No Doubt

2 01 2009

I’m sure I can’t be the only one disappointed in the already-critically-acclaimed film Doubt, based on John Patrick Shanley’s award-winning play. Other than Meryl Streep’s portrayal of Sister Aloysius, not much else came to life on screen for me in this one. I found the story and most of the performances uninspiring. The end of the film left little doubt. Without giving it away, I can say that the viewer is never given an alternate explanation for Father Flynn’s final action, leaving only one possible reason for it. Although it was a film built on innuendo, there really wasn’t much subtlety in the way the story was told: The stormy weather that always seemed to whip up at just the right dramatic moment; the light bulbs that popped on cue; the cat that caught the mouse, which alone might have been a nice touch except that Shanley felt the need to comment on it not once, but twice, in case we missed the thematic implications the first two times. Although I may catch some disagreement on this, I thought the characters were a bit stereotypical as well. Everything was done to make Streep as physically unappealing and as hard as possible; Sister James (Amy Adams) was the innocent and sweet child-nun, the film’s collateral damage; Father Flynn was the sensitive, sincere, and progressive priest; Mrs. Miller (played well by Viola Davis), the mother of the young black boy, was  troubled, weepy, left with no choices, and just wanting to give her little boy a chance in life. Sympathetic, yes, all of them, even Sister Aloysius in her own way, but made-to-order down to the last rosary bead. The not-quite-right execution of the compelling themes in Doubt left me frustrated. Gosh, I love Hoffman, but he seemed uncomfortable in this role. Mildly Recommended.

Of further interest….

hoffman_and_streephoffman_and_adamsSlant’s review of Doubt. The most honest one I’ve seen so far. Explains a bit about why the play seemed to work so well and the film did not. I’ll add to it by pointing out that Shanley wrote and directed the film, which appears not to be his most natural art form.


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3 Fine Things

27 12 2008

I’ve begun looking for interesting material to hand out to the students in my novel-writing class, which begins in January. One of the first things I’ll pass along to them is this Nobel lecture by 2008 Literature Laureate Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio. There are some amazing passages in this speech for anyone interested in writing, what writing means to us, and living a writer’s life. Highly recommended.

I’ve always had an interest in novels-into-film. I saw Purple Noon recently (or Plein Soleil) the 1960 French film directed by Rene Clement. This movie is based on Patricia Highsmith’s classic 1955 novel The Talented Mr. Ripley. The color and cinematography (by Henri Decae) are absolutely stunning and one of the reasons why the film is still notable today. The location shots in and around the Amalfi Coast in Italy are flat-out gorgeous. I was lucky enough to see it on the big screen. What I got was not only great eye-candy, but a terrific Highsmith mystery/suspense story and fantastic performances by everyone. Highsmith wrote five Ripley novels and several films have been made of them. It’s interesting to note, however, that Highsmith always maintained that she liked Alain Delon’s portrayal of Tom Ripley in Purple Noon best: Highly Recommended.

J.M. Coetzee

J.M. Coetzee

J.M. Coetzee is an amazing writer. One of my favorites of his is Waiting for the Barbarians, which still gives me chills when I think of it. His books are always deep and interesting and you’re never quite sure what you are going to get. So it is with Diary of a Bad Year, a New York Times Notable Book.

Coetzee’s novel is experimental in the sense that it’s told horizontally, across the pages from beginning to end, from three separate viewpoints: Senor C, the old man and political writer; Anya, the beautiful young woman he hires as a typist; and Alan, Anya’s obnoxious lover who wants to separate Senor C from some of his considerable wealth. The method of storytelling here definitely adds to the reading experience. It becomes an intellectual game reading passages, sentences, and scenes across the pages and piecing the story together as you go along, eventually finding a rhythm in the way the story is told.

None of the characters are irresistibly captivating, and Senor C seems to lecture a bit much, but eventually moments of true depth, honesty, and emotion emerge, and these moments make the novel an excellent read, even if it takes a bit too long for them to materialize. Recommended.

Of further interest…

Read a terrific Slate write-up of Coetzee’s novel.

Radio interview with Patricia Highsmith about language.


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Love Good Books? Catch a Woody Allen Film

20 12 2008

woody2One of the things I love about Woody Allen films is that they feel like good novels. His stories are interesting and interwoven, his characters quirky and complex, and he tells his tales with a unique voice and vision. Watching his movies is a bit like curling up with a good book. The Movieplex channel happened to show one of my all-time favorites this week: Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989). This is a dark comedy, possibly the darkest of all Woody Allen films to date, and it runs as smoothly as a fine-tuned clock. Allen follows two main story lines in the film:

Martin Landau plays Judah, a rich man and an important community philanthropist who makes the mistake of having an affair with an airline stewardess. This woman, Delores (Angelica Huston), turns out to be unstable and threatens to reveal the affair to Judah’s wife Miriam. Judah decides that he can’t let that happen, so he enlists his brother Jack (Jerry Orbach), a man with connections to the Mafia, to take care of the problem for him.

The second story is the comic tale of Cliff Stern (Woody Allen) who finds himself in a joyless marriage with his wife. Cliff is a documentary filmmaker getting nowhere in his career. Cliff’s brother-in-law Lester (Alan Alda), an incredibly successful producer of trashy sitcoms, deigns to offer Cliff a job directing a documentary about, well, Lester. Cliff’s wife pressures him into taking the job, which becomes a nightmare for him, with the lone exception of the lovely production assistant Halley (Mia Farrow), whom Cliff meets and quickly falls for.

Allen inter-cuts these two stories brilliantly, the dark and the light, the comic and the tragic. The stories gently dovetail off one another until the two main characters, Judah and Cliff, meet by chance at the wedding of a mutual friend. They sit and talk about their “hypothetical situations.” The tale comes together then and tragically comes apart. We lose all hope that justice will be served in one situation and that romance will win out in the other. And yet, as a testament to the complexity of the film and its characters, both Judah and Cliff end up happier in the end than they were in the beginning.

I don’t want to get too much more into the fine and subtle movement of the film. It’s better if you watch it. But I will cite Crime and Misdemeanors as a terrific movie for book-lovers and creative writers to enjoy, admire, and learn from. (By the way, did you notice the cast? Wow!): Highly recommended.

PS: Melinda and Melinda (2004), Deconstructing Harry (1996), and Broadway Danny Rose (1984) will yield similar rewards, even if the punches don’t land quite as hard. Of course, I’d suggest just about any of Allen’s films. I’m a fan, in case you hadn’t noticed.

Of further interest…

10 Questions for Woody Allen: TIME Magazine.


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Milk Delivers

16 12 2008

milkBest advice I can give anyone is to run out and see Milk as soon as possible. Sean Penn as gay-rights activist Harvey Milk delivers possibly his finest performance in a carreer filled with great performances. Gus Van Sant’s direction is brilliant. He brings the 1970s to life with actual street footage from the era and news snippets of Walter Cronkite, a very young Tom Brokaw, and the always tragically silly Anita Bryant. Milk’s journey is told in fictional style with documentary brush strokes, all done seamlessly and with the full weight of history to foreshadow events. Harvey Milk may very well have been in the prime of his life when he was mercilessly gunned down. He was more than a gay-rights activist, he was a businessman turned San Francisco politician and the first openly gay man to be elected to public office in America in 1977. The struggle for gay rights, although inherently omnipresent, takes a back seat to Milk’s personal drama and the journey of some of the other characters (even the evil Dan White, well played by versatile actor Josh Brolin). But it’s clear that Milk and “the cause” are inseparable, a cause larger than any individual personal journey, a sentiment that the film echoes in near-perfect pitch. This is one of those rare films that you will want to see twice: Highly recommended.

Of further interest…

The Times of Harvey Milk (intro to 1984 Documentary).

Gus Van Sant: Elephant.

 


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Philosophy is for Everyone!

11 12 2008

Philosophy Now Nov/Dec 2008

The November/December 2008 issue of Philosophy Now is dedicated to the topic of utopias, and it has one of my articles in it.

I’ve written a brief review of an obscure Kurt Vonnegut short story “2 B R 0 2 B.”

Yippee!

Check it out here if you like….


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Creepy Noir

8 12 2008

I have kind of a love-hate relationship going with the Independent Film Channel (IFC). Sometimes they air some terrific stuff, and other times they show some real crap (over and over again). But when they’re on, they’re on. This weekend, IFC aired The Honeymoon Killers, a creepy 1969 movie based loosely on the true story of Ray Fernandez and Martha Beck, who met through a newspaper ad in the late 1940s and set about scamming and killing single, desperate women just to steal their meager savings. Director Leonard Kastle filmed it in black-and-white, giving the picture a cold and disturbing atmosphere. Shirley Stoler as the obese Martha and Tony LoBiano as the dashing Ray were both brilliant and well cast. In real life, Ray and Martha were fried at Sing Sing in 1951. This film was so unsettling it creeped me out for the entire weekend. (The first murder, performed with a simple claw hammer and a pair of stockings, was surprisingly realistic, and Kastle didn’t hold anything back.) Interesting note: A little research revealed that Martin Scorsese was the original director, but was fired after a few days for taking too long to set up shots. I’m not sure how much influence he had on the overall tone of the picture, but it would seem almost inevitable that he had some. Highly recommended.

And when they’re off, they tend to be way off. On Sunday night, IFC showed Last Man Standing, the truly horrible Bruce Willis and Christopher Walken film about a bunch of 1930s thugs in a dumpy little Texas border town all killing each other. For who cares why. With every cliche imaginable. With voiceover. Ugh. It almost seemed as if IFC had intentionally programmed a fine example of noir against a lousy one. This is how it is done, and this is how it should never be done. Totally not recommended.


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Great Canadian Writer Guys

5 12 2008

Robert J. Sawyer is more than just a terrific sf writer and a brilliant editor (hey, he did publish my first two novels, after all), he’s also a great guy, which is why I’m so pleased that the TV series based on his novel Flash Forward is going so well. Courtney B. Vance and Jack Davenport have been added to the cast. (Rob just announced this on his blog.) Flash Forward the novel explores some interesting questions, such as, what would we do if we could get tantalizing glimpses of our own futures? How would this affect fate and free will and all that we know to be true about our lives and the world? It will be really interesting to see what kinds of questions the TV series asks. But heck, read the novel, if you haven’t already, before the series comes out: Highly recommended.

Not to be overlooked is another fine Canadian writer, Corey Redekop, and his novel, Shelf Monkey. This is a book written for and about book lovers. For all of you who have ever felt passionate about literature and your favorite authors, this book is a must-read. You might think that a book about books and readers would almost have to be boring. Forget it! Corey pieces together an interesting plot revolving around TV personality Munroe Purvis (an Oprah-like pusher of crappy books) and the book-wormish, self-proclaimed “Shelf Monkeys” (most of them working in a bookstore, a-hem) who simply cannot let go of their absolute hatred for Purvis. I don’t want to give away too much of the story because it will take a lot of the fun out of reading this book. The surprises are worth the price of admission. There is a good bit of social satire, and the characters are exceptionally well drawn. At one point in the novel, two of the major players are talking about literature, and Aubrey asks Thomas:

“What makes a good writer, in your opinion?”
“Style, character, plot, and the ability to abandon all three when necessary.”
“And what makes a bad writer?”
“Same thing.”

Corey’s book is filled with these sorts of keen observations and witticisms, all kinds of fun literary references, and, well, style, character, plot, and the ability to abandon all three when necessary, in the best possible way. I had a chance to meet Corey this year, finally, at the Canadian Book Expo. He lives in Winnipeg (a city that I’ve grown very fond of) and blogs at Shelf-Monkey. His novel? Highly recommended.


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I Hate Sis Ain’t Pretty…

29 11 2008

But it sure does play well on screen in Jonathan Demme’s new film Rachel Getting Married. This movie has plenty of fire. There is no love lost between sisters Rachel (getting married) and the younger Kym (released from drug rehab for the wedding). Kym has always been the tortured, troubled, selfish sister, while Rachel is the good daughter who made all the right choices and personal sacrifices. On the surface, the film is about the wedding and the typical sibling rivalries, but as the story unfolds we see the inner workings of a family that has suffered an unimaginable tragedy and is doing its best to recover and survive. The war between the sisters is fierce and gut-wrenching once you realize what is boiling just beneath the surface. Anne Hathaway is terrific as Kym, as is Rosemarie DeWitt as Rachel. Deborah Winger, in her limited screen time, makes the most of it and has at least one outstanding moment. Bill Irwin as peace-maker dad puts in a remarkably strong performance and is the quiet star of the film. Demme (the same guy who brought us Silence of the Lambs, Philadelphia, The Manchurian Candidate) does an admirable job with this much smaller, tragic story, somehow leaving us with a sense of hope. It’s an excellent film, even if at times over-indulgent and slow (the wedding itself, like most real weddings, drags on way too long): Recommended.

 

 

The Old Maid (1939) starring Bette Davis and Miriam Hopkins, is a truly great film based on an Edith Wharton novel (and a Pulitzer Prize winning Zoe Akins play). I mention it here because it’s basically about sisters doing rotten stuff to each other. (How can you go wrong? It’s still a hot theme almost 60 years later!) One of the things that makes this film ever-so-special is the knowledge that Davis and Hopkins hated one another in real life. It sure does come through on screen! Charlotte (played by Davis) has a child out of wedlock with Delia’s (played by Hopkins) ex-bo, poor Clem who dies in the Civil War before the child is born. When Delia finds out about this scandalous secret, she spills the beans out of jealousy and spite and destroys Charlotte’s impending wedding to Joe. You might need to stretch your imagination a bit to believe that the sisters actually get past all this and end up living together in the same house, with Charlotte allowing Delia to adopt her child. But those were simpler times. Today we’d see psychotherapy, acts of violence, and an appearance on the Jerry Springer Show. (Sigh.) Davis acts circles around Hopkins and there are some moments that are so breathtaking they’ll bring tears to your eyes. (In all fairness, Davis has the better role.) Director Edmund Goulding gives Davis plenty of space to act. It’s unfortunate that Davis never liked this film, especially since she won an Oscar for her performance, but most critics believe it’s because of her loathing for Hopkins. Check out the trailer; it’s way-cool. Highly recommended.


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NY Times Magazine

22 11 2008

I subscribe to the Sunday NY Times but don’t always scour it as thoroughly as I’d like to. As far as the Magazine insert goes, I usually skim it or don’t get a chance to read it at all. However, this past Sunday, the Magazine was exceptional and I ended up reading three great pieces that I’m going to recommend for those of you who love politics as I do.

The cover story, an interview with outgoing Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, had some candid and lively Q&A, including her thoughts about where democracy is going in the world and the “Bush agenda.”

Ron Suskind’s story, “Change,” looks at the final days of the Bush admin and the dawn of Obama’s. There’s some great insight here and historical perspective into how some political eras end and others begin.

For those of you who have been following politics for a while, how do you not love Howard Dean? Matt Bai interviews Dean in “The Other Winner” and lays out some fascinating facts about Dean’s grass roots party rebuilding and how his strategy paved the way for Obama’s success and the party’s rebound.

If you missed the 11/16 Magazine, it’s well worth reading in the library. Highly recommended.


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Reading Oscar

20 11 2008

I tend to get my hopes up before I begin reading a book that has won an award or landed great reviews. So when I picked up The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz, which comes with a laundry list of accolades, including the National Book Critics Circle Award, Times Book of the Year, New York Times Notable Book, and oh, by the way, a Pulitzer, my expectations were pretty high. I think it’s inevitable that a book can’t live up to that kind of praise, it’s almost too much to ask, and Oscar is no different. It’s a good book. In fact, it has its moments of greatness. Oscar is a terrific character and you must and will fall in love with him immediately. But Diaz doesn’t stick with Oscar as long as you want him to, and when he leaves for other territory the novel becomes less engaging and feels a bit cobbled together.

Don’t get me wrong. There are other fine characters and several story lines that will keep you interested and reading throughout. The prose is full of life and energy and surprises. But the story drags to varying degrees throughout the middle, even as Oscar tries to hold it together. Poor, gigantic Oscar, who cannot find love, although his heart aches endlessly for it. Poor, fat Oscar, a Dominican living among people who value sex and being sexy above life itself and he has never even been kissed let alone laid. Some people find living life far more difficult than leaving it behind, and that, in essence, is Oscar. As the book closes in on its climax, and as Oscar’s life of shame and pain closes in on him, here is where we find our sad hero:

“On the outside, Oscar simply looked tired, no taller, no fatter, only the skin under his eyes, pouched from years of quiet desperation, had changed. Inside, he was in a world of hurt. He saw black flashes before his eyes. He saw himself falling through the air. He knew what he was turning into. He was turning into the worst kind of human on the planet: and old bitter dork.”

Oscar is the heart of the novel and it is a tribute to Diaz, certainly, that Oscar’s long absences are felt so acutely by the reader. All of the high praise that dozens of critics have handed out are true. A vibrant narrative. A voice that is (as the NY Times describes it) “profane, lyrical, learned and tireless, a riot of accents and idioms coexisting within a single personality.” It’s Santo Domingo and Upper Manhattan and melodrama and a cultural explosion all at once, and the science fiction and fantasy references liberally tossed about are a delight. But it’s also a bit too scatter-shot and frustrating at just the wrong moments and for too long. Some of the characters are not all that fascinating. Even so, for its sheer power and inventiveness and wondrous, wondrous Oscar: Recommended.


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