Month / January 2004

by DrMabuse

Remarks from the President

The crazed Dean speech was one thing, but I’m starting to have grave concerns about the President. Here’s a partial transcript:

Remarks by the President to the Press Pool
Plenty O’ Ribs Cafe
Area 51, Roswell, New Mexico

11:25 A.M. MST

THE PRESIDENT: I need some ribs, goddammit.

Q: Mr. President, how are you?

THE PRESIDENT: Shut the fuck up, you gadfly. I’m hungry and I’m going to order some ribs, Laura be damned. I ran six miles today and eviscerated the Bill of Rights a little more. I earned my ribs, don’t you think?

Q: What would you like?

THE PRESIDENT: What do you think I’d like? Ribs. What does a man do in a cafe but order ribs? Do you have any real questions?

Q: Sir, on homeland security, critics say you simply haven’t spent enough to keep this country secure.

THE PRESIDENT: My job is to dry hump this nation. I’m riding bareback, my friend. Who cares about jobs? Who cares about the economy? Who gives a flying fuck about the deficit? We need a space program resembling a really bad Brian De Palma film. But right now I’m here to take somebody’s order. That would be you, Rubber Band Man — what would you like? Stop pestering me with questions and start eating, son. You’re looking a bit thin. Have you been drinking? I drank once, but then daddy bailed me out. Put some of that meager money on the table like a man. This is all about consumer confidence. I don’t care how little they pay you over at the State-Ledger. This is how the economy grows. Max out your credit cards, jeopardize the state budgets. It drives the economy forward. And, no, don’t quote Paul Krugman, you twerp. I’ve had enough of that whiny little bitch. So what would you like to eat?

Q: Right behind you, whatever you order.

THE PRESIDENT: I’m ordering ribs, goddammit. Do you know about unilateral decisions? Well, this is how it works, David, I’m going to order a rib for you and you’re going to eat it. And I’m not going to leave until you nibble that sucker down to the bone.

Q: But, Mr. President —

THE PRESIDENT: No buts, David. This isn’t a press conference. This is about understanding how ribs work. It’s a bad metaphor, but I’m not leaving until you understand it, son. Do you hear?

by DrMabuse

Who Needs Those Two-Page DeLillo Reviews When You’ve Got John Grisham?

Horrible news about the NYTBR‘s change in direction:

Well, if you write non-fiction, review non-fiction, or prefer to read non-fiction, break out the champagne. “The most compelling ideas tend to be in the non-fiction world,” Keller says. “Because we are a newspaper, we should be more skewed toward non-fiction.”

What’s more, if you’re perplexed or simply bored with what passes for smart fiction these days, the Times feels your pain. More attention will be paid to the potboilers, we’re told. After all, says Keller, somebody’s got to tell you what book to choose at the airport.

Personally, I’d rather suffer through Laura Miller’s columns every once in a while than see the Gray Lady cave like this.

(via Old Hag)

by DrMabuse

Noir City #3

Last night, Eddie Mueller paired two movies based on W. Somerset Maugham material. Maugham, who was the highest paid author in the world during the 1930s, had a good deal of his material produced for the screen — primarily because he was the kind prolific and popular writer to have four new plays running on the London West End at the same time. My own two-volume set of Somerset Maugham’s short stories alone runs several thousand pages. Often the long stories set in the tropics blur into each other, with Maugham recycling plots and characters without apology.

But that’s not to suggest that we should discount Maugham’s gift as a storyteller. He was a plot-heavy writer, who read every story of Guy de Maupassant in French at an early age. He worked the literary angle with Of Human Bondage but kept it real with his Ashenden tales. The Ashenden stories are considered by many to be the prototype for the modern spy story. Drawn from Maugham’s own experience in espionage, they were to prove so successful that Hitchcock used two of the stories as the basis for his film The Secret Agent. Fleming and Le Carre could not have existed without Maugham, much as Doyle could not have existed without Poe.

But Maugham was also concerned with intimacy, keen on domineeering figures in a family (he considered his happiest days to be his early ones with his mother). And it was two selections along these lines that Mueller presented last night.

Christmas Holiday (1944): Despite the presence of the great Herman J. Mankiewicz, this adaptation is bogged down by a flashback-within-flashback structure. It takes forever to get to the crux of the story. The camera ogles endlessly over Deanna Durbin — here, in her first adult role, cast against type as a browbeaten nightclub singer. After breaking down at Xmas mass, Durbin tells her story to army officer Dean Harens (the Matt Damon of his time, thankfully without the star status) and it is here that we are eventually introduced to her husband, Gene Kelly, who has just murdered an associate. Unfortunately, it takes so long to get to the film’s real goodies, best epitomized in a split-diopter shot of Kelly and Durbin hunkered over a piano while Kelly’s controlling mother (played by Gale Sondergaard) rocks in the background. It’s a pity, because there’s some nice lighting by Woody Bredell, and some magnificent shots of a concert hall. And the Durbin-described “pathological” relationship between Kelly and his mother, with the Durbin dynamic, is something special to behold.

But the problem with this movie is that it’s too much of a blatant vehicle for Durbin. At the time this movie was made, Durbin was desperate to break out of her wholesome teen singer image. It was she who read Maugham’s novel and she who convinced Universal to make the film. And while she does a commendable yeoman’s job, the camera cannot stop shoving itself up Durbin’s nostrils, a one-two punch with soft-light, as if to hammer home the point that we are seeing a wholly different Durbin.

The results are an underwhelming film directed by an underrated director (Robert Sidomak, the man behind The Killers and Criss Cross), with a few sparks. But it could have been much better.

The Letter (1940): Over the past few years, a friend and I have had an on-again, off-again dialogue over William Wyler. He claims that Wyler is overrated — the worst director of the studio system. I claim he’s hit-or-miss, but that you can’t discount The Ox-Bow Incident, Roman Holiday, Jezebel, or Ben-Hur. Whatever Wyler’s problems, I maintain, he’s still great with actors and knows how to deliver when he has a script in his hand. No, my friend says, Wyler couldn’t come up with a decent visual to save his overinflated pecs. Watch your back, he says. I’ll stab it in the morning. Sometimes.

The subject is so heated among film geeks that even a documentary was made in 1986 called Directed by William Wyler in an attempt to put Wyler alongside directors such as John Ford and Howard Hawks.

Up until now, I’ve had to agree with my friend’s stance on visuals. Wyler always struck me as a guy who was riding on Gregg Toland’s coattails, leaving Toland to frame that magnificent supermarket shot in The Best Years of Our Lives or make Bette Davis look nothing less than sensational in The Little Foxes.

But The Letter not only predates The Maltese Falcon as a potential missing link between German Expressionism and film noir by one year, but it may very well be a visual example I can use in the Wyler debate. This film is pure eye candy. It is a film I must see again. From the opening tracking shot, in which a murder is committed in a tropical wilderness, the photography offers endless semiotics to sift through, at one point even aping the movement of Bette Davis as she’s describing how she shoots a man to death. There’s one sequence that takes place wholly in a living room, in which three characters are sitting. Wyler and Toland frame them high to low. The man who has committed a highly unethical act is visually tainted in a gray suit. The pure character who had no idea of this act is in white. And the person who caused all this is dressed in black, seated on a striped soda that suggests a jail cell.

The blocking in this picture is exquisite. Characters arch their backs over to match the Venetian blind shadows on the wall. I’m almost certain that Bertolucci had The Letter in mind when he went off to make The Conformist.

Unfortunately, The Letter is hard to track down. Ironic, given that it might be the solitary film to restore Wyler’s status.

by DrMabuse

Ribbed for Spot’s Pleasure

In Washington, the Folger Shakespeare Library has the coffee table book prototype on display. The book, recently restored and some 400 years old, contains an illustrated history of the world and is reported to have been “flipped over by bored visitors in 16th century living rooms.”

Don Paterson walked away with the ?10,000 T.S. Eliot Prize, but he says it’s tough living being a poet. It takes Paterson a year to come up with a whole poem. While declaring poetry an “amateur pursuit,” Paterson’s still shocked that poetry is as much work as any other form of writing.

Today’s obscenity racket: Passion Panties, a Tupperware-style sex toy company, has had one of its representatives arrested in Texas. The representative had even joined the local Chambers of Commerce. But that didn’t stop authorities from citing a state law prohibiting the sale of obscene devices, which are legally defined as items “designed or marketed as useful primarily for the stimulation of human genital organs.” What’s interesting is that, like the “entertainment purposes” rap in Alabama, commerce is not addressed. So I’m sensing a common theme here. You can sell, sell, sell just about anything under the sun. But heaven forbid that you design, market, or entertain. The Texas law is so nebulous that one can make the case that maxi-pads or ribbed rubbers are “obscene items” by way of stimulating gentials. But since the law stipulates “human genital organs,” presumably a vibrator deisgned and marketed for cocker spaniels is peachy keen, right?