Finally got to see a movie some friends thought should have not only been nominated for an Oscar for best picture, but should have won it.
I don’t think so!
Is it beautiful filmmaking? Yes.
Is he a good story teller. I’ll say.
Are the images and fantasy creatures as original as the critics claimed? Not really. Just clever variations on what we’ve seen before.
Was the young girl, the movie centers around, compellingly brilliant in her acting? Absolutely. Was anyone else? Mmmm, maybe a couple of them, a little, but…not really.
Is it obvious this guy is a comic books, or graphic novel, fantasy freak? I mean the director/writer Guillermo del Torro. Man is it ever.
Is that a bad thing? Not for the imagery, or even for the story for that matter, but, for an understanding of what drama can do? Way too comic-book lurid and extreme, including the melodramatic payoff.
It left me pissed off at the attempt to manipulate my feelings through inducing sympathy for the innocent victims, and than victimizing them further as my reward for sitting through the whole thing.
Thanks, but no thanks. Next time I’ll just skim the comic book.
Tuesday, March 6, 2007
Monday, March 5, 2007
TOUGH TIMES
Somebody asks me how can I sit around writing lists of favorite cowboy or rock’n’roll movies when the world is falling apart.
The world is almost always falling apart. As is almost everything else—nations, families, relationships, bodies—when they aren’t coming together.
But this time the world literally is falling apart, vide the polar ice cap melting, etc.
Borges once wrote something like: all people are given bad times to be born into.
I was born in early 1942, very bad times. But like with everything—the world, nations, families, marriages, relationships, bodies—there’s almost always some good news with the bad, or vice versa.
In 1942 The USA was losing—hard to remember from all the WWII (which by the way I never heard anyone say as written, “double-u double-u two,” back then or since, if they had anything to do with it, but always as “World War Two”) movies.
OUR SIDE WAS LOSING in 1942.
But, and there’s always a BUT, WWII ended The Great Depression, got the economy moving, lots of jobs on the home front for those not being drafted or volunteering.
A lot of people were dying, some unbelievably inhumanly, in 1942.
BUT so were a lot of people in 1952, 1962, 1972, 1982, 1992, and 2002, before we even invaded Iraq.
Only for some of those years they were dying in places we didn’t care about, or notice, or our media didn’t.
Yes, these times are tough in many ways, for mother earth, for those who felt and feel compelled to join our various armed forces, or who feel they have no other option, and for Iraqi civilians—as well as civilians in the Congo still trapped in a war that seems endless and under-reported because it’s officially limited now as opposed to the open-ended killing that was going on there for years and was equally ignored for the most part by the media in the USA and therefore most of us.
Etcetera.
Life is tough, there’s illness and betrayal, losses and failures and set backs and disappointments and reversals ad infinitum, BUT, there also are achievements, turn arounds, days of good health and tiny successes, sometimes even big successes, open heartedness, kindness, honesty, goodness, relief, even joy and harmony and peace.
I like movies and art and books and music and all that creative stuff because even as a kid it gave me a way to not only comprehend the variety of life experiences and perspectives, of its ups and downs and the balance there seems to be in all creation, BUT they also give me a means for staying in touch with what I share with all creation, as well as the aspiration to express that commonality by refining human expression to as close to perfection as possible, so far—the opera singer’s perfect high note, the ballet dancer’s perfect spin or leap, the movie actor’s perfect expression of grief or joy or relief, etc.—even when the creators of the art I’m digging aren’t aware that’s what they’re doing.
Sometimes it isn’t even their intention, or I’m the only one who seems to be getting something from a particular film or song or markings on a canvas or in a book etc.
When I was a kid I was sometimes teased or ridiculed or even abused for my love of the arts. Male children, where and when I grew up, didn’t give much importance to those kinds of things. Movies were mostly an excuse for a chance to kiss a girl or more, on a Friday or Saturday evening, though often it was more about throwing candy at each other, or goofing on the Hollywood clichés and pretensions, or looking for a fight or new girls to impress.
It was considered “faggy” where I came from to be too interested in the arts. Sports seemed to do it for most males. But for me, it was the arts, and when I watch new or favorite old films that still hold up, or read poems or novels or memoirs or look at paintings or sculptures or listen to songs or recordings or go to dance performances and the rest, it doesn’t give me “hope” because that’s about the future, it just centers me in “the infinite possibilities” of this very moment, despite the hard times.
Which doesn’t mean I can’t work to change the things I don’t like about the present, here’s the inevitable BUT, I can’t pretend that the reality of this moment is anything other than it is, as best I can understand it. And accept what is real, now, while working to change it
As my old friend Hubert Selby Jr. would put it to me, you can’t have up without down, right without left, hard without soft.
He’d point out I had a choice, if I was looking for pleasure, I’d better expect an equal amount of pain. But if I wasn’t looking for anything other than being present in this moment, I could take the pleasure, and the pain, of it, as all part of the same thing, being alive, right now, working for change or not, tough times or tender.
Or as experience has proven, most often both.
The world is almost always falling apart. As is almost everything else—nations, families, relationships, bodies—when they aren’t coming together.
But this time the world literally is falling apart, vide the polar ice cap melting, etc.
Borges once wrote something like: all people are given bad times to be born into.
I was born in early 1942, very bad times. But like with everything—the world, nations, families, marriages, relationships, bodies—there’s almost always some good news with the bad, or vice versa.
In 1942 The USA was losing—hard to remember from all the WWII (which by the way I never heard anyone say as written, “double-u double-u two,” back then or since, if they had anything to do with it, but always as “World War Two”) movies.
OUR SIDE WAS LOSING in 1942.
But, and there’s always a BUT, WWII ended The Great Depression, got the economy moving, lots of jobs on the home front for those not being drafted or volunteering.
A lot of people were dying, some unbelievably inhumanly, in 1942.
BUT so were a lot of people in 1952, 1962, 1972, 1982, 1992, and 2002, before we even invaded Iraq.
Only for some of those years they were dying in places we didn’t care about, or notice, or our media didn’t.
Yes, these times are tough in many ways, for mother earth, for those who felt and feel compelled to join our various armed forces, or who feel they have no other option, and for Iraqi civilians—as well as civilians in the Congo still trapped in a war that seems endless and under-reported because it’s officially limited now as opposed to the open-ended killing that was going on there for years and was equally ignored for the most part by the media in the USA and therefore most of us.
Etcetera.
Life is tough, there’s illness and betrayal, losses and failures and set backs and disappointments and reversals ad infinitum, BUT, there also are achievements, turn arounds, days of good health and tiny successes, sometimes even big successes, open heartedness, kindness, honesty, goodness, relief, even joy and harmony and peace.
I like movies and art and books and music and all that creative stuff because even as a kid it gave me a way to not only comprehend the variety of life experiences and perspectives, of its ups and downs and the balance there seems to be in all creation, BUT they also give me a means for staying in touch with what I share with all creation, as well as the aspiration to express that commonality by refining human expression to as close to perfection as possible, so far—the opera singer’s perfect high note, the ballet dancer’s perfect spin or leap, the movie actor’s perfect expression of grief or joy or relief, etc.—even when the creators of the art I’m digging aren’t aware that’s what they’re doing.
Sometimes it isn’t even their intention, or I’m the only one who seems to be getting something from a particular film or song or markings on a canvas or in a book etc.
When I was a kid I was sometimes teased or ridiculed or even abused for my love of the arts. Male children, where and when I grew up, didn’t give much importance to those kinds of things. Movies were mostly an excuse for a chance to kiss a girl or more, on a Friday or Saturday evening, though often it was more about throwing candy at each other, or goofing on the Hollywood clichés and pretensions, or looking for a fight or new girls to impress.
It was considered “faggy” where I came from to be too interested in the arts. Sports seemed to do it for most males. But for me, it was the arts, and when I watch new or favorite old films that still hold up, or read poems or novels or memoirs or look at paintings or sculptures or listen to songs or recordings or go to dance performances and the rest, it doesn’t give me “hope” because that’s about the future, it just centers me in “the infinite possibilities” of this very moment, despite the hard times.
Which doesn’t mean I can’t work to change the things I don’t like about the present, here’s the inevitable BUT, I can’t pretend that the reality of this moment is anything other than it is, as best I can understand it. And accept what is real, now, while working to change it
As my old friend Hubert Selby Jr. would put it to me, you can’t have up without down, right without left, hard without soft.
He’d point out I had a choice, if I was looking for pleasure, I’d better expect an equal amount of pain. But if I wasn’t looking for anything other than being present in this moment, I could take the pleasure, and the pain, of it, as all part of the same thing, being alive, right now, working for change or not, tough times or tender.
Or as experience has proven, most often both.
Sunday, March 4, 2007
MORE BLEEPIN’ LISTS: WESTERNS
Just caught UNFORGIVEN on the cable channel that shows Westerns. Maybe it’s a guy thing, or maybe an old guy thing, but I love a good Western.
Here’s a bunch of Westerns I can watch anytime:
STAGECOACH (the 1930s movie that made John Wayne a star, deservedly so)
RED RIVER (the only time Wayne was afraid as an actor, he said, was in his first scene with Montgomery Clift and his new kind of realistic film acting)
THE SEARCHERS (some critics consider this John Ford’s greatest film)
HIGH NOON (a supposed metaphor for McCarthyism, though I could never figure out which side it was a defense of)
MY DARLING CLEMENTINE (another Ford classic, and one of many Westerns about Wyatt Earp and the OK Corral shootout, this one with Henry Fonda is exquisite)
UNFORGIVEN (Clint and Morgan Freeman with Gene Hackman? ‘nuff said)
DESTRY RIDES AGAIN (one of James Stewart’s many great Westerns, containing the classic and easily satirized Marlene Dietrich Germanic-accented frontier floozy—see BLAZING SADDLES)
THE WESTERNER (Gary Cooper and Walter Brennan are such a great match, maybe Brennan’s best performance, it’s almost a love story between the two of them!)
SHANE (Alan Ladd, Van Helfin, Ben johnson and Jack Palance, with child star Brandon deWilde in what many consider THE classic Western)
BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID (some silly ‘60s nuances, but original)
THE WILD BUNCH (the underrated Ernest Borgnine holds this film together for me and makes it extraordinary)
THE GUNFIGHTER (Gregory Peck at his restrained best)
GUNFIGHT AT OK CORRAL (Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas, 1950s titans)
TOMBSTONE (despite being over the top, and Dana Delany being miscast as Curt Russels’s Wyatt Earp girlfriend, it is still totally compelling, Val Kilmer as Doc Holliday gives maybe his best performance)
Here’s a bunch of Westerns I can watch anytime:
STAGECOACH (the 1930s movie that made John Wayne a star, deservedly so)
RED RIVER (the only time Wayne was afraid as an actor, he said, was in his first scene with Montgomery Clift and his new kind of realistic film acting)
THE SEARCHERS (some critics consider this John Ford’s greatest film)
HIGH NOON (a supposed metaphor for McCarthyism, though I could never figure out which side it was a defense of)
MY DARLING CLEMENTINE (another Ford classic, and one of many Westerns about Wyatt Earp and the OK Corral shootout, this one with Henry Fonda is exquisite)
UNFORGIVEN (Clint and Morgan Freeman with Gene Hackman? ‘nuff said)
DESTRY RIDES AGAIN (one of James Stewart’s many great Westerns, containing the classic and easily satirized Marlene Dietrich Germanic-accented frontier floozy—see BLAZING SADDLES)
THE WESTERNER (Gary Cooper and Walter Brennan are such a great match, maybe Brennan’s best performance, it’s almost a love story between the two of them!)
SHANE (Alan Ladd, Van Helfin, Ben johnson and Jack Palance, with child star Brandon deWilde in what many consider THE classic Western)
BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID (some silly ‘60s nuances, but original)
THE WILD BUNCH (the underrated Ernest Borgnine holds this film together for me and makes it extraordinary)
THE GUNFIGHTER (Gregory Peck at his restrained best)
GUNFIGHT AT OK CORRAL (Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas, 1950s titans)
TOMBSTONE (despite being over the top, and Dana Delany being miscast as Curt Russels’s Wyatt Earp girlfriend, it is still totally compelling, Val Kilmer as Doc Holliday gives maybe his best performance)
Saturday, March 3, 2007
FAVORITE LIVES
I’m reading a biography of Neal Cassady, the inspiration for Jack Kerouac’s seminal novel ON THE ROAD. It’s called NEAL CASSADY The Fast Life of a Beat Hero by David Sandison and Graham Vickers.
There are details in it I hadn’t read anywhere before. Which is partly why I’m reading it, for those tiny satisfactions. But even if every detail in it were ones I already knew, I’d read it anyway. There are just some lives I am perennially interested in no matter how much I already know, or how repetitive the details. Why that is, is a mystery to me.
In Cassady’s case there’s some identification with his Irish ancestry, his spontaneously combustible personality, his compulsions and strivings, his wheelman skills and speed, his wandering-jones and speed-talker sex-obsessed street-philosopher energy.
Once, over breakfast in his apartment kitchen on the Lower East Side, Cassady’s part-time lover and old friend, the poet Allen Ginsberg, told me I reminded him of Cassady, and all I could think of at the time, in my ego-centric cocky thirties, was fuck that diamond-in-the-rough comparison—which I’d been getting all my life—because I thought I was more like Kerouac, the ethnic Catholic mystic romantic wordsmith poet.
But even before Ginsberg told me that, I had read a lot about Cassady. And he’s not the only one. Certain people’s lives have fascinated me, right from the first time my oldest brother, a Franciscan friar, gave me a book when I was a kid on the life of Saint Francis of Assisi.
But this “obsession” isn’t a general taste for biographies and autobiographies and memoirs, because only some lives keep me coming back for more.
For instance, I love Van Morrison, I never heard a recording he made that I didn’t dig. But I have no interest in his life at all. Whereas John Lennon—whose music I also love completely, with or without the Beatles—his life interests me infinitely.
It doesn’t matter if the bios or memoirs are accurate or poorly written or go against everything I believe that makes that life interesting to me, I still read it.
Here’s a list of people, about whose lives I read everything I can find:
John Lennon
Walt Whitman—I have read every biography or book published about him that I ever ran across in my lifetime. I always have a biography of him next to my bed, and no matter how many times I read the basic facts, the outline of his life, and whatever new take or angle or details the latest bio has, I find myself engrossed in his life again. I’m always rereading his collected poems and prose as well
Eva Hesse—the artist, whose work has been from the first time I saw it, among the art I cherish most, even if, for those who know her work, “cherish” seems like an odd choice of words
Lee Miller, the model and photographer and journalist whose work I dig and whose life continues to fascinate me
William Saroyan—the novelist, short-story writer, memoirist, playwright
Frank Sinatra
Jack Keroauc
Martha Gellhorn—novelist and war correspondent
Jean Rhys—novelist and short story writer
Veronica Lake
Elvis
Samuel Beckett
Brendan Behan—the Irish playwright and memoirist
William Carlos Williams—the doctor-poet, who also wrote fiction and memoirs
Henry Roth—whose novels barely fictionalized his life, a life that continues to engage me on every level
Blaise Cendrars—the French poet-adventurer and memoirist
Rainer Maria Rilke—the poet and fiction writer and diarist who was born in Prague and wrote in German but did not consider himself “German” or “Austrian” or anything other than an “artist”
Frank O’Hara—the Irish-American legend of "The New York School of Poetry"
Ezra Pound
Thelonious Monk
James Joyce
Irene Nemirovsky—a recent addition after her WWII novels were discovered and published in the original French only a few years ago, and in English last year as SUITE FRANCAISE
David Smith—the sculptor
Bing Crosby
and my own, obviously
There are details in it I hadn’t read anywhere before. Which is partly why I’m reading it, for those tiny satisfactions. But even if every detail in it were ones I already knew, I’d read it anyway. There are just some lives I am perennially interested in no matter how much I already know, or how repetitive the details. Why that is, is a mystery to me.
In Cassady’s case there’s some identification with his Irish ancestry, his spontaneously combustible personality, his compulsions and strivings, his wheelman skills and speed, his wandering-jones and speed-talker sex-obsessed street-philosopher energy.
Once, over breakfast in his apartment kitchen on the Lower East Side, Cassady’s part-time lover and old friend, the poet Allen Ginsberg, told me I reminded him of Cassady, and all I could think of at the time, in my ego-centric cocky thirties, was fuck that diamond-in-the-rough comparison—which I’d been getting all my life—because I thought I was more like Kerouac, the ethnic Catholic mystic romantic wordsmith poet.
But even before Ginsberg told me that, I had read a lot about Cassady. And he’s not the only one. Certain people’s lives have fascinated me, right from the first time my oldest brother, a Franciscan friar, gave me a book when I was a kid on the life of Saint Francis of Assisi.
But this “obsession” isn’t a general taste for biographies and autobiographies and memoirs, because only some lives keep me coming back for more.
For instance, I love Van Morrison, I never heard a recording he made that I didn’t dig. But I have no interest in his life at all. Whereas John Lennon—whose music I also love completely, with or without the Beatles—his life interests me infinitely.
It doesn’t matter if the bios or memoirs are accurate or poorly written or go against everything I believe that makes that life interesting to me, I still read it.
Here’s a list of people, about whose lives I read everything I can find:
John Lennon
Walt Whitman—I have read every biography or book published about him that I ever ran across in my lifetime. I always have a biography of him next to my bed, and no matter how many times I read the basic facts, the outline of his life, and whatever new take or angle or details the latest bio has, I find myself engrossed in his life again. I’m always rereading his collected poems and prose as well
Eva Hesse—the artist, whose work has been from the first time I saw it, among the art I cherish most, even if, for those who know her work, “cherish” seems like an odd choice of words
Lee Miller, the model and photographer and journalist whose work I dig and whose life continues to fascinate me
William Saroyan—the novelist, short-story writer, memoirist, playwright
Frank Sinatra
Jack Keroauc
Martha Gellhorn—novelist and war correspondent
Jean Rhys—novelist and short story writer
Veronica Lake
Elvis
Samuel Beckett
Brendan Behan—the Irish playwright and memoirist
William Carlos Williams—the doctor-poet, who also wrote fiction and memoirs
Henry Roth—whose novels barely fictionalized his life, a life that continues to engage me on every level
Blaise Cendrars—the French poet-adventurer and memoirist
Rainer Maria Rilke—the poet and fiction writer and diarist who was born in Prague and wrote in German but did not consider himself “German” or “Austrian” or anything other than an “artist”
Frank O’Hara—the Irish-American legend of "The New York School of Poetry"
Ezra Pound
Thelonious Monk
James Joyce
Irene Nemirovsky—a recent addition after her WWII novels were discovered and published in the original French only a few years ago, and in English last year as SUITE FRANCAISE
David Smith—the sculptor
Bing Crosby
and my own, obviously
Friday, March 2, 2007
OSCAR PPS: NICE GUYS FINISH FIRST
People have asked me why I didn’t mention the Oscar win for AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH. I will now.
I was happy it won, because I thought it was a great documentary, and because the director of it was Davis Guggenheim, who directed the episode of DEADWOOD I was on, and as I said in my post on that experience, is one of the most decent people I ever worked with, or for, in movies or TV.
I didn’t see the other documentaries, so I don’t know if AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH was the “best” but it did its job really well. It took a lot of dry material, already known by most of us, but put it together in a way that made it entertaining and engaging, with the help of Davis Guggenheim and Al Gore.
I was a little embarrassed by the self-congratulatory feeling to some of the praise of Gore at the Oscars. It isn’t like Gore is the first environmentalist, or the most active, though he certainly was one of the few politicians to have the foresight to address it, despite the ways that was used against him by his political opponents.
I never met Gore, but judging from the public record, his own actions and speeches, he too seems like a very decent guy, as well as smart. I don’t doubt that if he was president the problems our country faces right now would be different, and a whole lot less foreboding. Nor do I doubt that our prestige in the world would be as damaged as it has been by Junior and his cohorts.
Would Gore have avoided 9/11. Possibly. He, and his advisors, were well aware of the terrorist threat from Bin Laden and Al Quida (or however you spell it). They were ready to address it instead of ignore it, as happened when Bush was handed the election by the Supreme Court.
And Gore certainly would have addressed environmental issues better, not being such a lackey for the oil business, nor would he have abandoned diplomacy for a policy of “preemptive war” nor condoned torture.
It was sweet to see him and Guggenheim accept the Oscar for their effort to educate a wider audience on the effects of global warming and leave them with a message of hope that there are still things that can be done to at least begin to slow the environmental damage down if not eventually reverse it.
Sometimes nice guys do finish first. Even in elections.
I was happy it won, because I thought it was a great documentary, and because the director of it was Davis Guggenheim, who directed the episode of DEADWOOD I was on, and as I said in my post on that experience, is one of the most decent people I ever worked with, or for, in movies or TV.
I didn’t see the other documentaries, so I don’t know if AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH was the “best” but it did its job really well. It took a lot of dry material, already known by most of us, but put it together in a way that made it entertaining and engaging, with the help of Davis Guggenheim and Al Gore.
I was a little embarrassed by the self-congratulatory feeling to some of the praise of Gore at the Oscars. It isn’t like Gore is the first environmentalist, or the most active, though he certainly was one of the few politicians to have the foresight to address it, despite the ways that was used against him by his political opponents.
I never met Gore, but judging from the public record, his own actions and speeches, he too seems like a very decent guy, as well as smart. I don’t doubt that if he was president the problems our country faces right now would be different, and a whole lot less foreboding. Nor do I doubt that our prestige in the world would be as damaged as it has been by Junior and his cohorts.
Would Gore have avoided 9/11. Possibly. He, and his advisors, were well aware of the terrorist threat from Bin Laden and Al Quida (or however you spell it). They were ready to address it instead of ignore it, as happened when Bush was handed the election by the Supreme Court.
And Gore certainly would have addressed environmental issues better, not being such a lackey for the oil business, nor would he have abandoned diplomacy for a policy of “preemptive war” nor condoned torture.
It was sweet to see him and Guggenheim accept the Oscar for their effort to educate a wider audience on the effects of global warming and leave them with a message of hope that there are still things that can be done to at least begin to slow the environmental damage down if not eventually reverse it.
Sometimes nice guys do finish first. Even in elections.
QUOTE OF THE DAY
"I am not a liberal, not a conservative, not a believer in gradual progess, not a monk, not an indifferentist. I should like to be a free artist and nothing more, and I regret that God has not given me the power to be one. I hate lying and violence in all their forms...I regard trade-marks and labels as a superstition. My holy of holies is the human body, health, intelligence, talent, inspiration, love, and the most absolute freedom—freedom from violence and lying, whatever form they may take. This is the program I would follow if I were a great artist."
—Anton Chekhov from a letter
—Anton Chekhov from a letter
Thursday, March 1, 2007
POETRY VIDEO
I was interviewed, and asked to read some poems, in a studio in Manhattan before that recent reading with Howard Zinn at Cooper Union. So far, they've posted me reading a couple of poems in one take with some flubs, but if you're interested, just click on: TimesSquare.com. But be forewarned, one of them is heavily X-rated.
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