Listing Again, For The Moment

Terry Teachout has provoked me to thought (much to the consternation of DarkoV — but what has he done for us lately?) with this list of 10 American novels he wishes he'd written.

It's a rather oddly constructed exercise. The first question screaming to be asked is, Why American? I wish I'd written The Red & The Black, to say nothing of Anna Karenina, Bleak House and The Brothers Karamazov. In fact I wish I'd written À la recherche du temps perdu, in the original French, even though I haven't read a word of it. (Surely my ignorance of content only adds to the trenchancy of my desire to have been its author?)

"You do know I'm gay -- don't you?"

It could be an instinctive U.S. American solipsism that is at work here, but I suspect what Mr. Teachout is casting about for in this exercise is a larger sense of the authorial voice and depth of perspicacity that he aspires to when he approaches the keyboard. So neither Stendhal nor Dickens are worth mentioning, because their prose, while exemplary, exists at a great remove from the plain-spoken pipe-fitter's prose that Teachout favours.

If that is indeed the nature of the exercise, then I have to admit my list of 10 works of fiction I wish I'd written would be predominantly American, too. Here are the stories I try to “listen” to when I write; the last two are, of necessity, in translation:

1, Paul Auster's Moon Palace (more here).

2. Flannery O'Connor's, A Good Man Is Hard To Find. “She would have been a good woman, if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.” I'll never forget the force of those words the first time I read them. What writer doesn't strive for similar effect?

3. Jim Harrison's Julip. All three novellas are Rabelaisian comedies of a gentle sort. I suspect Harrison wrote them while easing himself out of a cocaine dependency. There is a compassion to their telling that I very much admire.

4. Ernest Hemingway, Big Two-Hearted River. For its interior sense of the exterior.

5. Nathaniel West, The Day of the Locust. While I've never been happy with its overwrought climax, I still love following West's misbehaving cretins into the ditches and canyons of Depression-Era Hollywood.

6. Madeleine L'Engle, A Wrinkle In Time. Watching Carnivàle and reading Stephen King's latest door-stopper, while pleasurable experiences, have been sharp reminders of just how profoundly subversive this woman was. With this little novel she is in a league completely her own — a destiny worth striving for, and proclaiming as boldly as possible once you're there.

7. William Gibson, Neuromancer along with Carol Shields, Swann. Both books delight in exploiting the deliberately ambiguous, but steer the craft in radically different directions.

8. Mordecai Richler, Barney's Version. Richler was remarkably assured in his point of view, and impressively sly about asserting it.

9. Bohumil Hrabl, I Served The King Of England. Evocative and immediate — deceptively so.

10. Franz Kafka, Amerika. Hallucinatory, fragmented, staggeringly incomplete — the most haunting of Kafka's novels asserts that a work needn't be “finished” to exert power over the reader.

There are other variations I've thought about exploring, including: writers who once inspired, but no longer; the dearth of Canadian content in my list, and why that is; but I'll leave it here for now, so that I can return to the business of the prairie cemetery.

Conversation Fodder: PASTE's "Best Of 2008"

Just in time for the US American Thanksgiving, Paste magazine delivers its Best Of 2008 issue. I believe I'll be letting my subscription lapse, but this yearly ish is worth picking up, if only to inform my heated debates with younger nephews at the extended-family dinner table.

Last year Paste proclaimed Boxer by The National to be the album of the year. Prior to that, I was too deep in retro-yearning to notice The National. I downloaded the album from eMusic, and was happy for the experience. We shall see what I make of She & Him when my downloads refresh in another week.

More anon.

Fave Thing #6

There's a young guy who works at the local cafe. He pours coffee, makes sandwiches and does the dishes. Every once in a while I freak him out with stories about "the old days". Last Saturday I really put the zap on him.

"Back in the 80s," I said, "I used to work in a typewriter store."

"Oh, wow," he said. "Ooo-o-o ... maaaan!" He followed this up with a run of laughter that used to be associated with Beavis & Butt-Head (remember them?).

It's true: a store devoted to typewriters was still a viable business a mere 20 years ago. In fact the billboard on the pre-Depression-era building advertised "TYPEWRITERS & Office Equipment", but the majority of the store's floor space was given over to typewriters and as a salesman typewriters were my exclusive domain. I did quite well by them, too.

A girl about to enter college would walk through our front door with her father in tow, the man's arms straining at the sockets from the hunk of iron he was carrying. We'd give him $15, relieve him of the burden and schlep it to our repair shop, then sell him something new for ten times the amount of his trade-in.

Our trade-in policy wasn't, strictly speaking, a ruse: we did sell reconditioned typewriters for $40. There was a tiny room in the back where an old guy hunched over and painstakingly repaired these old clunkers. He could be difficult to talk to, but he did good work.

Sales of new typewriters fluctuated with the seasons, but I averaged two or three used sales a week. We could have sold ten times that weekly amount for the better part of a year before we made so much as a dint in our stock of old typewriters. The building was lousy with them.

One weekend I was told to keep my dress clothes at home and report to work in my grubbies. I spent that entire day lugging old typewriters from the basement to the third floor of the building, one typewriter at a time. After just one hour of that I thought I was going to die, but things looked worse for my partner: he was nearly twice my age, and couldn't manage more than a few runs before he had to light another cigarette. That was the only time I saw the third floor of that ancient building. Rooms that had once been apartments were now filled — to the ceiling — with typewriters. The only reason we were going to the third floor was because we couldn't possibly squeeze another typewriter into the second. The place reeked of 3-in-1 oil.

It was a musty old building with plenty of musty old charm, set among an entire block of such buildings. To the one side of us was a cavernous pool hall. To the other was an ancient drugstore with a lunch counter. If you got to the drugstore before noon, you could order a "toasted" cinnamon roll — "toasted" in scare quotes because the old gal in the powder blue uniform would split the roll, smear a quarter-cup of butter on each side, then fry those babies on the griddle for a minute before she wrapped 'em in tin-foil and presented them to you in a greasy paper bag. I'm not averse to rich foods, but I generally took a pass on the "toasted" cinnamon roll.

The shop was a couple of blocks away from the university. One of my university buddies would meet me for coffee; when we were done, he'd clap me on the back and say, "Well, Rome wasn't built in a day!" O-ho-ho: this was the frequently voiced sentiment of the dotty old matron in Flannery O'Connor's Everything That Rises Must Converge, whose cringing son sold typewriters and silently aspired (seethed, really) to be a novelist. Among the many crucial differences between me and the son was my overall satisfaction with my job.

In fact, if anyone was in desperate straits in that outfit, it was the typewriter industry. The computer was breathing down the industry's neck, and they were coming up with absurd computer-typewriter hybrids, hoping to stave off the inevitable. If you wanted to, it was possible to spend over a grand on a deluxe office model, but not one of those typewriters was good for more than five years, tops.

In my later incarnation as a long-haired, still-scrawny boho, I thought an excellent "author's photo" would be a B&W shot of me in one of the upper typewriter crypts. I took my wife to the store (now selling computers and software), introduced her to the staff, then asked if such a photo-session might be possible. "They're all gone!" I was told. "The fire safety inspector gave us one week to get rid of them, so we got the biggest dumpster available and chucked them from the windows!"

My, but the visions that inspires. I expect 99% of the new models I sold (hollow plastic shells, one and all) have joined their company, compressed deep within some enormous landfill.

I'm still irrationally fond of typewriters, though typically of a vintage older than the ones I sold. Here's a doorstop in our house (the keys were being hammered by a visiting kid as I was typing this).



And this beaut rests in our basement.



It works, albeit hesitantly. It's just waiting for a little tender cleaning and a new ribbon. This summer, perhaps?

Fave Thing #5

This posting promises to be a messy bit of bubble and squeak, but here goes:

While my wife has been away, I've spent the closing hours of the evening watching episodes of Star Trek: TOS. It's a pleasant way to cap off the day: a mixed diet of nostalgia, a few revelations (I'd forgotten that Shatner, particularly in the first season, was capable of subtlety), and plenty of cheese to stick to the ribs of my imagination before I lay me down to sleep.

However, I'm taken aback by the chatter surrounding the proposed Star Trek film: namely, a prequel that chronicles the early adventures of Kirk / Spock / McCoy. This skirts dangerously close to parody — but then that's what the franchise has always done best, so why can't I join the falderal? Placing the vertically-challenged Matt Damon as “Kirk” next to the military bearing of Gary Sinise (“McCoy”) and the willowy Adrien Brody (“Spock”) is visual comic genius. What's not to love?

Well ... the voices, for starters. This trio of characters has been lampooned by so many improv groups, it's impossible to consider anyone attempting to do a serious job of it. Then there's director J.J. Abrams, whose track record elicits a perpetual chorus of, “Not bad, but I expected it to be better.” No, the whole proposal prompts me to search the farther reaches of cinema for a viable alternative to the franchise's usual ham-fisted tactics.

So why not animation? The last attempt might have been flat-footed, but there's been so much technological progress since then that I honestly believe a decent script and the right director (Brad Bird, maybe) just might give this nigh-unto-dead franchise a set of legs that could carry it into the 22nd century, if not the 23rd.

Then again, maybe not. There's some indefinable quality in animation that tends to set audiences at an emotional remove. Has anyone shed a tear during an animated film? If so, which films are we talking about: Dumbo? Bambi? Hm. Dim prognosis, indeed.

Still, someone should take this concept to the drawing board, and I nominate Ken Steacy. His sketchbooks are cheerfully optimistic, sensuous and lush without being overindulgent, and he's got a Tom Swift sort of enthusiasm for big technology. He's the man to get this thing off the ground.

Which brings me to Favorite Thing #5: Artist's Sketchbooks. Particularly comic book artists. Going through a few hundred Flikr slides (here and here) inspires me. It gets me thinking, “Why can't I do that? Or something like it? Why don't I quit with the Googling, scrape an edge to my pencil and start scribbling? Eh? Why not?”

H/T to Drawn (I might as well come clean: this is the page that got me excited about Steacy's ST potential). Also to DP Blowhard for this link. (Frankly, I'd hesitate to call Will Eisner “mediocre”: if you wonder what a back alley in the Bronx smells like, just read one of his books — you will taste the stench in the back of your mouth.)

Fave Thing #4

"You weren't that fond of it when I first brought it home," said my wife.

No, I guess I wasn't. I thought my instructions had been clear. I was thinking about stir-frying. I'd read an article written by some guy who said American stoves weren't constructed to properly heat a wok. He said anyone with brains knew the best way to stir-fry vegetables or anything was to use a large, flat cast-iron frying pan. He sounded like he knew what he was talking about, so I described the article to my wife and asked if she'd look for one in the discount store on the way back from work.

We'd been married for a month or two.

She phoned me at work to say she'd found a cast-iron pan. It wasn't exactly like I'd described, but she thought we'd use it just the same. Besides, she could always take it back.

"Great," I said. "Buy it."

When we got home, I stared at the chicken-fryer. "That's not really what I had in mind," I said.

"But don't you think we'd use it for other dishes?"

"Well," I said, "it's not really what I had in mind."

"I can take it back," she said. "I just figured we'd use it for other dishes."

There didn't seem to be any good reason to abandon my passive-aggressive strategy just yet. "We probably will," I said. "Let's keep it."

It's become my favorite pot. It is one of two pots we own that gives a dish the sort of character you want in a dish. Two or three times a month I'll roast a chicken in it. When it's done, I'll remove the bird and stir up some schmaltz for the wild rice. Whatever is left on the carcass is used for chicken stock. The chicken stock is used for risotto, which I make in the self-same pan.

The pan is also good for Bourbon n' Beans, and a host of other dishes. It's a great pan. We use it all the time.

As for the stir-fry advice, Mr. Magazine Article Writer didn't know what he was talking about. If you want a good stir-fry, nothing beats the hefty cast-iron wok her sister gave us -- the other indispensible pan in our collection.

Fave Thing #3

Dessicated Rock Stars, especially if they look cheerful. A few examples:

Lou Reed meets one criterion, but not the other;

But good ol' Johnny Rotten steps in to fill the gap (surely that's not his kid he's holding ... is it?);

Roger Daltrey appears suspiciously "well preserved", but methinks the trapped look on his face and his tenuous grip on the water bottle signifies an inner dessication;

Bob Dylan hasn't cracked a smile on camera since he broke up with Joan Baez;

Angus Young has, for the past quarter-century-plus, reportedly been a tee-totaller and devoted husband and family man, but any 52-year-old who's chain-smoked cigarettes from the age of seven to the present still qualifies as dessicated;

And finally the all-time champion of dessication and cheerfulness, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, if there's a bustle in your hedgerow, won't you please give it up for...

Mr. Robert Plant!

Fave Thing #2: From The Sublime To The Ridiculous

No, I'm not particularly partial to brown paper packages tied up in string: but I do have a soft spot for cardboard boxes, and my wife indulges me. Here is a corner in our basement, just under the stairs:



To make matters worse, there are boxes I hesitate to send there, this being a recent example (from a Christmas gift):



It should be enough that I'm enjoying the game with my daughters, but no: the box puts me in a nostalgic mood. For starters, the two hockey players on the left-hand corner harken back to the two knuckle-heads painted on the game of my youth. Besides, when we finally tire of our family tournaments, I'll want to re-box the game for safety sake. And happily married couples will be the first to tell you: it's always fun to reopen a treasured gift.

Fave Thing #1

I shall start with the obvious: a well-larded book shelf. This is a reading/composition corner. Or, more often than not, a "let's put our laundry on daddy's chair" corner for the girls.



This is in the guest room/office. We have several of these crates from the old book store, and if I remember correctly they date back to the 1930s and 40s. Bookstore clerks must have been a muscular breed back then: a crate full of books will weigh close to 100 lbs.



This shelf sits just outside our bedroom. It's the final opportunity for bookish order. Once a book is carried through that door, it will wind up on an enormous pile next to my side of the bed (if it's any good, that is).



If the book won't fit on the little shelf, it can go here, on the other side of the hallway. I believe there's still room for another 50 titles or so.



The dining room, where any mealtime argument you might have can be quickly cross-referenced with a few handy tomes.



And finally a little shelf, just before you leave. I suppose you could store your hat on a shelf like this. But what if, just before you step out the door, you are gripped with the urge to read Cormac McCarthy? No, it's much handier to place his Texas Trilogy, or a spare copy of John Crowley's Little, Big close to the door for just such an occasion.

If it works for Maria von Trapp...

...maybe it'll work for me. On the other hand, the song I have in mind was written for a fictional Maria von Trapp. So maybe it doesn't work. But then on the other hand, it seemed to coax some excellent improvisations from John Coltrane and a heap of others...

It's settled. From now til Friday, I'll be posting pictures of a few of my favorite things.

Film Fave #1: SAVE THE TIGER

The call woke me up early Satuday morning. Things had been going badly between my friend and his wife. Now he was phoning from a downtown hotel.

I cabbed over. It was a predictably sad business – I was fond of them both, and they were good parents to their kids. But the trajectory their marriage was on had been obvious for some time. There weren't any real surprises, except for the astonishing depth of heartbreak. 

When I got to the hotel room, I took a chair while he tidied up a bit. We talked. I asked a few questions, and mostly listened. Room service came with a Thermos of coffee and some breakfast. The conversation had run its course, so we ate in silence. My friend turned on the TV, and flipped through the channels. One of the movie stations was showing an old Jack Lemmon picture. We stayed put, and watched a few minutes. 

Those minutes stretched into the full two hours. When it was over, our mutual silence seemed to have reached a greater depth.

I don't think Save The Tiger sits on any of the “official” Great Movie lists, but today it tops mine. It isn't perfect – Harry Stoner is easily Lemmon's best performance, but he still has moments when he's projecting to the cheap seats; some of the plot contrivances are a little rough around the edges – but even the imperfections bring character to the overall work. It's an unselfconscious time capsule of the early 70s, an era when movie makers didn't mind following a person to work. In Stoner's fashion mill, ironically named after an Italian respite where he recovered from war wounds, Stoner's character is peeled back and exposed to us one layer at a time. He may slouch through most of the movie, but at work his inner steel surfaces, and we see the cunning and ferocity that kept him alive when he was a soldier. 

From time to time, he mentions lost ideals, but the only nostalgia that plays convincingly is his nostalgia for big band music and baseball. Stoner isn't trying to negotiate with ideals so much as he's trying to reconnect with his pre-war state of innocence. It is an intensely lonely struggle – Stoner can't invite others to help him with it, because when he does it only magnifies the gap between two solitudes. 

The film is bracketed with casualty reports, from Viet Nam, at the beginning, to the injured firemen at film's end. The film makers are sympathetic to Harry's plight, and convincingly communicate why so many business people become antagonistic toward government – it's just one more predator out there, contributing not just to their frustrations, but their demise. “Creative solutions” are a soft-headed indulgence. People are going to get hurt. 

This movie is unlikely to stay my number one pick for much longer, but it still belongs there for now. Every life inflicts casualties of its own, and any story, song or movie that takes care to shine a light on the survivor's soul is a welcome work of art. Save The Tiger does, and is, exactly that.

Film Fave #2: THIS IS SPINAL TAP

Good grief -- where do I even start? For one thing, This Is Spinal Tap miraculously prolongs one's appreciation of Heavy Metal as an artform. I first saw it -- January 1984, with a Bible School buddy -- in a tiny movie-plex theatre, filled with lads wearing Iron Maiden shirts and Pink Floyd caps. Everyone was laughing and cheering. Spinal Tap wasn't deflating Rock & Roll Mythology -- it was contributing to it.

Christopher Guest has done some incredibly funny movies since then, but Waiting For Guffman doesn't inspire me to join the community theatre, and Best In Show hasn't prompted me to go out and buy a dog. But this "Rockumentary" is different: even as these used-up geezers slip further into a well-deserved obscurity ("Puppet Show! And Spinal Tap"), the urge to actually start a band and take it on the road becomes nearly irresistable. To be so singularly confused and earnest and self-indulgent has to be fun! 

Until now, I've avoided talking about DVD bonuses -- I usually equate "extras" with "extra waste of my time" -- but this disc has been packed to the ribs with incredibly entertaining goodies. For one thing, the "audio commentary" is provided by the three surviving Tap members, who take the opportunity to set viewers straight on director Marti DeBergi's "hatchet job". There are also deleted scenes and videos for "Gimme Some Money" "(Listen To The) Flower Children" "Hell Hole" and "Big Bottom" -- all very funny stuff. 

I was never one to memorize Monty Python sketches and recite them for the assumed amusement of friends and family, but this movie has brought me as close to that brink as anything done by the Flying Circus. Fortunately, I can resort to timely short-hand: "Take it to eleven!" ("when we need that extra push over the cliff") or "That's just nitpicking, isn't it?" (in response to withering criticism), etc. The surest sign of a replayable movie is its infiltration into the viewer's daily goings-on. And with its ability to straddle that fine line between clever and stupid, This Is Spinal Tap invades with aplomb. 

Film Fave #1

Film Fave #3: RAISING ARIZONA

Number three is a particularly difficult choice for me – I could do a top ten Coen Brothers Films list (hmm – note to self...). In a list like that, I'm not sure which would come out on top. Since I have room for only one Coen Brothers title, I'll go with the first movie of theirs that I saw on the big screen: Raising Arizona. 

Nicholas Cage's performance as loveable sad-sack H.I. McDunnough (a convenience store hold-up artist who locks his keys in the car) is a comic tour de force. Newcomer Holly Hunter's face switches in an instant from withering scorn, to unshakeable despair. The entire cast is blessed with a script that delivers funny lines to everyone who shows up on set.

And in a film concerned with family and giving birth, the Coens crack their knuckles and roll out one cinematic pun after another. How nasty is it when two brothers deliver themselves from the muddy ground, like demon-spawn? And how pathetic is it when they chose to return on their own accord? And you just know the baddest guy is the biker who carries his own bronzed baby-shoes, and sports a tattoo that reads, “Momma didn't love me.” 

It's a funny, dopey movie, and yet when the McDunnoughs finally return the baby to Nathan Arizona and he delivers his cornball consolation speech ("I sure hate to think of Florence leaving me. I do love her so.") I always get choked up. Of course, then he asks the couple to leave the way they came in: by the window.  

I was going to include a few juicy quotes that always get me giggling, but there are too many. You can read a few here, or just resign yourself: get the movie off the shelf, drop it in the player, and enjoy.

Film Fave #2

Film Fave #4: KIKI'S DELIVERY SERVICE

When a young witch turns 13, it is customary for her to hop aboard her broom, leave home and set herself up in a strange city. On a sunny day, while lying in the tall grass and listening to her transister radio, Kiki decides tonight is the night. 

So begins my favourite Hayao Miyazaki movie, Kiki's Delivery Service. Thirteen might seem a little young for a girl to strike out on her own, but as with any Miyazaki movie, there is an innate sense to the proceedings that coheres quite naturally for the viewer. It helps that the world Kiki inhabits has none of the dire threats ours does. And it helps that she's a witch. 

It's a little unclear just what a witch's powers amount to, other than broom-flying. Kiki's mother runs a sort of apothecary, and the first snooty witch Kiki encounters claims to be a fortune-teller, before brushing off Kiki and her cat Jiji like so much dandruff. Kiki's chief challenges, it seems, will be social. 

Miyazaki's Kiki is the embodiment of youthful energy. Watching her, I reconnect with all the joyous uncertainty that came with leaving my home town. The trick to negotiating these changes is in maintaining confidence in your spirit, and Kiki is one of those blessed youths who doesn't have too many doubts in this regard. 

The inevitable does eventually occur: through a series of events, Kiki loses touch with her magic, and her source of confidence. Her spirit seems to reside under a wet blanket; she no longer flies through her life, but walks through it, one miserable step at a time. How she gets back in touch with her magic is a scene that is more momentous and exciting than any of the cliffhanger conclusions we've seen in the last 20 years, because it is deeply emotional and stirringly personal.

I love Miyazaki's work. As with most Japanese anime, Kiki's world is a melange of visual influences. Miyazaki distills a European storybook aesthetic that is at once recognizable and strange. Ivy covers the walls of tall, gabled stone houses, the streets are narrow, trains cut through the countryside and a zeppelin flight is heralded as a big event. All wonderful, but the charm of these images resides in Miyazaki's attention to detail – how many animated movies open with the wind blowing through long grass?

But Miyazaki's originality also lies in his ability to observe and identify so closely with his heroines. I can think of no other living film-maker who cares as deeply about his girl protagonists. Novelist Shusaku Endo has said the Japanese revere their mothers because they exist in sharp counterpoint to their fathers, who are expected to be stern and emotionally distant. Miyazaki seems to follow his muse most closely when he paints the emotional development and dawning maturity of young girls. 

Now that I think of it, Miyazaki's characters are almost always in the business of nurturing, though not always in the manner that one expects. But if emotional development comes through encounters with the strange in Castle In The Sky and Spirit World, with Kiki's Delivery Service it comes through finally recognizing what has been there all along.

Film Fave #3

Film Fave #5: THE LIMEY

There are some directors I’d like to hate, but don’t. Steven Spielberg, for instance – the guy reaches for sentiment whenever an honest conflict of emotion proves too difficult for him to frame. He panders to the crowd, but I usually leave the theatre (or return the DVD) feeling like I got my money’s worth with him. Hey – at least he pandered to me.

Then there are directors I’d love to love, but have trouble doing so. Steven Soderbergh, for instance. The way he takes chances – let’s do a three-hour drama about the drug problem in North America; that book by Stanislaw Lem that Tarkovsky kinda-sorta filmed … any reason why that couldn’t be a smart summer blockbuster?; etc. – is the sort of behavior I naturally tip my hat to. And yet I usually finish a movie feeling as if my patience got tested once too often.

Out of Sight is a good example. Critics were generally impressed with it, and it seemed to signify Soderbergh’s newfound willingness to work with sexy actors and a tight script to deliver a straightforward thriller that should be a hit with audiences. The script was based on an Elmore Leonard novel, and Leonard’s “hip” quotient was growing among Gen X – Soderbergh’s (and my) demographic. So I took my seat and looked forward to a smart guy delivering the sort of smart film that Hollywood habitually dumbed down. 

When it was over, I felt residually satisfied, but mostly let down. The story was smart enough, but by the end my interest in its characters had waned. I blamed the actors: George Clooney was still too slick to be taken seriously as a bumbling charmer, and J-Lo was J-Lo (always will be, I'm sure). The gorgeous jaw-dropper falls hard for the gorgeous jaw. Zzzzz. 

But, man, did I ever love that opening scene when Clooney storms out of the office, yanks off his necktie and is caught in a mid-throw freeze-frame. That scene had an infectious energy to it, but the freeze-frame was the capper – a quick wink at the audience, to let us know there’d be just enough self-consciousness present to keep this show fun. I sure could stand to see a movie that maintained that stylistic panache right to the film’s conclusion.

The Limey is that movie. Seen laid out on paper, the movie looks like it should be a director’s bloated indulgence: Soderbergh assembles a cast of 60s actors who have since slipped out of the mainstream (Terence Stamp, Peter Fonda, Lesley Ann Warren, Barry Newman, Joe Dallesandro), gets them to sink their teeth into every 60s cliché and hangover you could name, puts them through their paces in a revenge thriller, then skips off to the editing room where he playfully splices up its perspective in a 60s art film style.

Well, it is an indulgence, but it’s one of the leanest and most tightly controlled indulgences I can think of. Take Soderbergh's “art film” splicing: it's a little jarring at first, but it quickly becomes a reliable tone-setter for successive scenes. The first time I saw the film, I thought Soderbergh's narrative play was less intrusive and considerably more effective than Tarantino's had been in Pulp Fiction. With successive viewings each little fragment gains significance, but never in an earth-shaking “So that's what he meant!” way. 

As for the acting, it's some of the best you'll see from these veterans of stage and screen. I suspect Soderbergh is an “actor's director”, a guy who gives a few scant instructions, but is mostly inclined to stay out of the way. That would explain why Julia Roberts in a Steven Soderbergh movie is such bad, bad news: she will take over a film, just as surely as Barabara Streisand would. With the exception of Peter Fonda, who was experiencing a bit of a big-screen resurgence at the time, The Limey is cast with actors whose brightest moments have come and gone. They aren't trying to keep their star in the ether; they're trying to do good work. They approach their characters with attention to detail, and project with care.

There is some incredibly satisfying violence, but this is not a graphic film. The script is peppered with snarky asides that reduce me to fits of giggles every time I watch it, but it is surprisingly serious film. The veteran actors all play off roles they became famous for, yet none of it plays self-consciously. 

I want to keep gassing on like this, but the plainest truth about this film is its revelations are finally gentle ones – the sort that keep me coming back again and again, because they do not rely so singularly on astonishment and brutal surprise for their impact.

It's a fabulous film that has earned Steven Soderbergh a great deal of cache with me – enough for me to really want to enjoy myself with his next film (if only it weren't Oceans 13!) 

Film Fave #4

Film Fave #6: HEAT

Sure, it's high concept. Sure the dialogue can get a bit stilted, particularly between the sexes. And as with most Michael Mann films, the finale has zero emotional punch because it was set in stone in the first act, and heralded with trumpets throughout the rest. But Michael Mann directing Al Pacino and Robert De Niro is a match made in testosterone heaven, and I can watch this movie again and again because despite it all, Mann proves himself capable of genuine emotional depth.

Mann, never one to settle for a ten when he can take it to eleven, frames these two raging bulls with several football teams worth of nostril-flaring masculinity -- as if Pacino and De Niro weren't enough, we get secondary and character actors like Tom Sizemore, John Voight, Dennis Haysbert, Danny Trejo, Wes Studi and even tattooed motor-mouth Henry Rollins filling up the screen with their own brand of violent innuendo. And yes, Val Kilmer is in there, too, supplying a little adolescent surliness. Happily, he gets beat up pretty badly by film's end.

One of the film's pleasures is that just about everyone who comes on-screen gets theirs by film's end. It's a suburban morality play that's writ larger than Gidget: when Pacino finally connects with De Niro (and let's face it: their characters' names don't matter. This is the WWE, here: we paid admission to watch these two guys face off against each other) Pacino's cop asks De Niro's criminal, "So you never wanted a regular type life?" De Niro fires back, "What the fuck is that? Barbecues and ballgames?"

Yes, exactly. And when things finally explode, the first casualty to get blown to bits by machine-gun fire is a line of barbecues on display outside a grocery store. Boys, boys, boys -- you wanna play, you gonna pay. In fact, these men all do claim to want something akin to barbecues and ballgames. But their scenes with women play falsely: the couples laugh at shallow jokes, or they hug and sway together on the dance floor, or they even make love and whisper "Do you love me"-type lines, but it feels too deliberate. It's stagey, people are acting. It's only when the men hold up a bank that this feeling of artifice disappears. These boys enjoy the heat too much to give it up, so they get burned.

The strangest element in this morality play is Natalie Portman's character, an adolescent step-daughter to Pacino's cop. I think Portman's presence brings more emotional power than Mann quite knows how to handle. The other women in these guys' lives are all old enough to know better, so the viewer (and Mann) can keep them at emotional arms' length. But Portman's suicidal character sits on the other side of this morality play as the only true victim among all these firing guns. Her presence threatens to turn the morality play into a tragedy, and the way I see it, the film's emotional climax occurs when Pacino leaves the hospital vigil to finish his pursuit of De Niro.

I'm so glad she's there. Without her, the entire enterprise would be no more memorable than a particularly grim James Bond movie -- a heist gets pulled, shots are exchanged, people die. Heat could have been that sort of movie -- in fact Collateral was that sort of movie, and I certainly enjoyed that. But Heat is the more compelling and rewarding movie, thanks to its emotional core: a messed-up adolescent girl who flits in and out of all this flexing and posturing and shooting, serving as a spectral reminder of what's really being sacrificed in the spectacle, the noise and the heat.

Film Fave #5

Film Fave #7: FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE

Shortly before we moved the b&w TV set to the kitchen, we had it next to my mother's sewing table. A local TV station was broadcasting a week's worth of James Bond movies, and since I was an adolescent and peer discussion was important to me, I asked my parents if I could watch this night's 007 offering. I don't know if my father smirked and gave my mother a broad wink, but he might as well have. "Sure," he said. "Why not?"

My mother's sewing machine was busy that night. I crept closer to the TV, hoping to catch the scurrilous bits between the barrage of electronic interference she threw my way. You would think my quest was a futile business, but no. Somewhere between the zig-zags I caught: a woman in a bikini cuddled next to the titular hero; two gypsy belly-dancers, scratching it out for our hero's affections; a girl in the buff rushing to a hotel bed and slipping between the sheets; our hero with the girl on a train, playing at being husband and wife; our hero, delivering a vicious slap to the girl's jaw ... I dunno. There was some fighting and somesuch in there, too.

It's 30 years later, and I can't get over From Russia With Love. To my mind, this is the Bond movie by which the others are measured, and nearly all of them slip well below the standard -- which is curious, because the movie wears its flaws as if they were badges of honour. The special effects are dodgy (you can spot the string holding up the exploding helicopter), the hero couldn't possibly be more sexist (well ... the early Goldfinger scene in which he gives a massage-girl named "Dink" a swat on the fanny is a bit of a topper), the gypsies come straight from central casting (and do a lousy job of fighting). The knife-in-the-shoe is pretty cool, though, and gets a lot of dramatic mileage.

Connery is called the "dangerous" Bond, and in the early films there's no doubt about it. His character straddles a line between irresistable charm and genuine repugnance. He's like a character from a James Salter story: the cad who crashes the party drunk, helps himself to the cognac, and gives the hostess a pinch. He's appalling, but the hostess can't stop thinking about him. Of course the villains are cold and ruthless; worse still, they have impeccable manners.

Bond struts around these stiffs, the embodiment of loose-limbed, hands-in-the-pockets insouciance. And he flips from adolescent id to parental condescension -- usually after there's been a nasty, protracted fight with a Bond Girl's safety at stake. It's irredeemably bad behaviour, with not a trace of reality to be found.

Enlightened men shouldn't enjoy this stuff -- but some of us do. Consider it our Pretty Woman. 

Film Fave #6

Film Fave #8: BIG NIGHT

At the time of its release, there was criticism levelled at Big Night's high-falutin' Continentalism: two idealistic Italian brothers seek only to bring their enlightened Continental cuisine to Americans and make a business of it, but the Yanks just want-a the meatball. I can't see it. To my eyes, this movie is an essentially American story about vision and compromise.

It's easy to get idealistic about what goes on in the kitchen, and Primo (Tony Shaloub) is a supreme food snob. But he is not just a perfectionist -- he is an artist, a proposition we have to take in faith in the early moments of the film.

His younger brother, Secondo (Stanley Tucci) is a businessman with ideals of his own. Unfortunately for his long-suffering girlfriend, Phyllis (Minnie Driver) they show up in the bedroom. It seems Secondo has something of a virgin/whore complex: he doesn't mind sleeping with the competition's wife (Isabella Rossellini), but can't quite muster up the wherewithall when it comes to his American beauty. Phyllis doesn't yet understand just what she represents to this sleek-suited dude. He wants marriage, he wants a nice house, he wants a Cadillac -- he does not want to settle for love in the back seat of a beat-up Oldsmobile.

Just around the corner is their competition -- a hopping, happening place where spectacle takes precedence over the culinary quality. Ian Holm's "Pascal" roars into the picture with an off-putting bluster and fury, a ridiculously comic Alpha male who takes command of every scene he's in. Secondo approaches him with hat in hand, looking for a loan, a favour, anything. Pascal promises him an evening with Louis Prima -- the only Italian who could possibly upstage Pascal.

I am not normally a fan of "food" movies -- and I don't much like cooking shows, either. It's all a form of Playboy entertainment: one person stands up and presents an airbrushed ideal that in fact requires the co-operation and talents of dozens of people to manufacture. Without a little mischief and humour, these scenarios very quickly get dreary. Fortunately the feast in Big Night plays itself like an extended joke, waiting for the mischevous punchline.

The audience knows what the punchline is, long before the brothers recognize it. This night is finally going to be their undoing.

I find the closing 40 minutes of the film incredibly satisfying. If the film's architecture has been a little studied in its set-up, the conclusion's stark simplicity has an emotional sumptuousness that speaks directly to the heart. Pascal's bombast dissipates like fog, finally revealing the cool menace beneath it. The two brothers fight on the beach the way two brothers who love each other fight -- they want to kill each other, but they can't bring themselves to actual blows. The final scene -- a long, unbroken take of Secondo preparing eggs for his brother and their hungover waiter -- is rightly heralded for its poetic tension. Scrambled eggs, for two brothers who couldn't quite pilot their ship to the glorious New World.

No words are spoken during this scene; the viewer is free to project whatever value he'd like. This simple act of care and provision ... is it enough to renew a modest, wiser sense of possibility in these two brothers?

Film Fave #7

Film Fave #9: MONSTERS, INC.

I belong to a group of cobbers who gather at an old cottage every fall. We slurp single malts, cook outrageously rich dishes for breakfast, lunch and supper, fire up a cigar or two and generally fill the air with our gassy opinions on the state of things. It's been 15 years of this, and the day we switch to an all-vegetable menu is quickly coming down.

Fifteen years -- eef. There is video footage of our original get-together. Incredibly embarrassing stuff. One guy in particular complained about the conversation: "I wish you guys would supply the footnotes to what you're saying." We were an incorrigible bunch -- most of us still in University, over half of us doing Graduate work.

I'm happy to report that fifteen years have taken a pleasant toll on our group level of testosterone and smart-assedness. However, the same guy -- still single, still straight, still childless -- said, "For years I didn't know what half of you were talking about. I still don't know, but at least now all I have to do is visit my four-year-old nephew and watch a few of his movies."

It's true: we've gone from aping Woody Allen and (oog) meta-referencing Lacan, Auerbach and Schweitzer (tsk -- old obnoxious habits do die hard. Shameful) to quoting Mike Wazowski.

Ah, but Pixar's Monsters, Inc. is a movie lovingly crafted to call to the tiny, darkened corners of our hearts. It's a buddy movie writ large -- the hulking, muscular "Sully" (voiced by the hulking John Goodman) allows himself to play straightman to the vertically challenged and too-clever-by-half smartmouth "Mike Wazowski" (Billy Crystal). Mike's love-interest is the Medusa-coiffed "Celia", and even though she is an odd thing to behold, a guy can't help but get a little itchy and scratchy when her voice has that busty-breathy Jennifer Tilly quality.

Hollywood's natural impulse would be to put Celia at the stress-point of a potential love-interest triangle, but nope: Sully's fine with Mike's latest affaire du coeur. The actual source of conflict is over a three-year-old girl, who lives on the other side of the closet door.

The beauty of Monsters, Inc. is in its patient, elaborate set-up. You have monsters who live in a parallel universe, powered by the screams of children. You want meta-referencing? MI has it in spades -- including nerdy references to Chuck Jones and Ray Harryhausen, with a host of Pixar in-house visual gags. Wielded by less competent hands, these gags would have all the subtlety and delight of a Nixon-era bumper-sticker. But John Lasseter and his Pixar crew have woven together a layered, fantastical world that is recognizable in its nuance and breath-takingly other in its scope -- the MI universe, in fact, becomes a loving homage to one of Lasseter's most revered influences, Hayao Miyazaki. (One of my cinema regrets is being layed low by the stomach flu when my family went to see MI on the big screen -- encountering the closet-door warehouse on that enormous scale must have been incredible.)

As meticulously rendered as this universe is, Miyazaki's greatest influence is seen Sully's increasing protective instincts toward the three-year-old girl, "Boo" -- which is, I suspect, the deepest pull for me and my buddies. Mike's desire for Celia is garden-variety romance -- the smart-ass runt can never quite believe this beautiful creature is actually falling for him, and he'll do everything in his power to keep the magic alive. But discovering a heart-felt concern for the safety and well-being of these tiny, alien creatures that seemingly jump into your life unbidden (explain it to me again: where do babies come from? You're kidding -- right?) ... well, that catches every father off-guard. It gobsmacks him, knocks him out, turns everything inside out in a way he could never anticipate, until what finally becomes truly alien are the things he once thought were the most important.

You don't get that without recognizing what a shallow, self-centered twit you generally prefer to be. And who better to give voice to this urge than a short, one-eyed monster named Mike Wazowski?



Film Fave #8

Film Fave #10: 8½

I'm afraid you won't get any profound analysis in this entry. I most enjoy watching Fellini's 8½ on a late night, when I can't sleep. It serves as my dream-life, I suppose.



Film Fave #9

Film Fave #11: BOOGIE NIGHTS

There are new friends, and endless parties by the pool. Deep emotional bonds get made; kids who were losers now have a circle of soulmates who recognize their true worth -- a replacement family, an ideal family. Boundaries are crossed (or, more accurately, a sense of what is appropriate was never established to begin with). Of course there's the sex and the drugs, unhappy moments that generate desperate forays into petty crime. And all of this is overseen by an impressario of limited vision who deep down just wants to be an artist.

Kinda sounds like the church youth group, doesn't it?

P.T. Anderson's break-out movie about the 70s-era porn industry is, in many ways, his roughest work, but it's the one I return to with the most frequency. He's working with a dream cast, who clearly relish what they're doing. Don Cheadle, Julianne Moore, John C. Riley, Philip Seymour Hoffman, William H. Macy, Mark Wahlburg -- each of these people has to persuade the camera that it's their absurd sense of the innocent that leads them down the garden path. Even Burt Reynolds, (who, rumour has it, sacked his agent out of pique midway through the shoot) proves himself up to the task -- a one-time-only performance that earned him an Oscar nomination.* And Heather Graham's presence doesn't hurt things any, either.

The soundtrack is spot-on, Anderson's use of colour is spectacular -- starting with mundane earth-tones, then erupting in garish splendour, only to sink into deep shadows by film's end. Anderson's pacing owes a great deal to Scorsese, but it never feels like he's aping the master. In fact there's a world of influence to be discovered, and this DVD possesses one of the few director's commentaries worth the viewer's time.

And as grim as the story-arc gets, Anderson's sense of the comic stays with him, suggesting that this is what best carries a person through life. It's certainly what makes the film re-watchable.

*Thanks to Anonymous for the gentle correction.

Film Fave #10