Book Review: Paperback Writer by Mark Shipper

Posted on April 8, 2013 by Alex in music, reviews, writing | Leave a comment

“Rock and roll is a joke
and the joke is on
anyone–performer or
audience–who ever takes it for any more than that…”
(p. 11)

Writing about music, as I’ve said before, is tricky. The ones who do it well–P.F. Kluge, Sheila Kay Adams, Lee Smith–take it very seriously. So it follows that writing a parody about music, one that’s simultaneously respectful and hilarious, is even trickier. Writing that parody about the greatest rock and roll band ever, the Beatles, is the greatest trick of all. Yet in 1978, a writer named Mark Shipper did it, in a novel called Paperback Writer, subtitled The Life and Times of the Beatles: The Spurious Chronicle of their Rise to Stardom, Their Triumphs and Disasters, Plus the Amazing Story of Their Ultimate Reunion.

The date of publication is significant. John Lennon was murdered in 1980; after that, any book like this would’ve seemed tacky, if not downright heartless. But in 1978, with Paul and John both still vital presences in the music world, it seemed reasonable to poke fun both at their excesses, and at the fans who would never let them forget their past.

And fun is most assuredly poked. I’m only going to mention a couple of the jokes, because I certainly don’t want to spoil it, but here are some examples:

Lennon proceeded to explain to the roomful of reporters that his statement about the Beatles being “bigger than Jesus” was misinterpreted.
“What I meant,” he said, “was that we are all taller than Jesus.”
“Oh, Jesus,” [Beatles manager Brian] Epstein said from the front row.
(p. 82)

Or this bit, post-Beatles breakup, when Paul argues with his wife Linda about their group, Wings:

“What’s it gonna take for you to stay in the group, Linda?”
“Top billing.”
“What?”
“You heard me. Top billing.”
“You mean Linda McCartney and Wings?”
(p. 185)

And the book is filled with alternate lyrics to the best-known Beatles songs:

Instant karma
Mix it with milk
Goes down your throat
Smooth as silk

And this, the bridge for “A Day in the Life”:

Woke up
Fell out of bed
Tried to get off the floor
Couldn’t
So stayed on the floor
All day long

Finally, there are the extended scenes of alternate history, such as Lennon and McCartney getting stoned while writing a song with Bob Dylan, or meeting the Beach Boys and Donovan (“Don’t call me ‘Don!’”) during their meditation phase. And the novel climaxes with what must have seemed inevitable at the time: a Beatles reunion tour that doesn’t go quite as anyone expects:

This is a relatively easy to find book since it’s got a cult following, although as far as I know it’s been out of print since the early 80s. Author Mark Shipper, it appears, withdrew into willful obscurity and has never resurfaced. Still, if you’re a Beatles fan, or just a fan of music in general, you’ll probably enjoy this a lot. There’s real affection in the humor, and McCartney’s final line is something that we all know is true, but don’t like to admit:

“I guess,” McCartney said as he took his wife’s hand, “it’s because you can’t live in someone’s past and live in their future, too.”
(p. 252)

Here are a couple of other bloggers talking about this book:

Pismotality

Rockcritics.com

Review: My Old True Love by Sheila Kay Adams

Posted on March 18, 2013 by Alex in family, folk music, folklore, reviews, writers, writing | Leave a comment

Writing prose about music is, to borrow an analogy, dangerously close to trying to teach a fish to ride a bicycle. If you could say it in regular words, there’d be no need to sing it. And music can do some things far more efficiently than any other art form. For example, it takes over seven hours to tell the three-generation story of the Corleones in the three Godfather films; Steve Earle covers the same amount of territory in less than five minutes in his song “Copperhead Road.” So really, the best a prose writer can do is try to describe the effect music has on the people who create it, and hear it.

The list of novels that do that well is fairly short. One of them, P.F. Kluge’s Eddie and the Cruisers, I reviewed here. Another, Lee Smith’s The Devil’s Dream, is on deck for a re-read and review in the near future. And Sheila Kay Adams’ My Old True Love is a third, one set in the Appalachian Mountains and about, among other things, the way songs can often speak for us when regular words fail.

Set in the years before, during and after the Civil War, it tells of two men, Larkin and Hackley, and the woman they both love, Mary. But it’s told by Arty, Hackley’s sister and Larkin’s foster mother, who’s barely older than they are. And it encompasses many aspects of the South that don’t get much attention, such as the idea that not every Southerner was gung-ho for secession or Civil War. And woven throughout all this is the music they sing, listen to, and share.

Sheila Kay is uniquely qualified to write this novel. She’s a professional storyteller and noted ballad singer; you can find my review of a documentary that features her here. Further, she’s so embedded (by history, biology and choice) in the region she describes that the book reads more like a memoir than fiction. She brings Arty to life in a way that’s astounding in its simplicity and vividness.

And the story does not evolve in the way you expect. In fact, there’s a glorious moment near the end where one character says something very simple, but it has the effect of turning the reader’s expectations entirely around. It works the same way the climax of the Scorsese film The Color of Money works: by making you suddenly realize this isn’t the story you thought it was going to be, and yet now that you know, you can see that it could be no other story.

I write about Appalachia in my Tufa novels, and my father’s family comes from the region. But Sheila Kay lives and breathes what she writes, and because of that, there’s an amazing depth and verisimilitude to her words. In My Old True Love, she brings it to life and shares it with us, just as the folks in her stories share the songs they learn. And believe me, the book sings.

Film Review: Over Home: Love Songs from Madison County

Posted on December 31, 2012 by Alex in filmmaking, folk music, Hum and the Shiver, isolation, music, reviews, storytelling, Tufa | 5 Comments

Way back in the early years of this century (being able to say that makes me smile), the spark of the idea that would become the Tufa struck me at the National Storytelling Festival in Jonesborough, Tennessee. Also at that festival, I first heard Sheila Kay Adams at one of the midnight sessions, in a huge tent on a warm summer night. So her stories and music, and my fictional Tufa, have always been spiritually, if not literally, entwined.

Sheila Kay Adams

Sheila Kay is a traditional ballad singer, a woman who has dedicated her life to making sure that these old songs survive into the next generation. Over Home: Love Songs from Madison County is a documentary that takes us into her life, and shows how she’s passing on her traditions to the YouTube and iTunes generation. I first mentioned it here, when I interviewed director Kim Dryden during the film’s post-production.

The poster for “Over Home,” designed by Saro, who appears in the film.

You can watch the trailer:

and additional clips can be found here.

Sheila Kay learned these songs the old way, “knee to knee” on front porches from relatives who still gathered to share songs and stories when other more urban families were beginning to turn away from each other, to television, radio and other forms of passive mass communication. “They did not call them ballads,” she says in the film. “They called them love songs. And the gorier they were, the more I liked them. And if they mentioned cutting off heads and kicking them against the wall, I was all over it.” These were songs that came originally from Ireland, Scotland and other Celtic countries, brought with the first settlers and maintained intact among the isolated hills and hollows of Appalachia.

This is old stuff, literally and figuratively, if you’re a fan of my novel The Hum and the Shiver. But unlike my fictional Cloud County, the Madison County of this film is a real place, and the people you see in the film are genuine. Most compelling of the newcomers is sixteen-year-old Sarah Tucker, who bridges the traditional and the modern in a way that gives you real hope for the future of this music (and music in general). The scenery is expansive and beautiful, as are the Smoky Mountains themselves, but the most fascinating landscape of all is Sheila Kay Adams’s face as she talks about how music helped her persevere through personal tragedy.

Over Home is currently making the rounds of film festivals, and hopefully will soon be available on DVD and streaming. If it comes to a festival near you, definitely check it out (and if you have any pull in festival scheduling, I heartily recommend scheduling it).

The Indy Challenge: Melissa Olson on Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

Posted on September 18, 2012 by Alex in guest blog, movies, Raiders of the Lost Ark, reviews, Uncategorized, writers | 1 Comment

Today the four Indiana Jones films are released on blu-ray, along with a host of special features (including the awesome TV special, The Making of Raiders of the Lost Ark, which I’ve had on VHS for decades). To commemorate this, author Melissa Olson (Dead Spots) and I have agreed to swap blog posts defending the most maligned entries in the series. At her blog I’ll be making the case for Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, and here she sings the praises of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

Greetings, my fellow Alex Bledsoe fans. I’m glad you could join me for this half of the Indiana Jones challenge. Some would say that I’m getting the short end of the stick by having to defend the series’ fourth movie, but I beg to differ. Now, I have no intention of using this blog to argue that Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is a Great Film. It isn’t, certainly not the way Raiders of the Lost Ark and Last Crusade are undeniably Great Films, which I believe Alex and I would agree on. But the thing about Crystal Skull is, it also shouldn’t be what it has become: an easily dismissed joke of a movie. Because when Spielberg and Lucas set out to make Crystal Skull, they tried something fascinating. And while it didn’t really work, not the way they wanted it to, Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is not just another tacky piece-of-crap sequel that came out way too late and was thrown together way too shoddily (I’m looking at you, Wall Street 2 and Basic Instinct 2). There’s a line of reasoning here, a story behind Crystal Skull that you might not know about. It’s interesting. Here’s why.

Unfortunately, you’ll have to bear with me for a bit of history first, because in order to really understand Crystal Skull, you have to go back to what influenced the entire series in the first place. In the late 1970’s/early 1980’s, the US was experiencing a sudden pull towards nostalgia: the 70’s had been such a complex period, politically and socially, that there was a certain anxiety and fear in the air, a general longing for simpler, more fun times. Filmmaker George Lucas managed to have absolutely flawless timing with the release of Star Wars, which gave the people exactly what they wanted. Star Wars combined elements of beloved 1930’s serials with bits and pieces of other traditional genres: samurai stories, war epics, westerns. Star Wars is a really good movie, but it’s stupendous success owes a lot to the perfect timing of supply and demand, a match of cutting-edge technology and nostalgia for simpler stories from simpler times.

A few years later, Lucas and his pal Spielberg were kicking around some ideas for how to do it again: make a nostalgic adventure film that was deeply influenced by the style of the 1930’s serials, but still had the best technology and grandeur that 1981 had to offer. They set it in 1936 to embody the spirit of those serials, and decided to involve the world’s biggest villain at that time: Hitler. They stumbled on the historical fact that Hitler was interested in the occult, pulled in Lucas’ interest in archeology, and ran with it. Raiders of the Lost Ark twists in themes of spiritual exploration, the potential danger in a search for knowledge, the power of faith and trust, and so on. And it featured the same sort of cartoonish stunts and exaggerated facial expressions that made those serials so popular in the 30’s: an enormous pit of deadly snakes, spirits that whip around and melt the faces off the Nazis, a gigantic boulder that almost rolls over Indy, and so on.

Fast forward twenty-some years. Let’s take a moment, people, to pause and pretend that we are the mighty triumvirate of Spielberg, Lucas, and Ford. Collectively and individually, we have more money than Marie Antoinette could spend in twelve lifetimes. In addition to our individual successes, we’ve already made a beloved, timeless trilogy together that (with the possible exception of Temple of Doom, which, in addition to pretty much lacking a plot, is so saturated with obscene female and Asian stereotypes that you can breathe them in and die of bigotry) actually holds up thirty years later. The three of us miss working together, and we miss the characters and themes we built for Indiana Jones. But…we are also older, and to do a fourth film now, when Indy himself would be so obviously changed, doesn’t make any sense. There’s just no way to follow the formula of the first three films with Dr. Jones as an older guy.

But wait. Suddenly, there’s a spark. An idea, if you will. Because after 9/11, and all the political and social turmoil that followed it, wouldn’t audiences enjoy getting back to nostalgia again? What if we could have it both ways? What if we could return to the spirit of Indiana Jones, but update it for a different age?

There was no way to get around the age problem, of course. Dr. Jones had to be aged about 20 years after Raiders, which put the story in 1957. So Spielberg and Lucas did the exact same thing they did with Raiders: they cast the real-life villain from that time period, which in this case was the Soviet Union – Communists. With that basic premise, Spielberg and Lucas put their thinking caps on. How to update Indy while keeping the same themes of spiritual exploration, the potential danger in a search for knowledge, the power of faith and trust, and so on? How could they revive the series but still bring in something new?

So they did what they did with Raiders: they focused on the pop culture of the period. Only instead of the serials from the 1930’s, they were looking at adding elements from the 1950’s favorite theme: Communists as aliens, aliens as Communists. The public’s biggest fear in the fifties was that the Commies would invade the US and turn good, hardworking American citizens into pod people, drones that were incapable of independent thought or action. And it was reflected in the American fiction of that time: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), Thing From Another World (1951), Invaders from Mars (1953), and so on.

You see where I’m going with this, right? Lucas and Spielberg didn’t “jump the shark” by making Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. What they tried to do was the exact same thing they did with Raiders: they wanted to bring in the global villain and the global fear of that time, but still stir in Indiana Jones’s traditional search for truth, faith, knowledge, and especially, spirituality. In each of the first three films, Indiana Jones explores a spiritual outlook: Judaism, Hinduism, Christianity. And in the end, Indy always becomes a reluctant religious savior, a convert, however briefly. His fourth onscreen adventure does its best to continue that tradition, but this time, the religion being explored is knowledge. Stylistically, Crystal Skull does keep the original trilogy’s deference to the serials of the 30’s – the death-defying stunts, the exaggerated expressions, the derring-do – but adds in the themes from films of the 1950’s. And that, folks, is a pretty damned interesting prospect.

But it backfired, and frankly, that had a lot more to do with us than with them. Go back, for a second, to the outlandish success of Raiders of the Lost Ark, back in 1981. I doubt very much that movie theater audiences in ‘81 shouted and griped at the screen because the boulder trap or the convoy chase sequences were unrealistic and hokey. Or the river raft drop, or the monkey brain dinner, both in Temple of Doom. They didn’t complain because in 1981, the audiences wanted to believe in Indy. They wanted that nostalgia; they’d sought it out. And Spielberg and Lucas delivered. Wild success. Champagne and increased budgets all around.

In 2008 – and today – however, audiences don’t actually want to believe in Indy anymore. We might think that we do, but really, what we want to believe is that we are smart. We are not whores for the man, in this case represented by three rich middle-aged men trying to sell us an Indiana Jones movie about aliens, for crying out loud. We will not be taken in by that bullshit, thank you very much.

But think about it. Setting your personal beliefs in God or aliens aside for a moment, is the fridge-nuclear bomb scene really any less believable than spirits flying out of the Ark and melting Nazi faces? Is a crystal skull (and there is a fascinating, real-life history of those, by the way, go Wikipedia it) any less likely to have supernatural powers than an old chest, some magical rocks, or an ancient drinking glass? Nope. The difference isn’t in the material, it’s in us.

And that is where Spielberg and Lucas made their greatest mistake; it’s how Crystal Skull got put on the geek shit list for all eternity. They misjudged what we wanted. They thought these tumultuous times meant we’d be ready for another return to nostalgia, but what we really wanted was confirmation that even though 9/11, an economic crisis, and the destruction of the planet happened on our watch, we are redeemable because those things have made us smart, shrewd, and skeptical. (Oh, and we’ve also seen an additional twenty-odd-years worth of the best movie effects money can buy, so good luck impressing us, Indy team.)

So. Back to my mission statement: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is not a great movie. But it isn’t a mess, or an epic disaster, or an unholy blight on the face of a much-beloved piece of American popular culture. It’s not even the result of three rich guys getting lazy and trying to squeeze some more money out of something cool they did a long time ago. It’s just a bad call. It’s three smart guys trying to revive something they knew we loved in a way they thought was fresh. That they happened to be wrong doesn’t make it any less interesting. Maybe it even makes it more so. Because if the purpose of art is to hold a mirror up to society, then you can’t call Crystal Skull a failure. It did show us who we are. It just maybe wasn’t who we wanted to be.

Henry Jaglom and His Theatrical Families

Posted on September 17, 2012 by Alex in Henry Jaglom, movies, reviews, Tanna Frederick | 1 Comment

Henry Jaglom’s newest film, Just 45 Minutes from Broadway,is an adaptation of his play about two generations of a Jewish theatrical family, and the secrets that come to light when one daughter brings home her “civilian” boyfriend.

For those unfamiliar with Jaglom’s work, he uses an improvisational style that blurs the edge between actor and character so that, to a degree no other filmmaker manages, it often feels as if you’re eavesdropping on real people. His films tend to involve ad hoc groups in restrictive settings (usually comfortable upper-scale homes), and his concerns around feminist issues (his series of “woman’s issue” films, for example, from Eating, to Going Shopping, to Babyfever). His work isn’t for everyone, and he has some vocal critics, but I treasure the sense of reality he presents.

Just 45 Minutes from Broadway is also an interesting bookend with another Jaglom film, 1995′s Last Summer in the Hamptons. That was the first Jaglom film I saw, and since then I’ve seen almost all his others. Interestingly, both these “theatrical” stories are fairly atypical of Jaglom’s usual concerns, but they share a family resemblance to each other. I have no real experience with the theatrical life, but both films show how seductive, and destructive, it can be.

In both films, an “outsider” figure comes into the well-established family, acting as the viewer surrogate. In Hamptons it’s Oona Hart (Victoria Foyt), a movie actress who’s recently starred in a smash superhero movie and now wants to get some real acting cred. In Broadway it’s James (Judd Nelson*), a real estate lawyer and fiance of one of the sisters. But while they’re similar figures, they’re actually opposites: Oona wants something from the Axelrods, and ultimately refuses to change, while James is there to meet his future in-laws, and ends up changing fundamentally.

The families, too, are similar. The Axelrods are preparing for the final performance of their annual theatrical review, while the Isaacs are facing the very real effects of the current economic downturn. In both films, the potential loss of a house represents the loss of the family unity. The Axelrods don’t really have a patriarch, but when your matriarch is the formidable Viveca Lindfors, you may not need one. The Isaacs are presided over by George and Vivian, theatrical veterans with family ties to the Yiddish theater. Sibling rivalry is also part of both, although Jack and Trish Axelrod are a bit more disturbed than the fairly upfront rivalry between Pandora and Betsy Isaacs.

Jaglom’s improvisational approach is a much bigger presence in Hamptons. Broadway feels more scripted (and that’s not a criticism), although the Seder dinner has the freewheeling, on-edge feel of a real social event. But it also means that Broadway stays more traditionally focused, and doesn’t meander (again, not a criticism) to the degree Hamptons does.

Both films are also showcases for Jaglom’s then-current muses. Foyt is terrific as a movie actress tempted by the “reality” of the theatrical life, but who ultimately can’t commit (her “baby seal” scene is great). And Frederick (as always showing everything her character feels at every moment) is luminous as the actress daughter worried that she can no longer exist either onstage or in the real world.

Jaglom (l) and Foyt

But the films have crucially different climaxes. Hamptons ends with the end: the final Axelrod showcase, after which the family home will be sold and the clan will likely no longer gather. Broadway ends with new beginnings, a more “traditional” romantic comedy ending but one that feels earned because of the affection generated for the characters.

Frederick (l) and Jaglom

As I said, I don’t have any real experience with theater, or theatrical families. But both the Axelrods and the Isaacs are people I’d love to visit for a weekend. I recommend both films for fans of ensemble acting, independent film and unique points of view.

*Never been a fan of Judd Nelson, but he’s absolutely great here. So I guess now I am a fan.

Review: Road to Hell

Posted on July 30, 2012 by Alex in Albert Pyun, Bulletface, Cynthia Curnan, Eddie and the Cruisers, filmmaking, Jim Steinman, Michael Pare, reviews, Road to Hell, Streets of Fire | 2 Comments

There are a lot of film parodies, but not so many films that function as commentaries. Offhand, the best known example might be The Freshman, in which Marlon Brando both spoofs his Godfather persona and simultaneously creates a new, ironic character.

Road to Hell, the new film by Albert Pyun, is a commentary film, in a sense. Michael Pare plays Cody, a riff on Tom Cody, the character he played in Walter Hill’s Streets of Fire. There’s also a pair of characters named Ellen, the original of which was played by Diane Lane in the Hill film. And although the film stands on its own, its fannish shout-outs to the earlier film give it a special sort of resonance to fans.

Not that the films are that similar. Streets of Fire was a big-budget flop, a kind of music-video adventure set in a timeless city that was half 1950s, half 1980s. It celebrated innocence: guns were fired but no blood was spilled, punches and kisses were exchanged but no real damage was done by either. Jim Steinman contributed a couple of his trademark overwrought songs. I loved it, and still do, but I can also see why others wouldn’t: it requires a special mind-set to step into that world and accept its stylizations.

Pare (l) and Kramer.

Road to Hell is like the hallucinations of someone with a fever who’d just watched Streets of Fire and perhaps read too many “true crime” novels. Working against a green screen, Pyun creates a surreal desert landscape in which this version of Cody collides with a spree killer (Clare Kramer, with great demented eyes) and her girlfriend (Courtney Peldon). The heart of the movie takes place in and around a broken-down jeep, where violence is ever-present among the three, although you can’t quite be sure how it will manifest. Cody is waiting for one Ellen, but it’s ultimately the other Ellen he finds.

The actors–it’s essentially a four-hander–are uniformly good. Kramer (a Buffy alum) is totally uninhibited, and Peldon is surprisingly subtle as her sort-of accomplice/girlfriend.

But the real surprises are the veteran Pare and the newcomer Roxy Gunn. Pare, whose career as a leading man never quite took off after his debut in Eddie and the Cruisers, shows every mile on his face as this alternate-universe Cody whose skills as a soldier and killer have become his whole life. I’ve always been a fan of Pare’s, one of those actors who does his best even when the whole film is against him, and here he’s subtle and affecting (as well as shockingly brutal). He shifts with ease from being iconic to pathetic and back.

Pare (l) and Gunn.

Gunn, making her debut, is a real find. In a time when all young actresses tend to blur together into one generic face, she really stands out. An actual musician (that’s her singing, her band The Roxy Gunn Project performing, and she wrote some of the songs), she has a natural ease onscreen that makes every moment seem real. In a movie where the main landscape is faces, she has one that conveys everything her character is thinking and feeling.

So I enjoyed Road to Hell for what it is: a riff on a movie both I and the filmmakers clearly loved, filtered through Pyun’s own unique aesthetic (which you can experience in a purer form in his recent Bulletface). I’m glad Pare got a chance to really chew into a part, and Roxy Gunn’s debut is magical. Will the general public like it? I don’t know. But then, it’s not every movie that includes both disembowelings and rock concerts, severed heads and love ballads. If you enjoy this sort of mash-up, done irony-free and with its own agenda, you’ll probably dig it. I sure did.

You can read my earlier interviews with Road to Hell director Albert Pyun here, and screenwriter/producer Cynthia Curnan here. Yes, I’ve been looking forward to this movie for a while.

“We two are now more than us two”: messing with the rhythm

Posted on February 6, 2012 by Alex in movies, reviews, storytelling | Leave a comment

The American poster.

Every good work of dramatic storytelling has an internal rhythm that we, as readers/watchers/listeners, subconsciously pick up on as we go further into it. It often means we’re able to sense where a story is going before we should, based on hints the storyteller didn’t even know s/he was giving us. Sometimes it can be obvious, like the ten individual ten-minute takes that comprise Hitchcock’s film Rope. Other times it’s far more subtle, like the way the ending of Peter Hoeg’s novel Smilla’s Sense of Snow seems first jarring, and then in restrospect, inevitable.

I was reminded of this when I rewatched one of my favorite films, Wim Wenders 1987 story of angels in love, Wings of Desire. Yes, it was remade into a trite and obvious American film, City of Angels, but we’re talking about the original now, a film of startling brilliance and delicate touch (and, I must also add, a totally different ending).

Marion, unaware Damiel is watching.

Succinctly, the plot involves the angel Damiel falling in love with Marion, a trapeze artist in a two-bit circus stuck in West Berlin during the Cold War era. As an angel he’s followed her without her knowing it, learned her secret desires and sadness, and at last gives up his heavenly existence for the chance to meet her face to face.

This meeting happens in a Berlin nightclub, where Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds provide a throbbing soundtrack. Marion and Damiel finally meet in the bar, and the scene is set for him to make a speech professing his love for her, which in turn will make her fall for him. It’s what we think the whole movie has been building toward.

But instead, she makes the speech to him. With no idea of his history, of who he really is or how long he’s watched and adored her.

This is part of what she says:

Damiel and Marion

Now it’s serious. At last it’s becoming serious. So I’ve grown older. Was I the only one who wasn’t serious? Is it our times that are not serious? I was never lonely neither when I was alone, nor with others. But I would have liked to be alone at last. Loneliness means I’m finally whole. Now I can say it as tonight, I’m at last alone. I must put an end to coincidence. The new moon of decision. I don’t know if there’s destiny but there’s a decision. Decide! We are now the times. Not only the whole town – the whole world is taking part in our decision. We two are now more than us two. We incarnate something. We’re representing the people now. And the whole place is full of those who are dreaming the same dream. We are deciding everyone’s game. I am ready. Now it’s your turn. You hold the game in your hand. Now or never. You need me. You will need me. There’s no greater story than ours, that of man and woman. It will be a story of giants… invisible… transposable… a story of new ancestors. Look. My eyes. They are the picture of necessity, of the future of everyone in the place. Last night I dreamt of a stranger… of my man. Only with him could I be alone, open up to him, wholly open, wholly for him. Welcome him wholly into me. Surround him with the labyrinth of shared happiness. I know… it’s you.

(You can see the scene on YouTube here.)

Sure the movie is stylized; it implies that Peter Falk, the actual actor and not a character, was once an angel as well. It’s loaded with poetic voice-overs, shifts from black-and-white to color, and has a sense of magic in the most mundane places in the world. But this is the moment when it all comes together and creates not just the romantic relationship between the protagonists, but the world view that they inhabit. Just as he secretly watched her, she somehow knows all about him.

David Gerrold, in one of his books describing his work on Star Trek, gave this simple advice for avoiding cliche (I’m paraphrasing): When you find yourself about to write something obvious, do the opposite. It’s good advice, and it’s what Wenders and his co-writer Peter Handke did. I assume this speech was written by Handke, the poet who contributed most of the monologues. But whoever wrote it, it was the brilliance of giving it to the opposite character from the one you’d expect that makes it resonate. Like the kindness of the angels in the film, the romance shows up where you least expect it.

So in a sense, Wings of Desire ends up exactly where we think it will. But it gets there via a totally unexpected path. It stays true to its rhythm, but at the same time surprises us by turning cliche on its head. And as such, it’s an object lesson for all storytellers working in any form.

Review: Mean Guns (director’s cut)

Posted on January 23, 2012 by Alex in Albert Pyun, movies, reviews | 4 Comments

Kimberly Warren as "D."

There’s a theory that silent-era filmmakers were just on the verge of perfecting movies as a legitimate art form when sound came in and took away the primacy of the image. Suddenly what people said became just as important, if not more so, than what they did. A purely visual medium entered into an uneasy symbiosis with the spoken word.

Occasionally, though, you run across a film that fully embraces its visualness. Not something like The Artist, which recreates the silent era, but a modern film that nonetheless tells its story in primarily visual terms. The real test is to imagine watching it without hearing the dialogue; if you can still follow the story, then it’s awfully close to pure film.

Christopher Lambert as Lou. And an example of the brilliant widescreen photography.

Mean Guns, released in 1997 and starring Christopher Lambert and Ice-T, is just such a movie. Taking advantage of a location (the soon-to-open Los Angeles County Jail), the film has a group of cold-blooded killers brought together, locked in and given the weapons to kill each other. The prize for the last three survivors: a suitcase full of money, and their lives.

The film’s first DVD release was a full-screen, pan-and-scan version. I once read that the reason so many modern action scenes are so hard to follow, is that this generation of filmmakers grew up watching full-screen versions of films shot in a widescreen aspect ratio. They internalized the chaos that comes when you chop off half the image, and that’s become the new standard. Certainly doing that to Mean Guns both added a level of anarchy the director never intended, and needlessly muddled a story that was crystal clear in its initial execution.

Now director Albert Pyun has released his widescreen cut, and it’s a revelation. This is a staggeringly visual movie that takes full advantage of the geometric shapes and reflective surfaces available in the brand-new facility. Further, the film is brilliantly cast with distinctive actors who don’t all look alike, a problem in way too many contemporary movies. You’re never in doubt who’s onscreen, their spatial relationships are clear and the nonstop action scenes breath and pulse with life.

The visual style that's totally lost in the pan-and-scan/fullscreen version.

I was astounded to rewatch this film in its correct aspect ratio and realize that it is, in fact, an action masterpiece. I don’t use that term lightly, either; I’d put this on an equal footing with George Miller’s The Road Warrior and Walter Hill’s The Warriors, two films that could also lose their dialogue tracks and still be completely watchable. This is a movie worth tracking down and diving into.

Oh, and did I mention it’s scored with mambo music?

You can get the widescreen version directly from Pyun’s production company by e-mailing curnanpictures@gmail.com.

Review: Death Watch

Posted on December 5, 2011 by Alex in reviews, writing | 1 Comment

The first volume of Ari Berk's trilogy.

I met Ari Berk at the Great Lakes Independent Booksellers Association annual banquet a few months ago; we shared a table as we each signed 200 copies of our most recent books. He was a great person to have beside me for such a repetitive and time-consuming task, and when he told me about his new YA novel Death Watch, I was instantly intrigued. Now that I’ve finally finished the book (a reflection of my own busy schedule, not the quality of the writing), I can say with all honesty that it’s a great, moving read.

Although it’s the first of a trilogy, Death Watch tells a self-contained story about Silas Umber, a teen whose father doesn’t come home one night. Silas learns that his father was the “Undertaker” for the seaport town of Lichport, a job very different from simply arranging bodies for burial. To discover his father’s fate, Silas takes over the position, learning about Lichport, its inhabitants, and his own devious and untrustworthy uncle. To help accomplish this, he uses his father’s unique tool of the trade, the titular timepiece: when you stop its hands, you can see the spirit world.

Lichport is a sort of Lovecraftian Innsmouth Lite, where the supernatural is accepted as part of daily life. Just because someone’s dead doesn’t mean they don’t hang around, both literally as re-animated corpses, or more figuratively as ghosts. Yet the dead are objects of sympathy, not terror, and the Undertaker’s job is to help them find whatever peace awaits them.

This is a dense and detailed book, but you never get bogged down. And Silas is a wonderful protagonist: decent, tortured, trying to do the right thing but prey to the same doubts and fears as the rest of us, magnified by his growing knowledge of the afterlife. His courtship of Bea, the one girl in town who seems to like him that way, is touching in his acceptance of a relationship that, to put it mildly, has difficulties.

Berk tells the story in clear, clean prose that doesn’t shy from attempting the poetic. Usually he succeeds, as with this passage about the ghost of a child:

A child sits by the tree on the playground. Every day it is the same. He sits by the tree. He does not look up anymore. No one comes for him. He can no longer remember what he is waiting for or how long he’s been waiting. There is only the tree and the cold earth below him and the voices calling out from the yard, but they never once say his name.

(p. 472)

And my favorite line: “Honest error may play prologue to wonders.” (p. 229)

The overriding emotions here are sorrow and loss, but this is far from a depressing book. Instead it reinforces the importance of memory, of keeping those you love close, and of trying to help others, both living and dead. And although it resolves all the plot issues it raises, it also leaves plenty of options for the rest of the trilogy. Death Watch is a great book, and I can’t wait for the second volume.

Watch for an interview with Ari Berk, coming soon.

Review: Treasure Island (1990)

Posted on November 21, 2011 by Alex in reviews, Treasure Island | 2 Comments

The spiffy new DVD cover

I’ve read Treasure Island many times, both for my own enjoyment and to my kids. It’s a great novel, an exciting story and a splendid basis for a film. But only one of the many film versions gets it right: 1990′s version for television, directed by Fraser Heston and starring his father Charlton and a young Christian Bale. For years this has been inaccessible except for premium-priced VHS versions, but now it’s finally on DVD in a splendid widescreen transfer.

In the popular consciousness, Treasure Island the novel labors under two misconceptions. One is that it’s a story for children; it’s not. It’s written from the perspective of the grown man remembering his adventures as an adolescent, not as a preteen. So in both the MGM and Disney versions, casting Jim as a small boy fundamentally alters the story’s dynamic. Christian Bale, on the other hand, is just right here. His adventures mark the transition from boyhood to the adult world, and he’s a good enough actor even at age 14 to anchor the film.

The other misconception is that the pirates are merely colorful but essentially harmless rogues, especially Long John Silver. Wallace Beery is friendly to distraction in the 1934 film, and it’s impossible to take Robert Newton’s hammy portrayal in the 1950 Disney film seriously. But what else could be done with Jim cast so young? Silver in the book is a dangerous man, a real flesh-and-blood pirate, fond of Jim but still willing to kill him if it helped get the treasure.

Charlton Heston proves just right for the part. With his history of larger-than-life roles, he’s got the stature and charisma to make the audience share Jim’s affection for him. And he’s a good enough actor that we buy him as a pirate, one vicious enough to intimidate the others.

The rest of the cast is just as solid. Oliver Reed nails the part of Billy Bones, while Julian Glover and Richard Johnson do solid turns as Jim’s compatriots. Even Jim’s mother, a thankless part as she’s the only woman in the story, is given a fiery presence by Isla Blair. The other pirates, from Blind Pew (a scary Christopher Lee) to Israel Hands (Michael Halsey), provide the constant menace that the story requires.

But what makes it work so well is that writer and director Fraser Heston treats the story as a serious life-and-death adventure. Knives cut, shrapnel rips, blood flows and people die. The island is no tropical amusement park, but a dark and sweaty place where buccaneer ghosts might still prowl the shadows. Even the late Captain Flint, the man who buried the treasure and who is usually no more than a name, is given a sense of presence and reality.

This version of Treasure Island is the real deal: well-acted, exciting and faithful to both the letter and spirit of Stevenson’s book. For those who’ve mistakenly considered this a tale for little children, first check out this film, then go back to the novel. You’re in for a pleasant surprise.