The Bat Segundo Show: Richard Russo II

Richard Russo recently appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #301.

Richard Russo is most recently the author of That Old Cape Magic. He previously appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #152.

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Condition of Mr. Segundo: Shoving Cape Cod mackerel down his throat.

Author: Richard Russo

Subjects Discussed: [List forthcoming, but lots in the latter half of the show about the Newsweek piece and the perceptive problems with close third-person.]

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Books RICHARD RUSSOCorrespondent: Bon Jovi’s “Living on a Prayer.” Why “Living on a Prayer” over “You Give Love a Bad Name?”

Russo: (laughs)

Correspondent: Was “Living on a Prayer” the tune that was more applicable to weddings here?

Russo: Ed, Ed, you’re trying to make me feel regret now, aren’t you? Because that would have been perfect as well.

Correspondent: Was it more about living than love? With the emphasis in the book.

Russo: It was the result of my wife and I having gone recently to a number of weddings and being absolutely fascinated by the way young people my daugghters’ age react to the song. Because it is so much before their time. And for a lot of young people — 28, 29, 30 — it is a kind of anthem And the way they not only know the words, they have a kind of routine worked out on the dance floor. Those in the know have this routine on the dance floor that involves the fist-pumping, which they do in unison. Sometimes forty or fifty of them, young people out on the dance floor, to a song that is just so much before their time. But they’ve adopted it. So it was a wonderful way to show a bridge between those generations. And Laura, who does such a kind act in that redeems her father, at least temporarily. It just fit that slot so nicely. It also suggests that when Griffin begins this novel, he’s had a tiff with his wife. But it’s really just a tiff. I mean, he has a kind of tenure in his job. He loves his life. He loves his wife. He loves his daughter. Everything is right. And yet by the end of the first half of this book, he’s living on a prayer. And he knows it. Whereas he didn’t in the beginning.

Correspondent: But it’s interesting. Because your timing is absolutely perfect! Recently, on YouTube, there’s this video that’s been going around, that 18 million people have seen, of this elaborate dance at a wedding all set to music.

Russo: Oh really? I hadn’t seen it.

Correspondent: Well, I know. I don’t think you’re much of an online guy.

Russo: (laughs)

Correspondent: I wanted to talk about the notion of the home in this book. There’s a sentiment that is expressed: “You aren’t a real adult until you have a mortgage you can’t afford.”

Russo: Right.

Correspondent: Griffin is pressured into home ownership. And he and his wife often sift through the real estate catalogs, splitting up properties into Cannot Afford It and Wouldn’t Have It As a Gift.

Russo: Right.

Correspondent: And then also, 13-year-old Sunny Kim says, “You have a lovely home,” later on in the book. Home though is not necessarily where the heart is in this. This is a couple that is united by home as a piece of property, as opposed to a place where one can establish a family. This is a couple that settles on The Great Truro Accord and actually figures that this prearranged stratagem will aid them in deflecting every curveball of life thrown their way. So I wanted to just ask you why the home, of all things — or even just property in general — would be the central place for this couple’s failure to (1) deal with life and (2) come to the real terms that they are their parents and that they share a lot of family qualities. That’s a lot of points. I’ll stop there.

Russo: No, no, that’s — yes, I’m overwhelmed by the question. The other conflict, of course, is that Griffin’s parents, of course, are confirmed renters. So their notion of a home is something which recedes before them. Like the Cape itself. I mean, home for them is a place that you can only visit. And so, for Griffin, home is something that he is really reluctant to go to. Joy loves her parents’ home. She loves the vacation home. The same home that they rent every year. For her, home is a central place, as you said. It is the place where love resides most powerfully. And I think I would also expand that to say that home, like marriage, is not just a private thing. Just as marriage institutionalizes love in some way, home institutionalizes family. So when Sunny Kim — the outsider — comes in and says, “You have a lovely home.” He’s saying, “You have a lovely daughter with whom I’m in love. You have a lovely marriage to which I aspire. You have a lovely home that I would like to live in one day and you have a lovely nation that is now my adopted home.”

So just as your question is big, my answer is kind of big. In the sense that the notion of home, by the time we get to the end of this book — especially that final Sunny Kim scene — that notion of home has gone from something at the beginning — it was two people separating real estate property on a place they can’t afford into those two categories — Can’t Afford It and Wouldn’t Have It As a Gift. And by the time we get to the end of the novel, it’s almost something that you would expect to be taken over at some point by Department of Homeland Security. (laughs)

BSS #301: Richard Russo II (Download MP3)

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Review: The Time Traveler’s Wife (2009)

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“Come with me if you want to love.” I expected that line at several points, and I confess that great expectation as a man who wanted to believe in this film. You see, aside from being a geek, I am also known to be something of a romantic sap. But the line never came. Henry, our buck naked SNAG and presumed protagonist, has this troubling tendency of emerging in some random time period, often fumbling around for fresh clothes, sometimes smashing in a car window, but always speaking in that deep and dependable Christian Bale-style Batman voice. (Such circumstances cause him to approach a preteen girl naked, and one wonders why he isn’t listed on the Megan’s Law database. If only Jean-Claude Van Damme were around to play Timecop.) Here’s a guy who seems to have found the time to smoke a few cloves before disappearing into the void (how else to explain his vocal affectations?), but who is incapable of drinking. You see, all that wine causes him to jump about from year to year too frequently.

But he isn’t interesting. He isn’t the Henry that I read and enjoyed in Audrey Niffenegger’s novel a few years ago. (But to hell with him. What of Clare?) But he does look an awful lot like Michael Biehn’s Kyle Reese, and he does shout the line, “What year?” as if some California governor is on his trail hoping to collect some tax revenue to salvage the plummeting state budget. (Not a chance. This film is set in Chicago, but lacks the late John Hughes’s gift for showing off the town.) But then this is Eric Bana, an actor never known for great depth. He’s the guy you call when Christian Bale isn’t available, or when you need some one-dimensional Romulan heavy for a reboot of a profitable franchise. I’m sorry to be so prejudicial, but it’s the truth. I want Eric Bana to wow me, but he reminds me too much of Michael Paré in the 1980s.

And it’s difficult to take any movie that includes a line involving “the most serene gestation on the planet” too seriously. As much as it pains me, we can blame screenwriter Bruce Joel Rubin for such colloquial absurdities. The man did give us, after all, Jacob’s Ladder and Ghost — two perfectly respectable flicks. Because I’m feeling generous, I’ll even give Rubin some plaudits for the Wes Craven joint, Deadly Friend, which had the decency to feature a silly basketball beheading scene. But Rubin isn’t that writer anymore. Or, rather, the system won’t allow him to be that writer anymore. When Henry meets his future father-in-law, he’s Philip Craig playing Philip Abshire playing Christopher Walken in The Wedding Crashers. You can imagine, at times, a bunch of screenwriters trying to cut and paste bits from other commercially successful films. Henry and Clare aren’t afforded the time to establish their relationship. The book had the decency to keep things cheerfully foggy, in large part because Niffenegger knew very well that the high-concept premise needed to ride on how Clare perceived this forever-shifting man of mystery. But the film version pins much of the perspective on Henry. And it’s almost as if a bunch of marketing guys had the following conversation:

MARKETING GUY #1: Dude, not only do we get the rom-com crowd, but we can get an entirely different audience!

MARKETING GUY #2: What?

MARKETING GUY #1: Time travel, dude!

MARKETING GUY #2: Stop calling me, dude. Sir is okay. But not dude.

MARKETING GUY #1: Whatever, man. Anyway, you’ve got all these sad fucking guys who have to take their girlfriends to some piece of shit rom-com.

MARKETING GUY #2: Okay.

MARKETING GUY #1: But we get them too!

MARKETING GUY #2: We already have them.

MARKETING GUY #1: No, no, no! Time travel! You’re not listening.

MARKETING GUY #2: Some of that sci-fi stuff?

MARKETING GUY #1: Dude, I totally got some action in San Diego.

MARKETING GUY #2: Dude, don’t call me dude.

And so on. Insert swagger and comparison of penis sizes. But the point here is that Marketing Guy #1 and Marketing Guy #2 seemed to think that The Time Traveler’s Wife could work as both a science fiction movie and a romantic comedy, thereby killing two demographics with one stone. But the book wasn’t designed this way.

See, here’s the thing. Niffenegger’s book is good, but don’t burrow into the damn novel hoping for deep insight. We needed to believe in the time travel plot. Indeed, it’s essential we believe in the time travel plot. Because, truth be told, the behavioral observations — which include the couple’s two best friends (one played in the film by the dude from Office Space!) — are about as dimensional as the regulars on a half-decent but instantly forgettable sitcom. It’s more Monica wondering what Chandler is up to this week, rather than John Cassavetes nuzzling his shaky camera into Gena Rowland’s soul. But in the book, we don’t care about the narrative shortcomings. Because the time travel plot is pretty damn cool and the perspective is told mostly from Clare. And we want to know what happens.

But in the film version, we know about Henry’s backstory. Because it’s told almost entirely from his perspective at the outset and there really isn’t room for speculation. And, again, he’s played by Eric “Hunk of Meat” Bana. If I wanted to spend 100 minutes with a hunk of meat, I’d waste my time in a meat locker. Bana gives us constantly blinking eyes and that husky voice of emo certainty. The makeup people can’t even age the dude with any verisimilitude. A streak of gray indicates that he’s in his early forties, but his wrinkles stay the same.

I can’t fault director Robert Schwentke for this, because he does his best to make this movie visually interesting. There are endless shots of hallways and doorways, establishing an interesting spatial quality that matches Henry’s time-traveling. But the cheesy Spielbergian handprint on the window had me howling for the Subtlety Police, as did the obligatory growing-up montage. I want to ensure anyone who is reading this that I’ve seen worse films of this type, but truthfully, I had more fun with the 2001 time travel romantic comedy, Kate & Leopold.

“How dare you! You tricked me!” “I never had a choice!” Not exactly the most nuanced dialogue centered around a vasectomy for a couple that knows each other over many years. But then this is a film that lacks the guts to take on the maturity or even the blossoming of romance, which I did find within Niffenegger’s novel in spurts.

The upshot is that you’re probably better off reading the book, which doesn’t have to contend with this obeisance to the marketing team and manages to make improbable moments work because of context, including the infamous lottery ticket scene. Speaking of striking paydirt, I’m not sure if Niffenegger deserved $5 million for her second novel, but at least she has passion. The team that put this movie together is more interested in getting you excited about young, attractive, and ultimately superficial people. I’ve complained about the Hunk of Meat, but Rachel McAdams wins my approval and deserves better than this. So too does the audience.

Review: Taxidermia (2006)

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I don’t know if I would go so far as to call György Pálfi our next Fellini (circa late 1960s), our next Pasolini, or even some predictable filmmaker going out of his way to offend us — even if the visual cues for his most recent film suggests all this. But he does have talent. And Taxidermia, which finally gets a limited and long overdue American release this Friday, is certainly not for weak stomachs or limited-minded men who cloak their shallow prejudicial insights inside the sheltered caverns of higher education. The distinguished critic sitting behind me, not the type to sit through a Saw installment, made numerous sounds of disgust. I kept slouching downward in my seat so that the remnants of some half-digested lunch wouldn’t hit me unexpectedly in the back of my head. But thankfully the critic was civilized.

The New York people may not get this film. But then again, they might. For my own part, I feel inclined to applaud it. For there is a regurgitation-heavy eating contest here that makes the “Lardass” scene in Stand By Me look as innocuous as a Disney film. Two men, having just finished shoving spoonfuls of some disgusting stew in their mouth, are now regurgitating their stomachs out of view of the audience. They then begin discussing a woman they’re trying to impress in the audience, all the while puking their guts into a bucket. When they return back to the competition, Pálfi’s camera sweeps through the crowd with an unexpected excitement. I was both disgusted and galvanized by this, and it is a rare film indeed that can dislodge two entirely differing feelings like this at the same time. And this audacious emotional combo made the Hollywood movie I saw afterward seem notably limp by comparison.

But Taxidermia isn’t just a film of scatological shock value. If you’re willing to give this film a chance (and, again, I hesitate to recommend this to those of flaccid constitutions), it offers some inventive visual ideas. A joyful man pisses fire. A camera circles across a floor containing a bathtub, revealing yet another matching bathtub, which houses any number of strange sights in its cavity (an animal carcass, a recently born infant, et al.). An act of bestiality has the violated animal transforming into various women. An enormous man — that champion eater, pictured above, a few decades later — sits permanently in an apartment with endless boxes of chocolate bars. There are giant cats he keeps in a cage and that he keeps big by having his son — a taxidermist — constantly feed them butter. Should I mention the ejaculation mass that shoots into a starscape? Or the creepy pederast we discover in the landscape of a pop-up book? Or, for that matter, the cock (penis) that gets pecked by another cock (animal)?

If such sights trouble you, you should probably blame Lajos Parti Nagy, whose short stories provided the source material for Pálfi to go crazy here. And while the last ten minutes of the film does feature some minor torture porn and the results, on the whole, don’t always work, I doubt very highly that I will see another film in which two champion eaters are enlisted to eat caviar on a boat to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Communist liberation. The film can be cartoonish at times. (Gergely Trócsányi’s shouting as the champion eater grows a bit tedious, but he is replaced by another actor in the next installment. I should probably point out that this film is also a three-part multi-generational epic.) But it’s easily one of the more alive films I’ve seen in a while.

The Underestimated Nicholas Meyer

In today’s Barnes & Noble Review, I take on Nicholas Meyer’s The View from the Bridge. Meyer is best known as the man behind Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, the film that arguably saved the Star Trek franchise (for better or worse). But people often overlook the fact that Meyer also wrote a series of amusing Sherlock Holmes pastiches (beginning with The Seven Per-Cent Solution), as well as the 1983 TV movie, The Day After.

Meyer is a far more interesting figure than most people give him credit for. While there are several unanswered questions in the book, the memoir does provide an interesting glimpse into an accidental career. But go to the B&N Review to get the full skinny.

Review: Wolke Neun (2008)

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My first instinct was to dismiss the silly second half of Andreas Dresen’s Wolke Neun (Cloud 9 for Yanks), which wallows in childish dialogue (“That’s just so mean!”) and betrays its wonderful first half. But after chewing on this film over the last few days, I’ve found, much to my surprise, that it has stuck with me. I’ve come around to the possibility that these melodramatic developments are, in fact, essential to the film’s broader point. I don’t believe (and my apologies to Jane Juska) this film is really about older people having sex or even elderly characters schtupping about and having a bit of fun, but about the many ways in which civilization has made sex the province of the young, the healthy, and the bendable. We all know that plenty of other people have sex too, but we settle for these smooth and unwrinkled depictions. Aside from the surefire crowd-pleasers of lesbians or ménages à trois, that’s the only sex these days that really sells. But have we lost sight of the awkward gaffes, the intercourse we have when we’re languid or not so virile, or, found sometimes in the troubled suburbs, those clumsy attempts at spontaneity?

Cloud 9 wants us to consider these questions. By casting exceptional actors in the parts (Ursula Werner and Horst Westphal, who resembles, at times, the German answer to Jack Lemmon) and by focusing on a sexual affair not often portrayed in cinema — one between Inge, a 67-year-old married woman, and Karl, a smiling 76-year-old bachelor — Dresen may be asking us to ponder our relationship with authenticity. (Incidentally, this is a subject that Dresen is quite punchy about in interviews: “There is no authenticity in the cinema! If you want authenticity, you should look out the window. You can see truth in the cinema, but you don’t see anything that’s authentic.”) But because Cloud 9 is committed to an inauthentic truth, I’m inclined to accept the inauthentic telephone call that comes near the end of the film and some of the closing corny sentiments (“Perhaps everything has its time.”). For why should we expect constant authenticity from cinema? Maybe we don’t really want to know the authentic truth and maybe we should be spending more of our time looking out windows. (Certainly this film’s failure to depict Viagra caused me to question the dutiful thrusts of our charming septuagenarian bronco.)

Here is a film that initially sets most of its action indoors, suggesting a sedentary life of decay. What do Inge and her husband Werner do for fun? They spend their time listening to records containing train sounds. When they do leave the house, they take a random train and take in the window’s view. “He loves train rides,” explains Inge. Karl, by contrast, offers buff and tangible ambles. “I prefer bike rides through nature,” says Karl. These distinctions may seem clear-cut to us, but Inge actually finds Werner’s locomotive fixations to be not loco, but touching. This is, after all, the man she’s been with for thirty years. Why should she expect otherwise? But then Inge’s lifestyle isn’t so much about expanding her self-discovery, as it is about approaching existence much as she takes on her part-time job: sewing alterations for handsome strangers. No surprise then that our smiling friend Karl meets Inge through her work. But this isn’t exactly Last Tango in the Nursing Home, because these characters thankfully remain independent. But that impending possibility is suggested with Werner’s father, who is infirm and in a rest home. “If I ever end up like my father,” says Werner, “you can shoot me in the woods.” It’s safe to say that Werner lacks Karl’s smooth touch. But then this is Germany.

During the scenes in which Inge rubs lotion on Werner, I was reminded of the creepy scene in Mike Leigh’s Hard Labour, in which Liz Smith rubs her husband’s hairy back. But Inge and Werner seem to get along better than Leigh’s happy couple. Does it all come down to physicality in the end? If so, that’s one hell of a cinematic conceit. But it would be foolish to suggest that this intriguing film is just a dialectic. (Perhaps this is simply what I wanted it to be.)

I should probably point out that during one of the film’s many long takes, I became strangely fixated on the two breast-like bowls hanging on the dining room wall. I doubt that many critics will confess this. And I need not go into the redblooded male’s unwavering interest in mammary glands. But I found this visual to confirm my strange hypothesis. Why on earth would I concentrate on this? Because Dresen may understand that my cinematic mind, like many, is programmed to accept inauthentic truth. And even when there’s a living, breathing character before us, art forces us to fixate on the potential symbols. “That’s just so mean!” says Inge over and over again when Werner eventually levels with her. Childish? Oh yes. But if we were more honest about cinematic authenticity, we wouldn’t have to be reminded. And if we were more truthful about such matters, we wouldn’t have to go to the cinema.

But Cloud 9 is an interesting film.