Apologies & Oscars

An apology, Gentle Readers, for my absence.  Between the holidays and the beginning of the new semester here at Very Small College, I have been a busy little bee.  Also, I haven’t read much that was worth discussing--mainly fluff.  Mindless fare which is fine for lulling me to sleep at night, ‘cuddled doon’ in my fleece sheets and goosedown comforter.  It’s not great, however, for semi-intelligent discussion with nebulous blog-readers.  I have been thinking of you, however, and so I dispense with the sorries and jump right into one of my favorite times of year: Oscar Season.

I am back to enjoying it in a modest way, after some years of burnout following my time at Very Distinguished University in the heart of Entertainmentland.  So I am attempting to see all the major contenders, and I shall try to redeem myself in my friend Danny’s Oscar pool (one year I got all the winners wrong.  ALL OF THEM.  He’s offered to start an anti-award with my name on it.  Oh, the shame).  I just wish this weren’t the year of White Man Problems.  A little diversity, please.  So let's begin with the one nod to diversity, shall we?

1) Selma.  It's really good.  It is not the Best Picture of the year, but it is pretty damn solid.  I am unconvinced that it is a great film, as such, but it is an important film, and certainly one that I hope makes its way into high school curricula across the nation (regardless of whether the movie wasn't nice enough to white people in power...REALLY?).   The march-cum-riot is heartbreaking and visceral, as it should be.  It's not needlessly gory, but it doesn't pull any punches, and the majority of the violence feels emotional, rather than the physical violence we've become immune to in films. 

As a movie, it has some problems.  I took issue with the sound, of all things.  There is one particular moment near the end, during the triumphant march (really, do I need to yell “Spoiler alert?”  It’s history, people!), when you see the actors singing “We Shall Overcome.”  But it’s overdubbed by a reedy modern folk song.  That’s not what I wanted to hear; I wanted a cacophony of voices joining together in recognition of a moment.  The music I wanted came at the end of the credits, and it’s a recording from the Smithsonian of the Selma workers singing together.  It’s scratchy, and it’s off-key-ish, and it’s authentic and very moving.  That’s the music I want to see over black and white footage of the march, not something designed to play on radio. 

I wasn’t crazy about some of the director’s choices, but overall it’s very good.  David Oyelowo is excellent, and I would rather have seen him nominated for Best Actor than the film up for Best Picture.  He’s bulked up a bit to play MLKJr, but if you like 'em a little slimmer, he’s incredibly foxy in Kenneth Branagh’s As You Like It (terrible film, BTW).   His MLK has a lot going on behind his eyes, and he truly owns the quiet moments of the film. 

One of the movie's strongest points was its emphasis on the politics behind the march.  People in power kept pushing MLK to broker a deal, to give something in order to gain support, to meet “The Man” halfway.  And the refusal to do so was impressive; his non-violence movement was already working with so little, the film made you recognize the insult of being asked to give something up when nothing is being accorded to the movement in the first place (does that run-on make sense?).  These people can't play give and take: they have nothing left to give.  It's a new way (for me) to look at the specific politics of this one moment, and I found it thought-provoking.

2) The Imitation Game.  A better film, overall, as a film, than Selma.  Guess which one I think more people should see, however?   Sorry, Sexyman Cumberpants.

World War II.  Bletchley Park, England.  A gathering of brilliant men convene to attack Enigma, the unbreakable cipher the Germans are using to encode their communications.  Enter Alan Turing, antisocial (likely autistic) mathematical genius who invents the first computer to break the code and win the war.  For a movie about a bunch of guys doing puzzles and sitting in an office failing to break a code, it's quite a riveting movie.  I held my breath waiting for a computer to finish its calculations; that’s impressive direction. 

The cast is fantastic, especially the young man playing adolescent Alan Turing, Alex Lawther.  He's really quite extraordinary.  And don't get me started on Benedict Cumberbatch, whom I adore.  The film is tightly plotted, builds some nice tension, and the denouement of Turing's career is heartbreaking.  I left the movie just muttering "WOW, that was good."

3) Birdman (or the Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance).  I’m still processing this one.  Part of me adores it.  It’s a smart, funny Michael Keaton as a Hollywood superhero has-been (and I love that the original Batman is playing down-at-heels Birdman) and his attempt to re-invigorate his career by writing, directing, and starring in a Broadway production of a Raymond Carver short story.  Needless to say, it all goes to hell.   

Cue conversations about theatre vs. film, artifice vs. art, relevance vs. tradition, being vs. seeming, etc., etc., etc.  Plus, Edward Norton plays the most obnoxious method actor/asshole in existence.  Can we please just give him the Supporting Actor statue now?  He’s GENIUS. 

But then there’s this odd layer of magical realism, or imagination, or psychosis, or something, and I’m just not sure it works.  Keaton’s character is telekinetic, and can fly, and hears the voice of his Birdman alter-ego in his head, and it’s just...off.  I would get really wrapped up in the drama of the characters, and then something magical would happen, and I would think “Oh, right.  We’re doing that here, too.”  I may have rolled my eyes at the screen once or twice.  A week after watching the film, I liked the magic a bit more, but it was vaguely irritating in the theatre...It is, however, really interesting.  And the acting is superb. 

Nota bene: Pop a Dramamine if you get easily motion-sick.  The film is practically all one take, and the camera swoops beautifully around and between the actors, only enhancing the claustrophobic feeling of backstage. It's a technically impressive feat, and really quite cool.  But it can be a little queasy-making if you have a soft tummy.

4) The Grand Budapest Hotel.  I know that Wes Anderson is supposed to be the disaffected voice of my generation, etc., etc. 
Sometimes he’s great and I love him (Rushmore, Bottle Rocket). And sometimes he’s twee and irritating and I want to punch him in the face (The Royal Tenenbaums, Moonrise Kingdom).  But oh my Lord, I love Grand Budapest!  I adore the sets, the costumes, the actors, the story, the dialogue, the weird kitschy fun of it.  It manages to be ridiculous and crazy and screwball and still be soulful and sad and moving.  That's a helluva balancing act to pull off.  I just love this movie.  And it’s one of the few out on demand (and HBO), so if you haven’t seen it yet, steal someone's HBOGo password!

5)  The Theory of Everything.  This Oscar Season is my year for oddly sexy British male eye-candy.  Sexyman Cumberpants, Ralph Fiennes, David Oyelowo, and now Eddie Redmayne.  Granted, not so much with the sexy as Stephen Hawking, but O for the awards show pictures! OK, now that my ovaries are under control (seriously, all I need to make it perfect is Tom Hiddleston, Jason Statham, and Clive Owen), let's talk about the movie.

...which is effing fantastic.  Redmayne's portrayal of Stephen Hawking is heartbreaking.  He's brilliant, and goofy, and funny, and he retains all of that as you watch his body disintegrate.  And talk about acting with your eyes: for the last two-thirds of the movie, his dialogue is either mumbled into near-incoherence, or delivered through computer. That's a rather extreme acting challenge.  

Furthermore, I can't even imagine how much pain Redmayne had to  be in after a day of filming; his body is agonizing to watch as Hawking's ALS takes its toll.  

The film is not so much about the science; it's more a biopic of Hawking's marriage to fellow scholar Jane Wilde (played by English rose-y Felicity Jones) as their marriage and Hawking's illness  takes its toll on both of them.  While the movie does a very credible job at explaining the strained but loving relationship between the two, I do wish there had been more science (yep, I said that.  In public. I want science.).  Hawking's brilliance is not only theoretical; it's also in how he has made physics accessible.  The physics in this movie isn't accessible, in fact, it's mostly ignored.  I just wish more effort had been made to highlight how such an incredible brain continued to affect the world, even as it became more and more trapped in its own universe.

And the "big" ones I've not seen: 
American Sniper.  Haven’t gotten there yet.  Not sure I can gird my loins tightly enough. 
Boyhood.  Haven’t seen it yet.  Fascinated by the idea; not sure if I’m anticipating something beyond the "let's-film-for-12-years" gimmick. 
Whiplash.  I desperately want to see this, but I missed it playing in local theatres.  (Now I'm starting to miss living in Entertainmentland.)  I adore J.K. Simmons, and  I’m pretty excited to watch him chew some scenery. Plus, jazz drums!!

 
So with what I've seen, I'm going with Selma for Picture, Eddie Redmayne for Actor, I haven't seen enough of the women but I quite liked Felicity Jones for Actress, Ed Norton or JK Simmons for Supporting, Keira Knightley for Supporting, and Richard Linklater for Director.  But what the hell do I know?  I'll be on my couch with the rest of the world, eating popcorn, waiting for Sexyman Cumberpants to photobomb someone, and yelling about how great Neil Patrick Harris's opening dance number is.  There IS an opening dance number, right, NPH??

Warning: Graphic Post

Graphic novels, that is.  

Oh, readers.  I have been reading SUCH good books lately. And I would like to thank a man I’ve never met: Dr. Mark Sample, Visiting Associate Professor of Digital Studies at Davidson College.  A few years ago, he taught a Graphic Novel course for George Mason University. Somehow I got my paws on an assignment he devised, and I trolled through his syllabus.  If you ever teach the graphic novel, use his tracing assignment: total genius.

For me, graphic novels are kind of hit-or-miss.  Some of them I love, adore, worship.  See Sandman, Maus, anything by Sean Tan.  Some of them, though, I find lacking.  I would rather read them in novel format, where there's a bit more ability to delve into character, or nuance...  See the Fables series (which I really wanted to love), Lost Girls, V for Vendetta, etc.  And I just can't do manga.  I've tried, but I just don't dig it.  

So like I said, I read Sample's syllabus and tossed it in a file somewhere.  Found it again a few weeks ago in a frenzy of paper-purging.  Read it, thought it looked interesting, and requested a few titles I didn't recognize from the local library.  OH MY LORD.  I love the books, and I want to take this defunct class.  Do you think Dr. Sample wants a weird fan letter from a fellow English teacher he's never met?  Because that would not be creepy. At all.  

Before we get to the graphic novels themselves, let me recommend Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics, a great primer on why graphic novels are more complicated than *merely* a run of pulp comic books.  McCloud discusses the history of the art form, the best way to read it (as art, as well as narrative), and the vocabulary.  It's an easy-to-read comic format, and it's engagingly written.  Absolutely a must-read if you're interested in the format beyond the occasional perusal of Betty & Veronica.

1) Asterios Polyp by David Mazzucchelli (no, really, that's how you spell it.  I swear.)

Asterios Polyp is a sonofabitch disgraced architecture professor who has screwed up his marriage and his job with his ego and his libido.  The book opens with his derelict apartment getting hit by lightning.  And it only gets cooler from there. The story is fascinating and multi-layered and would make a really interesting novel in itself.  Polyp has some serious identity issues stemming from the circumstances surrounding his birth: he had a twin who died at birth.  Sometimes he wonders if he stole his twin's life.  The twin makes occasional appearances, both thematically and artistically, and acts as a touchstone for Polyp's journey of self-discovery.

Then, as it's a graphic novel, you add artwork to the already stellar narrative!  One thread of the story is that each human being is the star of his or her own narrative, and thus sees the world differently: not a new idea.  But Mazzucchelli takes this trope and illustrates it beautifully, allowing the reader to visually pick out when one character falls into (or out of) sync with another.  Here are two panels from when Polyp meets his wife:

Note how in the first panel, his environment is shown in clean-lined blue and hers in cross-hatched red, even to the background of the brink mantel.  As their relationship continues, even just into the second panel, the two styles begin to merge as they engage with one another.  As the reader watches their marriage develop, and then dissolve, the stylistic variations underline the emotional tension of the scene.  

There are wordless sections that seem to underline how Polyp is feeling, but indicate that perhaps he is not conscious of his own process.  As if the lack of words in the graphic panels is a parallel to his inability to to self-recognize.  In short, it's pretty amazing.  It's a good read on its own, but has such artistic merit that it's worth reading (or re-reading) McCloud first, so as to pay attention to the art.

Less artistically impressive (at least as far as graphic-novels-as-art-form goes), but still totally awesome is

2) Mike Carey's The Unwritten series.  He has also written the Felix Castor novels (exorcist in modern-day London) and The Girl with All the Gifts (my recent zombie ants review).  He's pretty spiffy and I like how his brain works.  In The Unwritten series, Carey takes A.A. Milne, Harry Potter, and a healthy dash of literary criticism, and tosses 'em all in a blender.  The results are delicious.

Tom Taylor is the son of a gifted and prolific writer whose works have taken the world by storm.  Years after his father's mysterious disappearance, Tom ekes out a living on the coattails of his father's fame, signing books and charging for autographs.  He is, after all, the namesake of his father's famous creation, boy wizard Tommy Taylor.  Naturally, weird magicky things being to happen, and suddenly we the readers are confronted with Tom's essential identity crisis:  is he, indeed, Tommy Taylor, boy wizard?

While readers might first recognize the influence of J.K. Rowling, this series also has definitive ties to A.A. Milne, creator of Winnie-the-Pooh.  Milne's son Christopher (Robin) was tormented at school and grew to hate the books that had made him famous.  Our protagonist here is equally dismissive of the stories that provide his livelihood, despising the fans even as he makes a living from them.  

What makes this series more interesting than your average "something magic this way comes" is how very self-aware it is.  It's full of meta-literary criticism about the nature of narrative, the art of storytelling, and the traditional conflation between character and muse/writer/actor.  Because these characters are fighting over narrative.  Stories are all that matter.  Life truly does imitate art, in that places are only remembered in song or in story.  Strength is only accumulated through collective belief; if enough people believe a person or place is powerful, that person/place becomes powerful.  It's a fascinating idea, and one is addressed in a fresh, engaging way in this series.  The series creators are critiquing and highlighting the process of making literature while making literature themselves.  It's lovely. 

I haven't gotten through the entirety of the series (apparently someone else in my library system is reading this, too.  The nerve!), but I can only hope that it continues to be as insightful, as entertaining, and as clever as it is right now.  Tommy Taylor, I think I love you.

But most of all, Dr. Mark Sample, I love you, wherever you are.

Sovereign, Deadly, Perfect

Somewhere in an abandoned subway tunnel of New York, a guerrilla film screening is about to begin.  The film was never released, and bootleg copies are rare.  A group of rabid fans has followed hidden clues and mysterious graffiti markings to gather here, in the dark, to watch a horrifying psychological thriller helmed by Oscar-winning auteur Stanislas Cordova. 

Critics’ darling Cordova took the movie world by storm and won an Oscar for Thumbscrew, but then as his work became more disturbing, he was dropped by the major studios.  He retreated to his Adirondack estate, The Peak, where he continued to produce films which never saw general distribution.  One can only see them in floating screenings as above.  Cordova gave one interview to Rolling Stone in the '70s.  The rest is silence.

In homage to his searing films, fans—called Cordovites—are tasked to challenge themselves to see the world’s possibilities.  They use horror to push past the morality and mundanity of everyday life and “suck the marrow” out of experience.  Except, instead of being outdoorsy like Thoreau, they hold secret screenings of Cordova’s movies in sewers and try to scare the crap out of each other.  

Never heard of Cordova?  Yeah, well, that’s because he doesn’t actually exist.  He’s the shadowy recluse at the heart of Marisha Pessl’s second novel, Night Film.  Quite frankly, I’m kind of sad it’s all fiction.  As a reader, I want badly to see one of his movies.  (Rob Brunner has a great NYTimes article about the problem of loving nonexistent works of literature and cinema here.)

The mystery that shrouds the filmmaker seems impenetrable.  Disgraced journalist Scott McGrath has tried once before to expose Cordova, with disastrous results.  But now the director’s daughter Ashley, the enigmatic piano prodigy, has been found dead, and McGrath has a chance to redeem himself.

Before anything else, let me point out that this book is great fun.  It’s a claustrophobic, huddled-in-bed, late-at-night kind of a read.  You expect to look up from the book and see someone outside your window, smoking a cigarette under a streetlamp.  Watching you.

It does, however, have some issues.  I was surprised at how clunky parts of it were, since I really enjoyed Pessl’s first book, Special Topics in Calamity Physics (2006).  I can’t decide whether this book needed a little more time to marinate, or whether an overly long period of navel-gazing was its problem.  Certainly it could be tighter.  Witches, demons, Indian burial grounds, missing children, sexual deviance, drug abuse, art, music, and criticism: there is a rather sprawling list of topics addressed. 

The writing does have some lovely moments, but they are overshadowed by some fundamental problems.   The tone of the first-person narration seems naïve, almost juvenile, not at all in the style of a hardened newspaperman.  There is also Pessl’s penchant for italics.  This book is full of them.  Without necessity.  There is rarely a page without italics.  The italics don't seem to be a part of the character's voice, so I can only presume that they are part of Pessl's literary style.  It’s annoying.

Furthermore, I found the protagonist triumvirate of aggressively naïve Nora, drug-dealing Hopper, and world-weary Scott McGrath to be trite and irritating.  They all lacked depth and interior conflict.  I kept hoping Nora, in particular, would meet with an accident.  Sadly, she survives. 

 

Scott McGrath, our intrepid reporter and narrator, is a man who used to be a highly respected investigative journalist.  His past triumphs included exposés of cartels, dictators, and politicians.  But his illustrious career came tumbling down when he trusted the wrong (unverified) source and slandered Stanislas Cordova.  On live television.  Seems like a rather amateur mistake for a hardened journalist, dontcha think?

He is joined in his quest by two unsuccessful foils.  Nora Halliday is a wannabe actress with little to no talent, whose main purpose in the novel seems to be using her mindless worship of Ashley Cordova to push McGrath forward in his investigation.  Hopper begins as a seemingly-random hanger-on of Ashley, but his “big reveal” is neither unexpected nor particularly helpful.  His purpose in the narrative is to provide otherwise-unknowable information.  He’s a walking info-dump with an attitude.  

Our protagonists are not complex characters.  But the book is not about them.  It’s about Cordova and his weirdness.  And that’s when it gets gooooood.  Cordova is absolutely the most successful character in the book—the one character that’s not there.  As a filmmaker, he inspires generations of misfits and thrill-seekers.  His very inaccessibility is his greatest asset, both in the reality of the book, and the reality of the reader. 

It’s hard not to draw parallels between Cordova and troubled or reclusive filmmakers in “the real world.”  Cordova’s obsessively secretive sets, his intimate involvement with the lives of his actors, the blurring of reality and fiction all sound like accusations leveled against many intense 20^th-century directors, most notably Stanley Kubrik.  During the book's scene at an underground sex club called Oubliette, it’s nearly impossible not to think of Eyes Wide Shut.  

In an effort to ground these fantastical set pieces in reality, the book is chock-full of “documentary” evidence.  There are police reports, web searches, phone book pages, and newspaper articles.  While the evidence is well-presented, any book that uses this device is bound to suffer in comparison after JJ Abrams’ S.  This book’s use of “evidence” is solid, but it can’t begin to compete with S.  I’m not sure that any book can.

Pessl has also allowed some web content to the book, explaining in an afterword that a reader can continue to explore the world of Night Film.  There is, indeed, an app for that.   I’ve not played with the extra content, but I have to admit, it struck me as a bit cheesy.  A successfully built world should make a reader want to remain within its bounds, certainly, but this attempt to make the book a multi-media experience feels forced.  There is, however, some lovely art inspired by Cordova, including these awesome mock-ups for his faux films. 

One of my favorites is this one for At Night All Birds are Black:

As the story progresses, any semblance of reality begin to unwind.  There is a great, trippy sequence where McGrath gets stuck in a series of obsessively detailed Cordova film sets.  At this point, he has no idea what is real and what is fiction.  It’s one of the best sequences in the book, and absolutely worthy of reading alone in a darkened room.  By the time he escapes, you as the reader are seriously questioning whether he is a reliable narrator, or whether he has, in fact, lost his mind.

Because by this time, McGrath has developed a sneaking suspicion that he is inside a Cordova narrative (frankly, so have you, Gentle Reader).  There is some lovely metafictionality, as McGrath begins to interpret actual events as if he were the protagonist in a Cordova film.  He asks for help from Cordova scholars, trying to determine where his path in reality will take him, but using clues from the corpus of the filmmaker’s work.  It’s delightfully weird and twisted, a little like a literary take on Scream's rules of horror movies.

So, the characters can be one-dimensional, the writing veers from insightful to trite, and the plot structure is uneven.  House of Leaves it’s not.  But it’s readable and fun.  And if you read it late at night with most of the lights off, it’s enjoyably creepy.  I dare you to get through the book and not want to crash an underground Cordova screening. Happy searching...