REVIEW: Salinger (dir. Salerno)

My review for The Guardian:—

“If there’s one thing I hate, it’s the movies,” declared Holden Caulfield. Not so his creator who nursed youthful dreams of being an actor and liked nothing better, later in life, than to curl up in front of John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon, Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps, or his personal favorite Frank Capra’s Lost Horizon, in which Ronald Colman crash-lands in the Himalayas and stumbles across the secret of eternal youth. The perfect Salinger combination: enlightenment plus milk shake.  

Deciphering the famously retiring author’s lifelong pursuit of the same, in both his work and his women, is the task set by a new documentary, produced by Harvey Weinstein, and directed by Shane Salerno, the screenwriter who gave us Michael Bay’s Armageddon, Oliver Stone’s Savages, and other such Sylphine tributes to innocence lost. You don't know what would offend Salinger more, the invasion of his privacy, or the fact that he was so intruded upon by the man who authored the line,  “The United States government just asked us to save the world — anyone wanna say no?”
Salinger (PG-13) packs something of the same irresistibility. Salinger fan will see it through it through a frown of disdain, emitting occasional whimpers of protest, but see it they will for its revelations, dropped at cunningly dispersed at intervals throughout an otherwise wearying 2-hour-and-15-minute running time. This is very much Salinger in the eyes of Hollywood, with lots of ambition, demons, plushly exaggerated love interest, a portentous score that never quite dispels the suspicion that Bruce Willis will soon arrive and start blasting asteroids, plus an array of talking heads plucked from Harvey’s rolodex: Martin Sheen, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Ed Norton, even — God bless him — Judd Apatow, prompting the unbidden thought that Holden Caulfiled could easily have slipped into the cast-list of Freaks And Geeks, no question.

Of Salinger himself we see very little, of course, save for some re-enactments from a dynamic and swarthy young actor. See Salinger pounds away at his typewriter! Hefting logs up a mountains side! Running down a wrought-iron staircase (the same wrought-iron staircase, I believe, prowled by Jack Nicholson in Mike Nichols’s Wol)  upon being rejected by Farrar-Strauss! And then just as you’re about to pelt the screen with peanuts for sheer phoniness, we get the real thing: the only known film footage of the actual Salinger, shot during the war, when he was at his most tall, dark and Clive Owenish, doffing his hat to Parisian women offering him flowers. He takes a single flower and tucks it into his hat brim — a piece of gallantry he nonetheless performs with ineffable and beguiling shyness. 

Salinger’s war years have already been comprehensively detailed in Kenneth Slawenski’s 2010 biography, but here come fleshed out with some riveting archival footage. He had the kind of war that would make even Spielberg blush: storming the beaches of Normandy with 60 pages of Catcher in the Rye tucked under his uniform, surviving the Battle of the Bulge and “meat-grinder” of Hürtgen forest — they don’t say so here, but Salinger’s unit had a survival rate of one in four — before stumbling across the ashen horror of Dachau. Afterwards, Salinger promptly hospitalized himself for what the filmmakers call a “nervous breakdown”, from which proceeds their Big Idea — that, “the second world war made Salinger,” in the words of one of their countless talking heads, “it’s the ghost in the machine of all the stories.” 

 It’s certainly true that he saw enough combat — an astonishing 299 hours — to deprive a man of his wits, or that the voice that Salinger crafted for Holden Caulfield  — marvelously intelligent, supple, quicksilver, only ever inches from a crack-up — can only have gained its fractured depth from his wartime experiences. It may even have something to do with the kamikaze arc of his work, which for all it’s pellucid brilliance and uncanny inner-ear, remains American literature’s most heartbreaking case of arrested development. He went straight from juveniles to eternal verities, without going via the thing that most of us would recognize as adulthood, both in his work and his life — stuck in a “a fantasy of innocence” in the words of Jean Miller, the 14-year-old he picked in Florida with the words “How’s Heathcliff?” when he saw what she was reading. “Troubled,” she replies. What follows is the film at its most winsomely naïve: seaside strolls, violin swells and lines like “he remained haunted by the love affair that never was.” Yeah right. Until he has sex with them, or they had babies, at which point the girls turn into women and Salinger runs for the hills.

The resulting portrait, for all Salinger’s peculiarity, seems horribly familiar. You don’t need the war to explain his relentless deforestation of friends and family. The technical term for this is “literary genius” — in Salinger’s case, a lightning strike of such force as to blacken anyone standing in the immediate vicinity — even, in the end, his readers, although Salinger’s famous retreat from the raucous din of publishing to pursue the zen-like purity of writing it’s own sake, turned out to be something of a feint. In the doc’s biggest coup, we find out that the fabled Salinger safe contains five unpublished works:  two novels, one about his counter-intelligence work, and one a “love story” based on his first marriage to a German woman, a book about Salinger’s deloved Vedanta Hinduism (yawn), a reworked Holden Caulfield story Last and Best of the Peter Pans, and some new stories about Seymour Glass. 

 Most revealingly of all, each came with little green or red dot indicating which manuscripts required further work and which were ready for publication, and on what date. Shock, horror. He needed us after all.

B-

 

First 'Under The Skin' reviews

'This first act of the picture finds Laura driving her truck around the urban areas of Scotland seducing men on the street. She coyly convinces them to come back to what they think is her apartment.  Instead, Laura hypnotizes them like a Black Widow and they strip down only to walk into a merciless fate in what can only be described as a liquid prison.... Glazer may be the visionary behind "Under the Skin"s cinematic highs, but it must be noted that this film lives and dies on Johansson's incredible turn. Johansson's dialogue is mostly limited to her pickup lines as she scours the city for new meat. Even though a majority of her scenes are silent the 28-year-old actress still finds a way to bring a distinct dramatic arc to her character.' — Hitfix 

I'm in. Glazer's Birth was one of the great films of the 2000s. 

'Gravity' first reviews

"At once the most realistic and beautifully choreographed film ever set in space, Gravity is a thrillingly realized survival story spiked with interludes of breath-catching tension and startling surprise. Not at all a science fiction film in the conventional sense, Alfonso Cuaron's first feature in seven years has no aliens, space ship battles or dystopian societies, just the intimate spectacle of a man and a woman trying to cope in the most hostile possible environment across a very tight 90 minutes.... It's as if Max Ophuls were let loose in outer space, so elegant is the visual continuity, making for a film that will have buffs and casual fans alike gaping and wondering, “How did they do that?” and returning for multiple viewings just to imbibe the sheer virtuosity of it all." — Todd McCarthy, The Hollywood Reporter 

"In Alfonso Cuaron’s astonishing Gravity, Sandra Bullock, playing a lost astronaut stranded 375 miles above Earth, seeks refuge in an abandoned spacecraft and curls into a floating fetal position, savoring a brief respite from her harrowing journey. Of the many sights to behold in this white-knuckle space odyssey, a work of great narrative simplicity and visual complexity, it’s this image that speaks most eloquently to Cuaron’s gifts as a filmmaker: He’s the rare virtuoso capable of steering us through vividly imagined worlds and into deep recesses of human feeling. Suspending viewers alongside Bullock for a taut, transporting 91 minutes (with George Clooney in a sly supporting turn), the director’s long-overdue follow-up to “Children of Men” is at once a nervy experiment in blockbuster minimalism and a film of robust movie-movie thrills, restoring a sense of wonder, terror and possibility to the bigscreen that should inspire awe among critics and audiences worldwide." — Justin Chang, Variety 

Going Dutch

Sad news. From Anthony Lane's appreciation:—

'... I recall being given a copy of “The Sea, the Sea,” the Iris Murdoch novel that won the Booker Prize in 1978. It came heartily recommended, so I wasted no time in laying it side by side with “The Switch,” which had been published in the same year. A random sample, from Dame Iris:

Oh, he was slippery, slippery, touchy, proud. I must hold him, I must be tactful, careful, gentle, firm, I must understand how. Everything, everything, I felt, now depended on Titus, he was the centre of the world, he was the KEY. I was filled with painful and joyful emotions and the absolute need to conceal them. I could so easily, here, alarm, offend, disgust.

Huh? It’s like being swallowed alive by a giant thesaurus. How are we supposed to work out, with any precision, what these fellows actually mean, through veils of verbal blubber such as that? Meanwhile, over in Detroit:

“You notice in the drive?” Ordell said to Louis. “He’s got an AMC Hornet, man, pure black, no shit on the outside at all, your plain unmarked car. But inside—tell him, Richard.”

Richard said, “Well, I got a rollbar. I got heavy-duty Gabriel Striders. I got a shotgun mount in front.”

“He’s got one of those flashers,” Ordell said. “Kojak reaches out, puts up on his roof?”

“Super Fireball with a magnetic bottom. Let’s see,” Richard said, “I got a Federal PA one-seventy electronic siren, you can work it wail, yelp, or hi-lo. Well, in the trunk I keep a Schermuly gas grenade gun, some other equipment. Night-chuk riot baton. An M-17 gas mask.” He thought a moment. “I got a Legster leg holster. You ever see one?”

Be honest, now: Which is better, Dame or Dutch? That is to say, leaving aside both snobbery and its inverse (for no fictional setting, genteel or rough, is intrinsically superior to any other), who is more alert to the life of an English sentence—its rises, failings, falls, and emergency stops? You know the answer. It certainly saved me from spending too much time on Booker Prize novels, whether winners or nominees, then as now. Decades on, I still laugh at the Kojak line, and it’s easy to imagine how a clumsier or less adventurous writer might have handled the same idea: “It’s the kind that Kojak has on TV. He reaches out and puts it up on the roof.” See? Dead on arrival. But technique is not all; more mysterious is what radiates out from such technical command, amid the speeches, and lends dramatic energy to the owners of the mouths. The Murdoch paragraph has a lot to say, but it leaves us utterly clueless as to what either Titus or the narrator is like; they earn no place in our mind’s eye. Whereas Ordell is right there in a couple of deft strokes, egging Richard on, and Richard himself, well, even the words “he thought a moment” put us instantly in the presence of a major blockhead—a wannabe cop, who, it transpires, collects Nazi memorabilia. Character is language in action.'

INTERVIEW: BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH

'With his piercing blue-green eyes, set high like an otter’s, cheekbones like car bumpers, and unruly mop of chestnut hair, Cumberbatch has the kind of looks that seem to call out across alpine mountain-tops for the adjective “Byronic”. But his energy levels are more Tigger.  Offsetting the tousled, raffish, slightly boyish air is that rich Burtonesque baritone of his, last heard terrorizing the crew of the Starship enterprise in this summer’s blockbuster, Star Trek Into Darkness. Bill Condon calls it “a cello,” in which case, conversation with him can resemble a Haydn concerto, allegro con brio. The boy can talk. When I ask him a question about whether he asked Streep about the niceties of playing a real-life person, he delivers a ten-minute answer (10:32 seconds to be precise), brilliantly digressive, touching on a conversation they had about process, and music and notes, but to which actual answer, strictly speaking, is: no. “I’m sorry did I get off track?” he says blinking innocently, as if abashed by his own brilliance. He says his mother always knows he’s about to start another season of Sherlock because he starts talking double speed. “His voicemail messages are one of the great highlights of our friendship,” says Rebecca Hall who has known him since she was 13 saw him acting in a school stage production of The Taming of the shrew at harrow. “They contain whole conversations. They’re just joyous.”' — from my Vogue profile     

OSCAR PREDICTIONS: August 2013

BEST FILM: August: Osage County, 12 Years A Slave, The Butler, Gravity, Inside Llewyn Davis, Saving Mr Banks, American Hustle, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

BEST DIRECTOR: Alfonso Cuaron, John Wells, Steve McQueen, Joel Coen, David O. Russell

BEST ACTOR: Forest Whitaker, Leonardo Di Caprio, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Idris Elba, Robert Redford

BEST ACTRESS: Meryl Streep, Cate Blanchett, Sandra Bullock, Emma Thompson,  Julia Roberts

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR: John Goodman, Tom Hanks, Michael Fassbender, Matthew McConnaughey

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Oprah Winfrey, Carey Mulligan, Lupita Nyong'o, Amy Adams, Juliette Lewis

QUOTE OF THE DAY: Tom Hanks

'Everything you type on a typewriter sounds grand, the words forming in mini-explosions of SHOOK SHOOK SHOOK. A thank-you note resonates with the same heft as a literary masterpiece. The sound of typing is one reason to own a vintage manual typewriter — alas, there are only three reasons, and none of them are ease or speed. In addition to sound, there is the sheer physical pleasure of typing; it feels just as good as it sounds, the muscles in your hands control the volume and cadence of the aural assault so that the room echoes with the staccato beat of your synapses. You can choose the typewriter to match your sound signature. Remingtons from the 1930s go THICK THICK. Midcentury Royals sound like a voice repeating the word CHALK. CHALK. CHALK CHALK. Even the typewriters made for the dawning jet age (small enough to fit on the fold-down trays of the first 707s), like the Smith Corona Skyriter and the design masterpieces by Olivetti, go FITT FITT FITT like bullets from James Bond’s silenced Walther PPK. Composing on a Groma, exported to the West from a Communist country that no longer exists, is the sound of work, hard work. Close your eyes as you touch-type and you are a blacksmith shaping sentences hot out of the forge of your mind.' — Tom Hanks, New York Times 

Mad men and the single girl

My Guardian column this week finds me in a testy mood. 

'The testosterone comes off Bret Martin’s new book, Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution like wafts of Brut. A short, stocky account of the rise of such shows as The Sopranos, The Wire, The Breaking Bad, Mad Men, it comes with the muscular thesis   that cable TV has “become the significant American art form of the first decade of the 21st century, the equivalent of what the films of Scorsese, Altman, Coppola, and others had been to the 1970s or the novels of Updike, Roth. And Mailer had been to the 1960s.” You see? Now that’s what I call a thesis: beefy with name-drops, and a cultural frame of reference that could stun a herd of bison at 30 paces.

Martin corrals as hairy a group of alpha-males as have graced the pages of a book since Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders’ Raging Bulls. Here is David Chase, creator of The Sopranos, Eeyorish grump and attacker of desks, determined to “stick it to the bastards in their own house, right under their noses, and make them thank-you you for it,” in Martin’s words. Here is David Milch, veteran of NYPD Blue and creator of Deadwood, peeing out of a second-floor window onto flowers, showing off his drawer full of money, and — his party piece — whipping out his dick. Here is David Simon, future creator of The Wire, wearing ponytail and ripped jeans, thrusting his crotch into the face of colleagues at the Baltimore Sun. And here is his Wire star, Dominic West, working his way through his female fans. “A man could live off his leftovers” said Wendell Pierce. As  Andre Royo, who played Bubbles put it, “I look at Idris? Nothing but bitches outside his trailer. Dom West? Nothing but Bitches. Sonja? Dudes and bitches. Me? I’d have junkies out there. They fell in love with Bubbles.”

All this horse-play was, says Martin, par for the course for a creative revolution so fragrant with male pheromones you could float a jock-strap down the corridor on the thermals. “Not only were the most important shows of the era run by men, they were also largely about manhood,” he writes, “ in particular the contours of male power and the infinite varieties of male combat”, an unpersuasive bit of bluster the first time we come across it — really? infinite? — but by the time we read that Mad Men, too, is about the “infinite varieties” of male combat, you get a little impatient for specifics. There’s “bald stocky, flawed but charismatic” Tony Soprano; also   The Shield’s bald, stocky, flawed but charismatic Vic Mackey. We have The Wire’s alcoholic, self-destructive cops; or Rescue Me’s alcoholic, self-destructive firefighters; and so many “dark,” “flawed”, “morally compromised” anti-heroes that shades of grey begin to seem merely the new black — spray-on cynicism, a fake tattoo of cosmetic morbidity. All belong “to a species you might call Man Beset or Man Harried — badgered and bothered and thwarted by the modern world,” writes Marti, for whom  “men alternately setting loose and struggling to cage their wildest natures has always been the great American story.”

Doubtless, this sort of flattery slips down a treat at GQ, where Martin is correspondent, but it will come as news to anyone who thought Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, or Bette Davis’s Margo Channing, or Joni Mitchell’s Blue, or Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping told American stories.  You could argue that they’re not great American stories, of course, and Martin gives every impression of a man ready for the challenge. There is a consistent denigration of female achievement throughout Difficult Men, and only the skimpiest mentions of Homeland, Nurse Jackie, Sex and the City and Girls. As Emily Nussbaum noted in The New Yorker, Martin gives Sex and the City “credit for jump-starting HBO, but the condescension is palpable, and the grudging praise is reserved for only one aspect of the series—the rawness of its subject matter,” but his condescension swells even more ostentatiously for Girls, which garnered attention, he says, “because a) it was good — though not hefty enough to support the weight of all the Rorschach-like baggage commentators bring to it b) it was created by a woman”. The chauvinism aside, you’d think that someone who refers to The Rockford Files as  being “post-Watergate, post-Vietnam” in sensibility, and spritzes every room with the word “auteur” as if laying rose petals for the Queen of France, would think a little more carefully before skewering others for “Rorschach-like baggage.”

In it’s own way, Martin’s book reminded me of all that I don’t like about many cable shows. There’s certainly an off-putting sweat stain of machismo at HBO; poor Kelly McDonald cannot open her mouth on Boardwalk Empire without channelling the writer’s-room funk of men stymied for the sort of thing woman are rumored to say. The Emmies distract themselves with rewarding every performance on Mad Men except the one that really counts — Christrina’s Hendrick’s Joan Harris, an extraordinary alloy of bombshell armor-plating and plush Monroe-like vulnerability.  (“Of course Joan is the bitchiest character,” one of Matthew Weiner’s colleagues tells Martin. “ And Matt is a quintessential Queen bitch. He could write that character for days and days.”) It’s no accident that Hendricks is one of few Mad Men cast members, other than Hamm, to enjoy a successful transition to the big screen; or that cable has provided a platform for such actresses as Claire Danes, Glenn Close and Edie Falco to deliver career-defining performances, while David Chase’s determination to swing his Sopranos gravitas into a movie-directing career faltered with last year’s Not Fade Away. Even Chase still wanted into the movies.

Cable TV is going enjoying an uptick in quality at the moment, but I wouldn't exchange the entire 5 seasons of  The Sopranos for a single reel of Goodfellas, which it cribbed so mercilessly (and which is mentioned only once in Martin’s book). Of the rest, only The Wire really stands out, a masterpiece of flinty, impassioned journalistic fabulism in the vein of Dickens and Orwell, but — and this feels almost like it goes without saying — there is no visual stylist to be found amongst Martin’s show-runners to match Scorsese or Coppola or Malick, no visual storyteller to match Spielberg or James Cameron or Ang Lee. Hollywood can breathe easy.'

Fall Screengrab 2013: Actresses

From Top:—Sandra Bullock in Gravity; Jennifer Lawrence in Hunger Game: Catching Fire; Amy Adams in American Hustle; Julia Roberts in August: Osage County; Carey Mulligan in Inside Llewyn Davis; Adèle Exarchopoulos and Léa Seydoux in Blue is the Warmest Color.

When too much is never enough

In Songbook, Nick Hornby recounts hearing the J J Geils band for the first time — “loud, baffling, exotic, cool, wild” — and realizing that the band came from the same place in the American psyche "as Kramer in Seinfeld, and ‘Surfin Bird’, and ‘Papa-OOm-Mow-Mow’, and James Brown being wrapped in a cape and led off stage before bounding back to the microphone and Mohamed Ali’s Boasts, and the insane celebrations when a contestant won a lawnmower on the Price is Right.” I just finished watching Scorsese’s remake of Cape Fear for my book on the director and wondering if the same is true of him too. The film, as everyone knows, is excessive — excessively stylish, excessively violent, excessively referential of other movies, with a bonkers finale in which De Niro, speaking in tongues, goes down with the Bowden's boat, while Scorsese swings his camera around like a Thurible during Mass. If only he hadn't done that, was the gist of many of the reviews. I love Scorsese but. Too much is too much. And so on. And then it struck me that this problem wasn't confined to Scorsese. They said the same thing about Spielberg's colorised girl in Schindler's List, and the repeated Zapruder shots of Kennedy's brains in  JFK, and Spike Lee's speechifying in Do The Right Thing, and all the quotes from The Wasteland in Apocalypse Now, and countless other examples in which a film director, rather than doing the thing critics were okay with them doing, went too far, showed too much, couldn't shut up and generally splurged in ways that left the tidy bounds of good taste and discernment looking, well, tasteful and tidy.  I'm not sure it always used to be the case. Ford and Hitchcock and Hawks rarely got cinematically drunk in public. But starting in the 1970s, something got into the water supply, a tiny sliver of madness, an urge towards excess that is not just very American but something I have grown increasingly fond of, as the years tick by, and sanity seems an ever more elusive commodity. It's something that's come out of writing this Scorsese book, anyway, a grudging respect for the more bonkers films, or sequences, like the firework-lit impalement in Bringing Out The Dead, and the speaking in tongues in Cape Fear, and the freight-train crucifixion in Boxcar Bertha, and all the other miscellaneous jibber-jabber that seems to have burped up from Scorsese's subconscious. 

QUOTE OF THE DAY: Diane Keaton

'As Ms. Keaton recalled it, their relationship was not unlike Annie Hall,  with Mr. Allen becoming both her partner and mentor, offering her an attentive ear and introducing her to Freudian analysis. “I was constantly complaining about things and constantly had this low self-esteem,” Ms. Keaton said, “and had a tendency toward crying and worrying about why I wasn’t good enough, and he took it.” Not only did Mr. Allen pay attention, Ms. Keaton said, “he took an interest in my family and in my mother, who was a fantastic woman and a complex character, and in my sisters.” The surest sign that Mr. Allen was listening to her was when she read his script for Annie Hall (written with Marshall Brickman) and her character’s voice sounded just like her. “We can all feel it and understand it,” said Ms. Keaton, who won an Academy Award for her performance, “but we cannot write other people’s sounds.” Mr. Allen, she said, “can hear it — Annie Hall, flumping around, trying to find a sentence, that’s just remarkable what he did for me.”' — New York Times

I love that in the course of describing unique voices she gets the word "flumping" past the Times's style prefects. 

REVIEW: The Panopticon by Jenni Fagan

“The novel takes it’s title from the imposing rehab facility, located deep in a forest, that waits for Anais at the end of that car ride: four floors high, in shape of a C, and in the centre a hidden core that looks out, through one-way glass, onto every cell, every landing, every bathroom. Students of 18^th century English penology will instantly recognize reformer Jeremy Bentham’s infamous plans for an omniscient prison, never built but later turned by French philosopher Michel Foucault into a metaphor for the oppressive gaze of late capitalism. Students of 21^st century reality television will, on the other hand, instantly recognize the layout from TV program Big Brother, in which a bunch of undesirables argue, in closes quarters, over who redecorated the living room lamp-shade   with their underpants. Where does Fagan’s structure come to rest on that scale? Somewhere in the middle. The inmates are locked up at night, but during the day are free to roam a lounge area, dining space, and games room, all painted magnolia by well-meaning staff who say things like “we practice a holistic approach to client care at the Panopticon.” Winston Smith never had it so good. Anais is there for allegedly putting a policewoman in a coma, a crime for which she is hauled into the interrogation room at regular intervals, but she cannot remember anything, having been on the tail-end of a four-day Ketamine bender at the time. “I didnae tell the polis that. I didnae tell them I was so fucked up I couldnae even mind my own name.” She is soon bonding with her fellow inmates — swapping stories and swinging joints attached to shoelaces between the cells after lights out.  There’s the girl who burnt down the disabled school where her foster mother taught, the sicko who raped a dog, the guy who battered his own grannie. “We end email, start legends —— create myths. It's the same in the nick or the nuthouse: notoriety is respect.” What we have here is a fine example of Caledonian grunge, wherein writers North of the river Tweed grab the English language by the lapels, dunk it in the gutter and kick it into filthy, idiomatic life, thus leaving terrified book reviewers with no option but to find them “gritty” or “authentic.”     

I have no way of knowing if the acid trip described here — starting on the walk to school, then lurching sideways to a tower block, another run for drugs, and finally a police bust — is authentic or not having spent most of my school years protecting my privates from oncoming soccer balls, but there is no resisting the tidal rollout of Fagan’s imagery. Her prose beats keeps beat behind your eyelids, the flow of images widening to a glittering delta whenever Anais approaches the vexed issue of her origins:  “Born in the bushes by a motorway. Born in a VW with its doors open by the sea. Born in Harvey Nichols between the fur coats and the perfume…. Born in an igloo. Born in a castle. Born in a teepee while the moon rises and a midsummer powwow pounds the ground outside.” Solving this mystery — cracking Anais open — soon supplants the cop-in-a-coma as the book’s main narrative focus, as is only right: The Panopticon is primarily, and triumphantly, a voice novel. The rhythm and use of demotic may owe something to Irvine Welsh, but there is a poet’s precision to some of Anais’s more plumed excursions. I, for one, was as grateful for the fur coats and perfume as I was for the acid trips and dog rapes, the school of Welsh having long ago seized up, sclerotically, with its own druggy braggadocio. “Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face,” said Updike. Reading Welsh’s most recent work, you sense a writer trying, but unable, to break out of the rough bark in which early success has encased him."  

—from my review for the NYTBR

ANNIVERSARY: DIE HARD's 25th

From my post on Die Hard's 25th for The Guardian:—

'... Loner heroes and explosions are non-negotiable. In fact Die Hard owes it’s iconic status largely to the superimposition of the two. The sight of John McClane backlit by a massive fireball as he hurtles over the edge of Nakatomi plaza is as pure motion poetry. The Towering Inferno featured an all-star cast including Steve McQueen, Stephen Holden, Faye Dunaway and Fred Astaire all trapped inside a burning skyscraper. Die Hard wanted the spectacle without the job sharing. Hence the central running joke: one New York cop was all you needed to defeat a building full of blonde teutonic head-cases. John McClane thus marks the last development of the eighties action hero before he turned into the 1990s superhero. He is as superheroic as you can get without a cape. Instead, he has a white vest — that lasting testament to the continuity girl’s art. When we first see it is as pristine as a trans-Atlantic flight will allow, but over the course of the film, it grows ever more torn and besmirched, a visual record of all that he has braved, as McClane is shot at, punched and blown up. It thus marks an exact mid-point between the bare-chested heroism of Sylvester Stallone and the armor-plated, spandex-clad heroes that were to come.  In the Rambo and Rocky films, Stallone’s exposed flesh defines his masochism, his role as America’s punching bag, soaking up punishment on behalf of a nation traumatised by its loss in Vietnam. Loser could also be winners: that was the message of both Rocky and First Blood, less so of the sequels. 

As the eighties wore on, the sons and daughters of baby boomers soon tired of their parent’s geopolitical hang-ups.  Hans Gruber looks like a terrorist, but he and his blondilocks gang are really after money — a narrative sleight of hand and a nice joke at the expense of long-winded political thrillers like Day of the Jackal. In place of Geopolitics? Pop culture.  “Just another American who saw too many movies as a child? Another orphan of a bankrupt culture who thinks he's John Wayne? Rambo? Marshal Dillon?” taunts Gruber. “Was always kinda partial to Roy Rogers actually,” replies McClane before letting rip with his borrowed catch phrase.  This would increasingly become the norm as characters in movies established their regular-guy bona fides with audiences by means of their pop-culture savvy. Now it’s so widespread as to be commonplace: People in movies also go to the movies, and quote the movies, so much so that they sometimes threaten to go up a blaze of self-reference. McTiernan’s movie established a hero, and a tone, that proved wildly influential; Tarantino owes it a debt, as does Shane Black and the Iron Man franchise, although I would rule against allowing superheroes into the action movie paddock. The same for purebred sci-fi fantasy like Star Wars and Avatar. Genre is fungible, of course, but my top ten of the best action movies since Die Hard would look something like this:— 

1.   Terminator 2:  Judgment Day 

2. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon 

3. The Matrix 

4. Casino Royale 

5. Speed 

6. The Fugitive 

7. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade 

8. The Bourne Ultimatum 

9. Minority Report 

10. Run, Lola, Run 

From Joe Maloney's photographs of Jersey shore in the late seventies and early eighties, at Rick Wester Fine Art.

FALL 2013 SCREENGRAB: ACTORS

From Top: Oscar Isaac in Inside Llewyn Davis; Tom Hanks in Saving Mr Banks; Michael Fassbender in 12 Years a Slave; Benedict Cumberbatch in The Fifth Estate; George Clooney in Gravity; Michael Fassbender in 12 Years A Slave; Robert Redford in All Is Lost.

INTERVIEW: LIV TYLER

"She gives off an air of dreamy abstraction, with just a hint of the melancholy that sometimes attends great beauties, as if she alone had seen through a trick that still entrances the rest of the world. She talks about herself the way men talk about their cars. It’s just mechanics, maintenance. “I do have quiet an old-fashioned body, the shape of it,” she says.  “Corsetted, pulled in, little waist, pointy boobs — that look actually really suits me, because there’s some construction to them. I always go back to the classic images — I can’t help but be influenced by Elizabeth Taylor and Audrey Hepburn and Paul Newman and Steve McQueen and the Kennedys. I find myself inspired all the time by my mother and my grandmother and their innate natural elegance, more than the fashion or trends that are hot right now. It’s strange. I’m very independent and quite modern as a woman in many ways but I’m also quite old-fashioned.” For all her onscreen ethereality, Tyler, now 35, registers a surprising substantiality, with her broad shoulders (“like a linebacker”) and penetrating gaze, her familiar breathy cadence seasoned, these days, with the unimpeachable wisdom of the newly divorced."
— from my Liv Tyler interview for Net-a-Porter

REVIEW: PACIFIC RIM (dir. Del Toro)

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.  Giant alien monsters known as Kaiju are making their way through an inter-dimensional portal deep in a Pacific ocean trench, and are coming ashore to reduce cities like San Francisco and Manila  to rubble. The only thing that will stop them are giant robots, or Jaegers, piloted by two humans, one for each hemisphere of the brain, thus ensuring that the robots can tie their own shoelaces and guess how you are feeling. And if that sounds like a salad of just about every blockbuster of the last five years then you’d be right. What can I say, except Arthur Brooke and William Painter both had a crack of the Romeo and Juliet story before this Shakespeare kid showed up. 

 Advance word on Guillermo Del Toro’s Pacific Rim was that it was the “thinking man’s Michael Bay movie,” and while thoughtfulness is always nice, that’s not strictly speaking accurate. What distinguishes the two filmmakers is love — a deep and abiding love of the genre, love of monsters down to the phosphorescent tips of their tentacles, love of robots down to their last rivet, love of the laws of mass and momentum, and all the unfakeable geekery that lifts and propels every frame of this film. How long does it take to tell the difference? I would say by the end of the opening credits. That’s how long it takes for Raleigh Beckett (Charlie Hunnam), to lose his brother to one of the monsters, with one scoop of its paw. When the two of them first showed up, two blonde hunks strolling down the jet-way, grins the size of the Mariana trench, rock-n-roll blasting on the soundtrack, you think: oh no, not another hymn to chiseled American manhood. Actually, no. His brother gone, Beckett must instead find his footing with a new team, opposite a young Japanese woman, Mako (Rinko Kikuchi), with a face as pale as lily and a Louise Brooks bob, who wants revenge against the Kaiju for reasons having to do with a small, red child’s shoe. Del Toro’s sense of characterisation is calligraphic, sentimental in the best sense, almost Cruikshankian: everyone is outlined with bold, fluid strokes that that lead them right back into the thick of the action. There is commander Stacker Pentecost (Idris Elba), who sounds ominously Biblical and delivers lines like “I do not want your admiration and your sympathy, I want your compliance and your fighting skills,” plus two squabbling scientists, one of whom  believes that “numbers are the closest we can get to the handwriting of God,” a line just good enough to give the impression of sincere belief. For once the internationalism of the cast feels rooted in something other than demography, namely genre. A sequence delving into Mako’s backstory showing a little girl running terrified down ashen streets, manages to invoke both Hiroshima and 9/11, drawing juice from Japanese and American movie-making traditions. 

 Maybe that’s why the tracking is soft. Blockbusters — in their modern iteration at least — started out as an America form, maybe even the American form, like jazz and musicals and ice-cream, and the story they told was America’s backstory: David versus Goliath.  “I don't ever want to think you could kill that shark,” Spielberg told his actors in Jaws, a beta-male siding with the other beta-males against alpha-dog Quint, the shark-hunter. “Aren’t you a little short to be a storm-trooper,” Princess Leia asks Luke when he first bursts into her cell on the Death Star in Star Wars, another film sized to the asymmetrical fight of the little guy against the big guy, because what brings the empire down, remember is it’s size; the Death Star is too large to be adequately defended, leaving it open to a fighter craft the size of an x-wing. Both these fights recalled the fight America had just lost — in Vietnam, where it was the 900-pound gorilla brought down by a lighter, faster force — but reslanted so that Americans could root for the little guy again, a salve for the national dysmorphia which results when the world’s sole superpower still imagines itself a scrappy, underdog. No other form tracks this this more explicitly than the summer blockbuster, for no form more explicitly sets those two forces — size and speed — against one another. Think of Arnie versus the T-1000 in Terminator 2, a “Porsche to his Panzer tank,” as Cameron put it, an uncannily predictive of the equally mercurial threat the country would one day face. Or the asymmetric warfare waged in Avatar, whose largest dragon, the Toruk, is vulnerable to attack from above precisely because of it’s size. How the Mighty Fall: it’s the Cameron theme from Aliens to Titanic, and one he picked up watching the Vietnam war on TV as a teenager in Canada, amazed to see this giant of a next-door neighbour fall. It’s precisely what has given his fantasies such a virulent hold on the American imagination.

And it’s what makes so many modern-day blockbusters so slack: they haven’t the imagination for failure. They are glinting, 24-carot dreams of success — quite literal power trips. The new Man of Steel has very little time for Clark Kent, only for Superman, Kal-el, this time reimagined as a demi-God. The Transformer movies are boring precisely to the extent that watching two equal, opposed forces thrash it out is boring: only narrative sleights of hand and deus ex machinas will tip the fight. And why Pacific Rim is the most consistently thrilling bit of blockbuster sublimity since Avatar. I mean that word literally: "whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger,” said Edmund Burke in A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful  (1757) “Whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror." The romantics found it in the seascapes of Turner, the Alps, the craggy vertiginousness of Milton’s Paradise Lost, the caverns of Piranesi and Opium dreams. It’s not too hard to find traces of all of those in the awe-inspiring battles between robot and monster, most of them at night, some of them at sea, in Del Toro’s film. For once, the fights seem to be observing known physical laws, absent the tell-tale whizz of most CGI, but instead moving with the sluggish grandeur befitting their massive bulk — or as one of the scientists, appropriately named Newton, puts it, “that’s two-thousand five-hundred tons of awesome!” But what really wins the day is the way Del Toro has rescaled the action to allow human agency back into the picture; one delightful touch involves a monster slamming into the building and setting off a little Newton's Cradle on one of the desks.  Best of all is Elba, who finds a declamatory pitch for his performance that could part the oceans themselves. “Today, at the edge of our hope, at the end of our time,” he intones, like Olivier before the battle of Agincourt. “We are cancelling the apocalypse!” It’s just a power-chord, a bit of silly magnificence in a summer blockbuster, but it lifts you out of your seat, and reminds you of just how thrilling these things can be when they have a director of Del Toro’s imagination at the helm. Pacific Rim is rousing, playful and unfashionably fun.  If audiences don't go for it civilization really is doomed.

— my review for The Guardian

Call off the hounds! The most consistently thrilling, lovingly made bit of blockbuster sublimity since Cameron's Avatar, review to come....

Best Movies of the Eighties

Movie Mezzannine have posted theirs. Here's mine. 

1. Blue Velvet 

2. E.T. The Extraterrestrial

3. Diner 

4. The Terminator 

5. Raging Bull

6. Raiders of the Lost Ark

7. The Elephant Man

8. The Shining 

9. The Right Stuff 

10. Dangerous Liaisons

As good as they're saying it is.

Most anticipated films of the Fall

1. Gravity
2. Inside Llewyn Davis
3. All Is Lost
4. Captain Phillips
5. American Hustle
6. The Wolf of Wall Street
7. 12 Years a Slave
8. Fruitvale Station
9. The Past
10. Blue is the Warmest Color

These violent delights have violent ends

From my piece about Love for The Guardian:—

'Guilt is the only purely useless emotion, I’ve found — not just no use whatsoever, but actually the enemy. Here’s another thing I’ve learned: when you fall in love with someone, MIR scans reveal a firework display in the caudate nucleus, a pair of shrimp-like structures located deep in the reptilian brain. This isn't where everyone thought love lived. For decades everyone thought love was holed up in the limbic system — the place where infants recognize their mothers, and parents protect their families, and individuals feel loyal to their friends. No. It’s deep in the selfish, self-seeking reptile brain, the same bit dealing with reward and achievement, which lights up like a slot-machine when you make money, or win the lottery, or ace the final level of Grand Theft Auto. Some researchers have reclassified it not as an emotion at all, but a drive, like hunger. Romantic love, that is: Romeo-and-Juliet love, crazy-passionate-I-feel-like-I’ve known-you-all-my life love, the kind celebrated in pop songs and movies as the Holy Grail of all human activity — the prize, no less, for being human. On the subject of waking up next to a face you have seen a thousand times and trying to be as nice and kind to its owner as you can — the kind of love, in other words, most of us will actually attempt at some point in our lives — our culture maintains a deathly silence, broken only by the odd bit of Shakespearean verse. 

“So we grew together, 

Like to a double cherry—seeming parted 

But yet an union in partition— 

Two lovely berries molded on one stem.” 

Here are some of the things that didn't happen when I met my wife: it wasn’t love at first sight (we both had moments of ‘meh’). My childhood and her childhood didn’t sing each other’s siren song (she has a great relationship with the men in her family). It wasn't a meeting of minds, or a melding of souls, or a beating of two hearts as one. (If anything I was a little unsettled, as if sensing that the game might be up). We didn't fall in love, we just walked slowly into it, and at around the 9-month mark I woke up one day and thought: I do love her. That was my exact intonation when I told her. “I do love you.” As if it were a piece of news we’d all been waiting on. She is the love of my life, quite literally: the woman I have spent the most of my life loving — the most minutes, the most hours, the most days, the most time. Fromm again: the man who waits for the right person to come along can be “compared to the man who wants to paint but who, instead, of learning the art, claims that he has just to wait for the right object, and that he will paint it beautifully when he finds it.” It’s an inside job. I know for a fact I am not her perfect man. Living with me, she says, is “like living with a teenage girl,” although I don’t play Taylor Swift that loudly. Earlier this year, we had an argument over what to watch on TV. She got back from work early to find me already ensconced on the sofa.  

 “What’s going on?”  

 “Superbowl.”  

 “What time is it on?”  

 “Ten minutes.”  

 Her eyes narrowed.  

 “Oh honey, I wanted to watched Titanic. You know I did.”  

 “We just saw Titanic!”  

 “That was the 3-D version. It was awful. They looked a million miles away from each other.” 

“Sweetheart. It’s the Superbowl. The Baltimore Ravens. I’ve been waiting all week to see those 49ers get spanked…. Oh don't pull that face.”  

 I got my way in the end. We watched Titanic.'

Best Pop Songs of 2013 (so far)

1. Black Skinhead — Kanye West
2. I Was A Fool — Tegan & Sara
3. Diane Young – Vampire Weekend
4. Hard to Find — The National
5. Fall Down — Will.i.am and Miley Cyrus
6. Kiss You — One Direction
7. The Way — Ariana Grande
8. Give Life Back to Music — Daft Punk
9. Beautiful — Mariah Carey
10. Let's Go to Sleep — Future Bible Heroes

Best Films of 2013 (so far)

1. Before Midnight B
2. Iron Man 3 B+
3. World War Z  B
4. Star Trek Into Darkness B
5. Frances Ha B
6. Side Effects B
7. Only God Forgives  B-
8. This is The End B-
9. The Great Gatsby B-
10. The Bling Ring B-

Best Albums of 2013 (so far)

1. Heartthrob — Tegan and Sarah
2. Trouble Will Find Me — The National
3. Impossible Truth — William Tyler
4. American Kid — Patty Griffin
5. The Beast in its Tracks — Josh Ritter
6. Southeastern — Jason Isbell
7. Random Access Memories — Daft Punk
8. Modern Vampires of the City — Vampire Weekend
9. Woman — Rhye
10. Once I Was An Eagle — Laura Marling

PROFILE: SETH ROGEN

'“Have just been advised Seth only needs 10 mins for grooming,” reads one of the emails that shuttle between his publicists and the Guardian’s photographer, which sounds about right. The roly-poly figure who turns up a few minutes later at the Four Seasons in jeans and t-shirt, sneakers, topped off with jew-fro and froggy grin, seems barely to need ten minutes for anything. “Hey,” he says, “What’s going on?” before settling into a sofa that seems custom-molded to his contours. He talks in sentences that go up, up, up, up, up like a roller-coaster car, his furry eyebrows shooting up for emphasis, before beginning their long descent, down, down, down, down, towards the point, or the punchline, which is invariably marked by a gurgling Mutleyesque laugh of his: “Hurhurhurhurhurhur.”   Spend any amount of time with him and you will hear it a lot. Apatow sometimes teases him, “I don't get why you're funny. Nothing really bad has ever happened to you.” In a business populated by midnight prowlers, mining bottomless pools of pain for their stand-up routines, Rogen stands out for his benign demeanour.  Not that his sense of humour isn’t athletically obscene, but whether riffing about cacking his pants while watching Gladiator, or wondering why   people have deoderants for armpits but not buttcracks, he exudes the gurgling contentment levels of a child, or Buddha. Onscreen, his persona is a matter of zero torque. “He can really go at you hard,” says Apatow, “But underneath it you know he’s a good guy…. I don’t know why I must always look for pain. Even when it is not there.”'  

— from my Gaurdian profile of Seth Rogen

REVIEW: World War Z (dir. Forster)

It's surprising how affecting Brad Pitt is at playing fathers. The ingrate in me wants to credit those tabloid images of him and Angie and the kids finally rubbing off on our collective unconscious, but then there is his performance in Moneyball — my favorite performance of 2011, with a wonderful tired sadness around the edges — and now here he is, tucking up his kids in bed before going off to fight zombies in Marc Forster's World War Z, and communicating as much in a glance as Harrison Ford used to with Anne Archer in Patriot Games. Pitt's matured into quite a screen actor, his mellowness having finally found it's middle-aged groove. Advance word had it that World War Z had eaten it's own brains for breakfast, but not only is it not bad, it's actually quite good, with a couple of genuinely suspenseful sequences involving Pitt and his fellows tip-toing down corridors trying not to wake the zombie hordes from their slumber (they sleep standing up like horses) — shades of The Brood, and The Birds even. And the first twenty minutes are a text-book example of steadily mounting dread, with Foster  goosing the audience's peripheral vision with glimpses — never quite enough — of the advancing zombies. By now you will have heard of the film's major innovation: they move like greased lightning. And a bright idea it was — there's a Boschian glint to the film's imagery of teeming, toppling hordes, and for once the global imagery pays off; whether consciously or not, the film presents us a vision of the third world overwhelming the first, as if all the countries Brad and Angie aim to save had instead risen up and consumed them. It's like a home-movie-turned-horror-film of their latest adoption run. B