The Riddle Of The Pale King

The truth is that the heroism of your childhood entertainments was not true valor. It was theater. The grand gesture, the moment of choice, the mortal danger, the external fore, the climatic battle whose outcome resolves all- all designed to appear heroic, to excite and gratify an audience… Gentlemen, welcome to the world of reality there is no audience. No one to applaud, to admire. No one to see you. Do you understand? Here is the truth-actual heroism receives no ovation, entertains no one. No one queues up to see it. No one is interested.

-The Pale King-

I never read unfinished novels as a rule. The Mystery Of Edmund Drood, Answered Prayers and The Last Tycoon are all unread by me and will remain so. When I’m feeling particularly bitchy I’ve been known to observe that Hemingway shooting himself rather than finishing The Garden Of Eden was perhaps the most honest review of all time.

Yet The Pale King proved irresistible. Wallace’s life ended with so little resolution. His death was a question mark, not the exclamation point of Hemingway’s or the sad ellipse of Thompson’s. How could The Pale King seem like anything but the answer to the question mark? The response to his call. Add to this the mysterious nature of the work itself; just what was The Pale King? What hid behind the haunting elegiac title? A complete work? A smaller self contained part of a larger one? A first draft? A partial one? The main character was a self insert. It was a period piece. There were thousands of pages. Top this off with the unseemly fact that Wallace’s death has become as much a part of his work as any of his books. His self-inflicted martyrdom indeed threatens to obscure the whole of it.

(Muffy made a big deal of crying when David Foster Wallace died. But she's never even read Infinite Jest.)

Picture and Caption taken from Hipster Pets

It should be noted that this reflection became decidedly different after reading Johnathon Franzen’s New Yorker Article.

People who had never read his fiction, or had never even heard of him, read his Kenyon College commencement address in the Wall Street Journal and mourned the loss of a great and gentle soul. A literary establishment that had never so much as short-listed one of his books for a national prize now united to declare him a lost national treasure.

Ouch. OK Mea Culpa. I was one of those who had never read Wallace until after his death. I can remember reading those obits and wondering sinkingly if I had just not missed out on The Kurt Vonnegut of my time. When Adult Swim interrupts its programming to broadcast your name for a solid minute you've reached ubiquity. Of course I went right out and bought Consider The Lobster (A command not an invitation) and Brief Interviews With Hideous Men. Yet I cannot help but think that Franzen would take this as me proving his point more than anything else. (Though as footnotes are illserved in blogs I must take this parenthetical to wonder why or when knocking the Kenyon College Address became a prerequisite in proving one’s “cred” when writing about Wallace? Zadie Smith also goes out of the way to give the famous essay a swift kick in Changing My Mind. Well screw that. I don’t care how many posers it gives a gateway to I love the essay.) But it gets better-

Adulatory public narratives of David, which take his suicide as proof that (as Don McLean sang of van Gogh) “this world was never meant for one as beautiful as you,” require that there have been a unitary David, a beautiful and supremely gifted human being.

Again ouch. Had to play the “V Card” didn’t you? The article that was shaping up in my notes, prior to reading Franzen’s piece, wasn’t that. I may occasionally be guilty of fannish forgiveness but seldom out and out Hagiography. But it wasn’t not that either. At the end of the day it wasn’t Cobain who I was thinking of when it came to Wallace, as so many have drawn a line between the two nineties icons an easy and rather dumb looking choice as Cobain looks more and more with each passing year like some dumb kid whose money killed him. Rather it was Dennis Hopper’s weary voice that came through “Acute Perception can drive you crazy.” It said, and as Wallace was in possession of arguably the acutest perception in modern literature well it’s tough to make that not seem quasi mystical.

So what is The Pale King, when one tries the impossible task of reading it in and of itself. Without the knowledge of its making and of the artist who made it. The answer is actually pretty simple. It’s a David Foster Wallace book. Written with that same inimitable blend of dexterity and compassion. The dance between merciless precision and the forgiveness that such understanding brings.

Like the best of Wallace’s work it contains the adrenaline rush of a high wire act. It’s the feeling one got from his work time and again and it’s almost shamefully heightened her with the foreknowledge that this time Wallace did not make it to the other end of the line.

The triumph of The Pale King is that the text does survive as itself despite this. If it does not quite cohere as Wallace’s other novels do, it is because that would be impossible. It’s filled with moments, an early chapter of in which a Saintly child provokes an unmitigated fury in everyone who meets him, is composed with such comic pathos that it hurts the soul (“The principle loathes the mere sight of the boy but does not quite know why. He sees the boy in his sleep, at nightmare’s ragged edges- the pressed checked shirt and hair’s hard little part, the freckles and ready generous smile.: anything he can do. The principla fantasizes about sinking a meat hook into Leonard Stecyk’s bright-eyed little face and dragging the boy facedown behind his Volkswagen Beetle over the rought new streets of suburban Grand Rapids. The fantasies come out of nowhere and horrify the principal, who is a devout Mennonite.”) There’s a spiritual awakening that quickly follows that is one of the moving depictions of grace I’ve encountered. But the core of the book comes in the one hundred page (nearly paragraph break free) novella at its center. Which includes all the absurdity and humanity that made Wallace’s work a wonder. Including the encounter with the eponymous King. A substitute maybe Jesuit, a stern God Figure who charges one of the principles to make order from chaos, whom I quoted at the beginning and now will quote again.

“-this is effacement, perdurance, sacrifice, honor, doughtiness, valor. Hear this or not, as you will. Learn it now, or later- the world has time. Routine, repetition, tedium, monotony, ephermeracy, inconsequence, abstraction, disorder, boredom, angst, ennui- these are the true hero’s enemies, and make no mistake, they are fearsome indeed. For they are real.”

That Wallace lost his own battle with these enemies cheapens the work no one whit. Because when you clear away all the smoke and mirrors Wallace’s death was not a riddle or a clue, but a tragedy. The Pale King is not an answer it is a novel.

And as it is a novel it is, as all novels are, a gift. One that I humbly accept and will seek to make good use of.

Scream 4

(Say what you will about the movie. This poster kicks ass.)

Call it the benefit of low expectations. Call it being softened up by a ten hour work day and thus primed to enjoy something undemanding but I had a blast at Scream 4. A clever, nimble, gratifyingly old school slasher, that was solid fun from its meta beginning to its meta(er) end. If nothing else it stands head and shoulders above The Scream sequels. Not that that is… you know… particularly hard.

For one thing, it gets the tone right for the first time since the first film. Riding that edge between playing with and paying off genre conventions, actively playing your expectations against you with just the right mixture of mischief and genuine unpredictability. As well as ditching the baroque plotting that made the sequels such a chore to get through.

More importantly there’s a genuine feel of investment in the film. The eleven year fallow period which previously looked like a sure sign of desperation, now looks unexpectedly like the greatest favor that could have befallen the film. Not only did it provide enough time for some new stuff to happen in horror and thus give the writer some new material to comment on, much needed because by Part 3 they were really reaching. But it also provides some unexpected poignancy. Odd that a slasher film that made it’s name by appealing to the youth market (Remember all that grousing about WB horror? No? What was the WB you ask? Fuck I’m old.) benefits so greatly from having a cast that is older. There’s the sheer rarity of it, I mean how often do you see adults in a horror movie? Let alone a slasher movie? More importantly it’s the way the cast has matured, particularly Campbell. It feels like they’re more invested in these characters now then they ever were when they were just supposed to be their break out roles that they left behind and laughed at.

As for the new cast, who initially posed the biggest amount of worry, well let’s just say that “surprisingly likable” goes right across the board. I mean there’s the surprisingly likeable Handen Panettiere (I know right?) the surprisingly likable Rory Culkin, the surprisingly likeable Emma Roberts. All actors who have exhibited, little to no, to actual negative charisma in previous roles all do a really good job in the film. I’d chalk it up to a sure hand in the director’s chair. But you know… it’s a Wes Craven joint…

In all fairness the film feels blessedly competent after the “This is a fucking joke right? Some kind of prank. No way this guy is fucking serious.” direction of My Soul To Take. Wes Craven proves if nothing else he can still get the fuck out of the way and deliver a few good scares. There’s nothing to write home about here, but nowhere does he actively embarrass himself either and for Craven I’d say that’s a solid W. Even the ending which initially seems to overreach into taking a detour into crazy town, is redeemed by the pretty clever commentary on the nature of reboots it provides (Compare it to the “Guh?” for the sake of “Guh?” ending of Scream 3 and you’ll see what I’m talking about).

The film isn’t perfect sure. A few of the scenes stray too far into overtly comic territory (“Fuck Bruce Willis.” Though truth in criticism the film is often legitimately funny, particularly in the opening. That said I was the only one in the theater who laughed at the Robert Rodriguez joke.), it is a bit on the long side, the plot involves some narrow escapes for The Slasher that are eye rolling even by the lenient standards of the subgenre and Mary Shelton is bizarrely offputting. On the whole I’m so shocked that Scream 4 does so much right that I can’t be that ticked that it does a few things wrong. A fourth installment simply shouldn’t feel this light on its feet.

Dreams With Sharp Teeth

About seven years ago (Jesus), I found for sale in the college library a copy of “I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream” and one of “The Deathbird Stories”. Beautiful books, first editions. Had I had the foresight to hang onto them they could probably pay two months rent right now. Unfortunately, I did not have the foresight to hang onto them as after reading them I came to an important conclusion.

I did not like Harlan Ellison very much.

Now some years later in the wake of Snow Crash and my reevalution of Neil Stephenson, I began to wonder what other writers I may have unfairly left on the dust heap. Perhaps Harlan Ellison was one of those fellows. After all I was overly sensitive at that age, and I just read The Whimper Of Whipped Dogs in Dark Descent. It was overwritten and hectoring but had a certain flare. And lots of smart people like him: Neil Gaiman, Stephen King, Patton Oswalt. Why not give him another shot? So I bought his seminal collection Dangerous Visions and decided to watch the documentary about him, Dreams With Sharp Teeth, to give myself a bit of an overview. Having done so I’ve come to an important conclusion.

I still do not like Harlan Ellison very much.

Ellison is in the simplest terms, a bully. The worst kind too, one who can dish it out but can’t take it. The fact that he is occasionally brilliant helps not one whit. After all even the lowest bully must occasionally flash some charisma or not even the most craven toady will follow. Make no mistake I’m not saying that Ellison does not occasionally write brilliantly. He has stories, like “I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream” that are literally unforgettable. Stories that sear themselves to your brain, that you don’t so much read as see like vivid brain burning fever dreams that threaten to lobotomize in their intensity. What I am saying is that it is not worth wading through the other ninety percent of self aggrandizing dreck in order to get there. His occasional brilliance only highlights just how far short most of his stuff falls.

If you’ve never read Harlan Ellison he can be a little tough to get around. Though not as his followers will try to convince you, impossible. He writes mostly, but not solely science fiction and pops up a lot in his own work. If you take a shot every time you encounter the word “I” in an Ellison work you will be dead before the first page is finished. He’s basically an ugly, dancing imp version of Kurt Vonnegut (Compare Repent Harlequin Said The Tick Tock Man to Harrison Bergeron. Go! You’re welcome grad student whose dissertation I just came up with). If Kurt Vonnegut’s message was “Damnit babies you’ve got to be kind.” Ellison’s can perhaps be summed up as “Damnit babies you’ve got to be unkind.”

A lot of different things upset Harlan Ellison and he yells about them all very loudly. He stamps his feet and pounds his fist and threatens to hold his breath until his little face turns red thanks to the unfairness of politics, and religion and the kind of world where rats eat babies. Of course, nothing upsets Ellison quite so much as questioning something he believes him. You should see him throw a shit fit about file trading, if you ever want to see some fine hypocrisy. I guess we should question all systems but Capatalistic ones ey Harlan? Anyway every once in awhile Ellison composes a story around one of his tantrums and every once in a greater while that story is a work of genius. What can I say, even a blind squirrel eventually finds a nut. But if there’s an author with a higher miss to hit ratio I have thankfully never encountered them.

As for the movie it’s hagiography. Not particularly remarkable hagiography either. A more appropriate title would have been "A Lot Of Famous People Like Harlan Ellison.” Well bully for them. It is this movie’s misfortune to come so close in my viewing after The Z Channel a truly warts and all portrait, that managed to convey the importance of its subject and the respect of his friends, without being a white wash. There’s a moment where an interviewee briefly suggests in the mildest possible terms, that Ellison’s devotion to making a crazed spectacle of himself has distracted others and himself from his actual work and perhaps made it so Ellison has not achieved his full potential as a writer. He is hustled off stage and never heard from again. Why would we want such a dark ray of, you know, interesting viewpoint when we can cut back to Robin William’s mugging?

Yet like the man itself the documentary occasionally shows exactly why people read and respond to Ellison’s work. Just flashes mind, flashes of the brilliance that Ellison is undoubtedly capable of. Like I said, I never said that Ellison is not capable of genius. Just that I am sick of walking through the minefield of his other stuff in order to find it. For all I care he can keep it.

Harry Brown

Harry Brown is the kind of movie that’s toughest to write about, the kind that is exactly half of a good movie. Yes for exactly half of it’s runtime Harry Brown is a tense, stylish action film that both draws on the intrinsic pleasure of seeing Michael Caine being bad ass onscreen, without distracting from the powerful performance he gives. If Hanna was a failed attempt to give a B-movie class, then this half of Harry Brown is an exemplary case of giving a B-movie craft.

The other half of the movie is Boondock Saints 3: Old Saints Day.

Imagine Gran Torino with the climax of Death Wish 3. Imagine that The Horseman replaced it’s lead with Arnold Schwarzennegger. Imagine that Rolling Thunder featured it’s hero shirtless and oiled chucking grenades and quipping witty catchphrases.

You get the picture.

The point is that a revenge movie can go one of two ways, gritty and realistic, or over the top and operatic. And it is the fatal flaw of Harry Brown that it never chooses. Here is a movie that would have been immeasurably better had it kept things simple. Instead it boils over with an absurd climax which looks less like a bunch of cops clashing with criminals and more like those snippets of the soldiers trying to put down the rage virus that we got in the montages in 28 Days Later.

But lets take a step back.

Harry Brown starts with Brown, a mild mannered pensioner played by Michael Caine, losing his wife to disease, his best friend to crime and finding out he has terminal emphysema. Adding up all these things and sick of the crime addled project that he lives in Brown decides to devote his final days to the thing that gave real joy and purpose to his life. Killing dangerous mother fuckers. Simple enough right? If only.

First off it’s impossible to overstate the gravitas that Caine brings to these early scenes. Which play more like a Michael Leigh film about an old British man dying alone than it does your average action feature. Caine makes Brown real. And as a result, when Caine kills for the first time, too drunk to even know what he’s doing, years of training and instinct cutting through forty years of disuse in response to a mugging, you buy it. And when you see the power it gives him, the way it makes him feel in control of his own life again, when he goes back out to purposefully hunt you buy that too.


If the movie had just stayed on that level, responding, lashing out at the world Harry Brown could have been a great film. But no it is at this point that the filmmakers decide to TAKE THINGS TO THE NEXT LEVEL. Unfortunately for the filmmakers TAKING THINGS TO THE NEXT LEVEL, involves creating an army of subhumans for Brown to mow down, who make the collective targets of The Death Wish movies look like nuanced, deeply felt characters. The first time this happens, when Brown goes and buys a gun from a couple of Morlocks, I just rolled my eyes and accepted it as a genre trope. But as every scene afterwards began with the bad guys all but eating a babies brains to prove beyond a doubt that they are VERY BAD MEN who Brown MUST KILL. It is lazy writing unworthy of the scenes that went before it. God forbid we get any ambiguity in our vigilante justice movies.

Things go even more off the rails with Brown’s plans getting needlessly intricate and filled with CGI bullet wounds that would hardly be more offputting if Brown’s victim’s bled sparkles. This is exacerbated by the inclusion of a police subplot (featuring a wasted Emily Mortimer) which leads to a big action climax so wrong headed that it boggles the mind.

While Harry Brown offers man ugly looks at poverty, violence, drug addiction and degradation, it is the sight of a good movie evaporating before your eyes that really hurts the most.

Hanna

The idea of Joe Wright, he of the prestige picture, making a movie about a killer teen cutting a vast and bloody swatch through Europe had just the right ring of unreality to make it sound seriously appealing. Like the when the school’s top student shows up to class one day with green hair, a ring in her nose, wearing a Cramps T-shirt along with a nervous look in her eye. I mean seriously, the guy who gave us Pride And Prejudice was going to do Hit Girl? With a score by The Chemical Brothers? Sign me up.

Predictably if disappointedly, Wright extracts (almost) every ounce of cheap thrills from the film’s lurid premise. Making an archly, would be Kubrickian abstract thriller, that is rarely unselfconscious enough to have any damn fun. Nor does it ever really achieve the gravitas it strives for. Stuck instead in a kind of limbo. Wright strikes on a fairy tale motif for the film (in one of its best touches Blanchett is always introduced teeth first as in “My what big ___ you have") which is fine, but never really resolves itself into anything more then a strange stylistic tic. The makings are here for something great, but they never come together.

Which doesn’t mean we should turn up our noses at those makings. The movie is worthwhile if only for the strength of its three principles. In a world of homogenized stock types, Hanna, her father and the woman who hunts them both are three individuals whose collision makes for good watching despite itself.

This as mentioned is mostly due to Saoirise Ronan, Eric Bana and Cate Blanchett. The waif like Ronan both genuinely alien and convincingly lethal, Eric Bana being all Eric Banaey, and Blanchett who alone seems to understand the Grimm tone the movie is going for. Perhaps more so than Wright himself.

Wright himself has a surprisingly graceful eye for action, as well as mood. The few times that Hanna truly shed’s its confused nature and really gets us inside her head, such as a sequence showing how much over stimulation a simple room offers her, Hanna reveals the better movie it could have been. Unfortunately this kind of confidence is the exception not the rule from Wright, who fills the film with edgy montages, an ill advised detour into spy-fi and other elements that weigh the film down. More than anything the narrative is hampered by a lack of effective villains (Blanchett notwithstanding). Wright does such a good job convincing us that his protagonist are ruthlessly efficient killing machines that the posse of stock Eurosleaze that she puts on their trail never anything remotely like a legitimate threat.

Ultimately I spent more time in Hanna thinking that I should be entertained, than I did actually feeling entertained. Hanna sadly ends up being considerably less than the sum of its parts.

Your Highness

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The Lincoln Lawyer

Despite the fact that it managed to showcase more or less all of Michael Connelly’s bad habits in a single book, The Lincoln Lawyer managed to be a fairly engaging read, thanks to two nasty plot twists and an entertainingly corrupt(ish) character for the lead

The Lincoln Lawyer is a textbook example of how not to adapt a book. While it does nothing egregiously wrong on the surface, it just manages to make everything slack and less interesting. Given that the source text was already pretty vanilla to begin with, you had better believe that this takes some doing.

The Lincoln Lawyer follows the title counselor Mickey Haller, who ends up defending a rich kid from charges of attempted murder and sexual assault. Matthew McConaughey plays, Haller and believe it or not, I didn’t hate the casting when I first heard it (Once again the fact that I didn’t really have that great of a passion for the character probably helped). Haller is after all a slickster, someone who survives and operates by greasing palms, stacking the deck and generally acting disingenuously. McConaughey’s surface charm, slightly curdled after a long well documented string of just plain not giving a fuck, could have fit the character perfectly.

Alas it was not to be. McConaughey coasts through the role with his now trademark air of disinterest and turns Haller from a merciless operator to the standard "Lawyer with an aching heart in need of redemption." When the time comes for him to do his big “MY DEMONS ARE TEARING ME APART!” scene, well it’s just sad. Like a race horse trying to run with a broken leg, it’s like you can see that he knows that he should know how to do this, but he just can’t anymore. The rest of the cast matches him, the usually dependable Marisa Tomei overacts mightly here, as do John Leguizmo and Michael Pena in their one scene cameos. Only an underused William H. Macy and a perfectly cast, huffily entitled Ryan Philippe emerge unscathed.

The film’s not all bad, at the very least it makes good use out of it’s LA location, giving a real feel for the city and Connelly’s narrative is so tightly plotted that a few of his beats can’t help but survive with impact intact, even if they are played at half speed. Also Michael Pere is in this movie and so for a second I got to go “Man I love Streets Of Fire, what an awesome movie that is. Pere looks pretty good for his age.”

So in conclusion, go see Streets Of Fire. There’s a scene where Willem Dafoe walks out of a burning building. Delivers a threat. Turns around. And walks back in. It has more entertainment value than anything you will see in The Lincoln Lawyer.