David Carradine is dead at 73.

Thanks for the memories…

by Josh Catone

This past weekend saw the online release of the first non-spoof, fan-created film set in the Lord of the Rings universe. That by itself is fairly unremarkable, but a number of things set The Hunt for Gollum apart from your standard fan created fare. It’s long (about 40 minutes), it has better than average acting and writing (think direct-to-DVD caliber), it features incredibly high production values despite a meager £3,000 budget, and it is based on canon. That last bit especially, had some wondering if Gollum would run afoul of rights holders at Tolkien Enterprises.

Where most fan art uses original characters and story lines, The Hunt for Gollum’s writer and director Chris Bouchard based the script on appendices to Tolkien’s original work. That the film uses Tolkien’s actual story could have spelled trouble for the entire production. There are two understood rules in the world of fan art: don’t use official material (like logos, music, and to a lesser extent known characters), and don’t try to make money off your creations. Full Story »

Myth serves as an individual path into the collective unconscious.  It is a means to attain at-one-ment with the greater forces that affect the individual life.  That is, it informs life by putting it into context.  We often disdain myth because it generally portrays less than perfect gods (and goddesses), whereas what we call religion rests on an assumption of divine perfection.  How quaint it is to see the Springeresque antics of Zeus chasing women and Hera chasing Zeus, no wonder the Olympians fell out of favor to be replaced by a single, all-seeing, all-knowing God of perfection.  But which set of beliefs would do an individual more psychological good when faced with infidelity?

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Like a lot of other people, I watched the Watchmen this past weekend.

Despite lukewarm reviews and a running time that nearly hits three hours, the movie still managed to pull in a hefty $55.7 million dollars. While that’s apparently at the low end of industry expectations, the movie exceeded my fanboy expectations.

What I didn’t expect, though, was the spectacular time capsule-on-a-movie screen that Watchmen turned out to be.

As ground-breaking as Watchmen was as a comic book back in 1986-87, it was also very much a product of its time, infused with Cold War sensibility and anxiety, set in a crime-and-slime-ridden Times Square atmosphere writ large upon the world. Full Story »

As I watched the Oscars last night - or perhaps “endured” is a better word, because Huge Ackman prancing around with his nipples all stiff over the return of The Musical! (come on, just try to say it without Jazz Hands) is more than I can take without a cabinetful of medication - I noted that again Meryl Streep got nominated. (And by the way, now I hear that Beyonce might play Ginger in a Gilligan’s Island movie, which means you won’t even be able escape her ubiquitosity by getting stranded on a goddamned deserted island.)

Back to Meryl, though. Full Story »

Stage and film star Claire Bloom and author Philip Roth took no prisoners when their 17-year relationship ended in a firestorm.

When one of the partners in a marriage is a man who’s been called “a gleeful misogynist” –- in a complimentary article, no less –- it comes as no surprise when their union is torn asunder.

Claire Bloom and Philip Roth became a couple in 1976. She was not only a classically trained actress, but her beauty rivaled that of fellow English-woman Elizabeth Taylor (who she actually beat to Richard Burton, with whom she had an affair). He, of course is the American novelist whose career ebbed and flowed, until, after bypass surgery in 1989, he devoted his whole being to writing and was been on a tear ever since. Full Story »

The new season of PBS’s long running series Masterpiece Theatre, now known simply as Masterpiece, kicked   off last Sunday with a new adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s brilliant examination of gender relations and cultural  mores, Tess of the d’Urbervilles.

The production is first rate. The actors, young and earnest as they are, seem to have a clear grasp of the key issues of the novel, quaint as they may seem to sophisticated Post-Sexual Revolution viewers. I can recommend it without reservation, something I couldn’t do for last year’s Complete Jane Austen.

In fact, a useful question for us to consider is whether it makes sense for Masterpiece to offer such a production of Tess.  Who would get an exploration of the double standard in these times? Full Story »

“I’m interested in what motivates you, and how you understand the world.” He glanced sideways at her. “Rausch tells me you’ve written about music.”

“Sixties garage bands. I started writing about them when I was still in the Curfew.”"Were they an inspiration?”

She was watching a fourteen-inch display on the Maybach’s dash, the red cursor that was the car proceeding along the green line that was Sunset. She looked up at him. “Not in any linear way, musically. They were my favorite bands. Are,” she corrected herself.

He nodded.

- William Gibson, Spook Country

I’ve always been intrigued by the curious dynamic of influence. Full Story »

Last night we watched the Final Cut of Blade Runner again, and if you don’t have this package I can’t recommend it highly enough. 25 years on, Ridley Scott was able to finally re-craft the film as he wanted it originally, and the result is a stunning achievement. Scott has been one of our greatest directors for a very long time, but this may be his finest moment to date.

This viewing (probably my 35th or 40th - I lost count a long time ago) got me to thinking, all over again, about how little the film was acknowledged at the time of its release. Full Story »

by Earl Brandt

When it comes to films by great filmmakers, especially those by living filmmakers, I try not to read reviews, criticism, or even summaries prior to seeing the films for myself.  One of life’s great pleasures, for me, is the anticipation and ultimate enjoyment of the work of an artist I have come to know as a great – someone interesting, vital, who’s work is both timeless and immediate in its relevance, and who is in control of a craft and powers of creation.  Best, I reason, if I can encounter the work free of bias other than what is mostly my own.  (I do enjoy trailers – good ones are a pleasant tease.  While constructed, they are composed mostly of the work itself.) Full Story »

The Battle of Gettysburg certainly ranks as one of America’s great stories—but how it became such a great story is a story unto itself.

That’s the focus of Thomas Desjardin’s book These Honored Dead: How the Story of Gettysburg Shaped American Memory.

Does the world need one more book about the battle of Gettysburg? (Well, there will always be a market for one, so maybe that’s a moot question….) In the case of These Honored Dead, published in 2003, the answer was—and is—yes. Desjardin’s book is a must-have for anyone who seriously considers him/herself a Civil War buff. But perhaps more important, it’s an indispensable case-study for anyone interested in understanding the forces that shape public opinion as it evolves into historical record.

And with everything that’s gone on in the last eight or so years, that kind of insight could be particularly useful. Full Story »

James Bond is back in print, and the new novel, Devil May Care, reads just like the old ones.

That’s both good and bad.

British author Sebastian Faulks is the scribe behind this latest literary relaunch of the world’s most famous spy. Other authors who’ve penned Bond adventures, most notably John Gardner and Raymond Benson, have carried Bond into modern times while pretending that he really isn’t aging.

Faulks, “writing as Ian Fleming,” Bond’s creator, takes a different approach. He picks up 007’s adventures right where Fleming left off. Full Story »

For better or worse, cultures tend to rank genres of fiction.  So-called serious works, written by the likes of William Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce, rate well above mysteries, westerns, romances, science fiction, and (certainly) comic books on the literary org chart.  There’s justification for this.  We rank the stunning complexity of Mozart’s music ahead of chopsticks for a reason:  Mozart exhibits genius of the highest order, taking our most talented musicians years of study and practice to understand and master, and the first rendition of chopsticks was composed and taught to a wildebeest in under 19 seconds.

Or, to put it another way, Hamlet is clearly a more complex and wonderful work than Everyone Poops.

On rare occasions, though, a writer takes the unique features of a lowly literary genre and uses it to illuminate life in a manner that, perhaps, could be accomplished in no other way.  In 1895, HG Wells published The Time Machine, transforming science fiction from a mere, gee-whiz exploration of technical wonders to a spelunking crawl through the human psyche, illuminating the toothy growths of social terror clinging to the walls and ceilings along the way.  Only science fiction gave him the freedom to vastly alter the world and explore the unchanging human condition as it adapts to that world.  Only science fiction could give anthropologist Ursula Le Guin the platform she needed to explore humanity in the absence of fixed gender, as she did in The Left Hand of Darkness, or Isaac Asimov the frame of reference he needed to study the very meaning of what it means to be human in I, Robot.  Full Story »

One of my main interests is how we know what we know about the Civil War. My fascination in the topic stems not only from my work doing public history on the front lines at the battlefields in Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville but also from a public relations perspective. “The Lost Cause,” as a concept, was a basically huge public relations campaign to influence the way Americans remembered the war–or, as Robert E. Lee said, “to transmit, if possible the truth to posterity, and do justice to our brave soldiers.”

In that context, Gary Gallagher’s Causes Won, Lost, and Forgotten: How Hollywood & Popular Art Shape What We Know About the Civil War proved to be a fascinating and fun book to read. Full Story »

Jean Luc Godard’s 1968 epic WeekEnd closes with the following end title:

END OF CINEMA

Leonard Lopate of WNYC has a terrific interview with Richard Brody, film critic for The New Yorker and author of a new book on the cinema icon - Everything is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean Luc Godard. You can hear the interview below.

As Lopate archly notes and Brody diplomatically tries to refute, for the vast majority of cinema aficionados, Godard’s end title was prophetic.

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Give me one last dance
We’ll slide down the surface of things

You’re the real thing
Yeah the real thing
You’re the real thing
Even better than the real thing

I figured out a long time ago, even before I began encountering grad-level feminist critiques, that our media’s stylized construction and portrayal of female beauty was problematic. It’s bad enough that unattractive people don’t appear in movies, on TV or in magazines unless the narrative expressly requires someone unattractive, and sometimes even that isn’t enough. I mean, the star of Ugly Betty isn’t really ugly.

But it goes beyond this. Full Story »

I used to work with a HAL 9000. Back when I was at US West in the late ’90s we had a voice system into which we would record the day’s company news so that employees without Internet access could dial in and keep up with the latest events. As with any such system there was a dial-in sequence, buttons that had to be pressed in a certain order, etc.

One day, as I was working through the first stage of the sequence, our phone system apparently achieved sentience. For reasons that I still can’t explain, a decade later, and that nobody at the time had any clue about, the machine sort of … intuited what I was about to do. It performed an action or two that, put simply, it could not do. Full Story »

I recently had the pleasure of seeing “No Country For Old Men,” the Oscar-winning adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s novel of a drug deal gone bad and how one man’s decision to take a case of stolen money leads to a meditation on fate, circumstance, and destiny. Of particular note was Javier Bardem’s portrayal of murderous hitman Anton Chigurh not only as the embodiment of pure evil, but as an avatar of capricious, merciless fate, striking down people left and right, with no regard for their circumstances. Full Story »

It’s fair to ask whether a college kid should have to wash dishes in the dining
hall to pay his tuition when his college has a billion dollars in the bank.

— Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, “the ranking Republican on the Senate committee that oversees tax policy, [who] has written to the nation’s 135 leading universities, asking them to explain what they do with their tax-free endowments“; according to The New York Times, “Last year a record 76 American colleges passed the $1 billion mark in total endowments”; March 18.

I liken N.C.L.B. to a mile race. Under N.C.L.B., students are tested rigorously every tenth of a mile. But nobody keeps track as to whether they cross the finish line.

— Bob Wise, a former West Virginia governor who is president of the Alliance for Excellent Education, a group that seeks to improve schools; according to The New York Times, “… many states use an inflated graduation rate for federal reporting requirements under the No Child Left Behind law and a different one at home. As a result, researchers say, federal figures obscure a dropout epidemic so severe that only about 70 percent of the one million American students who start ninth grade each year graduate four years later”; March 20.
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Once is a film that deserves more, so much more. A truly independent effort built around music and characters whose authenticity simply bursts off the screen and fills your heart, this movie was so real in its violation of all things Hollywood that it was almost hard to watch. I kept waiting for the goddamned formula to kick in, and it never did, and the absence of the fix made me jittery. Shame on me. Full Story »