Nice guy finishes first

Way back in the mists of time, when I pulled an oar in a galley that was part of the Forbes Newspapers flotilla, I interviewed a Metuchen resident named Robert Kaplow who had written a young adult novel. One of the nicest, smartest guys you could ever hope to meet, and midway through the talk he let it drop that he was with The Punsters, a Jersey-spawned band with a line in humorous pop and its own self-produced album, Boardwalk Santa, a copy of which resided in a milk crate in my apartment. They’d even been on Uncle Floyd’s show! (I believe that’s Kaplow slinging the accordion in the clip above.) They actually became semi-regulars on the Floyd show, as the clip below will prove:

Our paths diverged after that: Kaplow went on teaching, I kept on newspapering, and we both kept on writing, though Kaplow’s got a lot more books on the shelf to show for his efforts. And now, a couple of decades later, Kaplow has been tapped by Hollywood: a film version of Kaplow’s novel Me and Orson Welles is going to hit the cineplexes after too long a delay, and I hope to see it sometime soon. Anybody who can work references to Eric Rohmer movies into a novel for teenagers is clearly destined for even bigger things.

Edward Woodward

Like a lot of other Americans, I first took note of actor Edward Woodward in ‘Breaker’ Morant, which came as part of the late-Seventies, early-Eighties wave of Australian films that launched Bruce Beresford, Mel Gibson, Bryan Brown, Peter Weir, Fred Schepisi, and George Miller on international careers. As the title character, an Australian officer accused of atrocities against civilians during the Boer War, Woodward was loaded with weatherbeaten star quality, particularly in the scene when a friend, an intelligence who knows the fix is in, offers Morant a chance to escape certain execution. ”Take a boat and see the world,” his friend says. “I’ve seen it,” Morant replies, and Woodward’s delivery ranks up there with Clint Eastwood’s signature line from Unforgiven — “Deserve’s got nothing to do wth it” — for sheer blistering coolness. Watching it, I assumed Woodward was simply further proof that something in the Australian water was producing actors and filmmakers who could put Americans to shame.    

As it turned out, Woodward — who died yesterday at age 79 – was a British actor, so talented that Laurence Olivier invited him to pick his own role at the Royal National Theatre. (Told he could write his own ticket, Woodward chose the lead in Cyrano de Bergerac — what wouldn’t I give to see that performance!) It’s a measure of Woodward’s lack of artistic vanity that one can spend most of The Wicker Man thinking his insufferably priggish police sergeant Neil Howie is the film’s villain, until the horrifying finale turns our expectations upside down, and gives Howie a strange moment of redemption and even grandeur.

Ire land

There’s an old joke to the effect that when an Irishman gets Alzheimer’s Disease, he forgets everything except his grudges. No Surrender, a pitch-black U.K. comedy from the late Eighties that’s crying out for a DVD release on this side of the pond, is tailor-made to illustrate that line. The story takes place in the Thatcher era, while the Troubles were still tearing Northern Ireland apart, but the mood and tone are strangely prophetic of the Good Friday Agreement that was still more than a decade off.

The script — the first and so far only film written by playwright and television scenarist Alan Bleasdale — centers on a nightclub that rises like a penitentiary cellblock in a particularly grotty part of Liverpool. The new manager (Michael Angelis) arrives to find that his predecessor has skipped out after booking a New Year’s Eve party for two feuding groups of Irish emigres, one devoutly Catholic and the other hardline Protestant, as well as a busload of pensioners with senile dementia, a punk band whose members can barely finish a song without getting into fistfights onstage, and an inept stage magician (Elvis Costello, in his first movie role) whose rabbit is on its last legs. Meanwhile, the club’s gangster owner is giving somebody the back-room treatment, and police are busting down so many doors in their search for terrorists that carpenters are kept on standby for repairs.

The new manager’s only allies are Bernard, a bouncer whose mental energy is used up in the maintenance of his pompadour (Bernard Hill in his pre-Theoden days, and hilarious), and Cheryl, the club’s sole waitress, played by Joanne Whalley, whose status as the thinking-man’s bombshell would be cemented with her roles in Scandal and The Singing Detective. It all builds to a gratifyingly chaotic conclusion, and a line of dialogue — “I’m know I’m a nobody, but I’m nobody else’s nobody” — that could serve as the motto of beleaguered commen men everywhere.

“Auld Lang Syne” provides an ironic background for the movie’s other plotline, which follows Bill McRacken (Ray McAnally), a onetime Unionist thug known as “Billy the Beast,” who has turned away from his violent past and found a measure of peace as a Liverpool businessman, though he still refuses even to speak to his Catholic son-in-law. On this night, looking for nothing more than a night out with his friends, he finds himself with too many auld acquaintances to deal with. One, a gun-runner from the old days, is threatening reprisals against McRacken’s family unless he gets help hiding from the police. Another, Paddy Burke (James Ellis), is a Catholic bruiser spoiling for one last round with Billy the Beast. Though blind, Paddy is an ex-boxer still tough enough to beat the daylights out of a pair of would-be muggers, and he has a nasty surprise planned for McRacken.

Bleasdale is known for what used to be called kitchen-sink realism: he made his name in 1980 with The Black Stuff, a television play about some Liverpudlian workmen who land a choice job laying tarmac at a new housing development, only to lose their savings and their jobs after trying to do a little business on the side. The show aired on BBC One and proved popular enough to spawn a sequel, The Boys from the Black Stuff. The cast of No Surrender is studded with Black Stuff alumni, notably Angelis and Hill, and the story showcases the deft blending of politics and gallows humor that remain Bleasdale’s trademark as a writer. No Surrender is angry but not despairing: the diehard fighters on both sides are viewed as bloody minded clowns, and when Cheryl, a Catholic, defuses a situation by singing a hymn and getting the others to join in, there’s a sense that both sides can find a way past the violence if they use a little ingenuity.

For me and a lot of other American viewers, the biggest revelation in No Surrender was  Ray McAnally, an Irish actor well known for his stage and television work in the U.K. After No Surrender, McAnally enjoyed a late explosion of high-profile roles in big ticket films like The Mission, We’re No Angels, and especially My Left Foot, in which he played Christie Brown’s roughneck father. When death took him too early in 1989, McAnally was set to play Bull McCabe in Jim Sheridan’s film version of The Field. The role went instead to Richard Harris, a gluttonous scenery chewer, and one can only imagine how much better the movie would have played with McAnally’s more reserved approach at the center. His Billy McRacken is outwardly easygoing and ready to laugh things off — when his old gunrunning buddy shouts “No surrender! No foooking surrender!” McRacken shrugs and says, “I surrender. In fact, I give up.” But the old steel is still there, not too far from the surface, and when McRacken gets pushed too far the results are pretty spectacular.

There was a time back in the late Eighties when American filmmaking had become effectively brain dead, and it seemed the theaters had nothing to offer that wasn’t big, loud, and stupid: Stallone movies, each one worse than the last; John Hughes teen-worship flicks; formulaic fodder from the Jim Cash-Jack Epps hack stack (Top Gun, Legal Eagles, etc.); special effects extravaganzas from the Spielberg-Lucas production plant.

What saved the latter half of the decade was the appearance of a string of low budget, high talent films from the U.K., most of them black comedies with terrific character actors and scripts that were, if not overtly political, then certainly politically aware. At the time it was simply a relief to be able to see a movie that was about something real, instead of the umpteenth retread of the go-for-it formula. My Beautiful Laundrette is probably the best known of these semi-cult films: it helped launch the career of Daniel Day-Lewis, just as Withnail and I turned Richard E. Grant into a cult hero. Among the others were Letter to Brezhnev, A Private Function, Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, and How to Get Ahead in Advertising. Not all of them were great, but most of them were at the least very good, and now that I’ve been able to find a VHS copy of No Surrender, I can confirm it’s one of the best of the bunch. Won’t the nice people at Criterion give this one a little buffing up (the soundtrack desperately needs remixing) and put it back into the spotlight?

Color it hopeless

Since John D. MacDonald used color-coded titles for his Travis McGee mystery series, I’m trying to come up with a suitable shade for my response to the news that Leonardo DiCaprio is set to star in a film version of The Deep Blue Good-by, the 1964 curtain-raiser for the series.

“Black” seems too strong for what bodes to be merely another exercise in mediocrity and non-epic fail. Hmmmm . . . The Merely Mauve Mediocrity? The Weak White Washout? The Deep Blue Direct-to-DVD? I don’t know anything about the behind-the-camera talent signed up, but I can tell you the casting of the lead is ridiculously wrong. DiCaprio is a Jimmy Cagney type, while McGee is a tall, gangly ex-football player who doesn’t seem very imposing until you try to tangle with him. DiCaprio is far more talented than the other actors who’ve tried to embody McGee, but this ain’t the role for him.

It wouldn’t be the first time a McGee movie went wrong. The first film adaptation, Darker Than Amber, brightly offered Rod Taylor as the Florida beach bum. Long out of print, the movie is chiefly remembered for its climactic fistfight, in which Taylor and the actor playing one of the villains got so angry at each other that the staged brawl became a real knockdown-dragout. It wasn’t one of the stronger McGee titles to begin with, but Rod Freaking Taylor? Just how open-minded do we have to be in this life? Sam Eliot was better than expected as McGee in a 1983 television adaptation of The Empty Copper Sea, but the Florida setting was switched to California. On the outrage meter, that’s tantamount to putting Philip Marlowe in Trenton, or stranding Sherlock Holmes in Gary, Indiana.

The Marlowe comparison stands because John D. MacDonald was the true successor to Raymond Chandler, another writer whose books resist adaptation. A great many actors have taken a run at Philip Marlowe, and while some have come closer than others — Humphrey Bogart and Robert Mitchum each came pretty damn close to nailing it in their respective versions of The Big Sleep — but the character remains wedded to the printed page, and the inimitable voice crafted by the author.

There’s a lot of Chandler’s mix of romanticism and cynicism in Travis McGee, but MacDonald went Chandler several steps better. Marlowe’s Los Angeles stalking grounds have already been despoiled by grifters and predators. McGee’s Florida home base is just starting to be overrun (the heyday of the series was in the Sixties and Seventies) by a menagerie of mobsters, developers, backwater creeps, and transplanted operators. MacDonald was usually at his best when he was pissed off about something, and the destruction of south Florida gave him plenty to get pissed off about. I’m not saying that cranky, mournful, sometimes inspired voice can’t be conveyed in a film, but I’m not going to wait around for it to happen.

And casting McGee is only half the battle. You also have to come up with a good choice for Meyer, McGee’s friend and foil. Not even the Sam Eliot film came up with an acceptable actor, so if anything the track record gives even less cause for hope.

Something tells me the odds are good that this film will never even get made. Plenty of projects never make it to the screen, and this has the earmarks of a non-starter.

In which case I have another problem: What color is limbo?

‘Solomon’ lame

Any interest I might have had in the long-pending film based on Robert E. Howard’s Solomon Kane stories just flew out the window. Actually, since my expectations were never that high to begin with, maybe I should say my interest dribbled down a sub-sub-basement storm drain. ‘Cause judging from this advance notice and this report from the Toronto International Film Festival, this flick has “Direct-to-DVD landfill leachate” written all over it.

Bugs’n'Ed

Considering the number of cross-dressing gags in old Warner Bros. cartoons, it was inevitable that somebody would do this kind of mash-up. So, ladies and gentlemen (and all possible combinations thereof), let me present Bugs Bunny in “Glen or Glenda.”

The even littler mermaid

After two masterpieces (Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away) and one misfire (Howl’s Moving Castle) — and a quintet of features before them that range from brilliant to merely excellent — Hayao Miyazaki’s latest film, Ponyo, feels like a bit of creative  retrenchment. The childlike simplicity of the story makes it the first Miyazaki film since My Neighbor Totoro clearly aimed at viewers in the single-digit age bracket. Even the animation has the quality of a child’s storybook. When we watch the hero, young Sosuke, climbing a steep hill to reach his house, the subtle brushstrokes coloring the luxuriant grass are faintly visible — a striking change from the almost photorealistic look of Miyazaki’s previous features.

Equally striking is the absence of anything remotely threatening in the storyline, which follows Ponyo, a half-human half-fish girl, as she sneaks away from Fujimoto, a half-scientist half-wizard who appears to be working to cleanse the damage mankind has done to the world’s oceans. Emerging from a rosy cloud of fish who resemble children in long nightshirts, Ponyo gets caught in a trawler net and decides she wants to become the human playmate of her rescuer, Sosuke. Yet even when Ponyo’s magical transformation throws the world out of balance and raises the sea level, the situation isn’t very scary. In fact, the people in the story perform heroically while finding the situation kind of cool. And when everything is put right, the world is rejuvenated and ready for a fresh start.

The outlines of the plot make this Miyazaki’s take on Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid,” but the film suggests something Stephen Jay Gould might have dreamed after reading Andersen’s story. The inundated landscape is full of Cambrian sea life: brachiopods and armored fish move dreamily over flooded roadways and canyons, jellyfish float in formation, and the Goddess of Mercy makes sure everybody is okay by putting bubble domes over the flooded houses. As I said, the storyline is childlike.

Childlike but far from childish. Miyazaki once again demonstrates his eye for detail, and openhearted appreciation of the way children behave when they are unselfconsciously themselves. It comes in moments as small as the way Sosuke ineffectually hitches up his shorts before wading into the ocean, or as big as Ponyo’s joyful laughter as she skips across water to help out a family with a sick baby. Virtually alone among animated filmmakers, Miyazaki depicts children as children rather than diminished adults.

Waiting in the theater for Ponyo to start, I had to laugh at the contrast between all the laboriously flashy computer-generated imagery of the trailers, capped by the canned razzle-dazzle of the Disney logo, and the simple line drawing of a totoro that opens each Studio Ghibli film. Too many animated films are like beautifully wrapped gift boxes with nothing inside. The simplicity of the Studio Ghibli logo heralds a plainly wrapped giftbox with an inexhaustible store of wonders.

Friday finds

Two young Iranians have reworked Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi’s memoir of her girlhood in revolutionary Iran, to tell the story of the bloody aftermath of the recent Iranian election. The literary remix, Persepolis 2.0, was done with Satrapi’s blessing.

A town built around books and publishing? I may just have to learn Korean.

A reminiscence about Ted Kennedy that shows his quality as a progressive senator, and why it will be next to impossible to find anyone to fill his shoes. Joyce Carol Oates talks about Kennedy’s unpunished crime and search for reinvention and redemption.

As a big fan of comedian Patton Oswalt, I can only applaud the imminent release of Big Fan, the movie about a big fan of the New York Giants.

Follow David Gill as he negotiates A Maze of Death.

A good reason to pre-order that upcoming Bob Dylan Christmas record.

Reading poetry (and teaching it) in Uzbekistan.

Now I have to put Sunshine Cleaning on my Netflix queue.

Ralph Nader has written a novel? Who knew? As J.D. Rhoades notes, the book sounds like a parody of Atlas Shrugged, which places two big burdens on the work. First, Ayn Rand novels come with self-parody already installed, and second, Nader ain’t exactly the life of the party. (Quite the opposite, in fact, as we saw in 2000.)

The Pixar version

A few days ago I watched Ratatouille again, both for the splendor of its animation — I love the riot of textures and metallic surfaces in the kitchen — and the generosity of its finale, in which the heroes triumph over the sepulchral food critic Anton Ego. I was also nudged by Patton Oswalt’s hilarious new record, My Weakness Is Strong, which includes a few routines about his voice work on the film, in which he played Remy the rodent hero.

But the finale written by Brad Bird — who, after The Iron Giant and The Incredibles rates second only to Hayao Miyazaki in my book of great animators — is what always brings me back to Ratatouille. Any other animation shop would have devised a slapstick comeuppance for the critic and called it a day. In Ratatouille, Remy and his friends win him over by bringing him back to himself, and the story gives Ego not only that deeply touching flashback to his childhood, but the space to offer the film’s best line:  ”Not everyone can become a great artist, but a great artist can come from anywhere.” A clip is at the bottom of this post. Consider the Spanish subtitles an educational plus.

After I saw Up — which is, despite my reservations about its second half, further proof that Pixar is the unchallenged standard-bearer for animated storytelling — I thought back to the recent corporate battle between John Lasseter’s shop and Disney, the corporate parent Pixar has creatively eclipsed.

Has there ever been a more crushing confession of failure than Disney’s threat, implicit in the renegotiation of its distribution deal with Pixar, to rush ahead with a second Toy Story sequel if Pixar went with another company? Disney was frankly admitting that its movies stink, its formulas are played out and its fund of creativity exhausted — and threatening to apply all those liabilities to Pixar’s most treasured property. ”Work with us, or you’ll see just how badly we can suck.” Some negotiating tactic!

Reviewing the film in The New Yorker,  David Denby makes some cogent points about the distinction between Pixar films and Disney:

Yes, there was the classic Disney group of animated features, released between 1937 and 1942, which included “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” “Pinocchio,” “Bambi,” and “Dumbo.” Children still love them, though this aging child doesn’t, really. The old Disney dispensation went roughly as follows: The material was largely based on fairy tales, with princes and queens and wicked stepmothers. Animals with long eyelashes engaged in gentle woodland conversation. There was much anthropomorphic charm, much sweet melodiousness, and, running through the sugar, a vinegary taste of fear, separation, punishment. The entire Bruno Bettelheim catalogue of psychological terrors churned below the surface. By now (for me, at least), the cloyingness, with its malevolent undertones, seems too calculated and heavy-spirited. But the recent Pixar films are something else. These movies are fashioned as much for adults as for kids. Set in the modern world, they are built around an exhilarating drive for achievement. A family of libertarian superheroes refuses to accept enforced mediocrity (“The Incredibles”). A talented rat wants to practice the art of cooking (“Ratatouille”). A robot saves the aesthetic remnants of a civilization ruined by excess and pollution (“WALL-E”). Some of the characters are isolated; they are all intelligent and strongly motivated. We’ve gone from psychological fable to moral fable, from fate to something like self-willed, even civic, passion.

There is much to like and dislike in the Disney catalogue, but my biggest beef with those canonical works – many of which I otherwise admire – was to give multiple generations of viewers the false idea that they actually know the story of Pinocchio, or the Little Mermaid, or Cinderella. You could argue that the original versions of those tales would be unpalatable to contemporary audience, and you might even be right. But the Disney operation’s habit of processing folk tales and forgotten classics into contemporary Cheez Whiz has been a problem for a lot of people, starting with Richard Schickel (whose 1968 book The Disney Version was the first serious attempt to examine the workings of Uncle Walt’s dream factory), and it played a big role in the company’s creative stagnation.

Right from the start, Pixar movies have turned their backs on stale fake-folktale plots and used contemporary materials with great freshness and ingenuity. Along with that “drive for achievement” Denby notes, Pixar movies also have a much broader emotional palette, including a readiness to weave adult fears and emotions into their kid-friendly storylines. The best line in the original Toy Story — “This isn’t flying, it’s falling with style!” — was taken even further in Toy Story 2, which quite explicitly addresses fears of mortality and the decision to make the most of your time regardless of what’s ahead. Apparently next year’s Toy Story 3 will continue that line of development, and I’m eager to see where they go with it.

Dream projects: Peter Jackson

This notion of linking up filmmakers with books that would benefit from being adapted into film hasn’t produced the kind of response I’d hoped for, but I post on anyway. The first four are here, and now on to the fifth.

PETER JACKSON: Dying Inside, by Robert Silverberg.

Dying Inside, published in 1972, was the culmination of Robert Silverberg’s drive to lift himself from a fast-working genre hack to a thoughtful writer who consistently stretched the boundaries of literary science fiction. His work from the late Sixties, beginning with Thorns, already stood head and shoulders above that of his colleagues, but Dying Inside was the perfect merger of a well-established science fiction theme — telepathy — with the kind of prose treatment found in top-notch literary fiction. SF abounds in stories of persecuted people with hidden powers who ascend to something like godhood; Silverberg stood the idea on its head by making his protagonist, David Selig, a man born with extraordinary powers, who must now cope with their loss as he ages. What makes the book engrossing rather than depressing is Silverberg’s skill at showing how the ability to read minds has warped Selig’s life: it has ruined two love affairs, spoiled his relationship with his younger sister, given the people around him a creepy sense of being under surveillance, and burdened Selig with a sense of himself as a grubby eavesdropper into the lives of others. The loss of this double-edged gift is paradoxically uplifting; unable to use his super power in any positive way, Selig now has the chance to become fully human through its loss.

Silverberg tells the story in fragmentary fashion, shifting from the first-person to omniscient third-person in response to the level of pain and embarrassment Selig feels as he looks back on his life. Not all of the memories are unpleasant: there’s a bravura sequence in which the teenaged Selig wanders a farm, idly slipping into the minds of the creatures around him, jumping from a trout swimming past to a pair of lovers in the throes of passion. At least one memory is downright thrilling:

One summer when I was eight or nine — it was before they adopted Judith, anyway — I went with my parents to a resort in the Catskills for a few weeks. There was a day camp for the kiddies, in which we received instruction in swimming, tennis, softball, arts & crafts, and other activities, thus leaving the older folks free for gin rummy and creative drinking. One afternoon the daycamp staged some boxing matches. I had never worn boxing gloves, and in the free-for-alls of boyhood I had found myself to be an incompetent fighter, so I was unenthusiastic. I watched the first five matches in much dismay. All that hitting! All those bloody noses!

Then it was my turn. My opponent was a boy named Jimmy,a few months younger than but taller and heavier and much more athletic. I think the counselors matched us deliberately, hoping Jimmy would kill me; I was not their favorite child. I started to shake even before they put the gloves on me. “Round One!” called a counselor, and we approached each other. I distinctly heard Jimmy thinking aout hitting me on the chin, and as his glove came toward my face I ducked and hit him in the belly. That made him furious. he proposed now to clobber me on the back of my head, but I saw that coming too and stepped aside and hit him on the neck close to his adam’s-apple. He gagged and turned away, half in tears. After a moment he returned to the attack, but I continued to anticipate his moves and he never touched me. For the first time in my life I felt touch, competent, aggressive. As I battered him I looked past the improvised ring and saw my father flushed with pride, and Jimmy’s father next to him looking angry and perplexed. End of round one. I was sweaty, bouncy, grinning.

Round two: Jimmy came forth determined to knock me to pieces. Swinging wildly, frantically, still going for my head. I kept my head where he couldn’t reach it and danced around to his side and hit him in the belly again, very hard, and when he folded I hit him on the nose and he fell down, crying. The counselor in charge very quickly counted to ten and raised my hand. “Hey, Joe Louis!” my father yelled. “Hey, Willie Pep!” The counselor suggested I go over to Jimmy and help him up and shake his hand. As he got to his feet I very clearly detected him deciding to butt me in the teeth with his head, and I pretended to be paying no attention, except when he charged I stepped coolly to one side and banged my fists down on his lowered back. That shattered him. “David cheats!” he moaned. “David cheats!”

How they all hated me for my cleverness! What they interpreted as my cleverness, that is. My sly knack of always guessing what was going to happen. Well, that wouldn’t be a problem now. They’d all love me. Loving me, they’d beat me to a pulp.

Like Silverberg, Peter Jackson made his own craftsman’s journey upward, from splatter movies to the Oscar-winning Lord of the Rings films and the upcoming prestige release The Lovely Bones, which is also being touted as Oscar bait. The artistic transition from Bad Taste to The Lord of the Rings is as dazzling as the leap from Invaders From Earth to Son of Man. Jackson also has an unabashedly broad appetite for fantasy and science fiction, as well as en eye for talent: in Heavenly Creatures, for example, he gave Kate Winslet her first major showcase.

The glimpses I’ve seen of footage from The Lovely Bones make me think Jackson would be the one to find an ingenious and original way of visualizing Selig’s telepathic experiences. Just as importantly — perhaps more so — Jackson knows how to imbue fantasy material with well-grounded, earthly emotions. My two favorite sequences from The Two Towers — Elrond’s warning of what awaits Arwen if she stays behind, and Theoden’s recitation of “Where is the horse, where is the rider?” — have little to do with special effects and everything to do with the power of the human voice, and the savvy of a director who knows when it’s time to hang back and simply let the actors carry their scenes. To see that kind of artistry at work on adapting what is arguably the finest SF novel of the Seventies would be a rare treat.