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by Edward Champion

The Real Enemy Mine vs. The Reel Enemy Mine

My review of The Reel Stuff, an anthology of horror and speculative tales turned into Hollywood films edited by Brian Thomsen and Martin H. Greenberg, appears in today’s Los Angeles Times. In addition to the reading (in most cases, rereading) I had to do for the review, I watched many films: hence, the crazed kudos for Candyman posted at some ungodly hour not long ago.

Johnny Mnemonic had the consolation of some unintentionally hilarious moments and Screamers was a hoot, complete with a distinguished Canadian actor licking a knife and scowling, “It’s never sharp enough.”

But the worst film of the bunch was Enemy Mine. I hadn’t seen the film in almost two decades, but time had not been kind. Its failure, however, had less to do with its sweeping production value (even with the visible matte lines) and more to do with its almost total bastardization of Barry Longyear’s Hugo and Award-winning novella. Aside from changing the book’s ending to include a literal mine (did they really think the audiences were that dumb?), screenwriter Edward Khmara and director Wolfgang Petersen placed less emphasis on Davidge’s unexpected role as surrogate father, introduced over-the-top meteor showers, and otherwise muted the novella’s themes of war and camaraderie. There is even a terrible moment in which Pepsi product placement gets Dennis Quaid excited.

Longyear’s novella was collected in a handsome book put out by White Wolf called The Enemy Papers, which also featured two other stories, “The Last Enemy” and “The Tomorrow Testament,” set in the same universe. But this went out of print. Thankfully, the book is also available through Back in Print. Longyear also has a website and an interesting history.

by Edward Champion

Roundup

  • Like, oh my God! What the hell is going on? Chuck Palahniuk is writing books and I like totally can’t understand him! I mean, like, why is this Palahniuk guy writing about porn? Don’t you like automatically get VD if you have sex with more than one person at a time? Is there a position other than missionary? In Evanston, you get arrested if you even think of downloading porn. Or so my good mama told me. And she was always right! But thankfully I can take my decency to the NYTBR, a respectable publication terrified of printing the word “bulls__t.” God bless America! (via Syntax of Things)
  • John Updike lectures: what’s so American about American art? But the real curious thing about this speech is whether Updike dared to read out his footnotes in front of a crowd.
  • Publishers are often demanding their top-sellers to pump out a book a year, and the article has a quote from hack novelist Robert B. Parker that is truer than he realizes. (via Sarah)
  • There are some days in which you want to kick a spoiled fanboy in the teeth for his unwillingness to try out anything that even remotely strays from the beloved canon. And then there are other days when you just laugh your ass off over how petty they are.
  • The International Society for Humor Studies is the place where those who have not laughed in over a decade arrive when their services as human beings are no longer required. The rest of us go to an IHOP and cry when the blueberry syrup runs out. (via Bryan Appleyard)
  • Michael McClure on why we still need the spirit of the sixties. (via Booksurfer)
  • Amazon UK and Hachette Livre UK are duking it out over who gets the greater spoils. Amazon’s response? “As a company we do not comment on our relationships with publishers.” As concerned citizens, we do not comment on our relationships with avaricious asshats. (via Booksquare)
  • Colleen Mondor has quite rightfully taken an advertising blog tour concept to task. I had similar thoughts in 2005 when Kevin Smokler did something similar with his Virtual Book Tours. (Smokler, it should be pointed out, has abandoned this idea for this sounder idea that benefits everybody.)
  • The Internet is killing off porn theaters in Bogotá.
  • And if you need an audio alternative to yet another dismal and soporific installment of the Slate Audio Book Club — where you can hear Troy Patterson, who sounds as if he’s smoked a good deal of skank weed, flex his purported but nonexistent acumen with a CliffsNotes summary of Anna Karenina (I managed to get to the 4:22 mark before Alt-F4ing) (and fuck me, this is a longass sentence with too many asides) — this CBC podcast has Canadians getting into a tizzy (one getting a stomach ache!) over Nicholson Baker’s Human Smoke.
by Edward Champion

Bolaño, Oh Bolaño!

Roberto Bolaño! If you were still alive, I would perform fellatio upon your great member, bobbing up and down without break until I had attained the great literary spiritual condition known as chronic lockjaw. Do not fear, Great Literary Corpse of Bolaño! I do hope that you can hear me. I am not a necrophiliac, but I will still read every scrap you have ever written upon! If there is an obscure photograph of you, I will scan it and turn it into a screensaver. If there is an audio file of you flatulating into the great Chilean winds, I will link to it and declare it A Fart of Significance! For it came from your Great Literary Backside! If there is a 3,000 page first draft of a novel that you have written, I will read it and annotate it and do nothing else! I will sell all of my stocks and buy NOTHING BUT YOUR BOOKS! For you are Bolaño! And I am a mere literary peon! I cannot even think about your work without salivating or pissing my pants! You are Bolaño! A genius! Incapable of fault! To declare you a Great God is enough! With these hollow plaudits, I offer Significant Thoughts About Your Work that will be declared Significant because they evoke your Great Name!

I will name my first son Roberto and my second son Bolaño. I will name my next dog Tinajero. If he barks in objection, I will shoot him in the head and obtain another dog and name him Tinajero. And if the second dog objects, I will continue to shoot these dogs in the head over and over until I have found a mutt who answers to the great poet’s name! I will eat lima beans even though I know them to be unappetizing. For how else can I summon Ulises’s spirit than to invoke his name? How else might I find Tinajero?

I will have sex with any woman who will declare herself both a Bolaño lover and a Visceral Realist. I will obtain the clap because I know what it means to be both visceral and real. I will get into brawls with any literary acolyte who does not worship at your altar, who does not look to poetry as the solitary salvation of humankind, and I will be your pimp. I will start a cult and collect money for the Bolaño Foundation! The followers will then start harassing anyone who does not worship at your altar. We have learned lessons from Allende.

If others claim that my life is worthless, that I smoke too many bowls, that I do not write or take responsibility for my actions, then I will not listen. For your wisdom is final. I will wallpaper my room with your image. For you are Bolaño! And my collected output is worth worse than One Mighty Page of your oeuvre.

by Edward Champion

Edward Douglas, Hopeless Hack and Amental Film “Journalist” — Part One

New York hack “journalist” Edward Douglas, a creative typist employed by ComingSoon.net and an intellectual coprophiliac quite happy to scarf down the moist cloacal deposits offered by film publicists, recently left a comment. Mr. Douglas writes that telling the truth about Hollywood and the junket system is “the reason why blogs like [sic] shouldn’t be considered viable outlets to do these interviews.” Is that so?

In a moment, I’ll address the question of whether Mr. Douglas is a writer with enough credibility to make such a claim. But for now, there is a more pertinent question: What makes Mr. Douglas’s idiot tinkerings at ComingSoon.net any different from a blog? It appears that Mr. Douglas doesn’t write for newspapers. In fact, he writes exclusively online. Could it be that Mr. Douglas is merely a piss-poor journalist? Could it be that Mr. Douglas’s isn’t that good of a writer? Could it be that he is a small insect creeping his way up the dunghill of film journalism? A mere mite to be smashed with a robust and responsible Doc Marten?

In an effort to determine precisely why and how Mr. Douglas is a lazy and inept journalist, I’m initiating a weekly series that will examine Mr. Douglas’s work (if his scrabbling can be called that) as it appears on his site, ComingSoon.net. This is the first installment.

MR. DOUGLAS’S OFFENSES AGAINST JOURNALISM AND THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE — THE WEEK OF JUNE 1, 2008

On June 5th, Mr. Douglas interviewed Jon Favreau. Instead of using this time to investigate Iron Man 2 at length or ask Favreau about some of the interesting connections between his earlier and more “real” films (Swingers and Made) and these newer fantasy blockbusters, Mr. Douglas preferred to state the obvious to Mr. Favreau, asking him the vapid question, “So now you are back to being in front of the camera and goofing off?” Clearly, it is Mr. Douglas who is the one goofing off here with this slipshod inquiry. But, of course, since Mr. Douglas (and the other junketeers who were present for this interview) is a consummate ass-kisser, this early question was merely a setup to stroke Mr. Favreau’s ego with this scintillating observation concerning all potential superhero epics now in the planning stages: “I guess you will have to direct all of them.” Again, we see that Mr. Douglas and his unsearing peers prefer constant assuaging over journalism.

Also on that day, Mr. Douglas wrote this amazingly idiotic piece of hackery in relation to Anand Tucker. Marvel at this atrocious sentence!

It must have been a bittersweet departure, because it would have been a fantastic film under Tucker’s guidance and he was a big fan of the books, but leaving the film allowed the director to successfully dodge the bullet and the backlash when the movie bombed horribly, something that many felt greatly accelerated the decline and death of New Line in its previous guise.

Mix your metaphors much, Mr. Douglas? Split your infinitives much, Mr. Douglas? Separate your clauses at all, Mr. Douglas? Are you even aware of Strunk & White, Mr. Douglas? Does anybody edit your pieces, Mr. Douglas? Unable to deploy a figurative metaphor (“the bullet”) for his object, Mr. Douglas feels a strange need to introduce a literal one (“the backlash”). And who are the “many” who felt that The Golden Compass was responsible for New Line’s decline? Is this like the tribunal scene at the end of M? Mr. Douglas suggests by this cavalier item that he is an insider. But he is a dilettante. A proper journalist would offer a link or a specific authority for others to follow.

Let us also ponder the modifier “exclusive” — a word that Mr. Douglas seems peculiarly fixated upon. An exclusive interview suggests that Mr. Douglas is nabbing these interviews on his own, that he is obtaining bits of information that nobody else has. Mr. Douglas is not in the habit of confessing when he’s at a press conference or a sharing a roundtable interview with other journalists. So perhaps he has deluded himself into thinking that he’s getting an “exclusive.” Or this is what he tells the people who pay his checks. Either way, he is a liar. And further examinations into the “exclusive” nature of Mr. Douglas’s material are forthcoming.

But for now, I note that Mr. Douglas reported that he had “an exclusive” item involving Werner Herzog’s upcoming movie, Bad Lieutenant, with Herzog claiming that his film was not a remake of the Abel Ferrara film. But if Douglas had such an “exclusive,” why then did the same news (with a strikingly similar quote) crop up on Defamer one day before Douglas’s report? Could it be that Defamer’s S.T. VanAirsdale (who also blogs at The Reeler) was at the same junket/press conference? (VanAirsadle, to his credit, had the humility and the decency to avoid the word “exclusive,” pointing to “some minor miracle/apparent PR botch” that permitted this interview to happen.)

On June 3, the hopeless Mr. Douglas posted his conversation with documentary filmmaker Nina Davenport, where one can see Mr. Douglas’s considerable deficiencies as an interlocutor. Davenport was commissioned to film an Iraqi film student. The resulting film became an altogether different documentary named Operation Filmmaker. Sounds like an intriguing exposé into cultural transition, yes? Well, not for Mr. Douglas. He was not so tickled at putting forth remotely challenging questions on, say, how much Davenport and her camera might have been inadvertently responsible for the film student’s erratic behavior. In fact, since Mr. Douglas is apparently incapable of using his noggin (or unwilling to) for his questions, we get three questions from Mr. Douglas that rely upon the “It must have been hard”/”Was it difficult?” interviewing cliche.

Let us consider this hackeneyed phrase. In what world do you utter such a conversational banality and not get your ass kicked? You don’t ask a dentist if it’s “difficult” for him to fill in a cavity. You don’t tell a barista that “it must have been hard” to make that latte for the last customer. Why are amental hacks like Mr. Douglas so content to treat their interview subjects like children? (Answer: Because today’s junketeers aren’t interested in adult conversations. They remain inveterate assuagers.)

Douglas really thinks his readers are idiots. Why else would he write, in relation to a junket with Kung Fu Panda co-director John Stevenson, “A lot of what he had to say will certainly be of interest to anyone hoping to one day break into the animation or computer effects field.” Even discounting the fact that Douglas (or one of his fellow roundtable junketeers) foolishly compares the Head of Story position with ADing, is Douglas arrogant enough to believe that aspiring animation students will be going to ComingSoon.net to get technical information? Compare Mr. Douglas’s condescending flummery with Steve Fritz’s more comprehensive and informed interview of both Kung Fu Panda directors, where Fritz not only gets answers on how fight moves were animated and carried out, but even obtains a concise paragraph on key frame animation.

It will, of course, take some time to examine the spineless atavist known as Edward Douglas. I should observe that Mr. Douglas’s affronts to journalism are, as I have intimated with the comparisons above, by no means endemic to film journalism as a whole. I have my problems with David Poland, but at least Poland is attempting some basic ratiocination. One cannot say this of Mr. Douglas, whose execrable word spewing makes Poland look like F. Scott Fitzgerald. It is not just the ineluctable conclusion that Mr. Douglas writes with all the dependability and precocity of a malfunctioning dot matrix printer that should trouble us. He actually gets paid for this.

It is now my goal to inform those who pay Mr. Douglas for his services that they are getting a terrible deal. It is he who is the one not deserving of any credibility. It is he who is the one who should be confined to a go-nowhere office job without the benefit of air conditioning. Future dispatches will follow.