Somebody's Asked Me To Be An Expert In Something: Part 4

You may remember a while back that thanks to my print critic work I was asked to head up a local Film Noir festival. Well we're doing a sequel of sorts this July with a batch of Neo Noir films. Today I'll be talking about Point Blank and thought I'd share what I had to say. Sorry if the syntax is funny its written for speech.


Point Blank is a tough film for me to talk about, as I think it’s a pretty great movie and a pretty terrible adaptation.

Point Blank is based on the first Parker novel, The Hunter by Donald Westlake. Though Westlake wrote many books and screenplays, including those for The Grifters and The Stepfather, he’s still best known and well beloved for the two long running series he wrote. The first The Dortmunder books are a series of comic capers, involving the titular luckless thief and his bedraggled crew. The second which he wrote under the name Richard Stark, involves the ruthless thief Parker.

Despite their tight plots, and well drawn characters the studios have had nothing but trouble bringing these characters to the screen. With the Dortmunder books it’s the usual case of bad studio decisions, including the casting of a young Robert Redford as the perpetually hangdog Dortmunder. With the Parker novels the reasoning is a little less straight forward. Its been tried many times, with many different actors playing Parker, including Lee Marvin, Robert Duval, Jim Brown, Mel Gibson, Peter Coyote, and even Anna Karina. Though in one of those touches that makes you shake your head, not one of them has ever been named Parker.

And yet despite the honest efforts of so many, Marvin is great tonight, Duval is probably my favorite, there’s never been a film that accurately captures the tone of Westlakes Novels. For the reason why, lets look at what Dennis Lehane, who as far as I’m concerned is the greatest living writer of crime fiction, and if you like this stuff you owe it to yourself to check out a few of his books today, wrote in the introduction to the new addition of the Parker books that were just released, after a long spell of being out of print.

“Parker. The greatest antihero in American noir. If Parker ever had a heart, he left it behind in a drawer one morning and never came back for it. He never cracks a joke, inquires about someon’s health or family, feels regret or shame or even rage. And not once does he wink at the reader. You know the Wink. It’s when the supposedly amoral character does to let the reader know he’s not really as bad as he seems. Maybe in fact, he’s been a good guy all along.

Parker IS as bad as he seems. If a baby carriage rolled in front of him during a heist he’d kick it out of his way. If an innocent woman were caught helplessly in gangster crossfire, Parker would slip past her, happy she was drawing bullets away from him. If you hit him, he’d hit you back twice as hard. If you stole from him, he’d burn your house to ground to get his money back. And if, as in Butcher’s Moon, you were stupid enough to kidnap one of his guys and hold him hostage in a safe house, he would kill every single one of you. He’d shoot you through a door, shoot you in the face, shoot you in the back, and step over your body before it stopped twitching.

Nothing personal by the way he gets no pleasure from the shooting or the twitching. He’s a sociopath, not a psychopath. But what he is above all is a professional.”

Understandably, adapting something that harsh can make studio execs a little queasy. Which is why, though many Parker books have been adapted, The Hunter, the one tonight's film is based on, keeps getting remade. It might not be pretty, but at least Parker is doing these dirty deeds based off of a recognizable human emotion like the desire for revenge. And not just a profit motive.

So if I believe this film, is at best a misinterpretation of a series of books I and many others hold in very high regard, why do I like it so much?

Well for one thing it just plain neat!

Director John Boorman has had one of the strangest careers in modern film, switching between excellently made but somewhat standard movies like, Deliverance, Hell In The Pacific, and The Tailor Of Panama. And films that are, completely insane. Its like he feigns normalcy long enough to get the studio executives to look the other way, and the next thing you know he’s making Zardoz and there is Sean Connery in a thong, and a giant stone head screaming that “The Gun is good, The Penis is evil.” Or it’s the Exorcist 2 and he has James Earl Jones dancing around whilst dressed as a giant Bee.

Here he comes the closest to making an American French New Wave film. The most famous thing about Point Blank is its non Linear editing, the way the scenes seem to dance around their central point. You’ll see flashes of the past intrude on the present, and previews from the future. It’s a jarring style, and in the hands of a less competent filmmaker it could be annoying but Boorman pulls it off.

The film is also a great LA noir, with the swinging sixties vibe going around in the background. The first round of Neo Noir, starting from the end of the first cycle, to Chinatown, was often set in LA. Then as now still a city in flux. In many ways that city which is so many cities is the ideal place for a noir. Raymond Chandler certainly thought so. And if you’re interested to see more films that play with this genre, location and era, I highly recommend picking up Paul Newman’s Harper, The Long Goodbye, and The Late Show.

The film also hinges on Marvin’s performance. And seldom if ever, has his “huge slab of walking granite” persona been used to better effect. Marvin was never just tough, he’s beyond tough, picking a fight with him, would be like picking a fight with Mount Rushmore.

And yet there’s a certain sadness to his performance here that I don’t think you ever really saw again from Marvin. Revenge becomes his only reason for existing. And when he gets it, there’s nothing left for him.

There are those who even read the film as a ghost story. If you watch closely you’ll notice that Marvin never actually kills anybody in the film, And once his unfinished business is done he fades back into the night. Many a film noir are narrated by a corpse, this might be the only one that stars one.

The Willies Or Should You Prefer It "The Wiggins"

As much as I truly love horror movies, the strange fact is that I am very rarely scared by them. Grossed out? Occasionally. Startled? Now and then. But scared? Not so much. I’m a Cleveland Sports fan, horror movies are a breeze compared to my real life.

So when Andre over at The Horror Digest called on her fellow horror bloggers to reveal which moments in horror really truly have scared them, well I couldn’t resist.

So here, is the list of the moments that have turned me into a big pile of trembling goo. And occasionally still do.




10. Scream: Down From The Toilet Seat:


If you’ve read my reviews of Scream you know I have mixed feelings about the film to say the least. But I have to give credit where it’s due. Scream was one of the first (if not the first) R Rated Horror films I saw. And no matter what problems I have with it now, there’s no denying the film scared the shit out of me then.

The film has some truly effective moments despite its flaws. I could easily be writing about the famous Gialli like opening scene, or the video delay kill, which is still a great beat. But to me the best moments in Scream is its simplest.

Sydney stressed by the killings, and the taunts of her classmates runs into the girls bathroom. Genre Conditioning has taught us that this will be a character building moment. One that’s “safe”. But Sydney’s not so sure. She checks all the blind spots, checking around the corners and under the stalls, and just when she’s sure she’s safe, just when she’s sure she’s alone, a foot steps off the toilet into the frame.

Its one of the greatest “Oh Shit!” moments I’ve ever seen in a horror film. Both the film and the character go to such great lengths to convince us we’re safe, only to have the killer strike her at her most vulnerable at the last possible second. Like I said, its about as simple as it gets, out of context its just a foot stepping off a toilet, hardly the most frightening thing in the world. Nobody even dies.

But it’s a great “all bets are off” moment. The Killer can strike anyone anywhere, and the dread that comes from that boot oh so softly touching the ground, never leaves the picture.


9. The Thing: OH HOLY SHIT WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT HEAD DOING!?!!!???


The sequence starts off with one hell of a bang. One of the artic crewmembers goes into cardiac arrest, and the kindly old doc starts CPR. Only to have the patients chest open up into a jagged maw and bite the poor bastards arm’s off!

Already the WTF quotient for the scene is high, but it only multiplies when Suddenly the monster’s head springs up like a demonic Jack In The Box and every other part of the creature’s anatomy starts sprouting extra limbs.

The Artic crew does the only sensible thing and tries to kill it with fire. Severing The Thing’s head in the process. Normally that would be the end of things, as a rule even Things’ don’t like living sans head.

But then the severed head sprouts legs and starts crawling across the fucking floor. Even the ice cold MacCready can’t help but lose his cool, letting loose one of the greatest “What the fucks” I’ve ever seen onscreen. The message is clear. There are no rules. Shit will happen, and it will not be pretty.


8. Nightmare On Elm Street: Tina does Astaire:


It’s a moment so potent even the remake couldn’t fuck it up.

Its been building from the beginning, the elegant bate and switch, with our would be, should be, final girl. The way Tina has evaded Freddy before, all signs point to this being another narrow escape, before Tina starts to warn her friends and they end up dead. All signs point in the wrong direction.

The side step, the sheer viciousness of the attack, the violation of it. Painting the wall, and the ceiling of what still very much looks like a girls room in blood. The helplessness of both the victim and the on looker. It’s a horrific moment. A lot of people have died in a lot of slasher movies, this is one of the few that hurts.

7. I Walked With A Zombie: Tour Through The Cane:


Not much happens. A nurse guides her charge through the cane fields at night, taking her to a voodoo ritual in the hopes of curing her. In the distance the drums of the ceremony beat in eerie cadance with the sounds of nature, they come across signs of voodoo, eventually they meet a strange and silent guard.

Like I said, hardly an eventful trip, its never so much as suggested that the characters are in any overt danger, and yet…

The scene itself is so eerie, so unsettling. It has the real contours of a dream, familiar people and places made ominous. Strange detail treated as unremarkable. Horror is just a part of everyday life.


6. The Fly: Brundlefly:


I’m cheating a little bit, but as this entire list could be composed of nothing but moments from David Cronenberg movies, I think I’ve earned a little leeway.

The reason I’ve chosen Brundlefly to stand in for the whole of Cronenberg’s work, is that well it just does so nicely. Like all of Cronenberg’s work, The Brundlefly is so terribly plausible. So organically horrifying a living worst case scenario. Goldblum’s performance and Cronenberg’s direction combine something truly pitiful.

Brundlefly inspires pity, he’s pathetic, so repulsive, so alone. And never less then anything but a genuine threat. Whether vomiting on John Getz's hand dissolving it to the bone (something that surely we’ve all had the urge to do) or taking care in cataloging the various bits of the Brundle museum of natural history. The way that Brundlefly loses his humanity piece by piece is one of those rare perfect marriages between metaphor and narrative.

The Brundlefly might inspire pity, but he no longer understands it and woe to those who fail to see that distinction.

5. Nosferatu: Through The Doorway.



I straight up love Nosferatu. It is and always has been one of my all time favorites. And I challenge anyone who doesn’t think its legitimately scary to watch it alone on some dark night.

True, aspects of the film particularly the acting (so much fist biting) have dated, but the moment I’m pointing out not only uses this heightened sense of melodrama, its built around it.

The film’s Renfield Harker hybrid has just settled in for the night. Only to find that his host Count Orlock has decided to join him in his rooms. The young man does what any sensible person would do when confronted with the gristly visage of Max Shrek. He screams, apparently shits his pants, and holds the covers over his head. But still Orlock keeps advancing… and advancing.

The scene works because it’s the literalization of every child’s nightmare. No, that shape in the back of your closet wasn’t a benign pile of clothes. It was a fucking monster. And no pulling the covers over your head and turning on your nightlight didn’t stop it. Its coming to eat you.

4. Night Of The Living Dead: Gore Shot:



Lets face it. Gore shots aren’t scary. They’re cool. They’re examples of great wizardry and craftsmanship. But they’re not scary. When I see a great Savini effect I feel admiration, not fear.

That said, there’s one gore shot that really gets me, going beyond a mere gross out to hit something deeper. You know the one I’m talking about. Barbarra, having temporarily escaped her zombie pursuer explores the isolated farmhouse she finds herself in. Exploring all the rooms the tension builds unbearably, until she starts up the stairs and comes across the dead body of the former resident, with his face entirely gone.

It’s a shocking moment still, I can hardly think of how badly it would have shocked back in 1967. To the viewer it’s like a bucket of ice water thrown to the face. To Barbara its that final straw, she breaks, and perhaps the best part of that shot is who can blame her?

3. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre – Leatherface’s Entrance:



Familiarity can breed contempt. But not here. Despite it being used in just about every horror related montage ever, the entrance of Leatherface will never lose its ability to shock.

The build up is exquisite. The odd sounds, the strange house, the grunts from the backroom. The long creep down the hallway. And before you know it, he’s there, that horrific grinning face, stretched and grey with black pools for eyes. The crack of the hammer, the sound of that metal sliding door closing, gone before the reeling mind can even comprehend what its seen.

It’s a sick moment, and a real one, and it hits in that ugly primal way, that makes The Texas Chainsaw Massacre the greatest horror film ever made, in my own humble opinion. It's a moment that doesn’t just scare, it terrifies.

2. The Strangers – The Entire Fucking Movie



The thing I love about horror is the same thing I love about comedy. Unlike every other genre, there comes a point where it becomes unquantifiable. You can’t rationialize or intellectualize away an emotional response. Did a comedy make you laugh? OK, then it was successful, as much as you may want to deny it, you can’t help the fact that something reached you. Horror is the same way, if it scares you, if it gets past your defenses and reaches that soft meat within, guess what it just won.

Which is why I have to admit defeat with The Strangers. No matter what qualms you might have with the movie, and I’ve had plenty roll their eyes at me when I tell them that its my favorite horror movie of the past decade, easily, there’s no way I can deny that it scared the ever living shit out of me. That it snaked its way past my armor and found a place where I was weak and vulernable that I didn’t even know about, and squeezed until I begged for mercy. No way to deny that after viewing it I went home and locked all my doors, no way to deny that whenever I went outside of my apartment to have a cigarette at so much past ten o clock I couldn’t resist peering down the long streets watching for The Strangers.

The Strangers did what great cinema is supposed to do. It followed me out of the theater and made its mark on me. It didn’t just scare me, in its own small way it scarred me.



1. The Bride Of Frankenstein – The Hand Comes Out:

I’ve told this story before. The Bride Of Frankenstein is the first film I can remember seeing. At least in part. The kindly old man wanting to be sure his daughter’s murder is dead, falls through the hole into the cave under the windmill. He flounders helplessly in the water, amid the charred timbers. And then that hand reaches from behind that pile of rocks, and out comes Karloff in all his Piercian glory.

The power of that moment was too much, and I ran from the room screaming. But I’ve never forgot it, that delicious concotion of fear and adreniline. The power of the cinema to reach through the years and the screen to shake the ever living shit out me, and the power of horror to do it in the most direct way possible.

How could I not become a junkie?

Star Trek The Motionless Picture

I did a very silly thing the other day. Inspired by the confluence of my overwhelmingly positive reaction to Robert Wise’s Somebody Up There Likes Me and She Blogged By Night’s William Shatner Blogothon, I rewatched Star Trek The Motionless Picture.

I know. There’s no one to blame but myself.



Star Trek The Motion Picture, follows the old gang as they reunite to take on a gigantic force that’s destroying everything in its path and heading straight for earth. This might not seem like the plot for a boring movie. That is because you have never seen Star Trek The Motionless Picture before.

Star Trek is a film made to provoke very deep thoughts. What kind of responsibility does mankind have to its creations? At what point does Artificial Intelligence become simply intelligence? Is it morally right to kidnap and apparently kill a nice bland bald lady if in doing so one makes her ascend to a higher plane of consciousness?

And while Star Trek The Motion Picture does raise many questions, these are unfortunately not the questions it raises. The questions it raises are much more along the lines of; Huh? And why is it taking him so God Damn long to get to the space ship? How could so many people make so many poor decisions?

The problem with Star Trek The Motion Picture, is that it’s a film that gets above its raising. Everything in the film isn’t just Serious its SERIOUS. The film is often called out for aping 2001, but it really is very much a piece with the “furrowed brow” aesthetic of seventies pre Star Wars Sci Fi like Silent Runnings. And it reflects poorly on every single aspect of the picture. From the “We built these goddamn expensive models and sets so we’re going to show them to you!” pacing that drags down damn near every scene. To the old hiring of Robert Wise, who previously made one of the greatest hard scifi movies of all time with The Day The Earth Stood Still. To the drab ulitarian grey jump suits that the cast is forced into. Every part of Star Trek The Motionless Picture, is ugly, slow, drab, and kind of depressing. The Warp engines seem powered by nothing more then a free floating sense of Malaise. It’s a film only the Carter Administration could love.

Because here’s the secret about Star Trek, that everyone keeps forgetting. Underneath all the utopian ideals, and chats about logic versus emotion, and high minded sentiments; the franchise owes as much to the pulps and serials of the thirties as its hated Rival. Its not a grey jumpsuit it lives on Velour.

See Star Trek is supposed to be fun, which is something more or less every incarnation between the original TV show and JJ Abrams version forgot. Star Trek at its most basic is devoted to a formula that involves going out into space and finding something weird there. Maybe that weird thing will be some kind of monster who will force Shatner to take off his shirt. Maybe that weird thing will be a green alien bimbo who will force Shatner to take off his shirt. But whatever it is damn it, it will involve Shatner shirtless and cardboard sets!

Shatner always was the key to anchoring the Star Trek series, and no matter what else he has done to the series, no matter that he once shot a fan dance so utterly unerotic that I think he actually ended up creating anti eroticism, he strikes just the right cord as Kirk. Kirk with a gleam in his eye, and a steel chin. Kirk who never once looked down upon the goofy shit that came out of the writers room. Shatner always made being shot out into the far reaches of space to boldy go where no man has gone before, look like an adventure. That might sound like something that’s easy to do, but then why have so many failed so miserably at it.

You see him occasionally in Star Trek The Motion Picture, looking out the corner of his eye, seeming to wonder, “Has anyone ever fucked a satellite before?” Unfortunately, that’s a question that is never answered. Shatner is the only source of life in this film.

….



So I’ve been away for a bit. I’m hard at work on The Christopher Nolan Blogothon, which starts next Sunday. If you could find it in your heart to submit I’d be ever so grateful. That is unless you simply want the next month of TTDS to be Video Blogs of me weeping.

So forgive me, if don’t post as much this week (Though there certainly are a few articles on deck) just know its for a good cause.

…



In other news the amazing Planet Of Terror, has featured me on their "Meet The Horror Bloggers" segment. In addition to being a guaranteed fun and insightful take on the horror genre, PoT is incredibly generous to other blogs and independent horror films. They basically kick ass, and I can’t thank them enough for featuring me.

So if you’re coming here for the first time from there, I hope you’ll stick around, lots of good stuff coming up!

America! Fuck Yeah!

The Unseen #32: The Drowning Pool

Why’d I Buy It?: Came with the Paul Newman Boxset I purchased.

Why Haven’t I Watched It?: Has a reputation of being a lack luster sequel. Also it inspired the name of one of the worst Nu Metal bands, thus by extentsion worst bands ever, which is a tough stigma for any film to overcome.

How Was It?: Pretty much as its reputation has it. The belated (by nine years) sequel to Harper, finds its protagonist older, but not much wiser exploring shenanigans in the deep south. Harper is a pretty great little movie. Its one of the few great color noirs, with a cast to die for, including Janet Leigh in one of her best performances, Shelley Winters in one of the few roles I can stand her in, and a glorious Lauren Bacall playing an utter bitch Godess.

The problem is that its appeal is so tied into its location. Like similar great color noir Point Blank, Harper is a fantastic LA film, capturing the seductive tone of the city, shot by the great Conrad Hall in dusky sinuous palate. So when you remove the setting, which gave the movie its uniqueness, and Janet Leigh who gave the film its heart, and Conrad Hall, who gave the movie its look (he’s replaced by Gordon Willis, which isn’t exactly trading down, but who gets little opportunity to exercise his signature “Prince Of Darkness” aside from a few scenes) what are you left with? Not much.

Now don’t get me wrong, The Drowning Pool is a movie that is devoted entirely to Paul Newman fucking with crackers, there’s no way that doesn’t have some intrinsic entertainment value. Newman himself is charming as hell as always, even if he does seem to be coasting a bit in this one. And in all fairness the movie has a handful of great scenes. Including a bit where Newman interrogates a local gangster at his kennel, where said gangster happens to be training a pack of vicious pitbulls for dog fighting. Rosenberg keeps them and their sometimes bizarre training techniques in the background of nearly ever shot, which livens up the mise en scene considerably and adds a fair amount of tension to an otherwise standard bit of exposition. Then there’s an eerie roadside execution shot at night, with the assassins wearing creepy non descript party store masks, and Gordon Willis getting to cut loose for his one time in the film. But the film on the whole doesn’t hold together.

The cast has some bright spots, including Newman’s wife Joanne Woodward, with whom Newman always had chemistry, and Melanie Griffith in her slutty tomcat days, basically reprising her role in Night Moves to much lesser effect. Stuart Rosenberg, who Newman always had a report directs ably if not well. Drowning Pool isn’t a bad movie per se. I wouldn’t call it a waste of time or discourage anyone else from seeing it. Its just with so much better work from all involved so readily available, its kind of hard to see the point. It’s the very definition of a cinematic B side.

Used Cars

(Used Cars has some pretty amazing gags that depend on what you don’t know. I urge if you haven’t seen it to hold off on this review)

They don’t make movies like Used Cars anymore. Oh sure, comedies will play dark now and again, but it takes a special kind of movie to play dark enough to kill off its “cuddly old mentor character” in the opening reel. It takes a specialer kind of movie to use the increasingly grisly fates that befall his corpse as a running gag.

Used Cars follows Kurt Russell as the amoral head salesman of a broken down lot, whose trying to raise the fifty thousand dollars he needs to buy himself a seat in the state senate. Things escalate rapidly when the brother of the owner of Russell’s lot, murder’s his brother in an attempt to gain the extra lot. Russell having promised never to let the old man’s lot fall into his mercenary brother’s hands, starts an all out war. The result is a comedy that’s absolutely relentless.

Zemekis combines the character based comedy and relentless pace of The Looney Tunes with the “cram a gag in every corner of the frame aesthetic of Mad Magazine in its prime. And in the meantime manages to fit in one of the greatest mass car chases inbetween The Road Warrior and Gumball Alley. It’s a strident uber confident style of comedy, that is just unbearably fucking funny, and just kind of have to speak for itself. All I can say is out of context the following scene is pretty great. In context it’s nigh unbearably hilarious.



Kurt Russell anchors the film. Used Cars is a thoroughly cynical film. Its unthinkable that a movie like this would get made today without a scene to reaffirm that Russell is basically a decent softy underneath all the bluster. But Used Cars is too brave for such platitudes. Russell is an asshole at the beginning of the film, and he’s an asshole at film’s end. He struts through the movie like an amoral Bugs Bunny, with so much charisma to burn that we can’t help but like him, despite the reprehensible things he does. He’s just so good at blowing up the Elmer Fudd’s the film lines up for him.

To draw those two comparisons, you’d have to guess that Used Cars is a movie with some serious verve. Robert Zemekis it goes without saying, has become THE head cheerleader for Motion Capture Technology. It’s kind of a shame. To a certain extent this doesn’t come as a surprise. The best of Zemekis’s scripts have this kind of precision, that could only come from a dedicated control freak (Back To The Future is a fucking Swiss watch). And well before his obsession with Mo Cap, his tech head tendencies were in full flower (Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Forrest Gump, What Lies Beneath). The Mo Cap technique springs from a tendency to control every aspect of the frame, in a way that neither animation, nor live action will allow. It’s just too bad that a filmmaker who could make a film this loose, this wonderfully spontaneous and mad could fall to such a model maker’s impulse.

Stuff I've Been Reading: June

The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway
I’m a Stranger Here Myself, Bill Bryson
The Mother Tongue, Bill Bryson
The Killer Inside Me, Jim Thompson
Fragile Things, Neil Gaiman
What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, Haruki Murakami
Imperial Bedrooms, Brett Eaton Ellis
The Passage, Justin Cronin



“Now for a time there is glory in your might; yet soon it shall be that sickness or sword will diminish your strength, of fire’s fangs or flood’s surge or sword’s swing or spear’s flight, or appalling age; brightness of the eyes will fail and grow dark; then it shall be that death will overcome you.”

-Beowulf-

All fantasy fiction, hell most heroic fiction in general, is about death. This is true from everything from The Illiad, to Beowulf, The Sandman, The Chronicles Of Naria, The Lord Of The Rings, even Harry Potter. They all build to a moment when the hero for all their trials and tribulations, for every insurmountable obstacle they have encountered, faces the one that trial that none of us will best.

Whether the death is metaphorical or literal, whether the hero is resurrected in a blaze of glory, sinks gently into the abyss, or is whisked to the grey havens, all fantasy fiction brings us to the point, the absolute limit of our experience.

But I don’t know if I’ve ever read a fantasy novel that crystallizes this idea so perfectly as The Passage. Like The Fountain, its uses genre fiction to explore death not as subtext, but as text. And creates what is probably the most startling work of genre fiction I’ve read since The Stand.

This is not the world wiped clean and about to rebuild. This is a dead world, where even the animals have been scourged from the earth. Not since Children Of Men have I seen a work of art so stunningly depict a world without hope.

It wouldn’t be fair to give away The Passage's story. Suffice to say, what starts as your standard boilerplate about a military experiment gone awry, does such a graceful literary sidestep about two hundred and fifty pages in that it blows my mind.

And just when it seems that the story has gotten off track. (It does contain one pretty big narrative misstep involving an epidemic of psychic contamination that is never explained.) Just when it makes its strokes just a bit too broad and on the nose. Just when it seems the stories becoming too episodic, it resolves itself in a conclusion so strikingly resolved in its purpose, that its just incredible. The finale of The Passage, where everything the hero cares about is taken from him piece by piece, has a narrative purity and resonance to it.

It’s a sequence that reminds us how powerful and necessary heroic fiction can be. How essential it is. As does the book.



I’ve never been a huge Haruki Murakami fan, but I’ve recently started running again and picked up this book on a lark. And have made a habit of reading a chapter after each workout. Finding that I’m more responsive to his spacey detuned prose when my brain is swimming in endorphins.

What I talk about When I Talk About Running is a part memoir part manual as Murakami writes about his history as a writer and a marathon writer. But if you thought that Murakami would be any more straightforward when talking about himself, you don't know him very well.




Everything Bill Bryson writes is witty, interesting, warm and wonderful. He could right a pamphlet on Lawn Mower parts and I would be sure to pick it up. These are both minor pieces of work for Bryson. The first a light etymology. The other a series of columns about adjusting to American life he wrote for an English newspaper. Still no matter how well worn the ground Bryson makes the trip worthwhile.

I have an odd relationship with Hemmingway. I’ve never bought into the cult of Poppa (a nickname that If I hear someone use will guarantee I will never take anything they have to say seriously again). But neither do I dismiss him as so many do, all the dull predictable things the PC critics throw against him. Hemmingway is simply put a valuable 20th century author. He is not however THE valuable 20th century author. And I can easily name a dozen authors from the same time period whose works I’d save from a burning building, before I snatched A Movable Feast.

I buy into the doomed romanticism of The Lost Generation. Perhaps more then I should. And The Sun Also Rises is famous for two things, being the definitive depiction of such, and its rampant anti Semitism.

On one hand it is an appealing depiction of damaged, affluent Americans using Paris and Spain as their playground between the wars. It features Hemingway’s style at his best and worst. His most cartoonishly macho, and haltingly fragile. And it also makes Mel Gibson look like a Zionist.

I actually have pretty strong issues with how easily some stuff gets labeled as racist or misogynistic. A lot of times people seek to penalize authors and directors for their supposed racism or sexism, when what they’re actually doing is commenting on said characteristics (DePalma) or portraying them honestly. These critics seem to live in a world where people aren’t often misogynistic racist assholes. And while that sounds like a pretty great place, the world I live in is chock full of them.

That being said, The Sun Also Rises crosses the line between Joe Friday style “Just the facts reporting.” And actually inexcusable about the eight millionth time Cohn is asked to stop being such a dirty hook nosed kike (not a paraphrase). It’s not the harshness of the language or attitude towards Cohen, which were probably accurate. Nor the fact that Hemingway’s protagonists all agree that Cohn should stop being such a Heeb. This could also be labeled under simple accuracy. No what pushes The Sun Also Rises firmly into troubling is that COHN himself seems to agree that he should stop being such a Jew. His entire role consists of him being a punching bag for people who despise him, because he’s too much of a Jew to either A) punch them in the face or B) tell them to go fuck off. It’s a concept of Jewishness not far removed from Eric Cartman’s.

This is of course not to say that The Sun Also Rises is not worth reading. The difficulty of its subject matter does not preclude its occasional genius. Only mars it.



That The Killer Inside Me should end up pissing a lot of people off should be no surprise to anyone at all, should they have actually read the book. Whatever horrors the scourge of Sundance has on the screen I can more or less guarentee that there are worse ones here on the page writ large in Thompson’s inimitable barb wire prose.

The story of a small town deputy, who loses the carefully maintained control he keeps over his psychosis, partially in a convoluted attempt at revenge, partially to cover up said attempt, and partially because he just plain likes it. Is as merciless as they come.

Reading it is like watching the temperature gauge on a faulty boiler. It quakes in the yellow most of the time, dipping occasionally into the green for some lucid exposition. But every once in awhile it richocets up into the red. And when Thompson does that, when he gives us madness at full bore. It is terrifying.


Fragile Things is basically a collection of B Sides from Neil Gaiman, he admits as much in the prologue, but it’s a reminder of how entertaining even a collection of B-Sides from Gaiman can be.

Its uneven to say the least, and has the distinction of carrying both my favorite and least favorite Neil Gaiman stories ever written. And while its not something I would ever recommend to a beginner, it does offer a wide survey of his styles and obsessions.

Meta fiction becomes Bret Eaton Ellis (I can more or less guarentee that will be the last time you see me type that sentence). Lunar Park is as far as I’m concerned the most underrated book of the decade. A startling meditation on the responsibility of artists (this from a man accused of being among the most irresponsible), post 9/11 tension, Stephen King, and the complicated currents of love and resentment that can flow between father and son. It’s a masterpiece.

And if Imperial Bedrooms never fully coalesces into something worth reading, well for a long time it seems like its going to. Less of a sequel, then an “Elseworlds piece” Imperial Bedroom’s spends its first fifty pages or so gleefully poking its finger into the meeting place between fiction and reality, following Clay the protagonist in Less Then Zero, in a world where Less Then Zero (Both the book and the film) exist.

The insurmountable Problem with Imperial Bedrooms, is that while Less Then Zero was about a group of people watching the last remaining bits of their souls flicker out and die, Imperial Bedrooms is about characters who are already dead inside. They have finally become the “cock sucking coke snorting zombies” Ellis so famously derided in the no hold’s barred opening of Lunar Park.

Ellis has always been an author who is often unfairly accused of being immoral because he portrays immorality so well. Its odd because there’s nothing glamourous about Ellis’s depiction of evil. Its empty hunger and venality fueled to abhorrent levels by boredom and fear. Empty consumption driven to the breaking point by the characters numbness.

And yet even as the main character in Imperial Bedrooms falls to depths yet unseen by Ellis characters, the effect is curiously underwhelming. The resulting Damnation or redemption only matters if you care one way or the other. And for the first time with Ellis, I didn’t.