Ferlinghetti
"I once started out to walk around the world but ended up in Brooklyn, that Bridge was too much for me."
Rick Yancey’s novel comes to us from the YA shelves. Normally, I’d ask myself, “Why are you reading this? Shouldn’t you be reading something more… mature?”
[MORE: Republished at Like Fire]
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This is a movie I mistrusted, and so did not see when it originally came out. As a DVD, sitting at home, it’s fine. One of the issues I had with it was the choice of Streep taking on the role of Julia Child. It was too obvious a choice. Julia was almost a comic caricature of herself in real life, so playing her – especially for Streep – was fraught with peril. Still, she did a creditable job, reigning herself in, at least a little bit. I disagree though, that her’s is anywhere near an Oscar performance. For my money, Amy Adams, overlooked if not outright dissed, gave the better performance. Yet the received wisdom is that Streep “carried” the film. I beg to differ.
I also misunderstood the premise of the movie. If I had cared enough I could have found out easily enough. So it came as a pleasant surprise that this wasn’t just a Child biopic. That was half the story, but the other – and more interesting to me – was the story of Julie Powell, an aspiring and failed writer, who takes up blogging. The blog idea was to make all of the recipes over the course of one year in Julia’s famous book. I like this real life idea and found it an interesting one for a movie.
The two stories never really made it into a complete and whole film though. The fact that Julie and Julia they never met, just seems weird to me. But of course, they apparently did not. Stanley Tucci, as Paul Child, turns in a professional performance. When does he not?
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I caught an interview with a biographer on Terry Gross’ Fresh Air today about a new book on Thelonious Monk. Monk was one of the first jazz musicians I really got in to. He’d been around for twenty years or so before I discovered him. The word genius is thrown around a lot, and it’s used quite liberally in a documentary on HBO called The Jazz Baroness. But a genius Monk surely was. Monk was also bi-polar before we’d ever heard of such a thing.
Between the Terry Gross interview and the documentary (which is on HBO On-Demand for a another week) there’s a lot of biographical information that I never knew – not that I’d ever delved and dug looking for it. The documentary itself was made by the niece of Baroness Nica de Koenigswarter, Hannah Rothschild. Yep, those Rothschild’s, which makes the story even more fascinating. although not an especially accomplished doc, it’s a fascinating look at this “Jazz Baroness” and her relationship not only with Monk but with literally hundreds of jazz greats. It’s a fascinating look at that period in jazz music history. If you revere Monk or like jazz at all, this is certainly worth a look.
Monk’s son (T. Monk) is one of the talking heads in the doc. I had the pleasure of catching T. Monk at a local jazz club in Boston several years ago. He put on a good show.
I love Monk’s ‘Round Midnight, of course but I also love this one: Ruby, My Dear.
Matador is an early work of Pedro Almodovar which stars the gorgeous Assumpta Serna and a young – make that very young – Antonio Banderas. Full of erotic sexual tension and repression, Almodovar uses the Matador-Bull dynamic as a sex and death metaphor. Passions rule and damn the consequences. Probably only Almodovar can get away with a film like this: flamboyant, audacious and unself-consciously lurid. Like most Almodovar movies, this is beautifully filmed with stark, saturated colors.
Banderas seems lost at sea and over his head in this early role, while Nacho Martinez is perfectly damaged as the limping ex-matador. Serna plays the mysterious woman, feminist, brilliant lawyer, and secret matador worshipper perfectly.
You need to be an Almodovar fan to appreciate this one, I suspect, so recommendations come with that caveat.
♦♦♦½
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.
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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.
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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
