twitter  http://twitter.com/FinestKindBks

Zadie Smith’s new book is comprised of seventeen essays, clumped into five brackets: “Reading”, “Being”, “Seeing”, “Feeling” and the last, “Remembering”, which contains a single excruciating essay (by far the longest in the collection): a remembrance of David Foster Wallace. In her six essays from ”Reading”, Zadie  opens with a rather complicated one that has as much to do with her mother as with her ostensible subject, Zora Neale Hurston:  being black and the meaning of “soulful”.

She really hits her stride with her essay on E.M. Forster (“tricky bugger”), a subject that Zadie is obviously very fond of.

In the taxonomy of English writing, E.M. Forster is not an exotic creature. We file him under notable  English Novelist, common or garden variety…he never believed the novel was dead or the hills alive, continued to read contemporary fiction after age of fifty, harbored no special hatred for the generation below or above him, did not come to feel that England had gone to hell in a handbasket, that its language was doomed…

“Banal and brilliant” at the same time, Zadie shows her Forster feelings with gentle humor. And on literary criticism in general, Zadie shares these insightful thoughts:

Here’s the funny thing about literary criticism: it hates its own times, only realizing their worth twenty years later.  And then, twenty years after that, it wildly sentimentalizes them, out of nostalgia for a collective youth

It’s fun to listen as Zadie brings thoroughly modern sensibilities to her commentary on, say, the likes of George Eliot (“the result is that famous Eliot effect, the narrative equivalent of surround sound”). Poking at Henry James for his denseness on the subject of Middlemarch, Zadie notes that Virginia Woolf had it right: “One of the few English novels written for grown-up people.”

Jane Eyre is one thing. Middlemarch another entirely. Zadie makes a passionately strong case for the humanism of Eliot’s writing:

We are moved that is should pain Eliot so to draw a border around her attention, that she is so alive to the mass of existence lying unnarrated on the other side of silence. She seems to care for people, indiscriminately and in their entirety, as it was once said God did.

“Rereading Barthes and Nabokov”, is an example of Zadie “changing her mind”. As a young reader, she read one way. As a writer, she’s taken a somewhat different path. From the arguments of Barthes and Nabokov, she’s created an elegant synthesis.

Nabokov is not God, and I am not his creation. He is an author and I am his reader, and we are stumbling toward meaning simultaneously, together. Zebra cocktail!

You’ll need to read the essay to understand that reference.

Alas, there were certain pieces that were well beyond my reach. Among them the essay on Kafka. But in “Two Directions For The Novel”, which first deals with Netherland and then with Tom McCarthy’s Remainder, Zadie tears into the publishing game.

When it comes to literary careers, it’s true: the pitch is queered. The literary economy sets up its stall on the road that leads to “Netherland”, along which one might wave to Jane Austen, George Eliot. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Richard Yates, Saul Bellow. Rarely has it been less aware  (or less interested) in seeing what’s new on the route to “Remainder”, that skewed side road where we greet Georges Perec, Clarice Lispector, Maurice Blanchot, William Burroughs, J. G. Ballard. Friction, fear and outright hatred spring up often between these two traditions – yet they have revealing points of connection. At their crossroads we find extraordinary writers claimed by both sides: Melville, Conrad, Kafka, Beckett, Joyce, Nabokov….In its brutal excision of psychology it is easy to feel that “Remainder” comes to literature as an assassin, to kill the novel stone dead. I think it means rather to shake the novel out of its present complacency. It clears away a little of the deadwood, offering a glimpse of an alternate road down which the novel might, with difficulty, travel forward. We could call this constructive deconstruction, a quality that, for me, marks “Remainder” as one of the great English novels of the past ten years.

She likes it. She really, really likes it! And in the same essay, she goes on to call J. G. Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition, “possibly the greatest British avant-garde novel. I’ve put Ballard’s book on my tbr list (I’ve already read Netherland, and Remainder).

In “Being”, two of the three essays are culled from lectures Zadie gave: One has her addressing her writing craft (“That Crafty Feeling), and “Speaking in Tongues” is a thoughtful essay on multiracialism and ‘voice’ – not the writers voice, but the voice of identity, of culture, and of heritage. She draws several parallels to Barack Obama in this one, that make extreme sense. The third essay is a reportage piece about Liberia, that frankly, just seems out of place here.

In “Seeing”, Zadie culls some of her film reviews – not much to cull from due to the nature of the films she had to review. There’s this though: In “Hepburn and Garbo” Zadie writes just the most wonderful eulogy to Katherine Hepburn. She was her role-model and icon. This is superior writing, and shows an immediacy that is real – she wrote it just a few days after Hepburn died. I’m not ashamed to admit that I laughed and cried when I read this. You can read it here.

After that, there was not much of interest for me, so I’d say it’s a spotty collection. Back to waiting for her next novel…

♦♦♦

This review can also be found in slightly altered form at Like Fire.Org

Seven years after the Watts riots, there was the Watts Summer festival. Captured in the musical documentary, Wattstax. I was channel surfing and came across this, already half over. I’d seen it many years ago, but it caught my attention. Just as I stop by, there’s Rufus Thomas in an outrageous pink outfit with white mid-calf length boots. Do the Funky Chicken now.

Rufus was infectious and although I came in late, I do believe that this was the highlight. And there’s Jesse Jackson with a crazy-early 70’s Afro introducing Issac Hayes. I am somebody. And Mr Hot Buttered Soul was certainly somebody too, back in the day. Richard Pryor was interspersed with the music. That man was one funny……well, you know.

It looked like a beautiful summer day as everyone cut loose. Dig those moves. Sorry I was late to the party. Right on.

Chan-wook Park (Oldboy) turns his macabre sensibilities to vampires, in this quick to DVD film. The start was confusing and nearly incoherent to me, but once it got going, it was a whirlwind. Its mixture of horror and humor felt just about right. Increasingly bizarre, it nearly, but did not, topple over from its own trajectory.

Vampirism is all the rage these days, and everyone wants an edge, a different take on the age-old genre. This one adds something new: A deeply religious priest who contracts the V through a blood transfusion (the AIDS theme), and attempts to ‘do no harm’. Tough when you need blood. Why is it though that men seem to be level-headed vampires with souls, and women invariably get all out of control with blood lust?

Although this perked me up in the last two thirds, still…’twas no Let The Right One In.  

 ♦♦♦

In August of  1873, Selina Dawes conducts the fateful séance that leaves her patron dead of a heart attack and other participants  injured. Shift to a year later (September 1874) and Margaret Prior. Margaret is one of those Victorian ladies that is “high strung”, prone to becoming over excited. Margaret, is also recovering from a suicide attempt, and begins visiting the women inmates of Millbank prison as a “Lady Visitor”. By this time, Millbank houses the infamous medium Selina Dawes. The novel moves back and forth between the brief accounts of Dawes, and the longer passages where Margaret is the narrator,. 

Waters is on familiar ground here, with her ghosts and séances. In The Little Stranger, one of this years Booker finalists, there were also seriously strange goings on in an increasingly dilapidated manor house. There though, it was the ‘man’ of the manor with the fragile psyche and drug dependency. In Affinity, Waters second novel from 2000, Margaret Prior is hooked on the gateway drug “chloral”, which she takes as a sleep aid. Laudanum is not far behind. Morphine is right around the corner.

Waters gives an early nod to The Moonstone (1868) by Wilkie Collins. In that ‘first’ detective novel, the protagonist (Rachel) has a large, extremely valuable diamond that is stolen one night while she sleeps. Laudanum junkie Franklin Blake is suspected of taking the diamond and hiding it somewhere. He forgets where. The prospect of this as a believable plot device was much discussed in Dan Simmons’ Drood.  Waters has Margaret’s special locket (of great sentimental value) go missing in a similar fashion. The missing locket is the first of many strange occurrences involving Margaret.

The locket itself contained a lock of a friend’s (Helen) hair. Helen is now married to Margaret’s brother. As the novel progresses, it becomes clear that Margaret has the ‘forbidden’ love bug. Helen though, has decided to play it straight. It’s still the 1870’s, dontcha know.

With her many visits to the prison, and on the rebound, Margaret becomes increasingly enamored of Selina Dawes. Dawes exerts a power over her that has Margaret increasingly weak-kneed in her presence. Selina assesses Margaret’s visits thus:

‘You have come to Millbank, to look on women more wretched than yourself, in the hope that it make you well again.’

Margaret sees the truth in this, but is undeterred. Her wretchedness takes the form of a virulent self-loathing. A self-loathing perhaps borne of the fact that she is ‘different’. Reading accounts of the Dawes trial, Margaret comes across a passage regarding the testimony of Madeline Silvester.

There are three attempts to question her, and she breaks down weeping at every one. Mrs. Silvester I don’t much care for – she reminds me of my mother. Her daughter, however, I hate: she reminds me of myself.

The affinity of the title, refers to that frowned upon attraction for members of the same sex. Whether there is a real affinity between the two women, or whether there’s a con in progress is the stuff of the novel. There’s an excellent plot twist near the end that forgives a lot of earlier complaints I may have had about the book. This makes it ultimately a satisfying read.

♦♦♦