Month / December 2009

by Edward Champion

Review: Nordwand (2008)

nordwand

It’s safe to say that Nordwand (known as North Face in the States and presently hitting the film festival circuit, to be followed by a rolled out release) is a better movie than Clint Eastwood’s The Eiger Sanction. Yes, the 1975 film has a few decent mountain climbing scenes. But it also has such preposterous moments as George Kennedy convincing Eastwood to carry beer in his backpack as they climb a mountain, so that he might guzzle the cans at the top. Eastwood’s climb up the treacherous north face of the Eiger mountain is, oddly enough, not too dissimilar from the one chronicled in Nordwand, although Nordwand is based on real-life efforts. And you could look up the names. But then you’d know the ending. And that wouldn’t be very fun.

Harsh snow, wintry weather, avalanches, attempted rescue by railroad station. The perfect ingredients for mountain cinema and a regrettable reminder that you can step inside the theater in the winter, but you won’t shake yourself of the snow. So much for escapism. But Nordwand proves to be considerably more engaging than The Eiger Sanction, K2 (which featured a whiny Michael Biehn), and Vertical Limit (which featured a whiny Chris O’Donnell)– in large part because there is a race between Austrians and Germans at the heart of the storyline, thereby making this climb — at least on the German front — one of national pride (and considerable stupidity). But since the two main mountaineers we root for don’t whine, as their American counterparts do, we are all too happy to cheer them on.

The events, of course, are set during Nazi Germany. It is May 1936 — the year of Leni Rifenstahl’s Olympia and the beginning of Nazification. Rifenstahl, as we know, got her start with mountain films. And we certainly know that it’s 1936, because one German offers this mood-killing explanation for why the Germans wish to climb the North Face before a festive crowd: “The pride of facing a challenge, whether it be sports or politics.” Jews have been stripped of their civil rights, but you wouldn’t know it watching this film. The newspapermen sent to cover the spectacle are more interested in “the spirit of the German conqueror in battle with the mountain. That’s what makes a story.”

Nordwand does make a good story, in part because many of the mountaineers die and we even get to enjoy fingers freezing up and people shrieking in agony. I don’t know how much of the mountain climbing in this film is real and how much of it is fake. Frankly, I am presently too lazy to check. But it seemed convincing enough for me. One admires the spirit of the sensible and experienced Austrians, the film’s protagonists. They offer some pretty nifty side swinging moves that I can’t imagine any whiny American trying on a indoor rock wall. The Germans are determined to commit folly in the name of the Fuhrer. While this is certainly their right (as characters, that is), I was slightly disappointed that there wasn’t more nationalism drenching through clinched teeth. But my desires were somewhat placated by a rather splendid mountain cake wheeled into a banquet room.

Overall, I enjoyed Nordwand and can recommend it to those who like German mountain films, which are less whiny and more interesting than the ones that come from America.

by Edward Champion

Liu Xiaobo Indicted

Some important news. PEN America has informed me that dissident writer Liu Xiaobo has been formally indicted by the Chinese government. Here’s the press release:

Liu Xiaobo Formally Indicted
PEN American Center Denounces Move, Pledges Solidarity

New York City, December 11, 2009— PEN American Center denounced the formal indictment today in Beijing of renowned literary critic and PEN member Liu Xiaobo, calling the move “extremely troubling” and urging supporters and governments around the world to step up the pressure on Beijing to free him immediately.

Liu Xiaobo, a leading intellectual who played a critical role in the 1989 Tiananmen protests and who was one of the main architects of the Charter 08 petition last year, was formally indicted by the Beijing Municipal Procuratorate today, just three days after his case was handed over by investigators and more than a year after he was detained. Liu is charged with “inciting subversion of state power,” a provision regularly used to silence writers in China. If convicted, Liu Xiaobo could face up to 15 years in prison. The case will be heard by the Beijing No. 1 Intermediate People’s Court, reportedly within the next four to six weeks.

“We are deeply disappointed at this new development in Liu Xiaobo’s case,” said Kwame Anthony Appiah, President of PEN American Center. “We are extremely troubled that the indictment seems to follow the assertion of the Beijing Public Security Bureau that Liu committed a ‘major crime’ in drafting Charter 08 with others, and that he should be convicted of ‘inciting subversion.’ Words are not a crime, and the right to freedom of expression is guaranteed by international law and China’s own constitution. We stand in solidarity with Liu Xiaobo, and call on the Procuratorate to drop all charges and release him immediately and unconditionally.”

A past president of the Independent Chinese PEN Center, Liu Xiaobo was detained on December 8, 2008, on the eve of the release of Charter 08, a groundbreaking manifesto and petition calling for greater human rights and democracy and an end to one-party rule in China. It has been signed by more than 10,000 Chinese citizens across the country, many of whom have been questioned, harassed, or briefly detained by authorities.

Yesterday, at great personal risk, many of those who joined Liu Xiaobo in signing and promoting Charter 08 released an open letter supporting him. The letter, entitled “We Are Willing to Share Responsibility with Liu Xiaobo,” challenges authorities to release Liu or punish them all equally. As of this morning, 318 people had signed, 240 of whom live in China.

PEN American Center is the largest of the 145 centers of International PEN, the world’s oldest human rights organization and the oldest international literary organization. The Freedom to Write Program of PEN American Center, which works to protect the freedom of the written word wherever it is imperiled, has been working to end China’s imprisonment, harassment, and surveillance of writers and journalists and curtail Internet censorship and other restrictions on the freedom to write in that country. For more information, please visit www.pen.org/china.

by Edward Champion

Review: A Single Man (2009)

asingleman

Colin Firth’s swooning fan base has long accepted the unlikely heartthrob as an endearing bumbler. Firth has often played the sensitive (and quietly sensible) romantic populating both mainstream romantic fare (the Bridget Jones films and Love Actually) and projects that are considered highbrow by way of artistic association (Pride and Prejudice‘s Mr. Darcy or Girl with a Pearl Earring‘s Vermeer). Atom Egoyan was one of the few filmmakers to scrape away at Firth’s squeaky clean archetype in the underrated Where the Truth Lies, giving Firth a raw and dark character suggesting a grittier and seedier version of The Importance of Being Earnest‘s Jack Worthing.

But none of these performances — as good as they are — has quite permitted Firth to summon up the totality of his talent. Market forces, content to give the people what they want, have consigned Firth to a curious upper middle-class ghetto. Firth’s characters often cling to a steady yet shaky authority, largely because they have occupied some station for too many years. Firth has atoned for these limitations with a smooth vocal command and an almost Mitchum-like commitment to movement, counterbalanced by a somewhat uncertain gaze. (The “I like you very much just as you are” moment in Bridget Jones’s Diary comes immediately to mind as an example of Firth doing his best to defy cliche.) But this pigeonholing hasn’t always allowed an interior glimpse. Firth has perfected the nice guy. But nice guys often have more internal demons than they’re willing to impart. It’s too bad that so many screenwriters, paid very well to adhere to formulaic conventions, fail to express this in their labor.

I have quietly hoped that some talented filmmaker would figure Firth out, or that Firth might obtain enough clout to headline some pet project, permitting those delayed demons to roil in a more complicated role. Indelible British actors often find Hollywood at some point in their careers, but this doesn’t necessarily mean that they are completely understood. (Exhibit A: Malcolm McDowell.) The people in charge are, after all, more concerned about the coffers than with human complexities. And I never would have imagined that fashion designer-turned-filmmaker Tom Ford would be the guy to push Firth to the limit.

A Single Man is one of the year’s best films. And it’s not just because Ford has given Firth a perfectly attuned role, permitting Firth to stockpile Professor George Falconer’s grief behind restrained grimaces and meticulous domestic action within a quite literal glass house. For A Single Man is also cinematically committed to George’s isolation. George’s heartbeat drowns out the soundtrack. He never quite sees a person head on. The secretary with the bobcut who gives one of George’s students his home address is filmed in slivers, and George replies, “You have such a lovely smile.”

It helps immeasurably that Ford’s working from very good source material (Christopher Isherwood’s fine novel) and that Ford is smart enough to make this his own. When George addresses his students in class, he sits before them on the desk, with three cameras cutting left, center, and right — as if George is some kind of fashion model being photographed on a platform. But to some degree, he is. His academic role is the only thing he has left after losing his partner, whose funeral he isn’t even permitted to attend (“family only”). Ford’s dramatic tactic is an eccentric yet effective perspective, reminiscent of the way that the vanilla-minded Steven Spielberg found a way to channel drug addiction through fatherhood in Minority Report

It also helps that we have been given a vision of the early 1960s that, for once, doesn’t call attention to its time period. Sam Mendes’s disgraceful adaptation of Revolutioanry Road didn’t understand that real people lived and wrestled with serious decisions. (It’s possible that Ford may have had Mendes’s American Beauty in mind with one of his other interesting visual tics. Whenever George feels something close to happiness, the gray visuals brighten up a bit. This isn’t as distracting as it sounds, and it’s more understated than Mendes’s now dated CG flowers.) The much acclaimed Mad Men understands this better, but feels the need to cram some “shocking” measure of its characters against contemporary standards. Can the characters really be defiling women like that? The more important issue is why Matthew Weiner cannot simply let these flawed characters act without the enforcement of moral judgment.

But Ford lets George live without such constructive qualms. We feel his loss. We feel his sadness. George is often kind, as we expect a Colin Firth character to be. But with grief comes a mess of forgivable solipsism in his willingness to light a man’s cigarette, bring over a bottle of liquor, or swim in the ocean to prove that youth hasn’t entirely expired. If George died right now, would he be okay? It’s a question echoing from happier days in the past, but one that the audience remains constantly aware of. The film’s commitment to George’s perspective causes us to be deeply locked within his being, but it also pulls off the difficult trick of making us sympathetic to those trying to get George back into the land of the living. This group includes a Spanish stranger and George’s best friend, Charley (Julianne Moore), who has also negotiated the line. We know this by seeing the way she lives now: aging, smoking, drinking, applying makeup, bombarding George with calls.

The film’s willingness to celebrate life, and the connective failings of single people of all stripes, propels it well beyond a one-note exercise and inures it from Weiner-style judgment. It is to Ford’s credit that he injects some humor into the morbid mix, for grief is never entirely tragic. There’s an overeager gun store owner, and some physical comedy involving a suicide and a sleeping bag. Life isn’t some “I wish I knew how to quit you” melodrama that makes us feel tolerant, liberal, and morally superior. It’s a little girl who doesn’t understand what her father means by “light in his loafers,” but who sees the possibility in a sad man sitting in a bank. A Single Man invites us to see that possibility too, both within its mise-en-scene and in the more important world before our eyes.

by Edward Champion

Interview with Keir Graff

In the wake of Kirkus Reviews‘s folding, I asked Booklist senior editor Keir Graff a few questions on the future of book review publications. He was very gracious and offered considerable answers.

Do you foresee Kirkus‘s closing having any editorial impact on present Booklist editorial policies? Will you be expanding your reviews? Changing the tone? Attempting to fill in any gaps left by Kirkus?

keirgraffInteresting question. Ron Charles eulogized “the last reliable source of negative reviews.” And, accurately or inaccurately, there is a definite perception of Booklist reviews as being “positive.” This is because of our recommend-only policy, which, briefly, means that we only review books we can recommend. Our core audience is librarians who use our reviews to buy books. And when the policy was implemented, the thinking was that, by publishing reviews that ended with a “do not buy,” we were wasting librarians’ valuable time.

Of course, the uses of Booklist reviews have evolved, and they are now used by readers’ advisors, licensed to Amazon, etc. And, as those uses have evolved, the concept of “recommend-only” has evolved, as anyone who reads our Upfront reviews knows: there are books we recommend because there will be patron demand, but that we think are horrible, and we say that — hopefully helping larger libraries know how many copies to buy.

But the short answer is that we won’t suddenly be doing more negative reviews. Despite the economic downturn, we have been able to review more books with each passing year, in part by reviewing more of them online. And while Kirkus‘s demise certainly leaves the whole industry poorer, I imagine there may be an opportunity in trying to fill the gap for Kirkus‘s subscribers. Our format is different, but for the harried Hollywood development exec, the volume and breadth of our review coverage could help fill a void, I’m sure.

(For more on our reviewing policy, you can go here.)

What is Booklist‘s present prognosis? Do you feel the worst has come to pass? Is there a timetable in place concerning Booklist‘s commitment to the future? Do you plan to maintain the present levels of compensation to reviewers?

Our fiscal year runs September to August, and the last fiscal year was, as you might guess, pretty awful. We’re doing better this year, especially in terms of new initiatives such as e-newsletters and webinars. And by using the word “initiatives” I have just sounded I work in marketing. But, yes, the worst has come to pass — at least for the foreseeable future. There is no timetable, but as we draw up next year’s budget, we’re going to have some big-picture talks about the future. The online environment is pretty key to all of that. Our compensation to reviewers has always been very modest, almost an honorarium, but we have no plans to cut it. (And we do pay our bloggers!)

You have reached out to the online world with your blog and through Twitter. Have these had any unique effect on Booklist? Do you see Booklist stretching out more of its review coverage into online waters? Concerning the balance between news and reviews, do you feel that Booklist needs to work more on the breaking news front to attract eyeballs and readers? If so, why?

Yes, we now have five blogs and two twitter feeds. That, and the free content on Booklist Online, have both helped us reach a wider audience and helped that audience reach us. We’ve always felt that Booklist reviews, though written for working librarians, could appeal more to the general public, simply because they’re written by smart book lovers who use rich language to make their points. But because Booklist is not available on newstands, we had a hard time reaching that public during the print era. Online, there have been great opportunities to broaden our reach without commensurate cost. Perhaps ironically, though, our biggest successes haven’t had to do with social media, but have come through plain, old e-newsletters.

Earlier I said that we’re reviewing more and more books, and this has been possible through our Booklist Online Exclusive reviews. In 2006, we published 32 of them; in 2007, 185; in 2008, 669; this year, 1,205. We’re able to quickly turn around embargoed and hot-topic books but also to flesh out coverage of the kind of meat-and-potatoes titles that libraries need to know about but that we might not have room for in the print magazine (for example, a brief mention of book 7 in a long-running hardcore sf/fantasy series). (All of our web-exclusive reviews, by the way, are made available for free via our Booklist Online Exclusives newsletter.)

Covering breaking news has never been our primary mission. But, yes, once you’re online, you need to keep current, and book reviews and author interviews will only get you so far. Our bloggers do use other peoples’ reporting as a way to link to our content. For example, when awards are announced, we often publish the list with book titles linked to our reviews. But because our web presence is only one part of our publishing program, we’re not in a desperate race for eyeballs the way, say, Gawker Media is.

How important are reviews to Booklist’s long-term strategy? Have we reached a point in which prepub reviews have less of a valid position in the marketplace? Or do the present financial hits upon book-related publications have more to do with other economic developments? If so, can you identify these and explain your position.

Book reviews remain central to our long-term strategy. Given our mission, helping librarians decide which books to purchase, any radical change of direction would be like breaking a contract. Librarians need and use our reviews, as we’re reminded every time we go to a conference.

As you know, the topic of print vs. online, of The Man vs. The Bloggers, has been talked to death, often in terms as unfortunately oversimplified as those I’ve just used. And in defending the importance of what we do, I’m leery of getting drawn into that unwinnable argument. I believe that coexistence is not only desirable but essential to a healthy literary ecosystem. Publishers can get excited about the immediacy of much of the blog coverage they get: they send out books, and all of a sudden reviews start popping up. Some of them are thoughtful and well written, like yours, and some of them are excited summaries by fans. All great. We can’t compete with that because we receive them, assign them to reviewers, send them, edit them, lay them out in print, format them carefully for online, etc. — but by the time they’re published, they’ve passed through many hands and received the benefit of a great deal of collective experience and perspective. Old-school crowd-sourcing, if you will.

I think, too, that journals such as Booklist, Kirkus, Library Journal, Publishers Weekly, all in some way perform the kind of function that newspapers do, or should, or used to, which is to offer readers a selection that they wouldn’t necessarily have thought of. Much is made of the web’s ability to give people exactly the experience they’re looking for, and that’s exactly why people should be wary of it. So it’s my belief that niche or specialist or genre blogs are terrific but should be balanced by some more general-interest reading, which, at least in terms of book reviews, is what we offer.

But back to your original question, which was about the marketplace: many people have questioned of late whether a New York Times review can actually sell books, and many people have said it cannot. But because prepublication reviews are written expressly for people who buy books, they do sell books. Maybe one starred Booklist review only sells a few thousand books (anecdotally, I have heard this is the case); taken altogether, that becomes a significant amount for any midlist title, while also providing the early buzz that can help a book gain momentum. But maybe the true relevance of prepublication reviews will only be known once they disappear from the landscape, and, at that point, I suspect that many publishers would be desperate to get them back. After all, they can send one book to Booklist and reach tens of thousands of readers (both via print and online). They often send books to blogs whose regular readers number in the hundreds.

I’m no financial expert, but it appears to me that Kirkus‘s immediate failure, and the troubles of any other prepub journals, can’t help but be tied to the fact that it’s a precarious climate for business in general, a precarious business climate for magazine publishing, and a precarious climate for book publishing as well. Add that to publishers’ fears of missing the boat with new technologies, new business models, etc. — even when they’re not sure where the boat is going — and it’s no wonder that advertising support for print publications has suffered. Although, as I said, this year has been better for us than last.

At Booklist, while we’re somewhat insulated from the full, Darwinian reality of corporate ownership, we do need to earn a profit to help fund the activities of the American Library Association. Like everyone, we’re working harder and have had to do more with fewer resources.

Five years from now, what will the environment of magazines and publications, mostly devoted to book reviews, look like?

Boy, do I wish I knew. It’s going to be a lot leaner, and using a lot less paper. But Booklist will still be here, reading and reviewing away.

(Our motto: “We read everything so you don’t have to.”)