I'm in New York but I've got three pieces in today's Washington Times. I wrote the On the Edge column, which was cleverly titled (not by me) "Rock in a hard place":
The White Stripes are one of the world's biggest rock bands. It's only fitting that their summer tour includes some of the biggest venues in North America: New York's Madison Square Garden (capacity: 20,000), Fairfax's Patriot Center (capacity: 10,000), Whitehorse's Yukon Arts Centre (capacity: just over 400).I asked some northern Canadians what the last great live show they saw was, and offered a few of my own memories on growing up a music lover in northern Canada.Yes, you read that right. The same band that can fill the most prestigious arena in the country also played a city whose entire population could fit into that arena.
The band is playing all 10 Canadian provinces and the three territories: Whitehorse in Yukon Territory, Yellowknife in Northwest Territories and Iqaluit in the eight-year-old Nunavut Territory.
"We want to take this tour to the far reaches of the Canadian landscape. From the ocean to the permafrost," Stripes frontman Jack White said in announcing the groundbreaking tour.
It's either the silliest or the smartest move in years by a top-tier band...
I interviewed British actress Brenda Blethyn for the first half of the Beyond Hollywood column. Her breakthrough role came when she was almost 50, in Mike Leigh's Secrets & Lies:
Many actresses complain that the quantity and quality of roles dry up as they get older. But Miss Blethyn is still in her prime, working steadily since she became a star.Read on to get her thoughts on the highly anticipated Atonement, the Ian McEwan adaptation due out later this year."Fortunately, I haven't had a problem. But I don't have any ego about the size of the roles I play," she says matter-of-factly. " 'Beyond the Sea,' that was a little tiny part. 'On a Clear Day,' that was a tiny bit. I liked the roles, so I did it."
I also reviewed Introducing the Dwights, the funny new film starring Brenda Blethyn:
Let me introduce you to the Dwights, film's latest hilariously dysfunctional family:Mother Jean (Brenda Blethyn) spends her days working at a canteen, her nights working the club circuit as a stand-up comedienne. Jean had a bit of fame a few decades ago and believes that if it worked once, it'll work again. (A typical joke: "Having sex with a big bloke is like having a wardrobe fall on you in the night -- with the key stuck in the lock.")
My recent National Review piece on Philip K. Dick's inclusion in the Library of America is now available online to all:
"In 1981, less than a year before his death, Philip K. Dick wrote that managing to publish only one of the many non-genre books he had written was the “long-term tragedy” of his creative life. The science-fiction writer published over 30 novels and more than three times as many short stories in his lifetime, but the mainstream success he craved always eluded him. Like many American originals, Dick was taken seriously by the French — some even suggested him as a Nobel Prize candidate — before his own countrymen understood his talent. Even after his death, his reputation didn’t increase at the same rate as his name recognition: Hollywood turned Philip K. Dick into an identifiable brand, but one that was best known for providing a brainy basis for big-budget action flicks.
If only Dick, born in 1928, had lived to 78 instead of just 53. A quarter-century after his death, he is finally considered not just a serious American writer but one of the century’s greatest. At least, that’s one conclusion to be drawn from Dick’s inclusion in the Library of America: the first science-fiction writer to be so canonized in what is the closest thing to secular sainthood in American letters. Best known for collecting the works of such titans as James and Faulkner, the Library of America presents “America’s best and most significant writing in authoritative editions.” And Dick has been included not for his realist books, which finally started appearing in print posthumously, but for some of his most outlandish sci-fi creations.
Some may complain that a genre writer has beaten Hemingway and Upton Sinclair into the Library of America. But these four novels — The Man in the High Castle, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Ubik — are not simply outstanding examples of their form. With their haunting evocations of alienation, thoughtful meditations on reality and religion, and vivid prose style, they are among the best American novels written in the last century..."
In Friday's Washington TImes, I reviewed The Treatment, a film based on the novel by Daniel Menaker:
Now that Woody Allen has decamped to Europe — at least for filmmaking purposes — those of us who looked forward to his yearly chronicles of the love lives of cerebral New Yorkers will take what we can get.I also wrote the second item in the Beyond Hollywood column, noting that the 2006 feature documentary Glastonbury, Julien Temple's film about the legendary music festival, is available free on Movielink.com through Monday.There's The Treatment, for example...
"Writing after work at the kitchen table, I was risking nothing except my sentences. No one knew I was there. There was no one to network with or suck up to. There were not 567 agents and 5,345 editors who imagined, rightly or wrongly, that their lives depended on discovering my unknown self, running me to ground at my Olivetti Lettera 24, breaking me through, publishing me too early, and losing interest when my second book did not fulfill the quirky promise of the first.
There was just one literary agency in Australia in 1962, but I didn’t know what a literary agent was. As for an M.F.A. in creative writing, I’d never heard of such a thing. Denied these distractions, all I could do was write.
...I am thinking that there is no worse place than New York to be a young writer. In my secret heart I believe they should not be here at all, but in Melbourne in 1961 when the bars closed at 6 p.m., there were three channels on TV, and the gas stations shut on Sunday. Who needed Yaddo or MacDowell? This was a perfect place to write."
--Peter Carey
I hope all you Americans out there are having a relaxing Independence Day. I celebrated with an all-American lunch of.. umm.. chicken tikka masala and tara chicken. I'm in New York and we stumbled on what looked like a stylish Indian restaurant. While awaiting our food, I overheard someone a couple tables away rave that it was the best Indian food she'd ever had. In my head, I made fun of this woman. Then I tried the food. And I had to admit, it may have been the best Indian food I've ever had. I apologized to this woman in my head. In any case, I highly recommend Surya in the West Village and in particular their tara chicken, delicious chunks of meat cooked in the tandoor with yogurt, basil, and other yummy spices.
I made up for my holiday-inappropriate lunch by going back to the apartment and listening to WKCR. The station celebrates Louis Armstrong's birthday twice -- on August 4, when scholars think he was actually born, and on July 4, when the man himself always celebrated his birthday. The program's been a very fitting celebration of America. (These things and an all-too-kind mention have very much made my day.)
I would have liked to wander outside more, but the weather here is cloudy and a bit cold -- although I am sitting outside at a cafe right now, with some sadly cold tea. (Of course, I also complain when the hot sun pours down on me in DC.) And it appears it'll be like this the rest of the week. But after a few days in DC, I'll be back here next week, this time mostly for work. Although annoyingly, some people don't seem to think watching movies and interviewing the people who made them is work.
Here's most of my last few weeks of work for the Washington Times:
I went against the critical grain with my review of Sicko:
Michael Moore has been proclaimed the savior of the documentary. He's often credited with single-handedly reinvigorating the genre, bringing millions to the multiplexes for what used to be art-house fare.Then again, I actually know something about one of the subjects discussed in the film: the Canadian health care system. His segment on that topic was disingenuous to the point of disbelief. Perhaps it's because the only Canadians he talks to in any depth are his own relatives.His last film, "Fahrenheit 9/11," is the highest-grossing documentary ever. His previous one, "Bowling for Columbine," won the Best Documentary Oscar.
His latest, "Sicko," is likely to replicate that success: Every sneak preview across the country last week sold out. Mr. Moore is still the big man on the documentary campus.
It's too bad that "Sicko" isn't actually an example of the genre...
Sicko, if not particularly helpful to the health care debate, is entertaining, though:
Mr. Moore is a talented man. His gentle, singsong voice is perfect for sly narration. He is almost always funny when he sets out to be. The best bit here is when he details the great treatment given to Guantanamo Bay detainees. (Including colonoscopies, but I suspect that's just part of the interrogation.)For the Beyond Hollywood column, I spoke to documentary legend Albert Maysles, who took some out from his own projects to serve as cinematographer on the documentary Gypsy Caravan:Without showing how exactly he got there, he's joined in a boat by some September 11 volunteer rescuers who can't get free treatment in the U.S. "They don't want any more than the evildoers," he calls out in the bay over a megaphone.
Albert Maysles could have rested on his laurels decades ago. He and his late brother, David, pioneered documentary feature filmmaking with their American take on cinema verite, evident in such classic portraits as 1968's "Salesman," about four door-to-door Bible salesmen, and 1976's "Grey Gardens," which showed the squalid lives of two secluded relatives of Jacqueline Kennedy (and was recently turned into an unlikely musical).He made some provocative comments on the state of genre, which I found very a propos with the release of Sicko this week:But the 80-year-old filmmaker seems as busy as ever...
The increasing popularity of documentary film today doesn't surprise Mr. Maysles. He says the shift was inevitable, "just the way it's happened in literature, which has moved from fiction to nonfiction."I also reviewed Gypsy Caravan, which is out in DC this week:Still, many of these newer films eschew the "direct cinema" that Mr. Maysles helped found, instead relying on voiceovers, interviews and, often, a distinct agenda.
"It's somewhat unfortunate that so many films are dedicated to a point of view rather than allowing the viewer to exercise his or her own judgment," he argues. "I think that's a higher form."
A documentary, he believes, should give the viewer "an insight into what's going on in the world" rather than a two-hour editorial. And he prefers films about real people — like those Bible salesmen or the Bouvier Beales — to those featuring yet more Hollywood celebrities.
It's unlikely that a single film could end centuries of persecution and prejudice, but if it were possible, "Gypsy Caravan" would be that film.The Roma, better known as Gypsies, originated in northern India and began migrating to Europe and North Africa almost 1,000 years ago. They've been fighting for respect ever since, enduring enslavement, sterilization and concentration camps. However, one learns on watching this glorious, life-affirming documentary, their spirit was never broken.
They poured their suffering — as well as the pleasure they found in love and family — into their music, which has influenced non-Roma all over the world. Spanish flamenco, to give just one example, was created in part by the Gypsies.
"Gypsy Caravan" follows five musical groups from four countries as they make a six-week, often sold-out tour of North America...
Earlier in the week, I reviewed the highest-grossing entertainment event of all time, now making a stop at the Kennedy Center:
"The Phantom of the Opera" is there, inside the Kennedy Center Opera House.The week before, I reviewed A Mighty Heart, which I found to be a missed opportunity:Andrew Lloyd Webber should be pleased. Though the composer was one of the first to bring popular music into musical theater, he's always insisted his work (much of it through-composed) is operatic.
When I interviewed him in December when he received a Kennedy Center Honor, I asked if his next project would be an opera or a musical. "What's the difference?" he responded. "Is 'Phantom of the Opera' an opera?"
Maybe, maybe not.
But this musical about opera certainly features some wonderfully clever operatic pastiches. And with accomplished singing, sumptuous costumes, gorgeous sets and impressive effects, the Cameron Mackintosh/Really Useful Theatre Company's national touring production feels perfectly at home in the District's most prestigious show biz venue.
In fact, the music phoned in by the Kennedy Center Opera House Orchestra is the only element out of place...
Daniel Pearl was a fascinating man. The journalist who was kidnapped and murdered in Pakistan in 2002 grew up in an intellectual Jewish household in Encino, Calif., but ended his life across the world in Muslim Pakistan. He was a member of two groups — Americans and Jews — much hated by fundamentalist terrorists, but he spent his time investigating them. The journalist risked his life both to document a culture and to probe how some in that culture are funding terrorism. He was also an accomplished musician who brought his violin along for impromptu jam sessions in the bars of Asia.For the first half of the Beyond Hollywood column, I talked with A Mighty Heart director Michael Winterbottom:Yes, Daniel Pearl is a compelling character, but you wouldn't know it from the new movie based on his life, "A Mighty Heart."
You learn more about him in the first five minutes of last year's HBO documentary "The Journalist and the Jihadi" than you do in the entire 100 minutes of "A Mighty Heart." Flashbacks (with Dan Futterman as Mr. Pearl) are meant to acquaint us with the man before his death, but all they really reveal is that Mr. Pearl was a very good-looking man and that he was much in love with his wife.
Then again, it's Mariane Pearl who wrote the book on which the film is based and Mariane Pearl who's at the center of this film...
Recreating a true story that had embarrassed the government of Pakistan led to some particular problems filming in that country.After intelligence people told Karachi police to quit cooperating with the film, the director had to get real actors to play the police. They were then arrested -- for "impersonating" police officers.There were security worries. "You make a film that's quite controversial, there are probably people who would like to get publicity by doing something violent," he notes.
It turned out not to be terrorists, however, but the intelligence agencies who proved the real impediment.
"There were always people in the lobby, following us around," he reveals. "They harassed our crew."
The film has even created controversy in the Western world: Some critics have complained about Miss Jolie playing a woman who is part black, even using the term "blackface."I also reviewed the interesting but flawed Angel-A:"It never crossed my mind as an issue because they seemed very similar, very close," Mr. Winterbottom says. Of Mariane, he notes, "Her mom was Cuban, her dad was Dutch. She has a Chinese grandparent. What, are we supposed to find a quarter-Chinese, half-Cuban, half-Dutch, French-speaking-but-could-act-in-English actress? It's ridiculous."
"Angel-A," Luc Besson's latest French feature, starts out as a rather amusing criminal comedy.The week before that, I had a Think Piece about Nancy Drew, in conjunction with the opening of the new film. (Read the whole thing to find out one of the things I was up to as a kid.)The appealing (in both senses of the word) face of Andre (Jamel Debbouze) fills the screen as he muses on his sudden popularity.
"Maybe it's down to me being such a cute, fun-loving kinda guy," he suggests.
Maybe not. None of the many people looking for Andre seem interested in shooting the breeze over a pint. The members of one crowd throw some well-timed punches, while those of another hang Andre off a very high point of the Eiffel Tower.
"Two things were crystal clear," Andre finally admits. "I really had to change my life. And I definitely hated Paris."
As soon as the title character makes her appearance, though, "Angel-A" quickly turns earnest...
It's the post-feminist age, but you might not know it from a look around your local toy and book stores.I also reviewed the film Nancy Drew:From Bratz to Barbie, stereotypes reign. The favorite heroines of young girls are most interested in fashion, and their loftiest goal is to snag Prince Charming. Those passive Disney princesses have had remarkable staying power — the first appeared in 1937's "Snow White," but they have survived second- and third-wave feminism to remain as popular as ever.
Thankfully, in the midst of the tarted-up dolls and royalty-obsessed storybooks, there's one character who could serve as a feminist icon. Never mind that she was created in 1930, years before the word even was used.
If you're looking for a role model who's intelligent and independent, Nancy Drew, Girl Detective, is your man — er, girl.
"Nancy Drew" acknowledges its storied legacy within its first seconds. The new film opens with a shot of a bookcase, its shelves filled with copies of the classic mystery books. One moves off the rack, and we see the same illustrations of a spunky teenage sleuth that girls have been poring over for decades.For the Beyond Hollywood column, I spoke to Olivier Dahan, the French director of a new film about singing legend Edith Piaf:This new Nancy Drew, played by Emma Roberts of Nickelodeon's "Unfabulous," doesn't look all that different from the Nancy Drew many of us remember. She has crawled right out of the 1960s, clothing, manners, roadster and all.
But the movie is very much an update on the series that was created in 1930, revised in the 1960s and on, and has appeared on our screens, big and small, for almost as long.
Nancy's new sleuth kit has an IPod, to give just one example.
Thankfully, she's still the fiercely independent girl who doesn't allow her soft spot for Ned Nickerson (Max Thieriot) to get in the way of crime-solving.
It wasn't the singular sound of Edith Piaf's voice that led French director Olivier Dahan to make a film about the singer. It was her singular look. "I wasn't a fan of her music," Mr. Dahan admits on a recent stop in the District to promote "La Vie en Rose" (titled "La Mome" in his homeland) opening in theaters today. "I don't like the word fan, anyway. I'm still not a fan."
I'm back from a sojourn in Europe. But as usual, it wasn't no work and all play. I had two pieces in Friday's Washington Times.
The first was a feature on DC's increasing status as a cultural capital:
It was one of the cultural events of the year. Literary lion Philip Roth received this year's PEN/Faulkner Award For Fiction for his novel Everyman last month. Joining him on the stage were three of the finalists, some of the country's best short story writers. Intellectual celebrities, such as actor and playwright Wallace Shawn, dotted the mingling crowd.I also wrote the Beyond Hollywood column, which was dedicated to a look at this year's lineup at Silverdocs, DC's annual documentary film fest that starts Tuesday:This celebration of serious fiction didn't take place in New York, the country's publishing capital, however -- it was right here in the District.
It wasn't even the only event last month that brought the cultural cognoscenti to Washington. Paul Simon received the first annual Library of Congress Gershwin Prize for Popular Song. Performers at the star-studded gala at the Warner Theatre included Stevie Wonder and Philip Glass.
When you think of an arts and culture destination, you probably think New York or Los Angeles. "D.C. is known really for its political and news media celebrities more than anything else," notes Library of Congress director of communications Matt Raymond.
That's starting to change. AmericanStyle magazine just named Washington the fourth-best arts destination among big cities -- ahead of, among others, Los Angeles...
Silverdocs gets bigger and bigger every year. The American Film Institute/Discovery Channel documentary festival has quickly become one of the most important showcases for nonfiction film. Its fifth annual program starts Tuesday at the AFI Silver Theatre with more than one hundred films, an additional day -- it runs through June 17 -- and four new awards.One of those is the Beyond Belief Award, presented to "a feature documentary that shows excellence in telling complex issues in faith and society." Many documentaries that get widespread attention are the fun titles focusing on the amusing foibles of obsessives -- like last year's Silverdocs feature Wordplay -- or warm stories only a cynic could hate -- like March of the Penguins. So it's good to see recognition given to those filmmakers grappling with some of humanity's most intractable problems, even if they don't always do well at the multiplex.
The festival features a number of docs under the Beyond Belief rubric, but what might be the festival's most fascinating film on the subject wasn't given the classification. Lake of Fire didn't have to be about faith -- but Tony Kaye's look at the American abortion debate most certainly is...
I have two pieces in today's Washington Times.
I wrote the On the Edge column on the extremely funny new film Knocked Up:
The premise of the new comedy Knocked Up is succinctly summarized on its poster: "What if this guy got you pregnant?"For the Beyond Hollywood column, I interviewed actress Elisabeth Shue about her new film, Gracie:Underneath that tag line is a huge photograph of the movie's star, Seth Rogen.
He's no Brad Pitt.
He's not even an Adrien Brody.
...
Some reviewers -- including our own Christian Toto -- don't find this modern-day Beauty and the Beast story completely believable. Sure, Ben is a sweet guy and he admirably takes responsibility for his unborn baby. But Alison is Hollywood good-looking -- couldn't she do much better?
Perhaps it takes a female critic to point out that while Knocked Up may be fantasy for many men -- minus the unplanned pregnancy -- it's reality for many women...
"It took a lot to get attention in my family," Elisabeth Shue laughs. "No wonder I'm an actress."
Actors are normally reticent to discuss their families publicly. But Miss Shue isn't just opening up about her life in interviews. Gracie, a film opening in theaters today, is bringing a fictionalized portrait of the Shue family -- particularly Elisabeth -- to the big screen...
My pieces in the Friday and Saturday Washington Times:
I declared Red Road the best film of the year so far. It's about a woman working as a CCTV monitor in Glasgow whose inserts herself into the life of man she sees on screen:
English writer-director Andrea Arnold made her debut feature, Red Road, largely following the strictures of the Dogme 95 school started by Lars von Trier. Everything is filmed on location; the action is captured with hand-held cameras through natural light; there's little music and no "superficial action." It is a taut piece of filmmaking.I also reviewed Jindabyne, an Australian film starring an Irish actor and an American actress, based on a short story by the American master Raymond Carver:Even with the restraint, Red Road manages to be a slowly revealed character study, a tense thriller and a moving drama...
Local legend has it that under the lake near Jindabyne, the small Australian town that gives the movie its name, is a "drowned town" whose inhabitants were overwhelmed by the tides. However, it's the people of the town above water who are drowning now, threatened by the tide of emotions unleashed by a single thoughtless act.Finally, I interviewed Laura Linney, who stars in Jindabyne:At the beginning of a fishing trip over a long weekend, Stewart (Gabriel Byrne) and his three friends discover a corpse floating along the lake...
"It's been the great unexpected surprise of my life," Laura Linney muses. She's not talking about her two Oscar nominations (for You Can Count on Me and Kinsey). Nor is she talking about her two Emmys (for Frasier and Wild Iris). No, the talented and famous Laura Linney is talking about being a film and television actress at all...
From a story in today's Washington Times on the Washington National Opera:
In its contemporary version of "La Boheme" -- a co-production with Teatr Wielki of Warsaw, Poland -- WNO will transform the central character, the writer Rodolfo, into a photographer to connect with younger audiences, Mr. Domingo said.Gosh, I know some observers have been predicting the end of the novel (as I noted below), but do today's youth really not even know what a writer is?
I haven't seen much in the way of reports on Saturday night's PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction ceremony, held at the Folger Shakespeare Library here in DC. So I thought I'd take a page from GalleyCat's "Scene @" series and post something here.
I should say first that the highlight of the evening for me was getting the chance to sit down -- with just three other reporters -- with winner Philip Roth. (I'll be publishing some of his comments in a story in the Washington Times.) "I think it's the best of the prizes," he says of the PEN/Faulkner Award. "Writers read from their work rather than thank their psychiatrists."
He came off as a very genial man who refuses to rest on his laurels. "It's a job," he says of writing. "It definitely hasn't become easier. Neither has become harder." He still works between eight and ten hours most days. He does this despite the fact that he's "absolutely sure" reading is "going out of fashion." He says rather matter of factly, "They pay attention to numerous other things now. The age of the book is coming an end."
As for his own reading, he says, "I find myself reading and re-reading the old classics. It's my last go round with some of the great writers." (That last sentence is just sobering, isn't it?) He's been particularly taken with Turgenev lately, commending to our attention First Love and Torrents of Spring. I ask about the contemporary writers he likes. "The writer I felt the greatest admiration for died a few years ago -- Saul Bellow. Bellow and Faulkner are the backbone of American literature in the 20th century." (He says Faulkner wasn't an influence, just a writer he loves.) He also mentions Don DeLillo, John Updike, E.L. Doctorow, and Joyce Carol Oates. He doesn't mention anyone under the age of 68. But he did say earlier that he actually read PEN/Faulkner finalist Charles D'Ambrosio in The Paris Review some 15 years ago and sent him a fan letter. (For his part, the amiable D'Ambrosio told the crowd he knew he'd arrived as a writer when he lost to Roth.)
I ask Roth about the upcoming film adaptation of his novel The Dying Animal. He doesn't have much to say. "These things don't turn out very well," he offers with a rueful grin. (One wonders if he was thinking of the recent adaptation of The Human Stain.) "The child in me gets excited about it, but the adult in me knows better."
Judge Debra Magpie Earling, in presenting the prize, says, "Roth's Everyman is the most terrifying novel I have read in some time." The other two judges were John Dufresne and David Gates, who introduced the finalists -- Charles D’Ambrosio (The Dead Fish Museum), Deborah Eisenberg (Twilight of the Superheroes), Amy Hempel (The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel), and Edward P. Jones (All Aunt Hagar’s Children). All but Jones were there to read from their work. There were many fine words spoken, but perhaps the best introduction was the one for Amy Hempel. "If there's any living writer to whom the phrase 'writer's writer' applies, it wouldn't be Amy Hempel," David Gates begins, noting that the writer would disavow such a cliché. Hempel's work may also have gotten the biggest laugh from the crowd, when Gates read a line from "In the Animal Shelter": "Every time you see a beautiful woman, someone is tired of her."
I was thinking during the ceremony that, given that all four finalists are short story writers, perhaps short fiction isn't dead after all. (Roth's winning novel was also a short one, by the way.) Of course, I wasn't the only one who thought so: See this story in The Washington Post. It makes rather a lot of the same points I made in my Doublethink piece of exactly two years ago.
From the Post:
We live in an era, after all, when the universal complaint is that we don't have enough free time; in a nation that is full of shortening attention spans, that, as Edward Jones puts it, "lives on instant stuff." Doesn't this mean that there should be growing demand for the kind of fiction that can be started and finished over a lunch hour or on a long subway ride?Well -- no.
Talk to enough writers, editors and agents and the attention-span argument gets knocked down pretty fast. "Any good story," as Eisenberg puts it, "is going to be compressed and very, very layered," which means it requires more of your attention, not less.
And here's a long excerpt from my Doublethink piece:
It would be easy to blame the decline of the short story on short attention spans, caused by the breathless amusements of MTV and unnecessary efficiencies like all the news you need to know in five minutes. But wouldn't a trend favoring economy result in short stories being more popular? Stephen King sells millions, and any one of his later novels is heavy enough to kill a cat (in hardcover anyway).The Post story is still worth reading, of course, and features interviews with some different types from those in my piece.On the contrary, says Greg Hollingshead, author and professor at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada. "TV and the Internet have easily consumed those short timespans that formerly might have been devoted to reading short stories." Maud Newton agrees: "It's easier to watch a half-hour TV show than to read a short story. I'm sure the rise of TV had something to do with the demise of the Saturday Evening Post back in 1969 and has continued to affect the demand for short fiction."
McGarry goes so far as to argue that television is the reason magazines have replaced fiction with non-fiction. "I think fiction upsets people more; it takes them out of their world; it entangles them in other lives in a very intimate way," she says. "Readers of slick magazines may be trying to resist this. They want diversion but they don't want to leave the safety and familiarity of their own lives and minds."
And while short stories may be short, they are concentrated. "A reader loses himself in a novel, but can stay there for a longer time, until the novel's world becomes familiar, comfortable," says McGarry. "A short story takes you in, but spits you right back out again." Hollingshead notes, "This was Frank O'Connor's argument in The Lonely Voice: Short fiction is about people at the margins, the novel addresses the mainstream middle class."
Newton suggests that the sustained popularity of the novel may be a form of rebellion against the brave new multimedia world -- a possibility that Hollingshead takes to the next logical step. "The strength of novels is that nothing else enables you to submerge yourself in an imagined world over several days or even weeks. And to be able to enter and leave that world according to your own schedule and even to carry the thing around with you, if you want. When technology comes up with something that can do that and that won't require the effort of reading, it will replace the novel. Meanwhile all mass literary hope rests with the novel."
"[T]he very nature of the genre does not require much in plot and structure. It only requires a lot of bullets."
--an IMDb poster on the upcoming (aptly titled) film Shoot 'Em Up
"I don't know why this chafes me so. I think it's because there's a certain strain of free-market conservatism which insists that the only values are market values and that whatever a market declares is the Eternal Truth. These are the loud people who tell you that CEO X, who has driven his company into the ground, must have been worth $140 million a year, because if he wasn't, nobody would have been willing to pay him the money. I hate these people.
I'm as much for the free market as the next guy, I suppose. But market failures are real and pervasive and much, much more common than most conservatives would like to acknowledge. Sometimes they work themselves out over time, sometimes they don't. In any event, I'm happy to live my consumerist life by the free market, but we should never allow it to dictate to us moral truths."
--Jonathan Last
I have made my first appearance in the Philadelphia Inquirer, with a review of Jim Crace's novel The Pesthouse:
America's future looks a lot like its past. At least that's the supposition of Jim Crace's dystopian fiction The Pesthouse...
The May 28 issue of National Review contains my essay on the new Library of America edition of Four Novels of the 1960s by Philip K. Dick. You can read it online if you're a subscriber and the print edition should hit newsstands soon:
In 1981, less than a year before his death, Philip K. Dick wrote that managing to publish only one of the many non-genre books he had written was the “long-term tragedy” of his creative life. The science-fiction writer published over 30 novels and more than three times as many short stories in his lifetime, but the mainstream success he craved always eluded him. Like many American originals, Dick was taken seriously by the French — some even suggested him as a Nobel Prize candidate — before his own countrymen understood his talent. Even after his death, his reputation didn’t increase at the same rate as his name recognition: Hollywood turned Philip K. Dick into an identifiable brand, but one that was best known for providing a brainy basis for big-budget action flicks.If only Dick, born in 1928, had lived to 78 instead of just 53. A quarter-century after his death, he is finally considered not just a serious American writer but one of the century’s greatest. At least, that’s one conclusion to be drawn from Dick’s inclusion in the Library of America: the first science-fiction writer to be so canonized in what is the closest thing to secular sainthood in American letters. Best known for collecting the works of such titans as James and Faulkner, the Library of America presents “America’s best and most significant writing in authoritative editions.” And Dick has been included not for his realist books, which finally started appearing in print posthumously, but for some of his most outlandish sci-fi creations.
Some may complain that a genre writer has beaten Hemingway and Upton Sinclair into the Library of America. But these four novels — The Man in the High Castle, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Ubik — are not simply outstanding examples of their form. With their haunting evocations of alienation, thoughtful meditations on reality and religion, and vivid prose style, they are among the best American novels written in the last century...
I had a rather busy week -- I have six pieces in today's Washington Times.
The first is a feature on Cormac McCarthy's novel The Road, entitled "Time to go, girl?":
One woman talks of "the book's grimness." Another goes further, declaring, "This is perhaps the most grim book I've ever read."I interviewed some of those women. They were all surprised by the choice, but they might surprise critics with their reaction to it.Another reader sums up the setting as "a colorless, hopeless post-apocalyptic world."
Such comments perhaps aren't surprising about a novel that won the Pulitzer Prize. But have they ever before been uttered of an Oprah's Book Club selection?
Oprah Winfrey chose Cormac McCarthy's 2006 novel The Road as the latest book to receive her influential imprimatur. "Oh, my goodness," Dianne Luce, president of the Cormac McCarthy Society, told the Chicago Tribune on hearing the news. "Those poor women don't know what they're getting into."
I gave three and a half stars (out of four) to both movies I reviewed this week, a rather rare occurrence. The first is a drama:
Away From Her is a deeply intelligent film about the burdens of marriage and memory. Given both the subject matter and the deft way in which it's handled, it's astonishing that it was made by a first-time director who has just turned 28.The second is a comedy:Canadian actress Sarah Polley (Go, My Life Without Me) shows here that she's as talented behind a camera as she is in front of one. Not only directing, she has also astutely adapted the work of another Canadian, Alice Munro; Away From Her is based on her short story "The Bear Came Over the Mountain."
The Valet is a thoroughly delightful farce. It's a tale of an ordinary man who finds himself in an extraordinary situation, and it's made up of elements with which we're all familiar: the love-hate relationship with the best friend, the rich guy with a sense of entitlement, the unappreciative girlfriend. And the best part is, writer-director Francis Veber has fun at every character's expense.I also interviewed the directors of both those films for the Beyond Hollywood column:With such universal humor, The Valet should appeal to everyone -- rich and poor, young and old, American and non-American.
So I'm hesitant to report that The Valet's original title is La Doublure and that this broadly appealing farce was made in France...
French writer-director Francis Veber has had perhaps more of his films remade in America than any other foreign director. But he was still surprised by the interest in The Valet (La Doublure), which opens in theaters today.And on a completely different note, I interviewed rap star 50 Cent in Los Angeles about his latest film role:"The day after the first screening of the film, at the Los Angeles Film Festival, I had something like five studios fighting to buy the remake," he reports on a recent stop in the District. "I realized it must be less French than I thought."
***
[Away from Her is] not the first film that deals with Alzheimer's disease -- there are 2004's "The Notebook" and 2001's "Iris," for example. But director Sarah Polley, who adapted the screenplay from a short story by Alice Munro, has made it a first in one sense.
"The thing they all had in common that I really wanted to avoid in this film was the reliance on showing these people when they were in their 20s," says Miss Polley during a recent visit to the District. "It's like we need to justify making a movie about people who are older. There's something that rubs me the wrong way about that."
It's an insightful comment, but surprising coming from a first-time director who just turned 28...
The actors and actresses playing American soldiers coming home from a tour of duty in Iraq in Home of the Brave, opening in theaters today, must have done grueling research. They probably talked to men and women who have seen and experienced violence most of them can barely imagine -- with one exception.Read on to hear 50 compare himself to President Bush and talk about working with Samuel L. Jackson, who once declared he'd never act alongside a rapper.Perhaps playing a soldier was a cakewalk for Curtis James Jackson III, better known as rap star 50 Cent...
Speaking of being lazy, I forgot to post links to my Washington Times pieces of last week.
For my feature "High culture meets haute couture," I got to talk to one of my favorite pianists (and fellow Canadian) Angela Hewitt. In fact, I have comments from a number of great classical artists -- Leif Ove Andsnes, Daniel Hope, Lisa Kaplan, and Tanya Bannister -- and a couple insiders:
All eyes were on Jean-Yves Thibaudet when the pianist walked onto the Kennedy Center stage earlier this season.I also reviewed a French film that is a thriller without the thrills:It wasn't simply because the audience wanted to hear the artist's sensitive interpretations of fellow Frenchmen Debussy and Messiaen. No, one couldn't help but stare at Mr. Thibaudet because of how he looked.
Call it classical chic.
The pianist is one of a growing number of classical musicians who are partnering with fashion designers. They are part of a new generation of image-conscious concert artists who are bringing style, attitude and sex appeal to what was long viewed as a somewhat fusty vocation...
Revenge is a dish best served cold in The Page Turner (La Tourneuse de pages).A wronged child waits until adulthood to get back at the woman who, thoughtlessly but inadvertently, changed the child's life. When the revenge-seeker goes in for the kill, she's swift and merciless -- The Page Turner shows both the wrong and its aftermath in just 85 minutes...
I thought I should offer up some proof that I sometimes neglect this space simply because I'm not around. (Other times it's because I'm busy; still other times it's because I'm lazy.) Here I am in sunny Denver with my cousin Melissa, who looks damn good after just giving birth to her second baby (who has the delicious name of Miles) a couple months ago.
"Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book."
--Cicero
"The only thing that makes it fun is the anticipation of applause."
--Tom Wolfe on writing
I found this Agence France-Presse story disturbing. Not because of the news that "Alain Delon, the 71-year-old French film star, has been laid up by a minor heart problem." More frightening was the revelation that there exists a French play called Sur La Route de Madison that is an adaptation of the American film and book The Bridges of Madison County. First EuroDisney, now this?
I'm not sure I should post a link to this article. After all, the subhead is "Fans of British novelist Barbara Pym are as quirky as her books." And I did rather like her novel Excellent Women -- I'm always looking for Jane Austen-esque books from this century. I also seem to be about 50 years below the average age of the Barbara Pym fan. But while it mostly deals in biography, and offers only hints of what sounds like interesting material at an annual conference, this CBC article is still worth a read for its look at an underappreciated author:
...she wrote in the morning, she cobbled together overheard snippets and notes in her journals, and she was a solitary creature. “There’s very little you can do not to be lonely,” she says [in an interview] with a twisted smile...
Lionel Shriver, whose novel We Need to Talk About Kevin deals with the aftermath of a school shooting, had an op-ed in Sunday's Washington Post on the Virginia Tech killings. It's not without problems -- a very minor one being that author or editor can't seem to decide whether to print the killer's name in the Korean or American form -- but it's very worth reading. I particularly liked this paragraph:
Consider what we have done to airports. Thanks to Richard Reid, we're obliged to dump our sneakers on the belt, struggle to tie our laces on the other end and sacrifice our cigarette lighters -- since otherwise, so goes the default presumption, we will all set our explosive shoes on fire. Thanks to a handful of British would-be terrorists who have yet to be convicted, we travel with humiliating Ziploc bags of no more than 3 ounces of shampoo, since otherwise we would obviously combine our full-size Herbal Essences with our chamomile conditioner and blow out the side of the plane. I doubt I'm alone in not feeling one whit safer as a result of this theatrical pretense of "security." Is this what we want to do to our schools?Finally. I've been feeling this way for months, but haven't found anyone else who seems to care. Americans often seem to be all too willing to give up their rights, great or small.
Shriver's comment about "humiliating Ziploc bags" is just right. I took a flight just a couple days ago at what seemed like a particularly zealous airport. They were going through many, many carry-on bags by hand after putting them through the x-ray machine. Why, I couldn't tell. They seemed to know from the scanner just what was in the bags, and though mine were searched quite rigorously, nothing was confiscated. I was told, however, with a stern look that, "You have a lot of liquids." Yes, my regulation Ziploc bag was full. I'm a young woman -- how many of us don't carry a fair number of lotions and potions along on a trip? And who doesn't grab that hotel-issue lotion to take home if it smells good? But since I don't seem to have broken any rules, I wonder why I received what was most certainly an admonition. Perhaps this screener would prefer it if I quit wearing my contact lenses -- I need to bring solution with me, after all -- in the interests of greater airport security. Or at least the appearance of it.
Here's a funny follow-up to my feature a couple months back on a controversy in in-flight entertainment. In writing about censors in the air, I had reported that a number of airlines aired a version of The Queen in which the word "God" was excised seven times. Now AP reports that one airline has edited Casino Royale in an interesting way: "British Airways cut a cameo by Richard Branson from its in-flight version of the latest James Bond film and blurred out the tail fin of a Virgin Atlantic plane seen in the movie." BA's move is all the more lame because, as AP notes, Virgin kept BA's logo when it aired another Bond film, Die Another Day.
My pieces in Friday's Washington Times:
I interviewed Paul Verhoeven (director of the highly enjoyable but widely misunderstood satire Starship Troopers), who has returned to Holland to make his first film there in over 20 years:
In Paul Verhoeven's latest film, Black Book (Zwartboek in the original Dutch), almost no character is wholly good or evil, from the Nazi officers occupying Holland to the members of the Dutch Resistance attacking them.I also reviewed Black Book:"Is that not what life is about?" asks the director, speaking by telephone from Los Angeles. "I think it's more real this way than the black and white portrayals we see in American movies, where people are just good or bad. Even good people can do mean things, and mean people can sometimes be generous."
Of course, Mr. Verhoeven has made his share of American movies...
Black Book is his first Dutch film in 20 years. It may feature a European take on character, but it has plenty of the trademark sex and violence for which Mr. Verhoeven's American films are known. He says it's just another example of hewing close to reality.
"Life is full of violence. It would be really a cheat to show 1944 and 1945 without an abundance of violence," he argues. "Sexuality has been treated in my movies always in an open way. I attach a lot of importance to sexuality because we are all biological animals."
Paul Verhoeven, after 20 years of making big-budget blockbusters in America, has returned to his native Netherlands. He took everything he learned with him.I also reviewed The TV Set, directed by Jake Kasdan, whose movie The Zero Effect is not nearly as known as it should be:His new movie is an example of what can happen when Old and New World sensibilities join forces. Black Book (Zwartboek) combines a European morality tale with a sleek American thriller, resulting in a deeply entertaining film that's also a serious exploration of rules during wartime...
Anyone who thinks there's an awful lot of drivel on television -- and wonders how it got there -- should enjoy The TV Set.I also had a brief in the Beyond Hollywood column on Filmfest D.C., going on now, in which I mentioned one of my favorites from the Toronto International Film Festival. It's the closing night film:This sharp satire, which follows a single show from inception to possible pick-up, demonstrates how even good series invariably seem to go bad...
This year's focus is new films from France. You couldn't do better than attend the festival's closing film, Paris, je t'aime. This piece, which played at the Toronto International Film Festival last year, features 20 short films by acclaimed directors, all exploring a different neighborhood in the City of Light.
The Coen brothers' entry, set at the Tuileries metro stop, is almost entirely silent. Steve Buscemi carries the short with his expressive face. Horror master Wes Craven's entry is surprisingly sweet, its supernatural element a visit from the late wit Oscar Wilde. But the best of the bunch is an insightful look at the French Muslim's world, from Bend It Like Beckham director Gurinder Chadha...
I think I blushed when I read this post on GalleyCat, one of my must-read sites, naming me as a "potential lit crit hottie." It's true that I spend the majority of the time at my day job writing about film. But just before I started there, I spent a couple of years as a biweekly books columnist. And as books are my first love, I spend most of my freelance time reviewing them. (My recent piece on Joan Didion for National Review is now online, by the way.) I'm also the fiction editor of Doublethink magazine, choosing and editing the short story for each issue. All my own published works there -- including my own short story, I suppose -- deal with literary fiction. (I really mention this to remind readers that I'm always looking for submissions -- we aim for stories between 2,000 and 4,000 words. We pay quite decently.)
Perhaps I'm just making myself feel a little better about spending so much time watching movies. I just wrote two stories about an animated film about fast-food items, after all. But what I really wanted to say was that even as an arts and entertainment writer at a daily newspaper, I get the chance to write about literature. In today's paper, for example, I have the "On the Edge" piece with what I'd like to think is an interesting argument about the great American writers of the twentieth century:
On the final pages of her 880-page biography Edith Wharton, released this week, Hermione Lee recounts her visit to the novelist's neglected grave in Versailles. "[T]he tomb was covered with weeds, old bottles and a very ancient pot of dead flowers," she writes. Miss Lee "tidied up" the grave, weeding it and planting a single silk flower.One hopes her magisterial biography will do the same thing for Miss Wharton's reputation.
When the phrase "great American novelist" is tossed around, the 20th-century names most often cited are F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner. But a trio of female writers -- Miss Wharton, Willa Cather and Dawn Powell -- has done just as much to chronicle the American psyche.
These three aren't simply undervalued women who in the name of "diversity" deserve a more secure place in the canon -- they should be at its peak.
That they're not says much about how literary reputation is born and sustained. Experimentalism counts for a lot; so does cutting a romantic figure...
I'm all about animation in today's Washington Times:
I review the Aqua Teen Hunger Force movie:
There have been many times, reviewing a film, when this critic has been tempted to say simply, "If you like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing you'll like. If you don't, you won't."That maxim might never be truer than for Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters -- even taking David Lynch's films into account.
The movie is based on what is likely the most successful original series on the Cartoon Network's Adult Swim late-night animation block -- this, despite the fact that the charms of this surreal television show are nearly impossible to explain.
Aqua Teen Hunger Force explores the foibles of three New Jersey roommates who just happen to be a self-centered milkshake, a thoughtful pack of fries and a really dumb but cute piece of meat.
In the Beyond Hollywood column, I talk to Dana Snyder, perhaps the best voice actor in the business, who brings Aqua Teen's Master Shake to life:
Dana Snyder, like many struggling actors, put in his share of time on the boards. He did plays and musicals, comedy in New York and regional theater around the country. "That's all I did," he recalls, speaking by telephone. "That was all I wanted."In the second half of the Beyond Hollywood column, I talk to Satoshi Kon. The director will be talking about his films at the Smithsonian's anime marathon on Saturday:Then he found fame as a trash-talking milkshake.
Speaking through a translator by telephone soon after he touched down in this country, Mr. Kon reports this will be his first visit to Washington. "I'm always excited by events like this," he says. "I know, logically, about the fact that there are fans of my work in America, but it's hard for that feeling to sink in."
His acclaimed films are known for their exploration of serious themes and their psychological complexity.
"There's a presumed stereotype that live-action films carry more dramatic content or more depth than animated films, and that's not an idea that I've ever shared," he says.
The April 23 issue of The American Conservative, which should be hitting newsstands now, contains my review of A Photographer's Life: 1990 - 2005, Annie Leibovitz's latest book. It's proven controversial because of the many pictures of the photographer's lover, the late Susan Sontag. Leibovitz shows Sontag stricken with cancer in her final days and even as she lies dead. I think that this is an important book, one that "marks a new phase for our most famous celebrity chronicler." Here's a snippet:
Perhaps no one has done more than Annie Leibovitz to make celebrities the gods of the 21st century. Her breathtaking photos inspire nothing less than worship. Perhaps A Photographer's Life, then, is to serve as a mea culpa. Nicole Kidman would never let Leibovitz photograph her as a real person, imperfect and just as subject to the ravages of age as the rest of us. But Sontag did, even if she never meant for the photos to be seen. Through her personal relationship with one professional contact -- she met Sontag when she photographed her for a book cover -- Leibovitz has succeeded in calling her entire career into question.
"Bad women are always the romanticists, the sentimentalists to begin with. They are bad but tragic or beautiful to themselves and it is this quality of imagination that makes them artists."
--Dawn Powell
I gave three stars to both films I reviewed in Friday's Washington Times.
The first is The Wind That Shakes the Barley:
"The Wind That Shakes the Barley" is the title of a 19th-century Irish rebel song. The Irish have revolted against English rule for centuries, but it's the Troubles of the early 20th century that have repeatedly found their way onto celluloid.The second is First Snow:The latest in this genre, British filmmaker Ken Loach's The Wind That Shakes the Barley, is a beautiful but brutal film...
As the new film First Snow begins, you might be forgiven for thinking you've stepped into a repertory showing of Memento.It opens with the voice of actor Guy Pearce giving something of a philosophical monologue over a striking visual image -- much like the 2000 film.
In fact, First Snow contains a lot of familiar elements: the startlingly accurate fortuneteller, the old friend out for revenge, the question of what to do when you know your days are numbered.
Yet first-time filmmaker Mark Fergus manages to take these standbys -- and more than a touch of classic noir -- and turn them into something that feels new...
My piece on Elliot Goldenthal's opera Grendel, directed by Julie Taymor, is in the April 9 issue of the Weekly Standard:
"I've discovered that I don't have that much talent, really," the composer Elliot Goldenthal confessed a decade ago. "If I work on something for 10 years or three weeks it's not going to make a difference. It's not going to get any better. No matter how many years I work on something I'm never going to get to Beethoven's level."That last sentence is a truism for any modern composer. But the rest of the sentiment is surprisingly humble coming from someone who works regularly in Hollywood--and particularly odd coming from the man who scored one of the most ambitious new operas in recent memory.
Grendel, with a $2.8-million budget, was the cornerstone of the Los Angeles Opera's 20th-anniversary season. The joint production with Lincoln Center premiered in Los Angeles last year and was later staged in New York as the centerpiece of the Lincoln Center Festival. The bicoastal nature of the project was fitting: Grendel was, more than anything else, a high-minded partnership between Hollywood and Broadway...
I had a great time in New York last weekend. But I couldn't fit in everything I wanted to do, so I'm going back today. I saw Joan Didion's play The Year of Magical Thinking, but I'll save my thoughts for the magazine piece I'm writing on it.
I also saw Murray Perahia play Avery Fisher Fall. He's one of my favorite pianists and was one of the main reasons for my trip. It was a wide-ranging program, with Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, and Schumann. This New York Sun review gets a bit closer to my feelings than the New York Times review, although I have to disagree with the critic's somewhat tepid notes on the Chopin.
I was less than impressed, however, with the New York audience. Talking during the performance, even a cell phone going off -- which rang and rang, its possessor perhaps too embarrassed to shut it off and admit ownership. What took the cake, however, was the couple that came in late. They walked down the aisle just after the pianist finished the first piece, a Beethoven sonata. Then they stood there, inexplicably waiting until he started playing again before they decided to go to their seats. This was accompanied by apologies out loud that could be heard eight rows up. The pianist had just begun playing a Bach partita -- and I'm most fond of Murray Perahia's Bach.
I have four pieces in today's Washington Times:
I reviewed Into Great Silence, a documentary that follows the daily lives of Carthusian monks:
Film is a visual medium. But few of its current practitioners make their art only through images.That's one of the reasons the documentary Into Great Silence (Die Grosse Stille) is so astonishing. The film has very little dialogue and even less of a plot.
Yet, it's entirely engrossing...
I reviewed The Lookout, which I found didn't quite live up to its promise:
Scott Frank has had a distinguished career writing intelligent, noir-ish films.He made his name in 1991 when Dead Again, just his second screenplay, was turned into a clever movie by Kenneth Branagh. He adapted two Elmore Leonard novels into the acclaimed films Get Shorty and Out of Sight. The second, a Steven Soderbergh film, got the writer an Oscar nomination in 1999 for best adapted screenplay. He then turned a Philip K. Dick story into Minority Report for Steven Spielberg.
The Lookout, the writer's directorial debut, follows in the same thematic tradition. The script isn't as tight as those he previously wrote, however. As talented as Mr. Frank is, The Lookout raises the question of how much of his previous success had to do with such accomplished collaborators as Messrs. Branagh, Soderbergh and Spielberg...
I wrote the Beyond Hollywood column, profiling a website that bills itself as an online film festival:
Al Gore isn't the only former Democratic senator who ran for president in 2000 moving into the world of small films.Bill Bradley is one of eight luminaries listed in the "advisors and investors" section of Jaman.com. The new site offers viewers access to a huge library of independent and world cinema.
The collaboration may not be as odd as it seems. The start-up, whose online doors opened just six weeks ago, has the same lofty goal as some politicians: to bring people together...
I also reviewed the new Showtime miniseries The Tudors. Some of it was cut for space, so I'm printing it here with some cuts restored:
The Tudors, Showtime's new miniseries, is insouciant about history, sometimes anachronistic and seems to have been created simply to give HBO a run for its money.It's also completely addictive.
The 10-part series, which cost $42 million to make, premieres on the cable channel Sunday night at 10. It aims at nothing less than making us rethink an icon.
We're all familiar with the fat, pompous Henry VIII from Hans Holbein's famous portrait. The Tudors offers us something rather different: The attractive, magnetic young king he was before that.
Producers have found just the man for the part in Irish actor Jonathan Rhys Meyers (Woody Allen's Match Point, CBS' miniseries Elvis): He's intelligent, sexy, decisive, headstrong but not out of control. What more could you want in a king?
The very first scenes establish the tone of The Tudors. "We meet to consider questions of great moment," Henry tells his gathered advisers. It's around 1520, and Henry, not yet 30, has been on the throne for a decade.
The French have murdered England's ambassador in Urbino -- Henry's own uncle. With his advisers' agreement, he decides to declare war. But Henry can't be bothered with the details. He tells Cardinal Thomas Wolsey (Sam Neill, Jurassic Park) to arrange matters. "Now," the king says, "I can go play."This recreation involves some very strenuous exercise with a comely blonde. His first words to her after they've finished: "How is your husband?"
The Tudors has a steamy mix of sex and politics. Comparisons to such HBO series as The Sopranos and Rome are inevitable. Tudors has the same generous helpings of sex and violence -- although it's never off-the-charts graphic -- combined with slightly highbrow thematic elements that make viewers feel less guilty about enjoying themselves so much. Producer Ben Silverman might have summed up the series ethos when he told the London Telegraph of the man with six wives, "The fact is, his d**k changed the course of history, literally."
Creator, writer and producer Michael Hirst, who wrote the script for Elizabeth, the feature film that starred Cate Blanchett as Henry's daughter, says in the press notes that Showtime asked him how accurate The Tudors was and that he guessed, off the top of his head, 85 percent.
It might be lower because Tudors is riddled with historical inaccuracies.
For starters, Henry's first wife, Catherine of Aragon, was only five years older than the king, but she's played by an actress (Maria Doyle Kennedy of The Commitments) 13 years older than Mr. Meyers.
Gabrielle Anwar (Scent of a Woman) is a lusty Princess Margaret, the king's sister. But the details of her life make it clear she's based not on the grandmother of Mary, Queen of Scots, but Princess Mary, another of the king's sisters. Here, however, the princess marries not the king of France but the king of Portugal. (Her sex scenes are clearly influenced by Hollywood; what English princess would have such tanned legs?)And while Joan Bergin's costumes are quite stunning -- Henry is dressed ostentatiously, with fabrics as elaborate as those of the women -- they're not exactly the sort of thing worn in the Tudor period.
Finally, many historians argue that Henry wasn't even particularly promiscuous.
But never mind the historical license, the source material is inherently rich in dramatic conflicts. The first is that within Henry himself. He's an intelligent man, a humanist who struggles to reconcile his ideas with his hope for immortality. He insists, "I intend to be a just ruler. But tell me this: Why is Henry V remembered?" Hint: It was a battle, not a tax break.
Another interesting intellectual battle is waged between Wolsey and Thomas More (Jeremy Northam, Gosford Park). The former -- the putative man of God -- chooses king over God, while the man of the world chooses God over king. Mr. Northam, one of the show's standouts, imbues his principled character with humanity and a deep sense of unease. This family man provides a foil to Henry and Wolsey, decadent men of God. (Remember that Henry's older brother was supposed to be king; the man who broke with Rome had been destined for the church.)
There are plenty of nods to the viewer, who knows the end of this story. "There's something deep and dangerous in you, Anne," Thomas Boleyn says to his daughter, played with the right sense of cunning unavailability by Natalie Dormer (Casanova). Henry tells More not to be so modest: "You're not a saint." (More becomes one, of course.)
Mr. Hirst is already at work writing season two of The Tudors. There's plenty of material -- Henry won't even have married his second wife by the end of this series, of which critics were sent the first half.
In this sympathetic portrayal of Henry VIII, even the decision to consider annulling his first marriage seems almost defensible. His father, Henry VII, took the throne in battle. The Tudors are a new dynasty, and one that might not last if Henry doesn't have a male heir. "All my father's work, finished," he despairs after a close call with death. "And it's all my fault."
Henry VIII, the man who beheaded two wives, a sympathetic figure? Forget about Tony Soprano, the lovable mobster. With "The Tudors," Showtime has out-HBOed HBO.
I had a rather busy week. Here are the five pieces I had in Thursday's and Friday's Washington Times:
What does Ringo Starr do for fun? I found out when I interviewed the former Beatle, whose art is on display this weekend in DC:
Only someone as iconic as Ringo Starr would consider delving into an entirely new art form a hobby.I've now talked to both living Beatles. I spoke briefly to Paul McCartney at the premiere of the Las Vegas Cirque du Soleil show featuring the music of the Beatles, LOVE."I am a busy guy, but also I do like to have downtime," the former Beatle says by telephone from London.
The work produced in his "downtime" will be on display this weekend...
I also interviewed Mark Wahlberg, the Oscar-nominated actor whose new movie Shooter opens this weekend:
What will Mark Wahlberg turn his talents to now that he's joined the select club of Oscar-nominated actors?"English period dramas. The Royal Shakespearean Academy," the actor says by telephone in a thick, fake British accent.
He's joking, of course. This is the actor formerly known as rapper Marky Mark, after all.
Not that one should underestimate Mr. Wahlberg...
And I interviewed Julianne Nicholson for the "Beyond Hollywood" column. The actress has a dual career as a television star and indie darling:
Julianne Nicholson has spent the morning on top of a building in New York. It's a windy day, and she's been watching babies get dangled from the roof.The treacherous work is for an episode of Law & Order: Criminal Intent. Miss Nicholson joined the cast of the television series this season, playing partner to Chris Noth. But instead of taking a well-earned break at lunch, the 35-year-old actress is speaking to a reporter by telephone about a small independent film in which she stars. Flannel Pajamas begins a run today at the Avalon Theatre...
I reviewed the witty new film Color Me Kubrick:
"Color Me Kubrick" is a delicious romp of a film, as outrageous as the man whose life it re-creates.Alan Conway (John Malkovich) was an out-of-work London travel agent who impersonated Stanley Kubrick while the legendary director was working on his 1999 film "Eyes Wide Shut." His con jobs were unlikely successes. Mr. Kubrick was American; Mr. Conway was British. Mr. Kubrick had a beard; Mr. Conway didn't. Mr. Kubrick was happily married to his third wife; Mr. Conway left his first for another man...
I also reviewed The Prisoner or: How I Planned to Kill Tony Blair, a tale of one small man caught up in the absurdities of war. It's a documentary about an Iraqi journalist who was thrown into Abu Ghraib and appears to have been completely innocent:
Yunis Khatayer Abbas is one of the countless victims of Saddam Hussein's tyrannical regime.The Iraqi journalist was tortured in a jail run by Uday Hussein, one of Saddam's sons, after writing of the U.S. embargo. He recalls Uday telling him, "If you do it again, maybe I kill you."
Things didn't get much better for Mr. Abbas under the American occupation...
I have made my first appearance in National Review. The April 2 issue of the venerable magazine contains my essay on Joan Didion's We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live: Collected Nonfiction. It's on newsstands now, but you can read it online if you're a subscriber:
The 1960s gave Joan Didion a nervous breakdown — or so it often seems, judging from her work on those years. “I went to San Francisco,” she writes in the preface to her 1968 essay collection Slouching Towards Bethlehem, “because I had not been able to work in some months, had been paralyzed by the conviction that writing was an irrelevant act, that the world as I had understood it no longer existed.” Lines from the Yeats poem from which she took her book’s title — and that of her essay about a 1967 trip to the Summer of Love — “reverberated in my inner ear as if they were surgically implanted there.” (One of its most famous: “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.”) While writing about the events of 1967, she was seized by an unnamed illness. “I drank gin-and-hot-water to blunt the pain and took Dexedrine to blunt the gin and wrote the piece.”As a celebration of sorts, I'll be seeing Didion's first play, The Year of Magical Thinking, on Broadway this weekend.Other writers have explored those riotous times. But none were as personally troubled by them as Joan Didion...
UPDATE: My piece is now available online.
My pieces from Friday's Washington Times:
I had the "On the Edge" column with a look at digitally enhanced performances:
Jennifer Connelly is one of the most acclaimed of popular actresses. Her performance in the recent film Blood Diamond is no exception. There's a scene, for example, near the end of the film in which Miss Connelly learns some tragic news while having a difficult conversation on her cell phone. The effect of the information can be seen on her face: a single tear rolls down the actress's cheek.I talked to a couple visual effects artists, who had some interesting insights.It's a moving performance. There's just one problem -- it wasn't all performance.
A visual effects supervisor exposed a trade secret earlier this year when he revealed that part of that performance was created digitally...
I reviewed The Namesake, the film based on the novel by Jhumpa Lahiri:
Many books and films in the last few years have bewailed the suffocating customs that stubbornly follow Asian immigrants to their adopted homelands in the West. These stories have been welcomed for telling a truth that's often little known in the wider society.That truth is not the whole truth, however. Some immigrants find comfort in the old ways that we modern Westerners would find constricting.
In The Namesake, the refreshing, yet flawed, saga of one Indian-American family, filmmaker Mira Nair (Monsoon Wedding) succeeds in offering a different view of immigrant life...
In the "Beyond Hollywood" column, I previewed the Environmental Film Festival and spoke with Namesake director Mira Nair:
Mira Nair has made a diverse group of critically acclaimed films. But whether chronicling the lives of a displaced family of Indians from Uganda (1991's "Mississippi Masala") or adapting a classic English novel about a social climber (2004's "Vanity Fair"), the director usually illuminates the troubles outsiders have in integrating into society.One of her next projects will be a documentary on the Beatles' 1968 trip to India. Rather than make another piece of Beatles memorabilia, she plans to create a film about inspiration.It helps that, in many ways, she's one herself...
"Why waste money on psychotherapy when you can listen to the B Minor Mass?"
--Michael Torke on J.S. Bach, born March 21, 1685
