Author / Edward Champion

Posts by Edward Champion

Edward Champion is the Managing Editor of Reluctant Habits.
by Edward Champion

The Latest Meme

I’ve been tagged by Pete Anderson for a meme that involves listing the first sentence from the first post from each month of the previous year. So here goes:

January: “In case you were wondering, my New Year’s Eve was just a tad more wilder than this.”

February: “I am operating on a prepossessing paucity of sleep and still have many things to do today. ”

March: “Robert Birnbaum talks with Martin Amis for the fifth time.”

April: “Richard Grayson alerts me to the Coney Island Reporter, a blog chronicling Coney Island’s unfortunate corporatization.”

May: “Condition of Mr. Segundo: Rattled by interlopers.”

June: “The crooked bastards at Javits want $29.95/day for wi-fi.”

July: “David Ulin raises a provocative point about Harvey Pekar’s recent prolificity, contemplating whether Pekar is authoring too many books for his own good, while likewise pondering whether Pekar’s concentration upon other personalities comes at the expense of Pekar skillfully depicting his own personal experiences.”

August: “At the the Litblog Co-Op, they’re cha-cha-chatting about the next round’s lineup.”

September: “Sunday Times: ‘The Pentagon has drawn up plans for massive airstrikes against 1,200 targets in Iran, designed to annihilate the Iranians’ military capability in three days, according to a national security expert.'”

October: “To my great surprise, there are scant YouTube links to Lois Maxwell’s fourteen Bond film appearances as Miss Moneypenny.”

November: “Recovering from many martinis.”

December: “Now this is a very interesting move, and I hope that Mr. Pierce will be granted some major technical flexibility to dramatically reconfiguring all of the blogs.”

I’m not sure what this exercise says exactly, except that the guy who keeps up this place is a relentlessly curious and cantankerous bastard who drinks too many martinis, doesn’t sleep enough, and has some political empathy. Which is probably pretty close to the mark.

For far more interesting people than this cranky rube, I tag the lovely Tayari Jones (who can now be found at the top of the revamped Bat Segundo site), Levi Asher, the collective contributors to the eNotes Book Blog, This Recording, and Sarah Weinman.

by Edward Champion

Tim Burton: Remaking the Movies You Grew Up With, One Movie At a Time

I am convinced that Tim Burton is on a mission to destroy all the movies I enjoyed growing up. First, there was his abominable remake of Planet of the Apes, which was an unpardonable dumbing down of Pierre Boulle and Rod Serling, even with the Charlton Heston cameo. Then there was Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, in which Roald Dahl’s acid-barbed warmth was glossed over with ostentatious production design and thespic detritus (from Depp, no less!). I haven’t yet seen Sweeney Todd, but, despite Mr. Teachout’s thumbs up, I fear the worst. Now comes word, courtesy of Bookshelves of Doom, that Burton plans to direct another adaptation of Alice in Wonderland.

Let us be clear on this. Burton’s decline began when he began remaking old films, presumably because his ideas or his stock of fresh screenwriters dried up. Aside from the ho-hum offerings Big Fish and The Corpse Bride, Burton’s been a lousy director. His films have been crammed with showy commercial impulses in which the stylized early Burton — with its enjoyable Aubrey Beardsley hand-me-downs — has all but disappeared. (Years ago, I sensed that something was amiss when Burton opted for an over-the-top black palette with Sleepy Hollow.) He hasn’t taken a chance or made an unapologetically fun film since Mars Attacks! There’s simply no trace of the guy who gave us Beetlejuice or Ed Wood left.

And if the good Terry Teachout says that Sweeney Todd is “the best film ever to have been made from a Broadway musical,” I hope you’ll still pardon my skepticism.

by Edward Champion

Don Morrison: Time Magazine’s Cultural Answer to FOX News

A few weeks ago, Don Morrison of Time Magazine suggested that French culture was on the decline. Morrison bemoaned the fact that the French take their culture seriously. He tsk-tsked fashion magazines for carrying serious book reviews (he says this like it’s a bad thing!) and small towns from putting on opera and theater festivals. Morrison’s main gripe was that “[a]ll of these mighty oaks being felled in France’s cultural forest make barely a sound in the wider world.” And that because of this, France was “a wilting power in the global cultural marketplace.”

The chief problem with Morrison’s essay, aside from its considerable hubris, is the term “cultural marketplace.” Why must culture be dependent on the marketplace? In addition, Morrison’s stupendous ignorance of contemporary French cinema — I’m nowhere nearly as steeped in French cinema as I once was, but has this dilettante not even heard of François Ozon or Gaspar Noé? — leads him to report that “France’s movie industry, the world’s largest a century ago, has yet to recapture its New Wave eminence of the 1960s, when directors like François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard were rewriting cinematic rules.” Is Morrison complaining about the French film industry in 1907 or the 1960s? Or is he just a hopelessly confused man? And if box office gross is the paramount distinction, what of 2001’s Amélie ($33 million U.S. gross), 2003’s The Triplets of Belleville ($7 million), 2003’s Swimming Pool ($10 million), or 2006’s Arthur and the Invisibles ($15 million)? And why doesn’t he cite any contemporary examples? Wild stab in the dark, but could it be that Morrison doesn’t know what the fuck he’s talking about?

I’d plunge into this essay further, but thankfully Bernard Henri-Levy has done my work for me, dispensing with this yokel’s argument quite adeptly and including a helpful taxonomy of axioms.

(Thanks, Gonzalo, for the tip.)

by Edward Champion

Bonfire Two Decades Later

The New York Times talks with various people about Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities on the twentieth anniversary of its publication. What does Wolfe think about New York today? “One day this is just going to be a Disneyland. This’ll just be a place where people come for entertainment, that’ll be it. There’ll be no industry other than the entertainment of just being here. If the financial industry should leave — and it could, any time it wants, it could leave. Only that excitement … keeps them here. They want to be able to call themselves ‘Wall Street.'”