Month / March 2011

by Sarah Weinman

You Can’t Be a Good Literary Critic Unless You…

You can’t be a good literary critic unless you write lists like this.

…have moved furniture.

…whistle a happy (or sad!) tune.

…understand what it is to be poor.

…understand what it is to be rich.

…love some kind of animal. In my world, dogs more than cats, but there’s no hard and fast rule.

…have a vice. Several, in fact.

…admit you’re wrong, know you will probably be wrong, accept that you’re wrong.

…have a loving relationship with a human other than yourself. Actually, make sure you love and (especially!) respect yourself, first, because otherwise you’re hardly in a position to love and respect anyone else, are you.

…cast off any lingering or slow-building bitterness. It shows, and it sucks.

…accept your words and judgment come with responsibility but that responsibility doesn’t mean being timid or pulling your punches.

…have a passport.

…read widely. Sure, you can review within a narrow range of books, but those narrow range of books need context, from highbrow to gleeful trash to everything in between.

…write something other than book reviews or criticism. Otherwise you’ll get stale and bored.

…still have your inner six-year-old.

…accept that lists like this are a crock of bullshit.

…laugh at stupid jokes and cry when shit upsets you. Otherwise known as, if you have emotions, feel ‘em.

…understand your being a literary critic has a (very short) time window. And that the very idea of making a living at this will cause heaps of laughter, mostly within your own head.

…take a fucking risk every now and then.

…live. Because let’s face it, being a good literary critic involves the same thing as being a good, well, anything. And if you don’t live, what the hell is the point?

by Edward Champion

Review: Super (2010)

If you are sending up the vigilante comic book genre, are you creating successful satire if you’re upholding the same anti-human values?

If you are sending up a very specific genre – in this case, the vulgar vigilante superhero movie that tends to be based on material written by Mark Millar – are you creating successful satire if you’re upholding the same anti-human values? Judging by the mirthless comedy Super, it appears that writer-director James Gunn never bothered to ask himself this pivotal question. Gunn is a man who, by including a joke about double negatives in his films, may very well be more astute than the digital Neanderthal Zack Snyder. (It’s worth noting that Gunn wrote the script for Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead remake.) He certainly seems to be channeling Snyder’s 300 in several flashback sequences filmed in muted color and near black.

But with Super, Gunn shoots blanks.* A cinematic comedy that includes violence is one thing, but Gunn has seen fit to include two rapes (and another indirect one in a car) in this film. Rape is a tricky topic for comedy, but, as The Atlantic‘s Sady Doyle has recently pointed out, rape is showing up in comic book movies with increased frequency. In order to make rape work, you either have to be a bona-fide iconoclast like Alejandro Jodorowsky, who featured a brazenly ironic moment in The Holy Mountain where a tourist takes a picture of his wife as she’s being raped by a fascist soldier, or a blithe mischief maker like Pedro Almodovoar in Kika. In Gunn’s hands, rape isn’t funny and it doesn’t contribute much to the story. At least Gunn can be commended for keeping the rape gender balance right. Rainn Wilson’s character Frank is raped. And so is Frank’s wife Sarah (Liv Tyler).

Frank (last name D’Arbo, not Castle) is a short-order cook living a short order life. Shortly before a noisy animated titles sequence that forces its “fun” on us (no animated rapes included), we’re informed that Frank has experienced two great moments in life: his marriage to his wife and a time in which he pointed out to a cop the direction in which a criminal sprinted. Frank has seen fit to memorialize these moments through crayon drawings. When his wife reports that the hands are too big, he applies white-out to make them smaller.

This is a fairly promising beginning. But Super never finds a fresh or lively angle, either as a bona-fide vigilante flick or a parody of one. Kevin Bacon plays Jacques, a nebulous drug pusher (owner of the nightclub Bare Assets) who gets Sarah (later revealed to have been involved in something resembling a Narcotics Anonymous program) hooked on the hard stuff. When the cops tell Frank that there’s little that they can do (Jacques doesn’t have a record? The cops aren’t staking out his club when he runs a flagrant operation?), Frank takes the business of getting his wife back into his own hands. He attempts to confront Jacques in front of his club and is beaten by his goons (which include the gravelly character actor Michael Rooker, whose main purpose in this film is to have his head beaten against the floor near the end).

Since Frank is a quietly pious man, he sees a television show called The Holy Avenger and experiences a Christian vision that involves getting his head carved open with very bad CGI and his brain sprayed with what appears to be the holy answer to special sauce. (Later in the film, Gunn has vomit shift around in a toilet and form a face. These conceptual deficiencies, whereby something scatological is rearranged into some fixed perfunctory image, truly reveal Gunn to be a fauxteur.)

From here, Frank starts reading comic books, beginning with The Holy Avenger. He is determined to become a superhero, even if he knows little. He meets Libby (Ellen Page), a 22-year-old exuberant working at a comic book store. He stitches his own costume – a red uniform containing the obvious joke of zippers dangling on the front – and becomes The Crimson Bolt. He wears a fake beard to a college library and asks where the hard crime is. Then he heads to Euclid Street and tries confronting these criminals. He is unsuccessful. He returns to the store, asks Libby about superheroes without weapons. He then begins to beat the heads of anyone he deems criminal with a large wrench. This includes people who key cars, who tempt children into cars, and people who cut in lines.

As Frank says in a flashback, “Happy people are kind of arrogant.” So, for that matter, is James Gunn. The story here is so sloppy that, after a detective following up on the Crimson Bolt’s activities is shot, the film never returns. The police also do not arrive as dynamite, gunshots, and various other nihilistic sounds go off near the end. (Gunn might have had a funny joke here about ineffectual police, thus justifying the need for vigilantes. But given how these plot threads dangle like long white shoelaces in search of anglets on the blackest boots, it becomes very evident that Gunn’s merely a colossal incompetent.)

However, the movie does have one redeeming factor. Ellen Page, whom I originally (and wrongly) pegged as some thespic XX answer to Michael Cera’s limited hipster archetype, offers surprising range for such a throwaway character. When she enlists herself as the Crimson Bolt’s sidekick, Boltie, and demonstrates gleeful excitement after a man has been maimed, the moment is executed with baleful fright – the only bona-fide feeling this movie successfully delivers. And that emotional truth exists because Page is smart enough to comprehend that, because Gunn’s material here isn’t especially funny, she has no alternative but to play her character as real as possible. “It’s called internal bleeding, fucker, and then you die,” she shrieks after a car has plowed a man against the wall. Yet moments later, she’s contrite. Later she’s desperate. Later she’s oblivious. These flighty flits between emotional states give Page’s character a resonant psychology that this blasé film doesn’t deserve.

Page’s strong performance also has the unintended consequence of revealing Rainn Wilson to be a spent force who has played Dwight Schrute for too long. (If Wilson was looking to escape being typecast, why did he sign on for a somewhat misanthropic character who, like Schrute, is into weapons and fundamentalist values?) Page even manages to perform better physical comedy than Wilson during one moment where Libby is attempting to prove her gymnastic worth before Frank. This is a shame, because Wilson does have a deep voice that might have pulled off some jocular response to Kevin Conroy’s Batman.

If comic book movies (or their satires) are to stand any chance of evolving, then the time has come to reject anything involving Zack Snyder or the dimwitted writers he’s happened to hire. We must demand better movies, whether comic book or not, for women. Let the corpulent Comic-Con slugs choke on their own Cheetos-soaked vomit.

* It seems fitting to ridicule James Gunn’s name, seeing as how he has done the same to Rainn Wilson’s character. But perhaps I’m just sour because I will never get my 95 minutes back.

by Edward Champion

Review: Source Code (2011)

Like a dependable pulp novel kept on the nightstand as dutifully as a gun under the bed, Source Code comes stocked with some unexpected ammunition.

If you grew up watching time travel trash like 1994’s Timecop, 1989’s Millennium, or 1991’s Freejack, or you forgave the execrable television series Sliders because you hoped that the show’s incompetent writers could serve up some half-interesting angle on the parallel universe, then chances are you will enjoy Duncan Jones’s little thriller, Source Code. I am pleased to report that there is something more here than VHS nostalgia. The movie doesn’t have the ambition of Shane Carruth’s Primer or Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko, but it does share in part the anarchistic exuberance seen in Nacho Vigalondo’s Timecrimes – especially when Source Code‘s protagonist starts hitting people.

The story involves Captain Colter Stevens (Jake Gyllenhaal), an ostensible soldier who flew helicopters in Afghanistan but who has no hard memories of his last mission. His spirit is beamed into a man on a Chicago commuter train during the last eight minutes of his life. At the end of each existential installment, he is blown to bits by a bomb. Before this, I had thought a shaky theatrical act getting assailed by rotten fruit was the height of humiliation. (And it seems that Jones has anticipated my worldview. One of the train passengers is a television comedian.) Shortly after Stevens is “killed,” he is then pressed for details by a woman (Vera Farmiga) who doesn’t seem to comprehend that being repeatedly subsumed in an explosive fire is likely to cause a touch of disorientation, to say nothing of PTSD.

This is all part of an experiment called Source Code. Later in the film, we are given some adorably dodgy science about the brain’s electromagnetic field, curiously similar to Johnjoe McFadden’s theories. Just before death, the brain has the ability to take an eight minute memory of its final moments. And this is why Stevens can wander about a train. Who knew that the mind was a 7-11 security camera? The vital question of whether Source Code can be used to recall some of humanity’s most inebriated evenings is never pursued.

Stevens’s purpose is to find out who the bomber is so that a much larger explosion, purportedly prepared by the same individuals and threatening to take out the Windy City for good, can be stopped so that Uncle Sam doesn’t have another pretext to strip away more civil liberties. Every entry into this eight minute universe involves Stevens (or, rather, the man he’s leaped into) dodging a woman spilling a cup of coffee, responding to his fetching coworker Christina (Michelle Monaghan) while she’s telling him, “I took your advice. It was good advice. Thank you,” handng his train ticket to the inspector punching holes, and listening to a boorish bourgie man across the aisle complaining about the train being late. Given these limitations, the filmmakers are successful in constructing a universe that generates interest through slight alterations. What happens if you get off the train? Or if you disarm the bomb? Or if you just start hitting people? Or if you frighten a poor woman on her way to work?

If this sounds as if I’m damning the movie with faint praise, I’m not. I enjoyed the flick quite a bit. But in light of a recent publicity fiasco, I feel that some modest corrections are in order. Director Duncan Jones has repeatedly mentioned in interviews that JG Ballard is one of his favorite writers. And it has reached the point where some of my friends – the kind of smart people who have “JG Ballard” set up as a Google News alert – have expressed interest in the movie. These Ballard soundbytes suggest that Jones is either somewhat literate or wishes to cultivate a potential audience who reads. But Ben Ripley’s screenplay has no great philosophical ambition, much less any suggestion that he (or Jones) is even vaguely familiar with Ballard. The movie actually owes more to the supremely underrated television series, Quantum Leap. (Jones, to his credit, has honored his inspirational influence by including Scott Bakula’s voice in a cameo.) Nor can the movie, despite its Linux-friendly name, be said to be very tech-friendly – especially when you start considering the preposterously effortless manner in which the phones inside the movie can access military information.

This is mass entertainment, folks. But it’s old school mass entertainment. Source Code is the type of small concept-driven movie that was fashionable fifteen years ago and that very much needs to be part of the regular crop of releases again. Like a dependable pulp novel kept on the nightstand as dutifully as a gun under the bed, Source Code comes stocked with some unexpected ammunition. Who is the eccentric and handicapped scientist played by the great Jeffrey Wright? Why is our hero trapped in a room that is getting very cold? Why is he not allowed to leave? Why is he asked to recall the Queen of Spades as if he’s a shark counting cards at a Vegas blackjack table?

In our present epoch of hollow CGI spectacle, we’ve taken the art of basic narrative questions very much for granted. So a movie like Source Code, which would probably merit ho-hum reviews if it had been released in the mid-1990s, becomes a rare lily to be plucked from the top of a dunghill. I hope that the film is commercially successful so that the business of telling real stories becomes a higher priority among the amental Hollywood thugs who believe that three reboots of the same comic book franchise over ten years is the way to win audiences.

by Edward Champion

Review: Circo (2010)

Aaron Schock has largely resisted Fellini’s understandable tendency to reinvent with his striking and quite magical documentary.

When it came to the circus, even the great Federico Fellini could not resist the personal myth. Fellini’s 1970 quasi-documentary, The Clowns, opened with the young director (portrayed by a child actor) watching workers hoisting a circus tent outside his bedroom window, with each series of grunts producing another incremental rise of the top in the magical night. Ambrose Bierce may have defined circus as the “place where horses, ponies, and elephants are permitted to see men, women, and children acting the fool.” But name another venue where professional fools – especially those who act before more human animals – cause a cinematic genius to reimagine the beginnings of his own allure. The modern circus has endured quite well after Philip Astley. Assuming that you haven’t handed over all four of your ventricles to the great capitalist sham, it remains difficult for any vaguely mischievous soul to countervail the circus’s great charms.

Aaron Schock has largely resisted Fellini’s understandable tendency to reinvent with his striking and quite magical documentary, Circo. The movie depicts a vibrant second-string circus in Mexico – one that has been in some form of existence since the 19th century, but which lacks the resources in the 21st to play the big cities. Nevertheless, you will find motorcycles rolling in the “globe of death” and performers giving it their all as a recording of Alan Silvestri’s Back to the Future theme plays over dim makeshift speakers.

We are told that you never need a house in the circus. And the maxim appears to be largely true. Home is where the heart is. While the family here appears close-knit, despite evidence late in the film revealing interpersonal fissures, those who stay in the circus work very hard, sacrifice vital aspects of their lives for their art, and face increased taxes and costs so that audiences can have a good time. There are some performances where hardly anybody shows at all. But the family still shrink wraps tasty snacks and they give it their all. After all, the show must go on.

Sick days are not an option. Money needs to be produced. When we see one of the trucks containing llamas and tigers break down, we know immediately how unforgiving the economy and the operational expenses will be on the family. It is something we can never truly understand through the film medium, except for those who try to leave the circus and can’t always adopt to the nine-to-five jobs and come back. But coming back is not without its difficulties. The circus life is one where, if you don’t convince a girl to get in the truck when you’re about to leave a stop, romance is a concatenation of ephemeral encounters.

“Without children,” says one man, “there is no circus.” And sure enough, the vehicles carrying the booming announcers roll through the streets of distant domiciles. It draws the enthusiasm of kids who run along the side and beg for tickets and try to schmooze the man at the wheel for a few more.

It’s difficult to walk away from this film without being deeply affected by the iridescent streaks that the circus manages to paint upon the most colorless crannies of Mexico. It remains a mystery how much of this is clever cinematography and how much of this is a bona-fide collision. But I don’t think it matters much. Beyond this rich visual charm, Circo movingly puts human faces upon the families who work long days for a few hours of grand entertainment.

For the Ponce family running the Gran Circo Mexico, being a kid means learning gymanstic tricks at every spare moment, and scarfing down tortillas and beans after a hard day of wrangling animals and performing chores and enduring the educational instructions of an uncle sitting on the steps of a trailer. As one family member says, “You have kids to give them everything. And they work too much.” But what kid wouldn’t want to tame a tiger? What kid wouldn’t want to put on a mask and entertain a crowd? There is also Naydelin, one very adorable five-year-old girl who, when leaving the circus for school, still finds delight in learning grammar – even though we know that she’s giving up the rarest on-the-job training imaginable. She feels genuinely apologetic for the young girls who will never know such a world.

Circo comes about as close as a film can get to knowing such a world. The film’s great sense of wonder comes in knowing that nothing here needed to be reinvented. This could not have been easy for the filmmakers and it’s certainly not easy for the audience. Because the people in this film chose the circus life and, against all odds, remained determined to walk on water. And if you can’t get behind that, it’s very possible that you’re not really living.

by Edward Champion

The Bat Segundo Show: Michael Crummey

In this 40 minute radio interview, Canadian novelist Michael Crummey discusses Galore, Newfoundland folklore, and his annoyance (and eventual embrace) with magical realism.

Michael Crummey recently appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #387. He is most recently the author of Galore.

Listen: Play in new window | Download

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Wondering if you can rent a motel room in the whale of a belly.

Author: Michael Crummey

Subjects Discussed: Childbearing in poor families, grisly deaths and irresponsible life decisions, infant mortality in the early 20th century, the relationship between historical investigation and magical realism, Crummey’s intense dislike of the term “magical realism,” dominant spectres and other ghosts, how the stench of death encourages the reader to get acquainted with new characters, the complexities in basing novels on historical events, aligning Galore‘s narrative to the Great War, not mentioning dates, the advance of religion before medicine in 19th century Newfoundland, the dissolute nature of Father Phelan, the netherworld beneath the real world, the truck system and fishing unions, whether Yoknapatawpha-like organization is required in building a world, avoiding Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude and learning to love it, alcoholic opera singers, balancing multiple characters into a narrative coherence, being saved by having family characteristics, being influenced by Marquez, another book as a road map, the unavoidable serendipity of reading, “happening” onto books with which to inspire a novel, Moby Dick, riffing on other people’s work, being suspicious of magical realism, magical realism as a cheat, not being able to talk about Newfoundland folklore, the importance of mechanical laws in the telling of the story, what readers are willing to accept, the song “Jack Was Every Inch a Sailor” as an unexpected inspirational force, magical realism as an interpretive notion similar to the Bible, and having faith in characters and fakery.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Correspondent: In terms of character balancing, if you’re running into the jungle and wildly whacking around with a machete, there needs to be something systematic. Particularly if you hope to arrange it in any sort of coherence.

Crummey: (laughs) Right. Well, I definitely had particular themes the book was following that, in a way, matched the trajectories for each of these characters for each of the generations. I was playing with the whole notion. Newfoundland is a tiny place. About a half million people. I mean, it’s big geographically. But it’s a tiny community. Half a million people today. A hundred years ago, I think it was less than half of that. And a hundred years before that, it was miniscule. Maybe twenty, thirty thousand people. So everybody’s related. And the gene lines between those generations. I mean, there are researchers from all over the world in Newfoundland studying because they can map how these genes crossed generations. Because there’s been so little contamination. For lack of a better word. So I wanted to play with that in the book. So when I started off with Judah, for example, I knew that the book was going to end with a direct descendant of Judah — and, of course, some of Judah’s characteristics; the smell, the white skin, and all that sort of stuff was passed on. And I knew that I wanted the book to end with someone who was in some way saved by being the direct descendant and having those characteristics. So all the way along, of course, I have this map to follow where these particular characteristics had to be passed down and then to do something interesting with those characteristics, all the way along, before I got to this end point.

Correspondent: Does this explain in part some of the copious cock imagery throughout the book? I mean, lots of blades and penises.

Crummey: Right.

Correspondent: Lots of propagation I found.

Crummey: Yeah. Well, I mean, partly that was homage to [Gabriel Garcia] Marquez as well.

Correspondent: Yes.

Crummey: Because every penis in Marquez is monstrous.

Correspondent: Yes. No pun intended.

Crummey: It’s huge. And that was just something else again I stole from Marquez. (laughs) But the whole sense of propagation — I mean, this was a place that was incredibly difficult to survive in. And my sense of it is that only people with an incredible life force in them would have made it.

Correspondent: This explains in part the considerable virility of many of these characters.

Crummey: That’s right. And it is rather astonishing when you go to the old graveyards in Newfoundland. The graves seem primarily to be divided into two categories. There are people who died before they were fifteen, often of some disease or drowning or whatever. And then there are people who died when they were ninety-eight. So the people who were strong enough to survive past the fifteenth year seemed to go on forever. So there is a sense of unbelievable stubborn virility in these communities. And often, sometimes there’s not much life-affirming about it even. I wanted to get that sense across and, in some sense, it just seems like a stupid animal stubbornness that keeps these people going.

Correspondent: Well, based off your research, what’s the dip like in terms of the middle aged? In terms of death.

Crummey: Well, I mean, to be fair, I would say that most people didn’t live much past fifty-five. Right? And that fifty was considered to be old. And in every community, there’s this group of people who live to ancient years. But for most people, I think they were broken by the life they were supposed to live. By the time they were fifty, they were probably crippled by the work that they were forced to do and by the fact that women, in particular, probably started having children in their teens and would continue to have them until it killed them almost.

Correspondent: I’m curious. You’ve brought up Marquez a couple of times. And I’m wondering at what point during the writing did you shake off the inevitable yoke of influence?

Crummey: Right. Well, I mean, I was a little concerned when I first started talking about this book with people about even bringing Marquez up.

Correspondent: You brought him up here. Just for the record.

Crummey: I’m much more comfortable with it now over time. Because it’s ridiculous. There’s Marquez and then there’s me. But I think the thing that gave me the courage to try the book was the fact that I felt like Newfoundland and Newfoundland culture was every bit as rich and bizarre and otherworldly and maddening as the world that Marquez was writing about. And I trusted that to create its own uniqueness as I wrote the book. So it made me unafraid to steal what I needed from Marquez and to see that almost as a road map for a way to tell the story. Because I knew that the stories and the places I was writing about were so unique onto themselves that they could create their own. If I let them be, they could create their own world. And I feel like I did that. A lot of people when they read this book, I think, think of Marquez. But I haven’t — at least I haven’t heard anyone yet — heard anyone say it’s just a Marquez knockoff. Because the place itself is so completely different. It stands on its own feet as a culture.

Correspondent: It was more of a narrative canvas. A map on the wall with which to go ahead and put your pushpins in.

Marquez: Sure.

The Bat Segundo Show #387: Michael Crummey (Download MP3)

This text will be replaced