The late Norman Mailer was one of the most important American writers in the 20th century who, despite what misgivings you may have about his vanity, arrogance, and odd sense of the masculine imperative, wrote some masterpieces. His novel, “Tough Guys Don't Dance", wasn't one of his master works, but it was a first-rate entertainment, a noirish murder mystery that combined Mailer's career long themes--the nature of courage, the search for knowledge through sexual encounters and violent challenges--with a wonderfully presented atmosphere and a cast of skewed, tortured, characters.
The tale of an alcoholic, would be writer who tries to recover from a black-out exactly how a woman's head showed up in his marijuana plant stash is an intoxicating read. A tale of improbable events and impossible characters made plausible by the poetry of Mailer's writing. As a film director, however, Mailer is quite awful, being someone with notions of how a film ought to look and how it should achieve its effects but with no idea how to get anywhere near the mark he set for himself.
The dialogue, acceptable in the context of the dark and brooding world of Mailer's novel, is preposterous here, revealing a tin ear for the rhythms of how people actually sound. Good actors seem stiff and embalmed, and bad actors come off as automatons. In a more forgiving light, one might say that his is an art film, an avant gard production that just happened to have some money behind it, but that would be wishful thinking. The movie is just odd and awful.
Friday, November 22, 2013
Wednesday, November 20, 2013
Jeff Beck : less is less
Occasional guitar genius Jeff Beck. |
Jeff Beck is a tiresome guitar player whose penchant for sparse noodling sends too many listeners, seduced by legacy and legend, into reveries about how "less is more" and the virtues of having a minimal palette of tones. Truth be told, less is merely less and a Jeff Beck performance means there will be huge, gaping spaces in an improvised section, while the guitarist waits for what seems like the random moment to lay another twist to the string. His band, particularly on the Live at Ronnie Scott's album, stays busy while the master awaits is riffing muse, laying down a carpet of funk with a fabric of high-register bass work, minimal drum work, and a variety of ethereal space chords emanating from the keyboards. John Cage had the notion that the audience need to sit in their impatient stews for some periods so they have a chance to listen to their own music (Zen/chance practices in music are more exciting theorized about than experienced firsthand) and the take away for me is that the point of going to a Jeff Beck concert is to confront his reputation and to wait for him to do something interesting. This is what the late critic Steve Esmedina called "boredom as aesthetic effect". Beck, I'm sure, intends other things, and thinks himself akin to Miles Davis, another musician who never burdened his solos with gratuitous technique. Davis, though, could build tension and, when required, fire on all cylinders and make it frantic, exciting, breathe taking. Beck does not do that. Decades go by and endless conversations refer to the genius of Beck and still, nothing happens at the address I was given. I understand that and we have, of course, is essentially subjectivities competing for dominance.
The matter isn’t whether Beck can play guitar. As a blues/rock guitarist who first came to American attention during the British invasion of the Sixties with the Yardbirds and later with his string of short-lived (but memorable) ensembles, Beck is a pioneer in matters of extending the vocabulary of an African American vernacular and incorporating elements of funk, jazz, reggae and fusion and rockabilly into his particular mix. He’s recorded quite a bit of music that still makes me turn my head and stare incredulously at the speakers; when he wasn’t being cheap with his playing and willing to lavish more in guitar bravado, his guitar work is of a whole piece.
Not just flashy solos, which were, in fact, the least of Beck’s best art, but of control of tone color, splendidly, tasty fills in the interstices of his band’s alternately rocking or funky fury, attacks, flurries and elongated elaborations on the tremolo bar when your attention was otherwise engaged. What makes Jeff Beck a great guitarist (when he wants to show off) is that while his compatriots were concentrating on the number of notes they could cram into a twelve-bar or sixteen bar phrase, he did what Miles Davis did with is trumpet after he ventured from the fast, rapid, conspicuously virtuoso inclined sphere of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie and instead pared back his soloing to what was essential and made musical sense.
While others dominated their songs and performances with fusillades that eventually became a comfortable rut, Beck filled his accorded solo slots with the gift of space, fewer notes, high register bends, and unique tunings. I put forth his first two albums The Jeff Beck Group and Beckola in evidence and will skip ahead to his fusion release Wired and still later Beck’s Guitar Shop as prime examples. That sweet, discerning blend of flash, taste, discretionary speed, off-center attack and an uncanny mastery of electric guitar volume are marvels for future generations to listen to if they wonder what all fuss was about. These weren’t records by an artist still making his reputation. Presently, his reputation is made, his name now a brand, his work too frequently a stylized snore. Again, I wish Beck would indulge the less savory side of his musical nature and burn a hole in the state no one can leap over.
That, though, is part of the fun of discussing musicians and their work. It just seemed to me that Beck has refined his style over the decades to the point that he is drastically essentialist in the tweaking of his playing; all the speedy, distorted, flashier bits are missing in large measure in the interest of a more mature purity, Artists, as they age, do that, but I think Beck's ruthless reappraisal of his chops has, for me, left much of what he's recorded sound empty. I would love to hear Beck rave it up again, to cram a lot of notes into a measure and make them stick, like he used to.
Saturday, November 16, 2013
Ender does not end here
Ender's Game, a movie based on the novel by
the currently controversial Orson Scott Card (who is in the soup for not knowing when put a cork in it), is a decently executed
science fiction film, although I found Harrison Ford's unrelenting
scowl as the head of the planet's military command to be a bit
of a headache inducer. The furrows in his brow were deep enough to plant
crops in. Director Gavin Hood keeps this enterprise moving along well enough, explaining its fake historical
circumstances and contrived dream theory well enough , but there was
really no anticipation in the story line.
I hadn't read the novel and likely will not do so--I like my scifi on the screen where words don't matter--but I had a very good idea where this thing was going. Let me just say that with the Title and the plot's strong emphasis on battle simulations in preparation for war, the shocking twist was not a shock, twined or unwound. It is, you guessed it, a thinly disguised critique of militarism and war mongering. It's not Noam Chomsky, but the subtext has the benefit of being easily grasped, too easily perhaps. The state of Political Commentary isn't that much smarter than the barely concealed verities in Ender's Game. The flashy visuals, not a spoonful of sugar,make the medicine go down.
The ending was an expected and unsatisfying set for the sequel; the dissatisfaction lies not in the fact that story was unfinished by the end of the movie, but that far too many movies you take a risk on seeing are likely not intended to be stand alone entertainments but rather the installments of studios hope will be profitable franchises. The prevailing feeling is "here we go again", as you feel part of the masses, teased by gossip, speculation and all other manner of celebrity non-news , responding in Pavlovian fashion to a vague , if loud and flashy promise that you can relive the thrills you had over a cherished film from long, long ago. You may that particular memory from your own experience. Whatever the film, though, all of us know, in an unguarded moment of self-honesty, that those thrills are not coming back.
I hadn't read the novel and likely will not do so--I like my scifi on the screen where words don't matter--but I had a very good idea where this thing was going. Let me just say that with the Title and the plot's strong emphasis on battle simulations in preparation for war, the shocking twist was not a shock, twined or unwound. It is, you guessed it, a thinly disguised critique of militarism and war mongering. It's not Noam Chomsky, but the subtext has the benefit of being easily grasped, too easily perhaps. The state of Political Commentary isn't that much smarter than the barely concealed verities in Ender's Game. The flashy visuals, not a spoonful of sugar,make the medicine go down.
The ending was an expected and unsatisfying set for the sequel; the dissatisfaction lies not in the fact that story was unfinished by the end of the movie, but that far too many movies you take a risk on seeing are likely not intended to be stand alone entertainments but rather the installments of studios hope will be profitable franchises. The prevailing feeling is "here we go again", as you feel part of the masses, teased by gossip, speculation and all other manner of celebrity non-news , responding in Pavlovian fashion to a vague , if loud and flashy promise that you can relive the thrills you had over a cherished film from long, long ago. You may that particular memory from your own experience. Whatever the film, though, all of us know, in an unguarded moment of self-honesty, that those thrills are not coming back.
Friday, November 15, 2013
PINK FLOYD'S LONG, TRUDGING MAGNIFICENCE
Rolling Stone has informed us that Pink Floyd, in order to celebrate the 40th Anniversary of the release of their admittedly brilliant album "Dark Side of the Moon, has invited fans to tune to their website this Sunday, March 24, in order to stream the record, in full. I can't help but think this is less the gift to fans than the band might think, since any committed fan of Pink Floyd likely already owns the album and has been listened to it relentlessly for decades; myself, I know precisely where every pop, skip and hiss occurs on my long lost vinyl copy. All told, this is one of those records that has been around for so long and has been played so often that I wish I could condemn it as nostalgia, but I can't. It is a brooding, moody, poetic and richly textured end-of-the the-dream concept album, a masterpiece of disillusion that rivals, I declare, T.S.Eliot and his beautifully distraught "The Wasteland".
There is in both the mesmerizing defeatism of their respective projects; the shoulder-shrugging and firm embrace of the will to live fully have never found better, more seductive expression, both poem, and album. Refreshing in the music and lyrics of Pink Floyd, as well, was a what I think is unmistakable for the working class; along among British Art Rockers, PF avoided verbal drag and double talking allusions and planted their narrations dead center in a streaming disgust with the mess men have made of the world; politicians and corporations for being such greedy, short-sighted exponents of the profit motive and the misery index, and the common people, for believing lies told them and willfully buying into a fantasy that will only kill them all, sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly. "Dark Side of the Moon" and "Wish You Were Here" were two endearingly burnished sides of the same dented coin, legitimate and remarkable expressions of a lightly toxic worldview.
Predictably, with commercial artists contractually obliged to produce new work on a corporation's schedule, they ran out of fresh things to say; later records tended to be as dreary as dour music is supposed to be. England has a tradition of hippie art-rockers going sour as they edge into their thirties; Barrett had the good sense to just break down and allow his legend to simmer on low boil for decades. It is an accomplishment that he has managed to be that footnote in the Pink Floyd saga that ABSOLUTELY NO ONE FAILS TO MENTION. I like that he his name persists on the band's name and legend with no effort on his part. His actual story is sad, though, and he would be the first example I would cite when arguing that drug taking without medical need is intellectually indefensible. Waters, though, stuck around, had his moment of glory in which truly great work was done, but he became a boring old cynic bemoaning variations of a faceless, grey, corporate England divorced from a romantically envisioned past. He reminds you of that great sex you had after a cocktail party where you fucked the fried liver out of your partner and then waking up and seeing who it was you were putting it to, or who was placing it in your personhood. Ugly recrimination followed rapidly and you wonder what was worth this current cramping of one's expressive style. Roger Waters never sang about that. Pink Floyd could have used more Tom Waits and Captain Beefheart and less Basil Bunting.
Although I am sick unto death of ever hearing this album again, "Dark Side of the Moon" is a keen and sufficiently angsty expression of a generation's loss of idealism. Their narcoleptic music and vaguely saddened ruminations, in fact, are an extended impression of a very bad drug crash, when the good vibes of acid and pot became overwhelmed by the critical burn-through of methamphetamines. The irony is that for a band that has lampooned, bemoaned and besmirched regimentation with their mirthless minimalism, their goal, with the live streaming, is to get the last three citizens of the planet who haven't purchased the disc to buy it, finally, and to become a nonconformist just as the rest of us have always been. Like-minded free thinkers.
Sunday, November 10, 2013
This Space: Kafka: The Years of Insight, by Reiner Stach
This Space: Kafka: The Years of Insight, by Reiner Stach:
"The problem with Kafka's fiction is that while in general the surface presents a generic world, recognisable even to those of us living a century later, the content is not familiar; it does not counsel the reader with wise observations on the human condition or provide practical information and descriptions of places for the reader to absorb and use in their lives; there isn't even a happy ending in sight. The only resort for the reader is critical: 'What do I make of this?'."
I would venture that Kafka's fiction "--does not
counsel the reader with wise observations on the human condition--" is exactly why it remains a literary art that
remains powerful and continues to resonate
nearly a century after his death. One can make a cogent case for
the primary mission of literature to be one of relaying stories of how
characters, heroes and heroines both, meet their challenges head on and come
out the other side, changed, but wiser and more or less intact, but I fear the
rhetoric he would use would be the kind of religious insistence which,however
presented and finely parsed with philosophical what-ifs and teleological
what-nots, maintain rather simply that fiction , fabulation of any kind, be
instructive.
That would be instructive in the ways of a culturally
dominant habit of pervasive rationalization that there is a purpose to the way
things are, that each trial is a test of faith and character (judged against a
vague, abstruse creed) and that the individual is required to keep faith and
entrust their well being and souls to Church, State and Banks.
Kafka is an artist precisely he didn't have much for the
finely tuned , beautifully poetic rationalizations of one might term
"moral fiction"; he was rather obsessed, both as individual and as
writer making an aesthetic choice, to be true to his alienated, bleak, cruel
existence where attempts to cajole and seduce a person to look on the bright
side of things only intensifies that nothing makes sense and that existence is
cruel, amoral joke. His loyalty was to truth as he experienced it, and his fiction, splendid eviscerations of
folk tales and judgment past, makes a reader consider their feelings of similar
psychic destitution and do the work of
making something , something beautiful, truthful and meaningful, where nothing
existed before.
Mormons Offer Cautionary Lesson on Sunny Outlook vs. Literary Greatness - NYTimes.com
Mormons Offer Cautionary Lesson on Sunny Outlook vs. Literary Greatness - NYTimes.com:
I have met and still
know a number of superb poets and prose writers who are former Mormons.
Catholicism and Protestantism are very much older than Mormonism, and one
should note the massive influence Christianity had on European culture, and the
longevity and resilience of its imprint. A writer or poet, whether believer or
some form of alienated and rambunctious free thinker, couldn't but have their
moral, philosophical and aesthetic precepts formed somehow by the daily
pervasiveness of theological thinking; in any event, poets and writers and
playwrights and artists of all sorts were able to find nuance, exceptions,
ironies, tension within the Church's thinking.
It was generations of artists attempting to resolve the
conflict between what they were socialized to accept and a suppressed desire to
believe and do otherwise. One can cite their own examples here, but suffice it
to say that some sought reconciliation between the desire to rebel and a need
to believe in more mystical infrastructure, while others wandered off toward
spiritual beliefs more accommodating of a free spirit, and still others
rejected an afterlife and its laws altogether.
This conflict follows us to the New World, where it morphed
into something else all together, hence another discussion. Mormonism, a young
religion founded only in the 1820s, is not in an historical position to have
its writers struggle with their belief system with the result being a species
of arguably great art; Mormonism, in fact, seems more a parody of basic
Christian catechism than anything else.
The same may be said of Scientology, a legitimate religion, I suppose, but one whose tenets of faith seem more the subject of bad science fiction writing. Christianity, of course, was a mirroring of Greek and Roman mythology, with a vast reduction of gods and demigods, of course. I suppose it's only the natural progression of things that so much contemporary spiritual thinking seems inspired by dog eared paperbacks one finds in damp boxes on garage shelves or in bookstores where dust mites and mildew rule the roost.
The same may be said of Scientology, a legitimate religion, I suppose, but one whose tenets of faith seem more the subject of bad science fiction writing. Christianity, of course, was a mirroring of Greek and Roman mythology, with a vast reduction of gods and demigods, of course. I suppose it's only the natural progression of things that so much contemporary spiritual thinking seems inspired by dog eared paperbacks one finds in damp boxes on garage shelves or in bookstores where dust mites and mildew rule the roost.
Friday, November 8, 2013
Changing seats
Save your cash and skip the slow-moving, turgid, and criminally inane Thor: The Dark World. It improves over the first Thor film, but there is lethargy in all the action scenes. Nothing seems crisp or crucial in the physical battles, although there is some good CGI of London smashed to pieces by the invasion of the Dark Elves. Chris Hemsworth as Thor talks like a bad High School drama student who is trying to force his voice into a lower register--he sounds like he's trying to suppress a burp while he speaks--and there is a frown on his face throughout the film that makes him look as though someone gave him a shot of castor oil. Tom Hiddleson as Loki is inexplicable anyway you look at-- he fluctuates between glee, sorrow, and rage raggedly, scene to scene. Plus, he is incapable of not looking like Data from Star Trek: Next Generation. Anthony Hopkins as Odin is utterly disengaged from whatever is going on around him and appears rumpled and ready for a nap. At the same time, Natalie Portman, consistently the least charismatic actress I can think of, moves through this movie in a variety of self-loathing postures, as though in pain, realizing everyone she knows will see her in this expensive windup toy of a film.
A Thor movie could be entertaining if there was the right cast, director, and script, a crew that had a feel of the source material, i.e., the Marvel comic book, not the original Norse legend. This is an efficient, professional bit of filmmaking and does provide a moment or two of entertainment. Still, the cast is so indifferent--either phoning it in or gnawing the scenery--and the plot points so diffuse, distracted, and pitifully predictable, in blockbuster terms, that what we have is an expensive, noisy apparatus utterly without charm. What's missing is the grace, energy, and, yes, essential good humor and humanity of the original Kirby/Lee comic book tales. Jack Kirby had an extraordinary visual imagination, and a capable rendering of his version of Asgard could have been simply magnificent, magical even. I think a Thor movie could be entertaining if there was the right cast, director, script, and crew that had a feel of the source material, i.e., the Marvel comic book, not the original Norse legend. This is an efficient, professional bit of filmmaking and does provide a moment or two of entertainment. Still, the cast is so indifferent--either phoning it in or gnawing the scenery--and the plot points so diffuse, distracted, and pitifully predictable, in blockbuster terms, that what we have is an expensive, noisy apparatus utterly without charm. Barry has a point that what's missing is the grace, energy, and, yes, essential good humor and humanity of the original Kirby/Lee comic book tales. Jack Kirby had an extraordinary visual imagination, and a capable rendering of his version of Asgard could have been simply magnificent, magical even.
What they settled for were computerized variations of Shangra La from Lost Horizon. Worse, the make-believe city resembled a cross between Hearst Castle and an M.C.Escher painting. That, combined with the sluggish momentum this movie is barely capable of, is quite enough to make you calculate how much you worked to make money for the ticket you bought to see something that finally made you feel like a moron for seeing. What they settled for were computerized variations of Shangri La from Lost Horizon. Worse, the make-believe city resembled a cross between Hearst Castle and an M.C.Escher painting. That, combined with the sluggish momentum this movie is barely capable of, is quite enough to make you calculate how much you worked to make money for the ticket you bought to see something that finally made you feel like a moron for seeing. They've thrown a lot of things in the air for this juggling act, and too many things hit the stage they're playing on.
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It's not that I object to happy endings -- in this case, each of the characters played by Sam Jackson and Ben Affleck realize the exact nature of their wrongs and wind up doing the right thing by the world and themselves: The concentration of the events into one day snaps credulity, and while you're wondering whether this is an alternative universe where there are 76 hours to a day, the film drags way too much in critical areas. Jackson and Affleck are both quite good here. Still, in the crush of the events that are eating our protagonists up, there is too much reflection, self-examination, and fortuitous circumstance for the characters to redeem themselves. The irony is fine, but Affleck's flailing do-gooding at the end is a stretch, theatrical without being dramatic.
Like the film as a whole.
The good and bad of Brian De Palma
Brian De Palma is a film maker who covets the genius of other film makers, so much so that he reflexively duplicates their trade mark signature gestures as his own. This does occasionally result in some exciting film work, such as the staircase scene from "Battleship Potemkin" artfully crafted into De Palma's "The Untouchables".
More often, though, the unending of one homage after another homage, tributes, plagiarisms is not unlike a three year old's version of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich; they are virtually unwatchable, dripping with references, abrupt and illogical in their construction. De Palma, in fact, seems far too often to contrive a story just to insert his neurotic virtuoso camera tricks. He desperately wants to be taken seriously, to be considered an artist .and yet the best he can do is occasionally approximate the contours of another film maker's inspiration. No can really watch "Blow Out" and not think of the two superior films that inspired it, "Blow Up" and Francis Coppola's ingenious Americanization of the film, "The Conversation"; both those film makers had an idea of what the trying to do. The Untouchables and Casualties of War do not succeed as film narratives because De Palma had good scripts he hadn't the chance to alter, "improve" on, nor had the liberty to ignore. He is a director whose body of work would be more impressive if could reign in his desire to short-cut his way to genius. De Palma seems to select what scenes he would like to plagiarize and then fashion a movie around them; that would be an interesting technique if it had better results, but it doesn't.
Saying that De Palma's style is "post- modern pastiche” is a nice way of saying that this director hasn't an interesting idea of his own. The tradition has been, and stubbornly remains, that younger artists are influenced and inspired by older artists; the younger artists, those few who will rise as being notable on their own terms, will imitate and then mold their influences with their own experience and sensibility. It's a compelling dialectic. De Palma's work is a good example of what is fatally wrong with the post modern method: take various scenes from other film makers and then does a puppet show.
Carrie, Casualties of War, The Untouchables and Carlito's Way a few are indeed fine movies, but one can say that they are the least "De Palma like" in the body of work. He does good work when he sticks works in service to a good script; he had the potential of being a very good "Hollywood hack", an underappreciated designation to those directors who take assignments and produce powerful movies that resists fashion and politics.
Perhaps he should have aspired to be Robert Aldrich rather than Alfred Hitchcock. De Palma revealed technical virtuosity, yes, but unlike those he admires, he could translate his personal quirks and issues into a compelling art. Scarface is a classic merely because it is glutted burrito of excess; true to a post modern nature, one cannot decide if it is intended as parody or critique. I doubt De Palma knew either, as the increasing extremes of debauched sex, violence and vulgarity achieves not catharsis but rather the opposite, apathy. The last few minutes, the climatic shoot out with Sonny's invitation to "say hello to his little friend", is wonderful, of course, but it is the only thing in the film worth talking about these decades later. It is simply bad movie made memorable solely because it was so expensive and garnish.
Casualties of War is one of DePalma's best films, a straight forward and powerfully told morality tale, highlighted with notable performances from Michael J.Fox and Sean Penn. De Palma has always been a master of moving the camera in virtuoso turns (or rather, someone who has mastered the virtuoso camera turns of others, i.e. Hitchcock, Eisenstein, et al), but he is too often a lousy story teller, replacing a tricky sensationalism for plausibility. Here, he gets the combination right, a crucial issue at hand--at what point do liberators fighting for an Essential Good become worse than the evil they think they're fighting?-- the right script , the right actors, a balanced trifecta that compels the would be maestro to keep his film making in balance as well.
There is not a wasted scene, not a gratuitous cut or splice to hijack this movie's power. Michael J.Fox does a credible job as a soldier with religious convictions that are in conflict with his Mission, who's perimeters, he finds, are being improvised and diminished, and Sean Penn is stunning as hyper-macho team leader whose loyalty for the good of the men under his command changes from Good Soldier to Concentrated Evil; his sense of morality is shattered and ground to dust and there is a gleaming insanity just behind those radiating blue eyes. What additionally comes into an articulate focus are De Palma's views on violence towards women at the hands of warped men. Rather too often in films, women seemed little more than witless innocents or scheming, sulking whores who were engineering their violent ends due to a variety of self-scheming schemes; leeches, blood suckers, vampires, debilitating things to be poked, shot, prodded with blunt instruments, drills, knives.
The director, a gifted technician with a conspicuous desire to sit among the greats in the Auteur Pantheon, seemed to have issues with women, issues that seemed to find only extreme resolutions. The ambivalent treatment of the misogyny made you wonder whether DePalma was an inept moralist who couldn't make his movies perform both as entertainments and moral inquiries, or if he was merely interested in the thrill of seeing women abused by disgruntled men. With Casualties of War, the focus turns the churning culture of men in war time, on a band of soldiers who recreate and embrace their loyalty only to one another in the field to the tragic exclusion of all else. DePalma lines up the scenes of escalating violence and decreasing reason, until Penn's character offers up a lone Vietnamese women for his men to rape, offered up like a cash reward for a job well done; this is more than a melodramatic turn according to a prefigured script, but an effective, disturbingly presented result of group thinking. The issues aren’t nuanced considerations of good versus evil and what appropriate and punishments should be meted out--it is a blunt, plain truth, the inflicting of pain by the powerful against the weak. This problematic director for once gets that across forcefully, artfully, unambiguously.
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Writing at Salon.com, Louis Bayard turns in a cute piece defending that barnyard stinker Scarface, mustering up what reads like a strained enthusiasm for that movie's grinding, loud and bloody imposition on the senses. It's perfectly fine to find something interesting to talk about in films that otherwise stink on ice, such as the controlled formalism King Vidor gives to the Ayn Rand's proto-fascist film version of her novel The Fountainhead;the ridiculous politics and Vidor's visual elegance make the film watchable , not a little campy. It's a quality worth commenting on further. Bad is bad, though, and Bayard's love of the egregious Brian DePalma film cannot quite get out of the drive way. It's an old space-filling trick for a pop culture wonk to take up the case of a commonly derided example of mass-art and argue the hidden or forgotten virtues therein.
Lester Bangs was brilliant at inverting commonplace complaints and making the case for bands that would otherwise be swept off the historical stage, and time has shown that he was right as often as not, noticeable in his early raves for Iggy and the Stooges and the MC-5. But the trick is a stock ploy now, and the reversals of fortune have become a splintered, ossified rhetoric, and this defense of Scarface doesn't carry the weight to make what has to be Brian DePalma's most elephantine, graceless, absurdly baroque film into anything resembling a watchable entertainment. Even the fabled violence and allegedly "operatic" style, over the top as they are, no longer , if they ever did, jolt, shock or make us consider the effects of mayhem on the viewer, nor does it make us contemplate the nature of violence in American culture at large. All the other virtues, as intrinsic critiques of American greed, the cult of the individual, the flesh-eating glee of unconstrained capitalism, are all there, surely, but these elements are less examinations of causes of real world ills than they are pretexts for the leaden DePalma show piece stylistics where he see the director , again, mashing together camera strategies he's lifted from directors who work with a steadier hands.
Steady DePalma isn't, and Scarface drags and seems interminable despite its reputation for vulgarity and grizzly gun play. It just goes on and on and on still until the sheer tedious weight of the thing mashes you into the seat. One might say something of Al Pacing’s flame-throwing performance of Tony Montana, and here it is; even Oscar Winners can be wretched when left to their own devices, and Pacino without a good director or a decent script might as well be an antsy house cat clawing up the furniture.
Wednesday, November 6, 2013
Superman Puts the Zod On Batman
There is a bit of wondering going on about the role Kryptonite (the fictional substance that is Superman's weakness) will play in the Man of Steel sequel, tentatively titled Superman v. Batman. The thinking seems to be that the two characters will eventually duke it out, with Batman employing the special K as an equalizer in face of Superman's obvious physical advantage. I'd prefer it if the filmmakers found another angle to bring these two men together. I share the opinion that Superman defeats Batman, period, no explanations, no conditions, no excuses.
The "Batman v Superman" name is a working title only, and there is NO NEED to have these two characters fight. We can leave the Frank Miller tale where it belongs, in DC's "Elseworlds" sagas and let these two men meet under more realistic circumstances. In any event, even with kryptonite, Superman would likely win in a heartbeat. His skill set, ie, powers, are too many and overwhelmingly superior to Batman's skills and expertise. It would just strain credulity and lessen the reinvigorated Superman brand. More interesting, intriguing and with greater plot potential and character development would be to have the two heroes circle each other with suspicion, each considering the other as an abomination and contrary to everything each of them stands for. And, as the plot's crisis mount, the two find themselves in common cause and discovers that each has abilities and skills that come in handy in the fight against evil. This way we can have Batman's using his skills in detection and strategy with more purpose, and we get to see Superman be super against a foe, we assume, who can give him a fight worthy of his strength.
On the matter of Kryptonite, let me add that that the filmmakers would be wise to just get rid of. I always resented the fact that the most powerful being in the universe could be rendered weak and eventually killed with a mere radioactive rock. It doesn't do any good to hypothesize alternative theories around this; Superman is a character who is able to withstand immeasurably destructive cosmic forces and it is irrational for a hero of such heroic resilience to quite suddenly lose his strength and commence to perish because of a rock emitting a particular kind of radiation. It has never, never been plausible, even considering how insanely implausible (albeit entertaining) his comic book world is.
Kryptonite is, and always has been, a fast exit for writers who hadn't the imagination to create better, more demanding perils for Superman to face. It had gotten to the point that seemingly every two-bit punk and shoplifter had a chunk of the green stuff in reserve in case Super tried to interfere with their acquisition of ill-gotten goodies. We have to consider as well two other inconsistencies with the fictional rock; (1). If a rock emits radiation powerful enough to weaken and eventually kill the otherwise invulnerable Man of Steel, why have humans, in most of Superman's 75 years, been able to handle the substance without harm. This was a glaring inconsistency, an issue unresolved because the writers wanted human villains, be they punks, technologized billionaires, or mega-powered bad guy, to be able to handle the material to foil Superman and then move on with their agenda. It's a cheat in the narrative art.
By rights, humans should burst into flames and scream something horrible before there is nothing but a black scorch mark on the ground where they once stood. Kryptonite should have been killing humans all along.
(2). Why has it seemed that every single chunk of Kryptonite landed on Earth? Over the many decades that I've read Superman, it has always seemed that the kryptonite was much, much too plentiful. Even in the comics, the universe is a very big place and it would seem only the smallest, nearly unmeasurable amount of K would crash to earth. What I am basically arguing is that Superman's only weakness should be someone with superior strength, skills, intelligence. The Kryptonite trump card has got to end. And DC should run another Dark Knight novel with an alternative ending--Batman picks a fight with Superman and Big Blue, annoyed, goes Full Zod on him. If you want some of Superman, you're gonna get some of Superman. As they say, you mess with the bull, you get the horn.
Sunday, November 3, 2013
Sound, fury, cliché! Lazy pundits “double down” on “game-changing” “narratives” - Salon.com
Sound, fury, cliché! Lazy pundits “double down” on “game-changing” “narratives” - Salon.com:
'Thomas Frank, writing in Salon, does a neat job of collecting and arguing the uselessness of cliches and other forms of verbal filler when it comes to the discussion under way on cable tv's political talk shows.
I remember a night watching the old Keith Olbermann show on MSNBC where I heard he, author Richard Wolf and Washington Post columnist Gene Washington have a wonderful time saying "double down" to one another , in rapid succession. Conversations, even ones stressed by tv segment time constraints, are based on rhythm and cogent phrasing to be understood at first listen; the relentless repetition of the odious "double down" rendered the topic of the discussion all but incoherent to my ears, not an easy thing to do since I am someone who listens to what others are saying.
Gone was the showy outrage over whatever the latest GOP happened to be at the time; what replaced it was a verbal circle jerk that sounded like it involved the odious Kentucky Chicken offering, also named the Double Down. The sandwich was two thick,greasy chicken breasts and lots and lots and lots of cheese, bacon and assorted other bringers of cardiac complication. The panel on Olbermann's show sounded like they were slipping into a Food Coma, murmuring for more Double Downs before the Lights Went Out.
'Thomas Frank, writing in Salon, does a neat job of collecting and arguing the uselessness of cliches and other forms of verbal filler when it comes to the discussion under way on cable tv's political talk shows.
I remember a night watching the old Keith Olbermann show on MSNBC where I heard he, author Richard Wolf and Washington Post columnist Gene Washington have a wonderful time saying "double down" to one another , in rapid succession. Conversations, even ones stressed by tv segment time constraints, are based on rhythm and cogent phrasing to be understood at first listen; the relentless repetition of the odious "double down" rendered the topic of the discussion all but incoherent to my ears, not an easy thing to do since I am someone who listens to what others are saying.
Gone was the showy outrage over whatever the latest GOP happened to be at the time; what replaced it was a verbal circle jerk that sounded like it involved the odious Kentucky Chicken offering, also named the Double Down. The sandwich was two thick,greasy chicken breasts and lots and lots and lots of cheese, bacon and assorted other bringers of cardiac complication. The panel on Olbermann's show sounded like they were slipping into a Food Coma, murmuring for more Double Downs before the Lights Went Out.
Saturday, October 26, 2013
Hope for the Quentin guy?
On the subject of" the film Pulp Fiction", I will say again that I think that
film is a masterpiece, sheer inspiration in ways of writing, editing,
acting. Everything that Tarantino does in the film is fresh and
alive, a lively recasting of venerable Hollywood genre. The essential
problem is that he uses the same tact over and over; directors are
allowed to repeat certain things they do, since that is the essence of
having a style. But the point of having an identifiable style is being
able to do different and unexpected things within the recognizable
framework.
Howard Hawks, John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock and auteurs
too numerous to mention made movies which are praised for being individually
stylish and avoiding being declining versions of earlier work. What attraction is how a director or an author's style is adapted toward the story at hand and the genre specifications that frame the narrative; if everything is working the way it ought to, a viewer or reader loses track of stylistics and suspends their proverbial disbelief.
A competently managed style eases the audience through the "fourth wall" and engages them in the story. Tarantino has it reversed, a condition not unlike what plagues a two generation of able fingered rock guitarist, where the structure is meant to serve the flashy pyrotechnics. What Tarantino repeats himself, in a succession of films, that threaten to downgrade his method from "style" to mere shtick. Audaciousness quickly becomes an indulgent rut an artist can't climb out of.
A competently managed style eases the audience through the "fourth wall" and engages them in the story. Tarantino has it reversed, a condition not unlike what plagues a two generation of able fingered rock guitarist, where the structure is meant to serve the flashy pyrotechnics. What Tarantino repeats himself, in a succession of films, that threaten to downgrade his method from "style" to mere shtick. Audaciousness quickly becomes an indulgent rut an artist can't climb out of.
I
would argue that virtually all of Tarantino's movies are reboots, in his
case , the rebooting of a genre, be they crime stories, samurai tales, a
war film, a western. Doubtless he'll resurrect the Hollywood musical,
do a spy film and present us with super hero movie.
Those genre revivals, though, needn't be the over packed, eager to
please student projects his last three films have been. As he did with
his wonderful adaptation of Elmore Leonard's crime novel "Rum Punch" in
the form of "Jackie Brown", Tarantino has the ability to let the tale
advance without the worrying , hovering , obvious obsession to make the
scene more clever than it needs to be. Many were disappointed when"JB "
came out because it wasn't another "Reservoir Dogs" or "Pulp Fiction"; I
liked the way he scaled back his style, letting Leonard's plot unwind,
allow the characters to have breathing room in the film space they
inhabited, letting the conversation ring stylish, idiomatic and true.
What would be interesting is if Tarantino became bored with his established approach and challenged himself. None of this means that QT needs to stop being the QT we were first attracted too--genre jumper, dark humorist, writer of quotable dialogue. What it means is that there is a wish that he soon acquires the most important trait any artist with serious ability can apply to a project he or she is working on, the sense of knowing when to stop, of knowing when enough is enough.
What would be interesting is if Tarantino became bored with his established approach and challenged himself. None of this means that QT needs to stop being the QT we were first attracted too--genre jumper, dark humorist, writer of quotable dialogue. What it means is that there is a wish that he soon acquires the most important trait any artist with serious ability can apply to a project he or she is working on, the sense of knowing when to stop, of knowing when enough is enough.
Wednesday, October 9, 2013
Teen Age Waste Land
I was a guitar obsessive for years over a slew of players--Larry Coryell, Leslie West, Ritchie Blackmore -- and there were parents, friends and the less friendly alike who thought that I would be better off with a more purposeful hobby. Building ships in bottles,say, or collecting bottle caps with cork linings.But I was in my teens and early twenties, after all, and matters of family, work, sobering up , and career change would eventually consume the time I would otherwise have spent waxing on , 24/7, about my favorite guitarists.
In the meantime, I gloried in the fretwork of the string bending maniacs I called heroes, I read all their interviews, I bought whatever biographies were published, I owned each album these guitarists released in bands or as soloists, and my various apartments , through the years, were filled with the galvanic crash of frantic guitar music. Notes swarmed like bees over the lights. I was a fan, again, an obsessive, caught in the grip of having to have it all. I was also growing up and becoming slowly, faintly, conspicuously bored with my efforts to be definitive in my peculiar music world. I wanted something more. A life, perhaps. Some are not as lucky.
The sad part of the story is that I know some fellows, from a variety of circumstances, who are my age, late forties, and rattle on about their musical agendas at the drop of a beret. I did an interview with Ozzie Osborn in the early eighties for a weekly when Black Sabbath were coming through town, and an acquaintance named Roy couldn't get over the fact that I was the undeserving son-of-bitch among his associates who'd received an audience with his Ozziness.Roy complimented on this fact, saying that I must be something special to get the interview --"You met Ozzie, Man, that's doesnt jus happen, bro, you met Ozzie, I mean , The Oz, the god-damned Oz shook your hand , bro..."-- and then would kneel , valet style. Of course, being a young asshole myself, I got a kick out of that, but he kept it up for weeks, months, months turned into years, a decade passed, friends got married, had kids, other friends died of many different things, life became full and complicated, and close to twenty years later, around the time I turned forty, I was in the local market when Roy turns up in the aisle pushing a cart, thick around the middle, hair long, grey and thinning.
"Hey, how's the Oz man" was the first thing he said. I said I was okay, and after the expected pleasantries, he asked me what I thought of Randy Rhodes, Osborne's guitarist who was killed in a plane wreck. Not much, I said, I liked Van Halen better.
"But Randy played with Ozzy, man" he said," and you met Ozzy. Where's that at? Randy Roades played behind Oz and he could..."
Scary.
Sunday, October 6, 2013
YES, ANOTHER SLAM ON THE GRIM GUS JONATHAN FRANZEN, WHO CANNOT STOP WRINGING HIS HANDS
The Guardian continues to give Jonathan Franzen novelist room to vent; this week he opines at length that modern life is horrible, awful, far, far inferior to the good old days when he was young and the internet was only a dream fools had after a tequila binge.
I was born in 1952, and 'though being somewhat older than Franzen, I
think he's become a tiresome, humorless prig who views modern life
through a filter that renders repetitive results. It's a natural
instinct to resent and resist change, but truly smart and creative
people cease with a protest that will not be heeded and adopt to the
changes times and technology have brought us.
Often enough, the writers,
poets and playwrights and publishers and book retailers who embrace the
means available to them find themselves doing more interesting work; it
means that they are engaged with the world that swirls about them and
are fearless enough to interrogate shifting assumptions and remain
relevant to readers who, I think, like to read writers with stylish
prose styles wax poetic on the doings of human contradiction and
convulsion.
Me, I love the internet, and I haven't had to give up the
things I love, ie, literature, movies, poetry, jazz and blues, writing.
The social sphere has been changing for the last 30 years, and I prefer
being in on the conversation. Franzen continues to mumble about his
fabled good old days, he continues to rue the dawning of the 60s and all
the decades since. What a pathetic sight, a premature elder alone in a
room with the shades drawn, the floor littered with crushed party hats
and shriveled balloon skins. It was a great party, Jonathan, but it's
over. Much fun and sadness has transpired since then. Did you miss all
that.?
Saturday, October 5, 2013
Holy Fucking Shit
If you've been thinking that the satirical web site The Onion has been more strident and less funny in their lampooning of American mores, you're not alone. Slate's Farhad Manjoo describes their busier, faster, louder, more extreme version in an article in Slate. It's a good dissection of a funny magazine in the process of losing what makes it funny. For me, the Onion peaked shortly after the 9-11 attack, when the web site called their mock-coverage of the catastrophe "HOLY FUCKING SHIT!" It was a brilliant and angry poke in the eye at the media that tries to give a dramatic reading to events however inane or tragic they happen to be; there was no convenient narrative axiom like "America Under Attack" with which to make unfolding events barely comprehensible in an entirely false light. I pulled up the Onion , wondering how a site dedicated to the idea that there is nothing too cruel or horrible in human cruelty that cannot be made fun of, would react to what seemed like the end of the world. React they did, and I laughed, a hard, extended laugh, an hysterical series of gulping guffaws and belches that left me breathless, near tears. The Onion cut away a veneer and and gave us a headline that was hysterical , stupified and terrified with the revealed truth that suddenly, brutally, absolutely we thought we knew for certain mattered. The Onion took the whole shooting match.
Friday, October 4, 2013
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The Atlantic a month ago ran a pig-headed bit of snark-slamming prog rock as "The Whitest Music Ever, "a catchy bit of clickbait...