Archives for November 10, 2003

As noted by Terry below, I finally got around to my second viewing of the great Lost in Translation this weekend. Although this screening was marred by Loud Talkers all around us (for instance, after a shot that emphasized Scarlett Johansson’s vanishingly modest belly: “She’s pregnant!”), it was still amazing. In fact, this time around it made me cry (that’s for you, Lizzie). And it certified my disappointment in 21 Grams.

21 Grams is the kind of bad movie that gets good reviews. I’m sure it will get more of them when it opens nationally later this month. Why? It is wonderful to look at; its haunting soundtrack is used with dead-on precision; it gets fantastic performances from Benicio del Toro and Naomi Watts (the film’s deliberately grainy look heightens the weathered beauty of Watts’s features; half its emotional effect comes from just looking at her); and for a good hour or so, it holds your curiosity at highest attention. Also, it has one stock scene–in which bad news is delivered–that is one of the most affecting of its kind I’ve ever seen. So the people who made this film really know what they’re doing. They’ve got the chops. But they’re playing a feeble tune.

Here’s John Rockwell, writing about New York City Opera in yesterday’s New York Times:

The City Opera has been aggressively lobbying to be named the flagship institution in the new cultural presence at ground zero. To its evident surprise, it has encountered resistance. As of this writing, no decision has been announced, but the downtown powers seem to want a greater diversity of artistic expression….

American culture has changed radically in the last 65 years. It is that change, rather than the virtues or failings of City Opera in its current condition, that is causing it problems downtown….

By now, for all the lip service still paid to high culture and for all the genuine passion and pleasure that millions still derive from it, the revolution is complete. The current issue of Vanity Fair, for instance, has a foldout cover of celebrity photographs by Annie Leibovitz trumpeting “American Music” without one classical musician in the group. American music in the minds of most Americans today is popular music. We’re a democracy, and the majority votes for what is most popular. Opera ain’t it.

To some extent, opera’s current marginality is its own fault, in failing to sustain the blend of creativity and popularity that distinguished the operatic past. And to some extent, one might wish for a little more responsibility on the part of our politicians.

But the fact remains that the new art that excites people these days is likely to come in the form of film or literature or popular music or visual installations, not from an art like opera, whose best days seem well behind it. If an artist today is to celebrate the common man or lament Sept. 11 effectively, it will most likely be

“In the Bag” has been temporarily suspended due to excessive life-related activity, but Household Opera is playing a similar game today. If the storm troopers came marching into your town, which books would you stuff in your backpack? It’s a nice, practical game, which is what makes it interesting. No less interesting is her list–Ashbery, Austen, Barthes, Bishop, Borges, Herbert, Puttenham (?!), Stevens, Woolf–which you can peruse by clicking here.

From BuzzMachine:

I’m in the middle of watching the Jessica Lynch movie and let me state the obvious: TV movies are crap. They weren’t always, but they are now. They are an utterly discredited form of media. As a form, they are scripted in neon and shot through the wrong end of a periscope. They are insultingly obvious and shallow. They are artistically inept. They are unwatchable and unwatched….

And there’s more!

A reader writes, apropos of yesterday’s posting on the New Jersey Performing Arts Center and its effects (or lack of same) on downtown Newark:

I’ve walked through downtown Newark countless times now and the more I hear about Newark’s Renaissance, the less I believe it’s actually happening.

That’s not to say Newark is getting worse, but I definitely haven’t seen NJPAC have any significant impact on the downtown area. It is bleak. There are a ton of “historic” (really old) buildings that you can tell were once beautiful and now are empty, dilapidated and depressing. No one is buying them or refurbishing them or using them. They just sit there with their broken windows and moldy brick getting more broken and moldier. The businesses that do exist fall into two categories: 1) big business commuter offices (notice I say “commuter” and those buildings really only include Prudential, IDT, Robert Treat Hotel, Hilton, Seton Hall Law, etc) and 2) low-end multi-purpose stores (the likes of Valu-Plus, Lot Less, Pay/Half–and I didn’t make up any of those names; hell, our Rite Aid even closes at 6 pm most days).

What’s really sad is that, if there were just more investors, downtown could become beautiful and happening. But that takes big money. Newark, the city itself, and its small business owners–concentrated in Portugese district of the Ferry Street area–definitely don’t have the capital it will take to help Newark reach its full potential–and there’s a lot of potential to be met. But I’m glad Newark has NJPAC. I like going to performances there. Honestly, though, I’m always afraid one of these days the [Newark] Star-Ledger is going to have to report that it’s in danger of closing due to lack of patronage if more people don’t start going. I think part of it too is advertising. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything beyond a brochure’s calendar of events in little piles around campus. Is there any advertising in New York for NJPAC? Doubtful–once again due to money. Anyway, that’s my reaction.

This comes from a smart and observant student at the Newark campus of Rutgers University, by the way.

It’s always fun–and interesting–to find someone in cyberspace who shares one of your private enthusiasms. OGIC and I, for instance, are great fans of the Parker novels, a hugely diverting series of sixty-minute eggs written by crime novelist Donald E. Westlake under the pen name of “Richard Stark,” but I don’t have any other friends who read them, so I wrongly take it for granted that nobody else knows about them. Hence it was a surprise to skim through the blogroll this morning and discover that Forager 23 has been holding forth on the subject of what Hollywood actor might make a convincing Parker on screen.

I’ve never written anything extended on the subject of Stark, but I did review Payback, an awful movie of a few years back in which Mel Gibson played Parker:

“Payback” was adapted from Donald E. Westlake’s tough-minded 1962 novel “The Hunter” (published under the pen name “Richard Stark”) which was also the source of John Boorman’s “Point Blank,” one of the most impressive crime films of the ’60s. “The Hunter” was the first in a series of novels featuring Parker (he has no first name), a no-nonsense career criminal who specializes in shrewdly planned heists. Largely forgotten save by connoisseurs of crime fiction, these novels are striking for the way in which the reader is made to sympathize with Parker, a thoroughly unappetizing near-psychopath whose only virtue is his professionalism. The plot of “Payback” is drawn directly from the first part of “The Hunter”–the film’s advertising slogan is “Get ready to root for the bad guy”–and so it is surprising to see how completely [director Brian] Helgeland has failed to catch the tone of the book. In “The Hunter,” Parker is a truly hard man, as amoral as a loaded shotgun; in “Payback,” he is a coarsely drawn caricature who has a soft spot for pit bulls and prostitutes but blows away anybody else who crosses his path.

Mel Gibson is a very good actor, but he’s all wrong as Parker, and not just because he’s too handsome. Lee Marvin, who played the same part in “Point Blank,” was anvil-hard, with a bass-baritone voice that sounded like large rocks falling from a great height. Not so Gibson: you keep expecting him to say something amusing. One wonders, then, what could have possessed so talented a performer to waste his time on so witless a project. No doubt money is the answer–as I write these words, “Payback” is the most popular movie in America–but given the fact that Gibson is also said to be both a devoted father and a good Catholic, one further wonders what possessed him to make a film that is morally and aesthetically odious. Money, they say, has no smell, but I can’t say the same for “Payback”: it stinks of the cheapest kind of cynicism.

(No link–sorry.)

Now over to Forager 23:

Parker is an affectless heavy, who’s always a couple of steps ahead of the law and a couple of crosses ahead of his fellow crooks. He’s a professional criminal, a mechanic–not a thug, but not Raffles, either. Both my friend and I thought that Mel Gibson, who played Parker in the relatively recent film version of the first novel, Payback, was completely wrong for the part. Gibson is all bug eyes, all acting, and, quite frankly, not very scary….

Lee Marvin is, not surprisingly, just about perfect as Parker. Now here’s the problem: actors like Lee Marvin just don’t seem to exist anymore. Tough guy stars are a thing of the past: no more John Waynes, Charles Bronsons, or Clint Eastwoods. What happened to the heavy?

1). Audiences today are younger than ever, while guys like Lee Marvin and John Wayne appealed to more mature moviegoers. They often played world-weary characters who resorted to violence only reluctantly. If Rio Bravo were made today, Ricky Nelson would’ve gotten top billing and John Wayne would’ve just had a supporting role.

2). Action movies have become more about effects than about action. You only have to go back about ten years to find stuff like Steven Seagal’s Hard to Kill and Under Siege, which were genuine action movies, that is, they focused on the actions the main character had to take to get revenge/get justice/save the day, etc. For better or for worse, these movies center on Seagal. Compare this with the Vin Diesel pictures The Fast and the Furious and XXX. Diesel’s role in these movies is to act as if he is ironically amused by all the spectacular effects going on around him. I think he does a pretty good job, but I never get a sense of his characters accomplishing anything–doing anything–taking action.

So what does that leave us when we try to cast our hypothetical hard-boiled action flick? Not too much. The straightforward, low-frills action feature–the kind that Don Siegel used to make–is a thing of the past. These movies are still made, but they’re either direct-to-video or from Hong Kong. Big screen action movies have been emasculated. Casting Parker has become impossible.

I agree, reluctantly. Read the whole thing here.

If any of this piques your interest, the latest Parker novel is Breakout, published last year. (Go here
to check on the current availability of other novels in the series.) The unofficial Parker Web site is here. And Donald Westlake talks about Parker (among other things) here.

It’s a puzzlement, by the way, that Westlake, a writer who is now best known for his charming comic crime novels, should also have dreamed up so comprehensively unfunny a character as Parker, which presumably tells us something interesting about human dualism, the subject matter of all film noir and noir fiction. See today’s almanac entry for further details….

P.S. Speaking of noir, everyone’s favorite hieratical sourpuss has posted a very knowing Raymond Chandler parody. (I’m jealous–I’d kill to be able to write parodies, which I regard as the most subtle form of literary criticism.)

“I do not believe that there is any man, who if the whole truth were known of him, would not seem a monster of depravity; and also I believe that there are very few who have not at the same time virtue, goodness and beauty.”

W. Somerset Maugham, Don Fernando