In Independence Day (1996), the writer/director had aliens raze the world’s major cities. In The Day After Tomorrow (2004), he flooded then froze the northern hemisphere. (By those standards, Emmerich’s destruction of New York City in Godzilla (1998) seems like such small potatoes.)

In his latest big-screen apocalyptic spectacle, 2012, Emmerich breaks apart the earth’s crust, rending the very continents themselves. But while Emmerich offers plenty of eye candy, his movie lacks any real “wow” moments. The end of the world never looked so cartoonish.

But it’s a wicked cool cartoon, full of destruction on a massive, massive scale. As the continents die, billions of people die with them—and moviegoers will no doubt find it all so very awesome to behold even if it isn’t especially suspenseful or emotionally engaging.

In place of engagement, Emmerich relies on his usual emotional shortcuts: Good guys win or, if they lose, they do so with a moment of slap-dash poignancy: bad guys/cretins/jerks/annoying people get their just desserts in almost-clever ways. Those little old ladies who drive too slowly on the highway and refuse to get out of your way? Yeah, even people like them get the kibosh.

Emmerich builds his premise on the kind of inflated pseudoscience that froze the world in The Day After Tomorrow. In that movie, Emmerich took global warming theories and exaggerated and extrapolated them into doomsday. In 2012, neutrinos shot at earth by the largest solar flares ever trigger a physical reaction inside the earth that causes the crust to shift.

The earth’s breakup just happens to happen in the year 2012, the same year the ancient Mayan calendar ends. Some fans of the end-of-days have interpreted that to mean the Mayans pegged 12/21/2012 as Doomsday. (Believe it or not, the Mayan calendar ends because the Mayans actually just ran out of numbers.) Still, because the Mayan theory has caught on in popular culture, 2012 will no doubt have its gloomy believers the same way Y2K did.

Emmerich doesn’t seem to really care whether the predictions about the Mayan calendar are true or not. In fact, he hardly even mentions the Mayans. Emmerich just wants an excuse to blow things up, and the Mayans provided a convenient excuse. Otherwise, Emmerich couldn’t give a crap. He’s just interested in big, big, big—as in “California slides into the ocean” kind of big. Who cares about Mayans when you have tidal waves taller than the Himalayas?

Emmerich doesn’t sweat the small stuff, like when the lead character, played by John Cusack, grudgingly brings his kids home days early from a camping trip at his ex-wife’s request yet still has to rush off because he’s late for work. Audiences aren’t supposed to wonder, either, how Cusack can drive a rickety old RV faster than a supersonic ash cloud blasted from the world’s largest supervolcano.

In fact, the real point of the movie might not be that the world is ending but rather than John Cusack can apparently out-drive anything, including ash clouds, earthquakes, and collapsing buildings. Cusack’s frantic driving gets to be ridiculously over-the-top, but it’s also meant to be crazy fun, too.

After a while, though, it all just gets to be a bit much. In the end, there’s no reason to care about the end. There’s no emotional heft, no existential weight, no substance to the spectacle. There’s plenty of bang, yet it elicits hardly a whimper. The end of the world is just old hat, and even Emmerich seems a little bored.

Special effects in movies, when well done, are fun.  They help us escape from our lives to enjoy tales of superheroes, mutants or alternate realities.  We travel to faraway or mythical lands and see dragons, dwarfs and trolls, tree-creatures battling orcs, wizards and sorcerers battling.  Oh yeah, and stuff blowing up.  (Thank you Michael Bay)  None of this really exists, of course, but that’s part of what makes it a good escape for the viewer.

It’s kind of hard to imagine a major blockbuster that doesn’t involve some form of death, shock, torture, shooting or explosion.  War movies can bring perhaps the most accuracy to this genre and this is especially true of those that don’t sugar coat it.  Saving Private Ryan was very graphic but not in an over-the-top, gratuitous way.  It brought home the realities of war.  Most action movies, however, take violence to a completely unrealistic level.

Yes, there are gangs in real life, and there is some level of underworld in our major cities. But our movies would lead you to the conclusion that every street corner is a drug marketplace, every precinct is infested by corrupt cops, in every alley lurks an assassin, every bar is a spontaneous kung fu fight waiting to happen and every nightclub is a potential gang warfare site.  Around every corner a secret agent lays in wait for another secret agent. Domestic abuse is rampant and a serial killer lurks in your closet waiting to decapitate you.  Some zombie wants to eat your brains.

The real world does offer some of these adventures (the supernatural notwithstanding) but, again, the point of the story is to provide an escape for the viewer.  One thing to remember, though: violence always has a victim. Very few chainsaw murders are consensual.

Sex in the movies is also plentiful. It’s in our ads and our magazines, it’s on TV, it’s everywhere.  But there are rules. Flash a single breast or hint at a risque sex scene and your movie gets an R rating.  Show anything more and you’re stuck with an X rating – if you get a rating at all.  Movies with gratuitous nudity get R ratings, while others flirt with “the line” and get away with a PG13. In general, the idea is to offer various levels of nudity and sexuality for the sake of appealing to various levels of horny viewers (mostly men) and to make a buck in the process. It’s easy to view this brand of escapism as more positive than violence, mayhem and death.

Then there are more artistically inclined movies, usually independent, that ask us to think about real life.  In these stories, people who don’t have Hollywood-perfect bodies might get together and do the things that normal people do.  Some breastfeed in public.  Some have non-erotic showers.  Some change clothes.  Some kiss.  Some have sex.  They might show some skin but almost every human is nude at least once a day, right? Skin happens.

If these stories are told effectively we will relate to the characters as they tap into experiences that we all share.  They show reality, or some plausible fictionalized version of it.  Sometimes there are heated arguments and even violence, but they spare us the fx. No blood spatter analysis, nobody shot at point blank range, no body parts flying at us in 3D.

With this in mind, let’s think about the Moral Majority and its neo-puritan descendants.  Which movies seem to catch their attention?  What is it that gets under their skin and ruffles their feathers?

Yes, this is a rhetorical question.

While I respect the rights of people to choose what they see, let’s consider some numbers. Last year, depending on your source, between 15k and 20k Americans were murdered.  This adds up to about six people in 100,000.  Each of these murders, by definition, put an unnatural end to someone’s life.  Friends and family mourned, and in many cases incurred physical and emotional burdens that they will never shed.  The suck factor for homicide is 100%.

Last year approximately a quarter billion Americans had consensual sex.  (Okay, I’m making this statistic up but it can’t be far off.)  If the number is close, this comes to about 70,000 people in 100,000.  Each of these instances (by definition) involved two (or more) people coming together and enjoying the company of another for a time.  Whereas being a murder victim is a once-in-a-lifetime experience, many of these people will choose to have repeat episodes with the same person.  In general, then, it’s safe to assert that most of these victims of consensual sex leave better than they arrived.  The suck factor for sex is not zero but it’s a lot closer to zero than it is to 100%. (Obviously I emphasize “consensual” for a reason – non-consensual sex, sex with a victim, is not sex – it’s violence.)

Isn’t this odd?  Movies portray violence on an exaggerated, unrealistic scale. Violence has a very high suck factor. And nobody bats an eye.  Other movies depict natural sexuality (or maybe unrealistic, but harmless sexuality). And sex is an act that almost every adult in the country takes part in on a semi-regular basis (or they’d like to). The suck factor is very small. And this is what gets conservative panties in a bunch.

So to sum up: in art it’s fine to kill, maim and destroy but it’s not okay to portray a satisfying natural encounter or to take a picture of said encounter.

When you think about it, this bizarre dynamic extends well beyond the arts.  The Right has no problem advocating and rushing into real wars, wars that leave a lot of innocents dead along with the baddies we’re supposedly liberating them from. But sensuality, in all cases outside of married Christian sex, is considered bad (and even that isn’t to be depicted or talked about).  A major irony here is that when we consider all of the political sex scandals from the past few years Republicans seem to comprise a large majority of the perpetrators.  They profess to frown upon nudity, upon cleavage, upon homosexuality, upon sensuality of any type.  But behind closed doors this is exactly what everyone seems to seek.  Even some of the loudest proponents of the Defense of Marriage Act have been caught in hypocritical, compromising sexual situations.  Amusing, or perhaps tragic, is the fact that morality police like David Vitter and Larry Craig snuck behind the backs of their spouses for sexual fulfillment, betraying personal as well as public trusts.  Couples who simply acknowledge the realities if normal human sexuality, on the other hand, can explore their curiosities and desires with the full support, blessing and (optional) involvement of their life partners.

Damn, America has it backwards.

Europeans are a lot more comfortable with their bodies than Americans.  Their magazines feature topless women and there are far more topless beaches.  They have movies with unabashed sexuality (you even find live sex acts in respectable theatre presentations).  We always seem to portray Brits as stuffy but in this respect it is us that are the stuffy ones.

I imagine that with most S&R readers I’m preaching to the choir, but I’ll say it anyway.  Sex is natural and it’s healthy to explore. It should be celebrated instead of demonized.

Disclosure: I take artistic pictures of people in edgy sensual circumstances and participate in activities that those offended by this article would certainly frown upon.  I am tired of having the reactionary moral positions of others thrust upon my art, my life and my friends when all of those participating are benefiting from their involvement.  I really don’t mean to sound like a hippie when I say this but…. Make love, not war!

Horror of the “gothic” variety that occupied so much of the conversation between Byron and the Shelleys (these would be the conversations that ultimately gave rise to Frankenstein) has traditionally traded in some easily recognizable tropes. Among the most common are your haunted places. Swamps and moors are always a little scary. Graveyards and crypts, of course. Transylvania.

And then there’s haunted houses. Dark mansions, castles on top of hills. Abandoned homes where terrible things once happened. Subdivisions built on top of Indian burial grounds. And so on. All these are other places – places off the beaten path, away from the streetlights, places removed from the guaranteed security of the normal. The message is clear, whether spoken or not: stick to convention – in place, in dress, in action and deed – and all will be well. Stray from the well-lit path and bad things can happen.

Not all artists bent on scaring the shizizzle out of us see the world in quite those terms, though. In particular, Tim Burton seems to see the conventional as a threat to bore us to death, and he finds redemption and a powerful beauty in the darkness. David Lynch is equally suspicious of normalcy, only whereas Burton finds it mainly soulless and empty Lynch sees it as sinister, a locus of profound menace.

(Note: As I’m neither a film studies scholar nor a real expert on either auteur, feel free to jump in with insights, arguments or elaborations of your own.)

Burton’s most memorable assault on convention came early in his career with the woefully underappreciated (at the time) Edward Scissorhands. All the houses are the same in ways that the neighborhood’s vibrant pastel palette from Hell can’t quite disguise, and the action illustrates the mind-numbing homogeneity of life in the ‘burbs. This is Burton’s vision of normalcy, and while it’s shiny and orderly and clean and even pretty in its own way, it’s a life without depth or texture. The visual field, like the emotional and spiritual landscape, is perfectly flat and two-dimensional.

Emotional, social and moral meaning enter this world only when the Frankenstein’s monster of the story – Edward, the freak from the haunted mansion on the hill, appropriately enough – finds his way to town. As it turns out, the construct/”monster” is creativity embodied, and for a time he brings the community novelty and joy. Then convention turns its ugly gaze on him, and the horror story begins a the thuggery of normalcy insists on driving out that which it does not recognize.

The world of darkness and death is a lot more interesting in films like The Corpse Bride. And who better to direct Batman Returns, a film where workaday Gotham is largely oblivious to the fact that its own dark spawn are waging a battle both for the soul of the city and for their own souls, which have been twisted by the city.

There is salvation in the oeuvre of Tim Burton. There is redemption. There is joy and happiness and beauty. But they’re not to be found in the places that most people look for them.

David Lynch’s cosmography is a little less hopeful. Whether examining a small town or a booming metropolis, he can’t help noticing that there’s always a seamy underbelly. Twin Peaks is an idyllic little town where you can always find friendly folks and a good cup of coffee (and hot). Fayetteville, NC (where Blue Velvet was set) may not be anybody’s idea of idyllic or beautiful, but it’s pretty “normal,” as America goes. And Big Tuna, Texas is apparently so pathetically dull that, in the estimation of one Wild at Heart character, the repulsive Bobby Peru is just about the most exciting thing to ever happen there.

But Twin Peaks has an evil spirit problem. The depiction of the debauchery loose after dark in Fayetteville was such that Lynch was allegedly encouraged never to come back. Willem Dafoe’s Bobby Peru is about as appalling a human being as you’re likely to see in a theater near you. And Lynch’s big cities are just about as uplifting as his small towns. The more normal and unassuming a place, the more likely it is to be haunted – either by the darkly supernatural (a frequent an element in these narratives) or by real people who are even worse.

To summarize, Lynch has a butt-ugly view of big towns, small towns, and one would presume everything in between. Hopeful types unwitting enough to wander into one of his films are rarely given anything to feel optimistic about (although I suppose you could argue that the vision at the end of Wild at Heart affords a bit of really confusing closure for Twin Peaks fans). At times it seems like he actually hates the people watching his work (that’s certainly the case in the scene that closes the final episode of the Twin Peaks television show), and at a minimum he has no qualms whatsoever about betraying the implicit trust between storyteller and audience that most American moviegoers take for granted.

In other words, normal Americans live in a horrorscape, and the best they can probably hope for is to live out their lives blissfully unaware of it, because ignorance is as close to happiness as they’re likely to get.

So, Happy Halloween to all of our normal, regular, happy American readers. As night falls on Samhain and the veil between our world and the world of the dead grows thin, perhaps you can take some secret pleasure in the idea that, in the estimation of two of our greatest filmmakers, your lives are as haunted as those who live in any village in any dark corner of Transylvania…

Zombie: Don’t worry. Only people with brains
get eaten. You’re safe.

They aren’t sexy. They aren’t romantic. They aren’t tragically doomed.

In fact, they’re ravenous, violent, and virtually unstoppable. They ooze all sorts of bodily fluids. And they want to eat your brains.

So how come zombies are getting such mainstream media treatment?

As a culture, we love and loath things that go bump in the night. We have to have boogeymen, for all sorts of reasons. Because they touch deep psychological fears in profound ways, our boogeymen serve as a kind of moral check on behavior that laws and rules just sometimes can’t. At the other end of the spectrum, we seem to have a lot of fun being scared. Boogeymen do that for us, too.

For centuries, vampires used to serve that function. Bram Stoker’s Dracula serves as the very best example, but vampires existed in folklore long before Stoker immortalized the legends on paper. Fewer things unnerve the living than the dead, which is also why fewer things have been more taboo.

Since Stoker’s 1888 novel, vampires have enjoyed a rich literary tradition (and the web is full of armchair essayists trying to sound erudite by expounding on that long literary tradition). But then along came Anne Rice’s vampire Lestat, a tragic, sultry, sexy fellow who broke nearly every vampire stereotype. Lestat made vampires sympathetic—which was a huge game-changer for the genre. As a result of that impact, Entertainment Weekly recently named Lestat as the greatest vampire ever. (The Bela Lagosi fan in me nearly choked since all vampires have ever been measured against the stereotype Lagosi established.)

Since Lestat, vampires have made a smooth transformation from being terrifying to being sexy. The fact that every teenage girl in America now wants to be Edward Cullen’s undead bride serves as perfect proof. (Guys aren’t immune, either. Check out Kate Beckinsale in the Underworld movies if you think female vampires aren’t hot.) I applaud Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan for trying to reverse that trend in their new novel, The Strain, which tries to make vampires creepy again—but I fear they’re fighting a losing battle.

And so, zombies have shambled in to take the place vampires once occupied in those dark, irrational corners of our psyches. Zombies now serve as that psychological boogeyman that vampires, through their own sheer attractiveness, can no longer serve as.

There’s one key distinction, though. Vampires represented a certain kind of calculating evil. They made conscious choices about who they preyed on and why, which seemed unnerving and sadistic. It’s evil of the nastiest kind.

Traditionally, we think of zombies as evil, too (Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead is a perfect example)—but in fact, zombies are mindless engines of hunger-driven carnage. Sure, they’re bloody, gory, disfigured, disheveled messes, and they act with single-mindless purpose to wipe out people. But they do it because that’s what zombies are wired do, not because they make intentional choices about it. There’s no willful violation of moral codes because zombies have no will. They are essentially forces of nature. A zombie basically represents Jack London’s impassive hand of Nature writ large and ugly.

In that sense, then, is the zombie any different than the financial collapse or the random act of violence or climate change? You can’t reason with those things any more than you can reason with a zombie. And when people feel as though they have no control over a situation, it shakes them in ways few things can. A zombie represents that same feeling, amplified to the Nth degree.

That’s a feeling most people can relate to these days. Zombies are tapping into the cultural zeitgeist.

Pop culture has latched onto that the way a zombie latches onto flesh—and fans have been feasting on it, too. It takes something terrifying and makes it fun (even being scared at the movies, even being creeped out by a book, are still basically forms of fun). As the trend continues, zombies actually become “safer” because people become desensitized. Believe it or not, that’s another reason why pop culture latches onto something like zombies: The process serves as a sociological “coping method.”

Eventually, Zombies will lose the primal power they’ve had (the same way vampires have). Their popularity will diminish, too, although it’ll never go away.

Who knows what’s lurking under the bed to eventually take their place.

When most of us think of Halloween movies, we tend to think of horror flicks, psychological thrillers, or bizarre mind-benders. The Nightmare on Elm Street, for example, or What Lies Beneath, or 12 Monkeys. But since 1993, a stop-motion animation musical has become as much a part of American Halloween culture as any horror franchise.

Boys and girls of every age
wouldn’t you like to see something strange
Come with us and you will see,
this our town of Halloween

So begins the opening song of what is perhaps the most misunderstood Christmas movie of all time, Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas.

Yes, I’m serious. For all the references to pumpkins, death, trick-or-treating, and the Boogie Man, The Nightmare Before Christmas is actually a Christmas movie. For those of you who have been living under a rock for the last 16 years and are unfamiliar with the plot, here’s the basics (spoiler warning).

• Jack Skellington, the Pumpkin King and unofficial leader of Halloweentown, finds his annual Halloween hijinks unfulfulling.
• Jack discovers “Christmastown” and decides to claim Christmas as his holiday instead of/in addition to Halloween.
• Jack convinces the residents of Halloweentown to help him, but Sally thinks that something is horribly wrong.
• Sally tries to convince Jack to abandon his plans for Christmas, but after he doesn’t, she has a premonition of just how bad it’s going to go.
• Jack has Santa Claws Claus kidnapped, and he starts delivering the presents that Halloweentown made for Christmas around the world.
• Jack has an attack of conscience, rescues Santa, and restores Christmas to its rightful place.

This isn’t a plot of a horror flick, or a thriller, or even a brain-bender. It’s a plot of redemption, of discovery, of caring. The two main characters each have a conscience, even if one of them doesn’t recognize it until it’s almost too late. Halloween movies view conscience and caring as a weakness that get you killed, imprisoned, or driven insane. It’s Christmas movies that illustrate the power of caring for your fellow people (although perhaps “people” shouldn’t apply to the various residents of Halloweentown).

And there’s no such thing as redemption in a Halloween movie – you survive and drive off/kill the monster, or you die a gruesome death. Redemption and it’s related theme of renewal are cultural themes of Christmas. Christians say that Christ was born to save us, and he saved us through his sacrifice and resurrection, not with a chainsaw or by traveling through time to harvest virus samples. And the Winter Solstice, the darkest night of the year in the Northern Hemisphere, presages the return of the sun and the renewal of the earth and life itself.

That’s not to say that Nightmare doesn’t have Halloween elements, of course. It does, after all, take place in Halloweentown and is largely populated with a cast of Halloween miscreants (vampires, witches, a mad scientist, scarecrows, monsters, and the aforementioned Oogie Boogie Man). And while Jack rescues Santa from Oogie’s chamber of Halloween horror, he does so by killing Oogie. And this is after Jack sings:

And for the first time since I don’t remember when
I felt just like my old bony self again.
And I, Jack, the Pumpkin King.
That’s right, I am the pumpkin King! Hah! Hah! Hah!
And I just can’t wait until next Halloween
’cause I’ve got some new ideas that will really make them scream
and, by God, I’m really gonna give it all my might!
Uh-oh, I hope there’s still time to set things right….

So Nightmare isn’t your standard Christmas movie. It’s not A Christmas Story, Miracle on 34th Street, or even The Polar Express. It’s not sickly sweet and heavy on the moralism like It’s a Wonderful Life, or brain candy like White Christmas. It’s more along the lines of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol and the related Scrooged, or the 1964 version of Rudolph, the Red Nosed Reindeer – scary and disturbing on several different levels, but with a good message.

So by all means, enjoy your Nightmare at Halloween, but perhaps you should watch it yet again during the Christmas season, as it is truly intended.

And finally, everything worked out just fine.
Christmas was saved, though there wasn’t much time.
But after that night, things were never the same—
Each holiday now knew the other ones’ name.
And though that one Christmas things got out of hand,
I’m still rather fond of that skeleton man.
So many years later I thought I’d drop in,
and there was old Jack still looking quite thin,
with four or five skeleton children at hand
playing strange little tunes in their xylophone band.
And I asked old Jack, “Do you remember the night
when the sky was so dark and the moon shone so bright?
When a million small children pretending to sleep
nearly didn’t have Christmas at all, so to speak?”
And would you, if you could, turn that mighty clock back
to that long, fateful night, now think carefully, Jack.
Would you do the whole thing all over again,
knowing what you know now, knowing what you knew then?”
And he smiled, like the old Pumpkin King that I knew,
then turned and asked softly of me, “Wouldn’t you?” (closing narration from the soundtrack)

Lyrics from The Tim Burton Collective

Image Credits:
Touchstone Pictures

October 30 is Frankenstein Friday.

Like a lot of kids, I could not get enough of monster movies. On Saturday afternoons, I would hunker down on my living room couch to watch Creature Double-Feature on our small black-and-white TV.

I loved Godzilla, Gorgo, the giant ants of Them!, War of the Worlds, and those delightful shock-fests from England’s Hammer Studios with Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee.

But none were better than Universal’s classics: The Creature from the Black Lagoon; Bela Lugosi as Dracula; Lon Chaney Jr. as the Wolf Man; and of course, Boris Karloff as Frankenstein. Watching Colin Clive scream, “It’s alive! It’s alive!” remains one of the most thrilling moments of movie magic ever filmed.

Those movies were so creepy because, unlike today’s horror films, they left almost everything to my imagination—and my imagination can be a whole lot scarier than anything Hollywood can dish out. It’s no wonder audiences back then found those classic monster movies shocking and truly scary.

But the beauty of a story like Frankenstein is that it succeeds on so many levels. The movie captured my imagination as a kid, but as I grew older, I began to appreciate the subtleties of Mary Shelley’s novel.

For one thing, her creature is an eloquent, thoughtful being who’s ugly but graceful. That’s a stark contrast to the lumbering Karloff, who had steel bars sewn into his costume to make him move so stiffly. Karloff’s monster barely uttered anything beyond growls and snarls, and when he does learn to speak in Bride of Frankenstein, it’s in short, choppy sentences.

More importantly, the book asks big-picture questions that are still highly relevant: Just because we have the technology to do something, should we do it? What role do ethics play in science? What is the cost of failure—and the price of success? What makes a human human?

Frankenstein raises questions about parent/child relationships, class struggle, commitment and responsibility. The text is rich with themes worthy of exploration and reflection.

We sympathize with the creature when the villagers chase it through the forest with torches and pitchforks for no reason other than they’re scared of it. After all, the creature is different. It’s not inherently evil, even though the villagers insist on casting it that way. As viewers or as readers, we feel uncomfortable at the injustice of it. The poor creature—if only they would just leave it alone!

But what’s really sad—or perhaps really horrible—is that Frankenstein happens around us every day. Angry villagers drive someone out of town just for being different: for being black or Hispanic or homosexual or foreign or poor. And when that happens, we have a tougher time seeing it for what it is and a tougher time feeling sympathy for “the creature”—especially if we’re the villagers.

* * * * *

But if it sounds like too much work to engage Frankenstein on those levels, there’s nothing wrong with sitting back and letting the story capture your imagination the way it’s been capturing imaginations for nearly 200 years.

The book has never been out of print. It’s one of the most adapted pieces of literature ever written.

Movie versions include seven Universal films, including the first three with Boris Karloff; an equally long-running series from Hammer Studios, starting with Curse of Frankenstein, featuring Cushing and Lee; a version directed by and starring Kenneth Branaugh, with Robert DeNiro as the Creature; and most recently a version from Hallmark Entertainment.

There’s Mel Brooks’s Young Frankenstein. There’s Jesse James Meets Frankenstein’s Daughter, Frankenstein and the Creature from Outer Space, and even Frankenhooker.

The first film version, though, came from the man who invented motion pictures, Thomas Edison. One of his first movies was a ten-minute production of Frankenstein.

There are songs written about and inspired by Frankenstein. Edgar Winter’s “Frankenstein” has almost-instant guitar-grinding, wawa-peddling recognizability, and Aimee Mann’s “Frankenstein” reminds listeners that “It’s rare that you ever know what to expect/from a guy made of corpses with bolts in his neck.”

And let’s not forget Herman Munster on TV, a role that made Fred Gwynn famous.

The first stage version appeared in 1823, just seven years after Mary Shelley published her book. She was excited at the chance to see her story staged. The play was such a success that it was revived in 1826, the same year the first foreign-language version of the play appeared. Today, no less than a dozen stage versions exist.

If anything can be said of Mary Shelley’s story, it’s that after nearly 200 years, it has a life of its own. “It’s alive! It’s alive!” indeed.

* * * * *

Several years ago, a community theater I worked with decided to include Frankenstein as the kickoff to its tenth-anniversary season. I was immediately drawn to direct the project because of my lifelong love of the story. Of the many scripts available, we settled on one by Victor Gialanella because it sticks closely to Mary Shelley’s themes.

Other scripts tend to stray too far from Shelley’s story. One reason is that Boris Karloff’s shadow is verrry long. Almost everyone who hears the word “Frankenstein” thinks of Karloff’s flat-topped creature with bolts in its neck. As a result, most versions try too hard to go out of their way to not be like Karloff.

Shelley’s story sometimes gets sacrificed as a result. The emphasis gets shifted to the spectacle and the horror—after all, those kinds of elements make for good movies and plays because they’re exciting to see.

But the meat of Shelley’s story is in all those big-picture questions. After all, what makes each of us “us” is different. It only stands to reason that we’ll each have our own answer to the questions “Who am I? What makes me me? Where do I come from?”

Frankenstein’s creation asks this of his maker. Mary Shelley’s novel asks this of its readers.

It’s the most important question any of us can ask.

I know where at least part of me comes from, and these days, I can sometimes still be found there. Only nowadays, I am curled up on my living room couch watching old monster movies with my 9-year-old son. It’s like taking a trip down memory lane while simultaneously opening the doors of imagination.

My son got a little scared by Karloff the first time he saw Frankenstein. He and hid under a blanket, trying to decide whether it was safe to steal a peek. I chuckled.

He was just one more victim of Frankenstein’s 200-year-old legacy—just like me. Just like a lot of us.

Steve Alten is waiting for some big news. In Alten’s case, “big” involves a seventy-six-foot-long man-eater that lives in the world’s deepest oceans and has been trying, for twelve years, to rise out of the depths and into cineplexes.

Alten is the author of Meg: A Novel of Deep Terror, arguably one of the best summer potboilers in the last decade and a half. In the book, a team of deep-sea explorers accidentally bring to the surface a Carcharodon megalodon—a species of giant prehistoric shark thought to have died out about 50,000 years ago.

“I have been enthralled with this entire species,” Alten said in a phone interview from his South Florida home.

In Alten’s world, as the prehistoric seas cooled, the giant sharks gradually retreated to the deepest parts of the ocean, where geothermal vents kept the water much warmer than the water at the surface. A layer of near-freezing deep-sea water just above the geothermal zone kept the sharks from surfacing.

When in came out in 1997, Meg rocketed onto the New York Times bestseller list. The Los Angles Times called it “Jurassic Shark!” A Time magazine cover story touted it as a “cool summer read.” Disney’s Hollywood Pictures optioned the movie rights. Three sequels hit bookshelves in the twelve years since, including the most recent, Meg: Hell’s Aquarium, this past summer.

But moviegoers are still waiting for their first Meg sighting.

“It’s been a little bit of a roller coaster ride,” Alten admitted. “There have been strange extenuating circumstances.”

Disney’s option expired when the head of the studio was fired. New Line optioned Meg in 2005, with director Jan Le Bont (Speed) attached to the project.  “Every department at New Line was excited about the project,” says Alten. “Unfortunately, the new script went off course from the novel, and the two CEOs never were committed to making a giant shark movie.”

As soon as the rights reverted back to Alten, he wrote his own script with producer Belle Avery. “It rocks,” Alten says. “I can’t wait to see this hit the big screen.”

Alten and his many Meg fans may get their wish. Private funding may soon be in place as part of a $150 million budget, with producers deciding on which A-list director will helm the first in what Alten describes as “a potential blockbuster series.”

While Alten waits for news, his fans still have Hell’s Aquarium to sink their teeth into. “I wasn’t sure I was going to write a fourth Meg book,” Alten said. “I realized there was more going on, more story to tell. I think it turned out to be the best of the series.” A fifth book in the series, Meg: Night Stalkers, is already in the works, although Alten said it will probably be the last.

“I have a lot of other stories I want to write,” Alten said.

Aside from the release of Hell’s Aquarium, the paperback edition of his thriller The Shell Game was just released on September 8. Originally published in early 2008, the book suggests a neoconservative plot to detonate a nuclear bomb in an American city and blame the disaster on Iran. For the paperback release, Alten made significant revisions. “I changed it to reflect an Obama administration in power when the next ‘false flag’ event is unleashed and blamed on the so-called war on terror,” Alten said “It’s actually a scarier book.”

Alten enjoys the challenge of blending fact and fiction in his work as a way to make the books as thought-provoking as possible. “I research as much as I can. I pull together pages and pages of text, which I have to understand myself—I have to teach myself,” Alten said. In particular, he pours through newspapers and internet sites, always looking for the latest science news.

“The internet is the most important tool for me,” he explained. “When I find something, I can redirect the story toward that new information so that it becomes an important plot point. It becomes integral to the story and changes the dynamics of the story.”

His challenge, he said, is to make the factual material as “palatable” as possible. “I have to make it part of the story, not something that interferes with the story,” he said. “My hope is that the reader comes away more educated.”

He also wants them to be entertained. “We all go through stress. We’re all worried about the economy, about insurance, about whatever,” he said. “When they pick up one of my books, I want them to have fun. It’s pure escapism, pure entertainment.”

Alten prides himself on his close relationship with his fans, many of whom appear as characters in his books. “I can’t think up small bios for a hundred people,” he explained. “So, I use real people.”

Alten responds to e-mails from fans by offering encouragement and advice or sometimes just a thank you. “If someone has invested their time and money into one of my books, they deserve that,” Alten said. “It’s one of the most important things to me.”

His fans, in fact, encouraged him to write his 2005 hit The Loch. Originally, the thought of writing about the Loch Ness monster had little appeal to Alten. “That’s hokey,” he said. “I don’t believe it. It’s a tourist trap. It’s impossible for a population of air-breathing reptiles to reproduce there for sixty-five million years.”

But a readers poll convinced him to reexamine the idea: overwhelming response from his fans showed they wanted a Loch Ness Monster book. “I approached it as a skeptic in the story,” Alten said, “because readers will approach it as skeptics.”

So, he dove into the research and found some contemporary theories that suggested something beyond a stereotypical Nessie. “I attacked the mythology—attacked it with science,” Alten said. “This was not Disney; this was something nastier. I like ‘nastier.’”

But the nasty giant sharks of Meg will always hold a special place in his heart.

“As a teenager, I was fascinated by stories about shark attacks,” Alten said. He also credits as inspiration an old photo “of six nerdy scientists” posing inside the jaws of a megalodon.

Megs grew in excess of fifty feet long, and they weighed upwards of 100,00 pounds, making them the largest carnivorous fish to ever swim the oceans. Their jaws hyper-extended open some ten feet—providing plenty of room for nerdy scientists—and were filled with rows and rows of serrated teeth, each about seven inches long.

“I wondered why nothing commercial had ever been written about [megalodons],” Alten said.

The public definitely had a taste for them, as evidenced by the success of Alten’s first book. “Meg got me out of my little apartment and into a house,” Alten said.

He sounds a cautious note, though, because his career has seen so many ups and downs. He and his family had to sell their home years ago when the Disney deal went sour. He’s had to switch publishers several times when his first publisher, Doubleday, dropped his second book deal when the house was being taken over by Bertlesman; his second publisher, Kensington, only wanted more shark stories. In 2007, he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, a situation he blames on the stress associated with writing The Shell Game.

But good news came recently, too. The rights to his Mayan Doomsday series, Domain, were optioned by movie star Manolo Cordova and 11 11 films. Domain, translated in Spanish as El Testamento Maya, was a runaway best seller in Spain and Mexico.

“I’ve learned never to get too high or too low,” Alten said. “There are variables I can control and more I can’t. Parkinsons was a bad break, but many other people have situations strike that are far worse. I try to keep things in the right perspective. As for the movie deals, I can’t control those things. My job is to write the best books and scripts I can, and God will take care of the rest.”

And so Alten continues to write and wait, hopeful that the “big news” will come soon—and that his giant shark will be unleashed on moviegoers at last.

Premium cable shows like The Sopranos and The Wire have won critical acclaim and millions of dedicated fans. Basic-cable series seldom, if ever, inspire that kind of reaction and, judging by production quality alone, perhaps they don’t deserve it. But, in recent years, basic-cable series have hired actors just as good as premium cable, not to mention network TV, which may have written them off as too old.

Two fine actors who were “relegated” to basic cable after their network, NBC, exiled their show, Law & Order: Criminal Intent, to basic cable are Vincent D’Onofrio (okay, he mails it in at this point) and that font of gravitas and seasoned cynicism Eric Bogosian.

Since switching to USA, though, the show has added veteran actor Jeff Goldblum. His renowned “quirkiness” once seemed designed to attract attention, but now that he’s nearing 60 it’s become endearing. In fact, you could make a case for him as the most compulsively watchable actor on all of television.

Another distinguished actor, Timothy Hutton, heads the cast of the basic-cable show to which I admit to watching in real time — Leverage. The series, which premiered in December 2008, is just completing its second cycle of episodes. With its criminals enlisted by law enforcement and high-tech assignments, it’s a combination of Ocean’s 11 and Mission Impossible. It’s even more reminiscent of The Equalizer, an eighties series starring British actor Edward Woodward as a former secret agent who offered his services free to average citizens as a troubleshooter or protector.

Transitioning to actresses, Beth Riesgraf plays an unusual and original character simply called Parker in Leverage who seems to be afflicted with Aspergers’ syndrome. But she’s only about 30 and we’re addressing more mature actresses — specifically, she who reduces me to a quivering mass of humanity: Gina Bellman as the grifter Sophie Devereaux in Leverage.

While you may not know her name, you might find her face familiar, as I did when I began watching Leverage. I finally placed Ms. Bellman — a stunning woman has a way of accelerating memory recall in the aging mind. She was a member of the cast of the British TV series Coupling, which, in 2002, two years into its four-year run, also began airing on PBS in the United States. The comedy was kind of a British version of Friends, but risqué to the point of licentious.

The character Ms. Bellman played, as ditzy as she was aggressive toward men, may have distorted her appearance, which I found unremarkable. Nor could she help but be overshadowed by Sara Alexander, perhaps the most luscious (if I may use that term without being accused of sexism) English actress since the young Polly Walker.

In any event, at 43 Ms. Bellman is vastly more charming and attractive than when younger. At first you think she’s quintessentially English because her lips and mouth come to a point as if perfectly formed to enunciate an English accent. But then you notice she’s what used to be called swarthy. Turns out that not only isn’t she English — she’s from New Zealand — but she’s of Jewish heritage.

It doesn’t even faze me when Ms. Bellman turns her head quickly and you get a glimpse of her snake neck. Nor does the thought that her thighs might be riddled with cellulite. Also, she just became pregnant with her first child and, as of a mid-August episode, she not only began showing, but her face was filling out — tiny blips on the radar of her attractiveness.

“Isn’t he a married man?” you might be wondering of the author. In fact, my wife turned me on to Leverage. Of course, she wasn’t aware that Ms. Bellman and I had a history. Besides, she has a crush on Ciarán Hinds, the great Irish actor. Lame excuses, I know. Such is the power of Ms. Bellman.

Basic cable boasts other actresses in her age group of comparable talent: Jada Pinkett Smith (can you say “luminous”?) who plays an improbably meddlesome head nurse in HawthoRNe, and, though I’ve never seen their shows, Kyra Sedgwick and Holly Hunter.

Neither is there any shortage (or should I say less of one) of strong roles for mainstream movie actresses 40 or older: Cate Blanchett (40), Laura Linney (44), Tilda Swinton (49), Emma Thompson (49), Frances McDormand (52), Meryl Streep 60, Diane Keaton, 63, Helen Mirren 64, Julie Christie, 68, and Judi Dench (74).

We seem to have finally to have entered an era where aging actresses’ ability to retain their looks, whether through surgery or healthy lifestyle, is matched by an entertainment industry which has finally admitted that its audience is graying.

Unfortunately, some movies get it so bad that you just can’t take them seriously. The husband of a friend of mine noticed a serious oversight during the freeway scene in Matrix: Reloaded that destroyed his suspension of disbelief: at least one of the computer generated cars was missing the drivetrain entirely. I didn’t notice, so I found the movie fine. He did notice, and from that point on wasn’t able to take Reloaded seriously.

I just finished a movie that I couldn’t take seriously, even as mindless entertainment, because the director got the science so wrong it was laughable. I just watched The Day After Tomorrow, directed by Roland Emmerich.

Let’s pretend for a moment that it’s possible for a super storm like that described in the storm to form. And let’s pretend that the storm could somehow suck air down from the upper atmosphere. And let’s pretend that a “critical salinity threshold” could shut down the North Atlantic Current. And let’s pretend that the shutdown would happen over the course of days. And let’s pretend that the Gulf Stream up along the coast of Africa…. Ok, let’s not, because that last point came within the first 15 minutes of a 124 minute-long movie.

Seriously, if you’ve seen the movie, go to the part where Dennis Quaid’s paleoclimatologist character is giving a talk in New Delhi. Watch the screens behind him that are supposedly showing the thermohaline circulation (see image at right). Not only does the circulation on the screen behind Quaid not have anywhere near the number of branches the real thermohaline circulation, but what should be the Gulf Stream is going up along the western coast of Africa, not along the eastern coast of North America.

After that, everything else became just more and more absurd. The “storm surge” that hit New York? Visually impressive, but it was essentially a tsunami. And it just sort of flowed around the Statue of Liberty, instead of knocking it over. And it flowed between the buildings in New York instead of blasting at least the first few blocks of buildings apart like matchsticks.

That cargo ship that conveniently navigated itself up tight city boulevards and grounded out right next to the library? Deus ex Machina to the max. And last I checked, there’s not a climate model out there that can give you good results within 48 hours – most take months of dedicated time on the most powerful computers yet devised.

And that’s without the cancerous child melodrama, the divorced parents melodrama, the “best friend falls through the ice” melodrama, the President apologizes to the world melodrama, and so on. And the last line of the movie (”Wow – have you ever seen the air so clear?”) nearly made me want to vomit.

About the only thing I really thought was totally and completely accurate about the movie was how stupid politicians are (the movie’s Vice President is a blatent Cheney dig, and it came out in 2004).

I tend to enjoy end-of-the-world fiction and have ever since reading “Lucifer’s Hammer” by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle in junior high. I’ve enjoyed Emmerich’s work in the past as well, and from the previews for 2012, it’s going to be another good “kill off the human race” flic. But I recommend that Emmerich stay away from science-based work in the future. Special effects and bad melodrama can’t save a move that is both fundamentally and deeply wrong.

NOTE: I’m sure that, given the movie came out in 2004, much of what I said above has been said before, repeatedly, and probably better too. But I had to say something.

Image Credits
AFP: Antara News Agency

Thanks for the memories…

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.

Bouchard smartly cleared his film with Tolkien’s estate before releasing it. “We got in touch with Tolkien Enterprises and reached an understanding with them that as long as we are completely non-profit then we’re okay. We have to be careful not to disrespect their ownership of the intellectual property,” he told the BBC. And there are undoubtedly a plethora of fans happy he did.

The Hunt for Gollum has been a huge success, amassing over 600,000 views on Daily Motion since it was released on May 3rd, and garnering mainstream press attention from the BBC, WIRED, NPR, and Entertainment Weekly. It’s hard to imagine that all that attention is doing anything but increasing the value of Tolkien’s intellectual property. That’s why Chris Albrecht over at NewTeeVee thinks studios should encourage fan films.

Fan films are nothing new — Wikipedia pegs 1926 as the birth of the genre — but the proliferation of cheap, high quality production tools and the emergence of the Internet as a mass distribution platform has some rights holders waking up to the potential for fan art to keep a brand alive. Last year, for example, DC Comics reversed a long standing policy of aggressively protecting its copyrights and trademarks, including going after fan flicks, and officially okayed fan art that was done on a not-for-profit basis.

But what if fans did sell their art? Would that be so bad? Most fan art is a labor of love, but some fans sink serious time and money into their homemade projects. James Cawley reportedly put more than $100,000 into recreating the original Star Trek set for his well-received fan-made Star Trek web series, and donated crew time likely would have cost more than $1 million at market value.

According to TheForce.net, a fan site for the Star Wars universe, which enjoys a rich community of fan created art with the blessing of George Lucas, the sale of fan films is a “sensitive issue.” Fan filmmakers worry that one project trying to make a buck selling unauthorized fan art could cause rights holders to pull the plug on the entire community.

But Mike Masnick at TechDirt wonders if maybe fans should have more leeway in their ability to sell artwork based on someone else’s IP. Speaking of Bouchard’s agreement with Tolkien Enterprises to keep things non-commercial he wrote, “what if people made such a creative film without reaching such an agreement — or without promising to be totally non-commercial? Would that be so wrong? It wouldn’t take away from or harm Tolkien or Jackson’s work. It would only enhance it. So why should these fans even need to gain permission to create such a movie?”

I spoke to Matt Maggiacomo, who makes a modest living performing as “The Whomping Willows,” a band that sings songs set in the Harry Potter universe, about his thoughts on fan art. The Harry Potter rock community – or wizard rock, as it is known – enjoys one of the most liberal agreements with a copyright holder of any fan art community. Representatives of the wizard rock scene came to an agreement early on with lawyers for J.K. Rowling and Warner Brothers allowing them to continue to create their music and even sell CDs, merchandise, and charge for shows (with a few restrictions, like not being able to sell merchandise online and not being able to use official logos and images on album art, t-shirts, etc.).

“I am lucky to be a fan of a series whose author is so generous with her creation,” said Maggiacomo, who thinks it is a testament to Rowling’s character that she is so open to fan art. “[But] it’s really up to the author/creator of the series. If Jo Rowling came out and said that she objected to wizard rock’s existence, I would quit. No questions asked. Ultimately we all began as fans of a series, and we have to keep that in mind. It takes a lot of work to create a universe; Tolkien and Rowling have each created one of the most complex fictional universes in the history of literature. We have to understand that these universes are the authors’ babies, and they have every right to limit and restrict use of their creations.”

Maggiacomo thinks that one of the reasons that Rowling, Warner Brothers, and Scholastic have been so open to wizard rock and have even allowed its participants to profit from their creations, is that the community as a rule donates a lot of time and money to charity. “I think this sets wizard rock and the larger Harry Potter fandom apart from other fan communities,” he told me.

In 2000, Henry Jenkins, the Director of the Comparative Media Studies Program at MIT, predicted that fan involvement would only become increasingly more important to the success of commercial media. “Soon, [copyright holders] are going to need those active fans more than ever before,” he told the UK’s Guardian newspaper. “In a world with multiple media options, video on demand and micropayments, fans may become the new gatekeepers who help direct consumers toward interesting and engaging media content. The smart media executive should figure out which direction the media-consuming public is moving, run around in front and shout, ‘Follow me.’”

Nine years later, that prediction is likely more true than ever. Albrecht is almost certainly correct that rights holders would do well to encourage fan involvement and be more lenient with fan created art. And if allowing fans to sell their work could translate into a more vibrant and longer-lasting fan community, then Masnick might be right as well. It’s hard to argue against the wisdom of letting fans make money from their creations when looking at the wizard rock movement, which has been able to sustain itself for at least 5 years and has grown to support over 500 bands, while raising thousands of dollars for charity.

Either way, the future looks bright for fan art. More receptive rights holders combined with low cost pro-level tools means better fan art regardless of whether it is made for a profit.

In his practice, Carl Jung noted that Catholics had less tendency towards neurosis than Protestants or Atheists.  He attributed the difference to the still heavily ritualized Catholic practice.  A Catholic mass had the ability to bring the individual into direct contact with the mystery of the world and the Other, whereas Protestantism and Atheism (or secular humanism) left the individual mired in this world and without a means to put life in psychological context.

Years later, Joseph Campbell would reiterate Jung’s idea when he talked about modern society’s lack of myth and the psychological ills that resulted from it.  That George Lucas used Campbell’s mythological template to structure the Star Wars trilogy proves the point.  The cultural effect of those films far exceeded any passing wonder in new special effects technology.  Lucas had produced a modern myth that was constructed from the seminal motifs of stories as old as mankind, and it struck a resonance with the public that can still be felt today. (But Star Wars and myth is a different Uncle-God Momma for a different day.)

Now, as then, people will rally to the mythological motifs when they are presented.  It would not be hard to argue that the ascent of Barrack Obama followed the outline of so many other hero myths, which is not to say that he cast himself that way.  It would say more about the population than it would about Mr. Obama, and would imply nothing false about him nor any gullibility on the part of his admirers.  Myth reflects reality which reflects myth.  It is, by now, ingrained in the human psyche even if it is mostly latent.  All that it requires is something to awaken it.

Perhaps we yearn for myth, seeking to find it in our lives…while a lack of it in our culture makes the connection more difficult to make.  But myth is by no means completely absent.  It not only lurks in our subconscious, but sometimes gets presented in unexpected – and delightful – ways.

Next time you have a spare hour and a half, use it to watch the animated film, Sita Sings the Blues. (available here)  Billed as “The greatest breakup story ever told”, it is a retelling of the Indian classic Ramayana.  Nina Paley manages to do so much with the film that a brief description would never do it justice.  It is a love story, a break up story, a myth, a comedy, and a musical told through multiple animation styles.  The 1920’s style vocal jazz interludes (provided by scratchy old 78’s of Annette Hanshaw) would seem out of place, but Paley weaves them into the story in such a way that the tapestry only becomes richer.  At times the story of the Ramayana is told relatively straight; at other times three shadow puppets (voiced by modern Indians) attempt to agree on, narrate, and explain their own cultural inheritance in a way that will make you laugh out loud.  And Ms. Paley brings the ancient, Indian story into the modern world by way of reflection, rather than forcing the comparison to make a point.

Though it is one of those films that you hope will never end, the end may be the best part.  Ms. Paley executes a closing that has Mr. Campbell smiling…wherever he is.  She not only brings an old myth to modern light, but reminds us that the myths to live by are here for us to embrace.

More information is available at www.sitasingstheblues.com, and Ms. Paley is “giving” the film away.  In reality, it cost her $50,000 to protect herself from corporate copyright lawyers (and that may not fully protect her).

Image credit: Nina Paley

Click here to view the embedded video.

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. As a topper, America’s Conservative government runs amok. (What’s the only thing worse than two terms of Ronald Regan, the book posits? Five terms of Nixon.) The story itself is grim, and it embodies a pessimistic view of human nature. The graphic novel manages to evoke sick-to-your-stomachness with its examinations of society’s self-degradation and man’s personal darkness.

Film director Zach Snyder chose to keep the movie set in the same time period of the original comic. He resisted attempts to update the script to reflect the war on terror and clung loyally to the Cold War zeitgeist. That choice, to stick with the graphic novel’s original setting, makes the movie feel a little like a wax museum on performance-enhancing steroids.

For most young people, the Cold War means little or nothing, so the movie carries little or no Cold War dread for them. I’m probably too hopeful to think that the film might inspire Millennial moviegoers to learn more about the Cold War (the way that films like Gettysburg or Glory inspired people to visit battlefields and learn more about the Civil War or the book and film versions of John Adams inspired people to learn more about the most overlooked Founder). Of course, that’s not the movie’s job. Watchmen is meant as entertainment—and thus far, all the Millenials I’ve talked to who’ve seen the movie have raved about it. And many have been inspired to read the book, which is pretty cool in and of itself.

For people my age or older—Gen X-ers or Boomers—the Cold War evokes pretty specific anxieties about annihilation, but the alternative world of the Watchmen keeps those anxieties at an observable but unengageable distance. Snyder is almost Brechtian in his insistence at keeping his audience disengaged from the political context of the story—which, in turn, keeps audiences from engaging in the story emotionally. I always felt like I was watching the story rather than really connecting with it. (The overall spectacle of the movie, though, certainly provided lots of cool stuff to watch.)

Theses will be written about the relationship between the movie and the book—what armchair movieviewer or fanboy doesn’t enjoy the ol’ fashioned compare-and-contrast?—but ultimately,Watchmen, the film, really has little to do with the book itself. Some moveigoers have no relationship with the graphic novel at all and can just enjoy the cinematic spectacle. Others, like me, have so much baggage and so many fanboy expectations that it’s nearly impossible to walk into the theater and enjoy the movie as a movie. And so, like any art, the movie’s meaning is largely drawn from the personal experiences of those who see it.

For me, that relates to one of the criteria of great art: How does art make us engage in discussion with ourselves? How does it force us to critically challenge our ideas and assumptions (and decades-old anxieties)? How does it help us see the world?

In that regard, I’ll argue that the movie serves as a more relevant form of art than the graphic novel (at least for the moment). I always found Dave Gibbons’ artwork to be underwhelming and uninspired; Snyder’s onscreen extravaganza, on the other hands, seems highly inspired—even if that inspiration comes from the graphic novel itself. Writer Alan Moore claimed his graphic novel was unfilmable, but Snyder did a damn fine job of proving Moore wrong.

Even if the movie doesn’t capture the bygone zeitgeist of a world that never existed, it captures something. It’s of-the-moment—a stylized, Hollywoodized moment—in the same kind of way the graphic novel was of its own gritty moment in the mid-80s. Whether it’s great art or not, Watchmen makes a fascinating time capsule and a great spectacle in the best ways movies can be.

Back to Meryl, though. Is it just me, or does she get nominated at least once a year? I hadn’t realized how close that is to being literally true until Best Actress winner Kate Winslet pointed out that this was nom #15 for Streep. 15. Damn. The miracle, of course, is that she’s only won twice, because she’s certainly the greatest actress of her generation, and may well be the finest who ever lived.

Streep’s second win was in 1983 for Sophie’s Choice, which I have always regarded as the single greatest performance I’ve ever seen in any film, ever, anywhere, period. I remember seeing it in the theater and when the movie was over having to just sit there a couple minutes and breathe. The film, and her performance especially, had drained me, not only emotionally but physically.

Which has me thinking about something that might be fun here. What are your all-time Oscar faves? For that matter, let’s feel free to include things that didn’t win (or even get nominated), but now, with the perspective afforded by time, perhaps should have.

So, open thread. Your greatest film, director, actor, actress, and supporting actor and actress? In addition to Streep, let me toss the Blade Runner Final Cut into the discussion for Best Film, as well.

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.

Why re-visit their marriage over a decade later? How about as a case study in why two people of opposite temperaments shouldn’t pair off? Or as a cautionary tale about airing your dirty laundry in public? In truth, it’s fascination lies in the incongruity of artists behaving like tabloid trash.

I first became curious about them while working on an article about writers and their lovers or spouses. The sticking point in those relationships has always been, aside from insufficient remuneration for the writer’s work, the amount of time he or she devotes to his labors. During my research, I came across this quote from Philip Roth, when he was interviewed by New Yorker editor David Remnick:

“Usually I write all day, but if I want to go back to the studio in the evening, after dinner, I don’t have to sit in the living room because someone else has been alone all day.”

Roth must have been referring to the days when he was married to Ms. Bloom, especially when they were in residence at his country home. They didn’t marry until 1989; in 1993 he served her with divorce papers.

Then I learned that their relationship occupied a central place in her memoir, Leaving a Doll’s House (Little, Brown and Co., 1996). Thus, if you care to assign blame for who turned their relationship into a public vendetta, it was Ms. Bloom.

But, as Time reviewer Elizabeth Gleick wrote about Bloom’s book, it “is hard not to wonder what will happen when Roth turns his novelist’s eye to this same material. Claire Bloom has good reason to shudder at the prospect.”

Drawing First Blood

Why, one wonders, did she strike the first blow when the odds were she’d be subject to fierce retaliation? Perhaps she was seeing a therapist who encouraged her to write the book as a way of standing up for herself with someone to whom she felt subservient. Ms. Bloom wrote of Roth, “that I was intimidated: Philip always gained the upper hand in any argument, and with his razor-sharp wit could easily say something amusing and cutting.”

Also Ms. Bloom likely needed the money. After all — “The better to get the whole ugly business over” — she’d brought the divorce proceedings to a premature close. “After a relatively brief period of negotiation,” she wrote, “and much against my lawyer’s strong advice, I settled with Philip for the sum of $100,000.” Though she was a star, she was still prone to the vagaries of casting and suffered dry spells during which she generated no income.

Nor did Ms. Bloom reveal anything, um, icky, about the “gleeful misogynist” — no sexual quirks, not to mention shortcomings. Their main bone of contention was Ms. Bloom’s daughter by her first husband, actor Rod Steiger. “Above all else,” she wrote, “both for him and for me — the subject of my relationship with Anna became an eternal battlefield.”

She admits that: “I clung to Anna in ways that were extremely unsuitable, especially as she grew older; this made Philip feel as though he was an intruder in our closed circle.” But “I hadn’t recognized how deep his prejudice ran. … I was caught in the middle. … Placing Philip’s needs over Anna’s meant hanging on to an important relationship at the price of my daughter’s trust in her mother’s protection.”

After an operation on his knee went awry, Roth sank into a depression and spent time at a psychiatric hospital. The reader may fault Ms. Bloom for holding Roth responsible for his odd behavior while ill. But there was no ignoring the extent of the cruelty to which he subjected her, especially when it turned out he’d met someone else and was trying to drive her away. To wit:

“Philip demanded the return of everything he had provided for me during our years together. His [itemized to a fare-thee-well] list included. . . $28,500 per annum he had given me over twelve years. . . $150 per hour for the “five or six hundred hours” he had sent going over scripts with me. . . and ‘a little something’ for adapting The Cherry Orchard and writing a play about the writer Jean Rhys.”

Roth, whose publishing contracts may be the largest a writer of serious fiction has ever received, saved the best for last: “. . . for refusing to honor my prenuptial agreement, he levied a fine of sixty-two billion dollars –- a billion dollars for every year of my life.”

Ms. Bloom’s response: “At first, the element of mockery I was doubtless intended to read into these messages was entirely lost on me.” Why would that be? Oh, because it wasn’t funny.

Blood Feud

In 1999, Roth wrote a letter to the editor of the New York Review of Books: “Over the past three years I have become accustomed to finding Miss Bloom’s characterization of me taken at face value.”

But by then he had already sought revenge to set the record straight by means of a novel published in 1998 called I Married a Communist (Houghton Mifflin). The title refers not to the book’s plot but to another book that plays a part in Roth’s book — one chronicling the failed marriage of its author, a character named Eve Frame, in a spirit similar to which Claire Bloom wrote Leaving a Doll’s House.

In his novel, Roth makes no bones about the problem the protagonist, Eve’s husband Ira Ringold, experiences with her daughter by a previous marriage. Ringold is not the author’s alter ego; as in some of Roth’s other books the task falls to Nathan Zuckerman. To make it more confusing, Zuckerman sub-contracts much of the narrating work to Ringold’s now aged brother, Murray.

Ira Ringold is an outsized (in physique as well as character) radio star after World War II, known as Iron Rinn, with Communist sympathies. Murray describes domestic life at Ira and Eve’s Manhattan apartment:

“Eve would be in the living room doing her needlepoint and listening to Sylphid plucking away and Ira’d be upstairs writing to O’Day [Ira's Communist mentor]. And when the harp [in real life, Anna Steiger is an opera singer] went silent and he went downstairs to find Eve, she wouldn’t be there. She’d be up in Sylphid’s room. … The two of them in bed, under the covers, listening to Cosi Fan Tutte.”

Eve becomes pregnant with Ira’s child. But he’s unable to talk her out of an abortion, which, he comes to realize, “wasn’t Eve’s decision –- it was Sylphid’s. … What he hears Sylphid saying to her mother is, ‘If you ever, ever try that again, I’ll strangle the little idiot in its crib!’”

Then Ira rents a well-appointed apartment for Sylphid:

“That night [Eve] gathered her courage and went upstairs bearing the drawing she’d made, the floor plan of the new apartment. … It took no time at all, of course, for Sylphid to register her objection and for Ira to be racing up the stairs to Sylphid’s room. … But no Mozart this time. … What he saw was Eve on her back screaming and crying, and Sylphid in her pajamas sitting astride her, also screaming, also crying, her strong harpist’s hands pinning Eve’s shoulders to the bed [with] Sylphid, screaming, ‘Can’t you stand up to anyone? Won’t you once stand up for your own daughter against him? Won’t you be a mother, ever? Ever?”

Leave us not forget the anti-Semitism (the self-hating kind — Claire Bloom was born Jewish) Roth ascribes to Eve as she lashes out at her sister-in-law, Murray’s wife: “‘You! What are you staring at, you hideous, twisted little Jew!’”

If you think this is pretty over-the-top for a supposed world-class novelist, you’re not the only one. It’s as if Roth is so intent on seeking revenge against Ms. Bloom that he fails to notice that his writing has sunk to the level of melodrama.

Worse, he describes a scene in which Eve seeks out Ira, who’s left her. She prostates herself before him, throws her arms around his legs, and begs him to come back. In her book, Ms. Bloom admits that she swallowed her pride in her attempts to keep Roth from leaving. But, Roth portrays Eve’s craven imploring not as a cry for help at some level, but as an assault on Ringold. That’s judgmentalism from the most imperious and frigid of heights.

Worst of all, he equates Ms. Bloom writing about their marriage with Eve Frame outing Rinn’s communism (which may be a metaphor for the single-mindedness with which Roth pursues writing).

No Grist Too Coarse for the Mill

One can hear the objection: All’s fair in love and fiction. Isn’t all life fair game for fiction, no matter who gets hurt? Perhaps, but in life as well as art a balanced portrait aligns fiction more closely with the truth.

While I Married a Communist is a wild ride of a book, the character of Eve Frame is a caricature that has no place in a novel by an important writer. Furthermore, while Roth’s reputation may have suffered harm from Leaving a Doll’s House, there’s no way it ruined him like Ira was when Eve outed him as a communist during the McCarthy era.

Today Roth enjoys accolades as America’s greatest living novelist. After the divorce, Ms. Bloom who’s played in everything from Shakespeare to a Charlie Chaplin movie to Ibsen to a Woody Allen movie, accepted a role in the soap opera As the World Turns to pay her bills.

In the end, the revenge Philip Roth sought with I Married a Communist boomeranged on him. Its author comes off as petty, narcissistic, and vicious — unbecoming traits that could work to keep this perennial Nobel-Prize-for-literature candidate perennial.

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?

The subtitle of Hardy’s novel is a simple phrase: A Pure Woman.

What the novel (and this fine production) attempts to examine is what Hardy’s (or any) culture means when it uses such a phrase.  As I mentioned above, maybe what makes even a thoughtful presentation of Tess seem irrelevant, perhaps even fatuous, in these same days of this our life is that we’re now two generations removed from the rise of the Women’s Movement (for lack of a better term).  And as we have been wont to do with racism, environmentalism, and class warfare, we have spent so much time wonking about these issues that we have come to think we have addressed them with more than words.

This relegates, in ways we don’t always consciously grasp, Hardy’s powerful depiction of the duplicity of our treatment of male and female sexuality to a sort of Antiques Roadshow valuation – its historical significance carries more weight than its artistic/social value.

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The last generation with significant experience of a pre “Women’s Liberation” culture are The Boomers, those aging self admirers. For us (and I’m as Boomer as it gets) Tess of the dUrbervilles presents a world we know well – a world where a woman was either a “good girl” or “damaged goods” -  a world  that we sought to redefine through our embracing of Free Love.

But as with most Boomer efforts, what we did was glom those cultural sensibilities we claimed so hard to reject onto our practice of the rejection of those sensibilities – guys “knew” that “hippie chicks” were “easy,” for example – useful for getting laid, but not women we’d seriously consider marrying. Even the free and easy sexuality of our college days often wound up as a series of monogamous relationships that “allowed” us to engage in “pre-marital intercourse” which we thought of as leading to a serious end (marriage, family) even when subconsciously we knew otherwise.

What we wrought with such a convoluted mindset, which books like Tess (and the Polanski (!) adaptation) allowed us to talk about without talking about our true selves, was a weird, confused and confusing melange of ideas and beliefs about male/female relations that has given our generation a divorce rate unlikely to be equalled in human history.

Boomer women may, then,  occasionally harbor notions of themselves as  Tess Durbeyfields. They’ve spent their lives since puberty arguing Hardy’s assertion that purity comes from somewhere besides an unbroken hymen. But if so, most Boomer men, at least in their rare moments of honesty,  would have to admit to being afflicted with a kind of gender relations MPD – they are both Angel Clares and Alec d’Urbervilles. They want their good girls bad and their bad girls made somehow pure again at the same time.

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Whether Xers or Millenials experience Tess of the d’Urbervilles with a similar troubled ambivalence about gender relations seems unlikely. For them, Tess will seem more like historical fiction than a key for coded discussions of their gender relationship confusions. Their insights will likely be deeper in some ways, shallower in others as a result of their Post-Sexual Revolution orientation. They will certainly be different.

But Tess speaks in a striking way to the Boomer generation – and thus this new PBS rendering of Hardy’s opus might be called “Tess of the Boomervilles.”

“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. This passage from Gibson’s latest finds the protagonist, a journalist who was formerly part of a short-lived band (of precisely the sort you’d expect to fascinate Gibson – not a huge commercial success, but possessing an intellectual depth that would assure riveted cult status for a generation or more) talking with her new employer (again, a typically Gibsonian character, intrigued by the potential to bridge the critically obscure with the commercially popular). In the exchange, we understand that Hollis (the protag) was influenced, but not in a linear (read, discernable) fashion, by music of a completely different genre than what she was producing.

I was thinking about this as I listened to Midnight Matinee, the new release from The Lost Patrol, a band that made my Best of list last year for their outstanding Launch and Landing CD. When you visit their MySpace page and scroll down to “Influences,” you get the damnedest list: Ennio Morricone, John Barry, Johnny Cash, The Cramps, Siouxsie and the Banshees, The Ventures, The Stranglers, Phil Spector, Julee Cruise, Cocteau Twins, Jesus and Mary Chain, Gary Numan, The Church, The Damned, The Chameleons, Dusty Springfield, The Cure, V.A.S.T., The Nightblooms, The Cult, The Beach Boys, Jerry Murad’s Harmonicats, A Flock of Seagulls, Dead Can Dance, Smashing Pumpkins, Sisters of Mercy, The Shadows, Al Caiola, Jack Nitzsche, Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass, The Verve, Jean Michel Jarre, Duane Eddy, Andy Williams, Angelo Badalamenti, Allison Krause & Union Station, Mazzy Star, Tarnation, The Catherine Wheel, The Sundays, Sigur Rós, Echo and The Bunnymen, Medieval Baebes, Aimee Mann, Miranda Sex Garden, The Shaggs, Joanna Newsom, Goldfrapp, X, Kate Bush, Lovespirals, Abby Travis and Curve.

Now, a lot of this makes sense when you listen to them. But then you get some more influences: films by David Lynch, Hal Hartley, Jim Jarmusch, Wes Andersen, Sergio Leone and John Waters.

Again, a lot of this makes sense when you consider the way in which The Lost Patrol’s music connotes landscape – wide, empty, frontier spaces at dusk, burnt oranges fading to blackest, solitary blue.

Once upon a time I thought of influence in that linear form that Hollis references – poets inspired by poets in ways that were evident upon reading. Musicians whose lineage could be tracked in quirks of phrasing. Painters whose technique never quite escaped the gravitational well of the masters they copied in their adolescence. And so on. As I learned and developed in my own right, though, I came to understand the non-linearity of influence: how one musical style could inform something new and apparently different; how certain types of influence can hide in the woodwork, only revealing themselves to those who study the hardest; and how influence can work across genres – music on poetry, painting on film, dance on sculpture, etc.

Those who have read my poetry have noted the straight-line artistic heritage: Eliot, Yeats, Thomas, Charles Wright. (Not that I’m worthy of those comparisons at all – it’s just that whatever I have done has aspired in the direction of these epic artists.) But I also like to note how important my early exposure to ancient masters like John Donne shaped my perspective – I doubt that’s as evident to most readers.

Earlier in my “career” I played with rock music influences, as well, sometimes going so far as to riff on Springsteen and Mellencamp and U2, and today my poems are frequently indebted to all kinds of musical insurgencies.

But there’s more. My writing has always been pretty impressionist. I’ve never worried about the hard narrative edges of the “stories” being told, but have instead focused on the imagistic, on the colors and vague shapes and details that were deliberately misremembered. There’s a lot of Monet and Degas in my poetry, in other words.

I was once called a “Jungian pagan” by a friend (who’s probably reading this and can identify himself if he wants to), and while I’m not 100% sure I’ve figured out what that means, there’s no denying that my writing trades heavily in the iconic, the totemic, the deeply symbolic. Jung? Sure, but also Yeats doubles back in here, and I can’t disregard the importance of Tarot in helping me think about what lies at the core of certain people, events, relationships, etc.

And what about the guy quoted at the top, William Gibson? The world I write about is frequently technological and urban, concerning itself with how my culture and my generation are being, have been, colonized by autonomous technology – that is, technology that appears to operate with its own agenda. Gibson is a core part of that, as is Bruce Sterling, and in depicting these moments I also draw on visual imagery from films like Blade Runner and the oeuvre-wide vision of directors like Tim Burton.

There’s nothing terribly profound in all this. Essentially it boils down to “influence is a highly asymmetrical, nonlinear process.” But since a novel and CD got me to thinking about my poetry, it seemed a worthy subject for a Sunday blog.

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. While it was nominated for two technical Oscars (Art Direction-Set Decoration and Best Effects, Visual Effects), it’s hard to look back and argue that it got anything like the critical acclaim it deserved (a point underscored by how well respected the film is today). In addition, it didn’t do very well at the box office (it drew a little over $6M that opening weekend, and the theater I saw it in was 90% empty).

Now, though, history has reassessed Blade Runner. Roger Ebert added it to his list of greatest films after seeing the Final Cut, and our friends at Wikipedia catalog the rest:

• In 2007, the American Film Institute listed it as the 97th greatest film of all time, making it new to the list, having been left off the 1997 version. In 2008, Blade Runner was voted the sixth best science fiction film ever made as part of the AFI’s 10 Top 10.[72]
• Blade Runner is currently ranked the third best film of all time by The Screen Directory.[73]
• One of Time’s 100 All-Time best movies.[74]
• British movie magazine Empire voted it the “Best Science Fiction Film Ever” in 2007.
• In 2002, Blade Runner was voted the 8th greatest film of all time in Channel 4’s 100 Greatest Films poll.

All of which brings me back around to a favorite topic of mine: art whose greatness was not realized in its time. “In its time” is a malleable phrase, of course. With film it might mean anything from “opening weekend” to 25 years or beyond, and with other, older forms of art we could be talking about decades. For purposes of today’s ArtSunday, I’ll let you, the reader, make you own calls about this.

From where I stand, Blade Runner is the greatest example in film of a work that critics and audiences whiffed on at the time of release. It was largely ignored or panned, over time evolved into “cult status,” and was eventually validated both critically and commercially well after the fact. No other film I can think of surpasses Blade Runner in this respect.

Other genres have their own examples of greatness discovered late (or even too late), of course. The poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, now regarded as one of the greatest poets of the Victorian Era, was never published in his lifetime, for instance.

Today, then, we invite our readers to offer their favorite examples of “the Blade Runner Effect” – that is, the condition of “late greatness” by art that was not duly acclaimed in its time.

That done, I’m certain a store near you is selling the 25th anniversary box of Ridley Scott’s classic. Go grab it, and while you’re out, stop by one of your finer bookstores and pick up a copy of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the superb Philip K. Dick novel on which it was based.

Oh, yeah – Philip K. Dick. Speaking of artists who never really got their full due….

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.)

In the age of the Internet, though, it can be difficult to avoid encountering info-bits about a new film prior to seeing it:  rows of part-filled stars, numerical ratings, blog-stubs, headlines, whether professional or viewer-based or somewhere in-between, are all encountered while surfing, and are now unavoidable when looking up movie listings.

It was not in this manner that I accidentally heard an entire review of the latest Woody Allen movie before seeing it about a week ago.  It was, rather, upon waking to my alarm clock set to NPR news radio, that I, as I often do, awoke to streams of dialog by people infinitely more conscious than myself.  In the transitory state between sleep’s stasis and becoming, more-or-less, fully awake, I sometimes listen to, partially absorb, or experience as ambiance, entire news stories – in this case, I heard the Friday-morning movie review of Woody Allen’s latest film, Vicky Cristina Barcelona.

The first paragraph of the review was enough to pull me fully into consciousness.  To wholly quote:

Comedy-deprived moviegoers are desperate for the return of the old Woody Allen — the one who was bard of Manhattan before his focus shifted overseas, the one who made them laugh. Each new Allen film is frantically examined: Is he back? Please let him be back. But Vicky Cristina Barcelona is not the return of Woody Allen; Elvis, it would appear, has truly left the building.

Such an opening set’s the stage for a piece of criticism with which I was and am inclined to disagree.  I would not want to appear pretentious, or waste time – yours or mine – in picking it apart.  Nor would I want to appear mean-spirited, whether effective or futile, in expending great effort critiquing criticism that includes the line, “it’s hard not be entertained by the Oscar-winning Bardem, who eats this role up like it’s a hot fudge sundae.”  After all, I am the insignificant blogger, not the professional reviewer.  (The same reviewer went even further in this review in the LA Times, ending with a paragraph that you might read for yourself if interested in how much some don’t see the value in this film.)

What interested me most about his radio piece, is the closing:

There is nothing wrong with Allen’s intention to marry comedy to emotion. It’s simply too bad that he’s not as good at it as he used to be.

What is too bad, I think, is that this reviewer was not able to enjoy a movie that is certainly as great as so many of Woody Allen’s great movies.  In particular, it is great precisely in its marriage of comedy to emotion – precisely.  The reviewer’s statement that “Some of Allen’s best work bridges the gap between humor and drama” provides insight into how he misses the mark in examining this remarkably solid film by a great artist of human relationships.  The gap of which he speaks is not there – in life or in art – not in this life, and not in this work of art.  They are, as shown in the work of great dramatists such as Shakespeare, beautifully commingled, inseparably integrated.  It is the mark of a great artist that her or his work should reflect and reveal this truth consistently, gracefully.  And so it is with Woody Allen’s latest.

After a truly enjoyable movie experience, I decided to peruse the net for other professional reviews (as opposed to blog postings of no notable status), and came across a  review in Time magazine.  The reviewer begins by lamenting that, after Allen’s death, “commentators will declare him one of the great American comic filmmakers — maybe not even comic; just great, period.”   He then goes on to declare that Allen “has not been residing in the auteur empyrean for the past couple of decades” and even has the chutzpah to state the following, which I will quote in full:

That Allen keeps making films is seen by many as an act of will, almost defiance, by a man whose genius evaporated some time in the late ’80s.

Rather, it would be chutzpah, if he had the chutzpah to state it himself rather than through a proxy “some” who would see.

Woody Allen is one of our great filmmakers.  His films are an America treasure.  Among his most famous quotes:  “I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve immortality by living forever.”   Whatever might happen with the latter, the former is a done deal.  I am not an expert on genius, but I will venture to declare that, while artists change and decline, its evaporation is a rare event, and when something such as this is suspected and noted, it is the commentator rather than the purported genius that ought to be called into question first.

Are you a lover of film?  Listen to this list and reflect on your feelings:  Annie Hall, Manhattan, Hannah and Her Sisters, Radio Days, Crimes and Misdemeanors, Bullets Over Broadway, Mighty Aphrodite, Celebrity, Deconstructing Harry – and this is a short list.  I see no decline in his recent films – Match Point is great, Scoop is exciting and fun, and that Cassandra’s Dream received almost no play in the theaters is no fault of the movie’s, but certainly other factors.

This excellent LA Times piece is an interview and a discussion of Alan’s work that explores the recent shift in his films.  On the surface, it is a shift overseas in financing, setting and location, and, to some extent, audience.  On a deeper level, the shift is one in tone, tenor, and theme, and will one day be as seriously and as closely examined as any significant marked shift in the work of a major artist.  For me, it is exciting and fun to watch while it happens.

One thing eminently clear to me is how much Allen enjoys making films.  If making one a year is not enough to dispel the absurd, truly silly, notion that he makes films now as some kind of an act of (almost) defiance, certainly the craftsmanship of the films is enough to do so.  Many people recognize Scoop as a great film, one that will be remembered.  I am not the only person baffled by the failure, not at the box office, of Cassandra’s Dream, but by the fact it did not even open in enough theaters to sell any tickets.  There are scenes in that movie you will not forget.  It was memorable as a portrait of a family taken apart by greed and habit, and it rises to the level of Greek tragedy in its examination of the consequences of self-seeking acts, including murder.

I will always seek out good reviewers and great critics and follow them and enjoy their work – I appreciate their work, and their role as intermediaries between art, entertainment and the public.  But, today, and with this film and these reviews in mind, I also embrace the rise of the blog and some aspects of the democratization of expression of opinion about art and entertainment, for the very reason I wrote this today – that someone might read my piece instead of, or in addition to, those of the reviewers who I think missed out on a great film experience, and certainly missed out in honestly and carefully portraying the nature of the latest Allen film in the context of Allen’s work.

The new movie by Allen is really, really good.  There may even be more to it than many realize at first.  It explicitly echoes Bergman’s exploration (in his Trilogy) of some of life’s deepest, most significant questions, such as whether love alone can give life meaning, no matter how messed-up it appears to work in our imperfect, messed-up lives.  Like the inversion of Bergman’s Smiles of a Summer Night into A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy, Allen’s art is here portraying life with just as much care and insight as Bergman’s Winter Light, but in a different manner that the gloomy Swedish fatalist.  A critic might get an inkling of this this, and view Allen’s attitude as misanthropic, as the reviewer previously discussed does.  Someone who knows and loves his art, though, will see this is simply Woody Allen working the way he does, reflecting life in his own unique way.  (There may even be a winking to Winter Light with a clever quotation of a statue of Christ in a small-town church – but I will leave such explorations to those who know something about film.)

Whether you have a history of enjoying Allen’s films or not, I think you will enjoy this movie – a truly remarkable, fun, and interesting cinematic experience – you have my blogging word, that you will not likely be disappointed.  I am not even going to spoil a wonderful film by telling  you anything about it.

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.

Desjardin, a former historian for the National Park Service at Gettysburg and currently a historian for the state of Maine, writes about the “ever-changing history of Gettysburg.” The book is not about the battle itself but what people think they know about the battle. He then goes on to explore how people know what they know (or think they know).

The battle of Gettysburg, as it turns out, has a mythology all its own. Desjardin explores the sources of those myths “not in an attempt to explode the myths but rather to examine the myth-making process.” That mythology is built on misunderstandings, misrememberings, manipulation, and outright lies.

Yet Desjardin suggests that the apocryphal can sometimes be more valuable—or at least more valued—than the factual, and the results of the story-building process can have important sociological and psychological (not to mention historical) implications.

“History has a way of coming out the way we hoped it would rather than the way things really happened,” Desjardin says. That has less to do with the way the events themselves unfold as it does with the way people retell those events after the fact. It also has much to do with the way a modern audience interprets those retellings to fit their own times and context. “[P]eople reinvent their legends and myths in order to meet some need or fill some void in their present,” Desjardin says. “This is not necessarily a conscious behavior but is more often a slow, subtle, subconscious process.”

In Gettysburg, that process got underway even before the smoke from the battle had cleared, and it has been slow, subtle, subconsciously evolving over the 145 years since.

Sometimes, the process has not been so subtle or subconscious. Desjardin points to individuals, like Union General Dan Sickles and Confederate General Jubal Early, who had vested interests in making sure history remembered events in a particular way. “When veterans such as Dan Sickles or Jubal Early work actively, even relentlessly, to shape our popular knowledge of past events, they literally make history, building a belief in a particular version of the story even if it is partly fabricated,” Desjardin explains.

Popular culture, too, makes history. Desjardin looks as such things as Michael Shaara’s novel The Killer Angels and the movie based on it, Gettysburg, Ken Burns’s The Civil War, Shelby Foot’s The Civil War: A Narrative, as well as the works of several popular painters. All have had profound impacts on the way American’s understand Gettysburg. “Despite the thousands of scholarly works on the subject, popular voices such as [Ted] Turner’s have done more to shape people’s understanding of the Gettysburg story than the army of professional historians who produced these works,” Desjardin says.

Even the placement of monuments on the battlefield has affected, and been affected by, memory of the battle.

On rare occasions, Desjardin argues against himself. When talking about Sickles, for instance, Desjardin talks about the partisan slants they each took in promoting their interpretations of events on the battlefield. Sickles tried blatantly to harpoon the reputation of his commander, George Gordon Meade, in order to cover his own battlefield blunders. At various times, Sickles’ version of events held sway over public opinion, and Meade’s reputation unduly suffered. “At neither period was one history more right or more wrong than the other,” Desjardin says, although he has clearly demonstrated that Sickle’s self-promoting efforts were clearly off-base. I chalk up Desjardin’s inconsistency to poor editing rather than poor logic.

Sharper editing would have also kept Desjardin from rehashing several topics in the book. He talks about The Killer Angels in one chapter, for example, and then two chapters later talks about it again as though he’d never mentioned it before. Rather than making a point in one chapter and building on it in the next, he writes as though he’s introducing the info for the first time (again) and then he builds upon it. Such rare lapses, when they do occur, make the book feel disjointed, but the overall readability of Desjardin’s book make such sections fly by, anyway.

These Honored Dead is a fascinating study of memory, myth-making, and storytelling. While Desjardin’s book deals specifically with Gettysburg, that same kind of myth-making and story-building is happening in the world, even today. Looking at how the story Gettysburg evolved can help us perhaps understand how the stories of the 2000 presidential election, the terror attacks of 9/11, and the war in Iraq are all being shaped. “There is no factual, unassailable answer to questions such as these, and consequently a constant battle rages among supporters of both sides who seek to sway the popular opinion—and the history books—to one point of view or another,” Desjardin says.

“[T]here is a deep and highly useful knowledge that can be gained by studying the past and observing its processes, especially those that involve story building,” Desjardin says. “Learning more about that process, we can understand an immeasurable amount about our past, our present, and even our future.”