The week in gore

(Yikes, it's been a busy month...)

I have seen a LOT of movies lately, and I found myself thinking something similar about three of them. Each got press at the time of its release surrounding their graphic violence (or, in one case, lack thereof), and naturally I had opinions.

First, "Drive," the movie starring the guy I can appreciate yet not totally fall for, Ryan Gosling. Ryan's a stunt-driver in Hollywood who moonlights as a getaway driver for various robberies. Here's a sampling of things I heard about "Drive" from reviews and other people who saw it in the theatre: "80's eye-candy;" "ultra-violent;" "adrenaline-fueled;" "non-stop escalating tension;" "I will forever boycott the Oscars for not nominating Albert Brooks." Etc.

For possibly the first time in my life, my reaction to a movie was so diametrically opposed to that of the critical consensus that I wondered if I'd seen a different movie. Usually I can understand where critics are coming from even if I don't agree with their opinions, but never do I check my DVD multiple times to make sure I didn't get a director's total re-cut.

I liked "Drive." The actors are wonderful (though I'd have given my imaginary Oscar to Bryan Cranston over Brooks). It's slow for an action movie - literally in some spots: very liberal, at times exasperating, use of slo-mo walking shots the like of which you usually only see where the screenplay is 68 pages long and they need to stretch the thing to feature length. But I'm okay with a more character-driven story that's willing to slow things down at times for resonance. But I didn't get "adrenaline" or "escalating tension" one bit.

But it's the gore dissonance between the critics and me that really got me. Frankly, I didn't think it was that bloody... but then, I watch a lot of zombie movies. Yes, people get killed violently because it's a film about violent people. But "Braveheart" uses more fake blood by a mile. Maybe it's more intense on the big screen. Or maybe "Drive" just attracted a lot of art house viewers who heard about it on NPR and who don't own "Dawn of the Dead," and they were caught off guard.

Then, this weekend, I saw "The Hunger Games" in IMAX and "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" in my living room. I'll take the first part last. ("Quiz Show"! - see, I don't just watch zombie movies.)

So, I've expressed issues with the "Millennium Trilogy" books (of which GWTDT is the first US adaptation) because I thought they could use serious input from an editor. Well, it appears that David Fincher was that editor. (Note: I have not seen the Swedish adaptation.) Fincher streamlines the story to focus on the most important elements and move the plot along. I tend to love Fincher's unflinchingness while getting irritated with some of his indulgences - for instance, in the DVD commentary he mentions using the largest rain machine ever used on a film in Sweden on a scene that would've been perfectly fine without rain, and all I could think about was how may indie films could've been made and distributed for the cost of that rain machine. But, I think the fact that I finished watching the movie and then immediately turned around and watched the whole thing again with commentary (missing a race in the process) speaks pretty well to how engrossing it is. And Rooney Mara is *amazing.*

But, onto the gore. One reason I waited until this came out on DVD was that I was concerned with the depictions of violence toward women, which is a pretty major piece of the story. I reasoned that, in the privacy of my home, I could pause and walk away if I needed to. But I didn't need to. The basic plot is about a hunt for a sexual predator, and nearly all of the descriptions of his crimes come in dialogue or in extremely quick cuts to crime scene photos. They probably weren't very pleasant to create, but what the viewer sees isn't gratuitous.

Of course, the A-number one scene I was worried about is when main character Lisbeth Salander is violently raped. I probably would've cut away toward the beginning of the scene, because it's not like the audience doesn't know what's happening behind that closed door, but I think I can understand why Fincher didn't cut there. It's a disturbing scene, but it's not unwatchable. Others' mileage may vary, of course. Going by the commentary, Fincher felt that showing more of what happens to Salander makes the later scenes when she gets back at her rapist more powerful. Not sure I agree, but at least he put some thought into it.

Now, onto "The Hunger Games," which has actually gotten some criticism that it's not violent *enough.* This school of thought says that the writers and director are blunting the emotional wringer that is a story about teenagers forced to battle to the death. On the other side are people who a) can't sell this movie to its target audience without a PG-13 rating, and b) people whose imaginations work perfectly fine, thank you.

I haven't yet read any of "The Hunger Games" trilogy, so I have a different perspective from someone who has every word of them memorized. But, in general, movies can, and should, spell things out far less than books do. Movies have the advantage of being able to convey information visually and audibly, and so a bunch of quick cuts at a battle site or a boom of the cannon that signals a competitor has died are all you need to understand what's happening.

I've read a few criticisms of THG that I think are bizarre. (No, not the racists who got the nasty shock that there are black people in Panem. No more virtual ink need be spilled there. Or the people still bitching about Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss. She's awesome, get over it.) For one, there's that "blunted impact" argument, which seems to imply that, because I didn't see 20-odd teens slaughtered, I can't have left the theatre in the appropriately somber state of mind. I don't know, I like to think that at age 31 I'm pretty perceptive to allegorical examinations of the glorifications of violence in 21st century American culture, but I'm grateful there's a critic out there who wants to remind me that forced murder is bad. Someone out there didn't appreciate Gary Ross' handheld camera, but if I could see this in IMAX and not get seasick, it couldn't have been THAT bad.

But the weirdest - shades of "Drive" in the "did we see the same movie?" department - are the critics who say the movie moved too quickly for the audience to fully digest what was happening. Was not the case for me at all, and I say that as someone who had only the film's output to go on (because I've not read the books). Even with minimal exposition, I understood the logistics of what was going on, who was who, who was bad/good, etc. That scene with you-know-who and the flowers - my dad got choked up, and he for damn sure didn't read the books. An entire theatre audience doesn't burst into applause at the climax of a movie if they didn't feel something.

So, back to the whole violence and gore issue... there are certainly movies where I don't have any tolerance for geysers of fake blood or for depictions of pain, usually when I feel it isn't necessary to get across what's going on. In general, I trust filmmakers to make thoughtful decisions about those things. But, like I said.........I do watch a lot of zombie movies.

A tale of two bookstores

Late last year, right after Christmas, I was looking for a copy of "The Hangover" on DVD. I was in the neighborhood of my city's Borders franchise, so I decided to pop in there and see if they had it. They did - for $29. I have not paid that much for a DVD in my life. (For the sake of comparison, I ended up going with a $10 version at Wal-Mart that came in a two-DVD set with "Wedding Crashers.")

It's important to note that the $29 version was the stripped-down edition, the kind that lists "interactive menu" as a special feature. (Note to DVD marketing people: this is like listing "track menu" as a special feature on a CD, or "ink on paper" for a book.) The edition with the actual special features was even pricier. I walked out of Borders shaking my head. Did they think someone was actually going to drop that much on a single DVD of a movie that came out 18 months earlier?

This is why they're bankrupt. Well, one of the reasons. Looking back on that moment just a few weeks ago, I can clearly see that my local Borders lost its soul, to quote Edward McClellan's piece at Salon. The place that in past years hosted local bands and readings of area authors and basically kept Thruway Shopping Center hopping was suddenly just another big-box store that I got into and out of as quickly as possible, usually disappointed.

Just around the corner from our Borders is a used book/CD/movie store, Edward McKay. I can't remember the last time I went in Ed McKay and didn't have to stand in line for half an hour. It's always packed with people dropping off items to sell or trade. And it's always my first stop when I'm looking for a book or DVD. Despite its unpredictable inventory, the staff can tell you exactly what's in the store and precisely where to find it. They stock LPs (which is how my 12-year-old nephew is getting into The Who). You could spend an afternoon there, not even buy anything, and still have a great time.

I hear the narrative that e-readers and the Internet are killing locally owned bookstores, and then I go to Edward McKay and wonder where exactly that narrative comes from. Maybe, as McClellan writes, "as paper books become a niche product, niche retailers will be the best place to buy and sell them."

A book-lover can only hope...

(PS: I have a copy of "Wedding Crashers" for sale, best offer. Original packaging!)

Stieg Larsson. Not blown away.

I'm now officially two-thirds of the way through Steig Larsson's "Millennium Trilogy." I borrowed The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo from my mom and bought The Girl Who Played With Fire* at Target. Today at a discount store I found The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest in hardback, but even at the discount rate it was still more expensive than the paperback edition will eventually be. So I didn't buy it.

Which is how I knew that these books, while entertaining, aren't really that great.

It all boils down to one thing: Larsson really could've used an editor. I don't know how much of his writing he got in front of an actual publisher before he died, but I firmly believe that these books would've been far better had he had the opportunity to re-write, condense and refine under someone else's direction.

For instance, each of the first two books takes nearly 200 pages to really get started. Before that, you have to wade through a ton of exposition. A compellingly written exposition dump is still an exposition dump. And then there's my bigger problem, which is that literally every single female character in both books at some point hooks up with the male protagonist, who's quite the boob guy.

Larsson's title for the first book was Men Who Hate Women, which is appropriate. (Seriously - it's beyond disturbing.) So maybe with Blomkvist he's trying to set up a man who really really super-loves women. And breasts. And stroking those breasts. A lot. And then telling us aaaaaaaaaaaaaalllllllllll about it. We also get to hear a lot about IKEA's stock and the square-footage of every single living space occupied by even the most minor characters.

Setting the scene is one thing, but I don't particularly care what a character spends on his or her lunch. A good editor could've pared at least some of that down and focused what are some good stories about a couple of unique characters.

* Edward McKay was thrilled to buy this from me. Apparently they're flying off the shelves at my favorite used-book store. I was also thrilled to use the store credit to subsidize my long-awaited purchase of "GoodFellas." So, everybody's happy.

Two books, two roles

Boy oh boy do people get stabby when you mess with the classic stories they grew up with. Two of my favorites, To Kill a Mockingbird and The Diary of Anne Frank, are in the news this week. This year marks the 50th anniversary of TKAM, so much revisionist literary criticism is called for. And a British writer has written a novelization of Frank’s Holocaust captivity, which has come under fire because of its depiction of a relationship between Frank and Peter van Pels (van Daan in the original edition of the published diary).

I’m not just a lover of these two books. I also appeared in community theatre adaptations of both when I was in high school and college – as it happens, two of my favorite roles.

Let’s take Anne first, because I played her first – twice, actually, in 10th and 11th grades in productions for local school children. It’s interesting to me that people are freaking out at the idea that Anne and Peter might have crushed on one another, given that the Goodrich/Hackett theatre adaptation went there about 50-some years ago: the play has them going on a “date” in Peter’s small room and kissing. Even the more historically accurate version of the play that opened on Broadway in the late 90s saw Anne and Peter spending a lot of time together, and added monologues (direct from the diary) where Anne talks pretty frankly about her sexuality.

That’s how I tried to approach her. Yes, Anne Frank is an icon of innocent idealism destroyed by bigotry, but before all of that she was a person – a girl who bitched about her family, who tore pictures of movie stars out of magazines and taped them to her wall. She was a girl that, at 15, I could identify with easily. Doesn’t part of Anne’s appeal, 65 years after her death, lie in the fact that teenage girls everywhere feel what she felt? That we’re special, that we’re misunderstood, that we just can’t wait for the one person who will instantly know these things about us? These are universal emotions.

Of course novelizing the life of a real person is going to raise eyebrows. But, please, don’t make Anne Frank a marble statue.

Atticus Finch has kind of been turned into a marble statue over the years, at no fault of To Kill a Mockingbird or its film adaptation, or the play version that I was in when I was about 20. Atticus seems to be the locus of the “TKAM isn’t THAT great” crowd’s criticism, with the Wall Street Journal calling him “a repository of cracker-barrel epigrams.” His main offense seems to be the scene early in the novel where Atticus tells his daughter Scout that the KKK is foolish, and nothing to be feared.

Let’s remember that Scout is six years old when this scene happens, so Atticus is perfectly justified in downplaying the brutality of the organization he’s about to go up against. (What is he supposed to say. “Yeah, they lynched somebody just last week, six-year-old. Let me tell you all about it...”) And, more importantly, let’s remember that the entire rest of the novel refutes this moment where Atticus gives his daughter a little comfort. Whether it’s Atticus facing down the KKK at the courthouse, classmates and relatives calling Scout a n****-lover or, you know, the entire plot of a racially motivated trial – TKAM’s theme that racism a) exists and b) is both harmful and stupid, couldn’t possibly be clearer.

My role in the theatre production of this story? I played Mayella Ewell, the woman who accuses Atticus Finch’s client Tom Robinson of rape. It’s still probably my favorite role, because it was just such a stretch for me. Unlike Anne Frank, I had next to nothing in common with Mayella. My job was to find some way to connect with her so that she wouldn’t be just a caricature. I focused on passages in the novel – Mayella hauling extra water for the flowers she grew at her house, thinking about the extra work that meant for her, and why she would take that on with everything else she had to do. Thanks to the part where Mayella talks about making shoes for herself and her siblings out of old tires, I even picked up a tire tread from the side of the highway so I could feel what it was like to walk on.

My hope is that I presented a character with which the audience could empathize, even as she did terrible things. I didn’t have to create Mayella’s humanity on my own; I had quite a bit to go on thanks to what Harper Lee wrote decades earlier.

So, when someone complains that TKAM is simplistic in its morality, I’m mystified. Maybe that reader who feels that way didn’t have the proper context of life in the South in the 1930s, when it takes place, or 1960, when it was published – but that’s hardly the novel’s fault. I’m not going to knife-fight people who don’t like TKAM because they think it’s too one-note. But I am going to pity them, because they’re missing out.

World’s Largest Frying Pan

Some things are better left to the imagination. The new book 101 Places Not to See Before You Die lists some of them, in the form of vacation spots and roadside attractions that sound really awesome in the abstract but in reality are somewhere between “Meh” and “Oh my hell, please just let me go home,” ranging from Mt. Rushmore to the Jersey Turnpike to Times Square on New Year’s Eve.

Since vacation planning is one of my many time-killing hobbies, I definitely want to read this. Because my favorite vacation destinations (and stops along the way) are kind of out there – figuratively, and occasionally literally.

There was the visit Grandma/rafting trip that took me over the Cherohala Skyway from Tellico Plains, Tenn., to Robbinsville, N.C. (very cool, excellent views, don’t wreck or plan to stop for a bathroom, watch out for the motorcycles). There was the one-day drive from my house to Nags Head (4 hours and 37 minutes!), around on 264, where I didn’t see another car for 50 miles, to Bath (which I’d wanted to visit since reading about it in North Carolina Legends when I was about eight years old).

I’m one of those people who love to take backroads as much as possible, stopping at any place that looks interesting. Which is how I ended up in Rose Hill.

Every time my family went to the beach on I-40, we’d pass a sign proclaiming Rose Hill the “Home of the World’s Largest Frying Pan.” And every time we passed it, we’d wonder what exactly the World’s Largest Frying Pan was… but by that point, we really just wanted to be out of that stretch of 40 where there’s not much, so we never did stop to check it out.

Right after I finished college, the guy I was dating at the time and I decided to take advantage of the fact that I finally had a job that offered vacation time, so we went to the beach for the weekend. Finally a grown up in control of the trip schedule, I’d planned a whole itinerary that included taking Highway 421 almost the whole way to Wilmington – and at long last stopping in Rose Hill.

Since the then-BF was a blacksmith, he was particularly excited about the frying pan. Was it cast whole, or in pieces? Had it been hammered out in a forge? And other metal-production questions I didn’t completely understand, but that fascinated him.

The thing about driving through eastern N.C. – with all the windows down, of course – is that you pick up some interesting smells (yay, hog farms!). Right outside of Rose Hill, we drove through a pocket of fresh cat food. I still have no idea what that smell was from. Anyway, we stopped at the first gas station we came to for directions.

I never want to assume that locals know their own landmarks – landmarks are generally without honor in their own countries – but the staff at the gas station not only knew of the World’s Largest Frying Pan, they were really excited to tell us how to get to it. You go about a half-mile down this road, one of the clerks told me – and it’s on the right. You can’t miss it.

Well, the “it’s on the right” part was true, at least. It’s in a sort of recreation area, under a shelter. And, no offense to the people of Rose Hill, but it’s hard for me to believe that what we saw under that picnic shelter was the world’s largest anything.

It’s basically a big deep-fry pit with black-painted cardboard masking around the bottom and a fake handle sticking off to one side. So it looked like a frying pan. Or, more accurately, like the set that volunteers would build for a community theatre production of “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids.”

The blacksmith just turned to me and said, “CARDBOARD?”

We got back in the car. We went to the beach. We never spoke of it again.

Is Michael Pollan anti-feminist?

Full disclosure: I’ve never read any of Michael Pollan’s books, so I pretty much judge him only by his media coverage. Part of the reason that I don’t want to read any of his books is that I get irritated at pop-analysis of issues that have major, complex systemic roots (like why people eat what they do), and whose only observable results seem to involve an uptick in the smugness quotient of the people who read them.

And, as I’ve complained before, people who earn millions off of guilt-tripping working class and poor people about buying irradiated apples from California at Walmart just kind of chap my ass. It’s within the realm of possibility that there’s someone in America who eats Hamburger Helper because he honestly believes it’s the best-tasting stuff on the planet, but most of us go there because it’s cheap.

I absolutely agree with Pollan that meals made with whole ingredients are both cheaper and healthier than a preservative-loaded meal in a box. My problem is Pollan’s explanation for why Americans have steadily moved toward eating more McD’s and less scratch cooking: It’s all the fault of the feminists.

Beginning in the early 60s, Pollan wrote in the New York Times Magazine last year, feminist activists “taught millions of American women to regard housework, cooking included, as drudgery, indeed as a form of oppression.” Well, yeah, because for some women, it was. It wasn’t the act of cooking that was oppressive – it was the fact that women weren’t allowed many other options.

(And can I reiterate that feminism didn’t magically drag millions of women into the workplace where they had never been before? My grandmother worked in the 50s, as did many women whose families needed the income.)

It should go without saying that Pollan is radically simplifying here. Let’s pretend that, instead of scapegoating Betty Friedan, Pollan had randomly picked any of the dozens of other paradigm shifts that took place mid-century, and then correlated that with the rise of factory food. Cheaper cars. Microwave ovens. White flight to the suburbs (meaning longer commutes). The space program (yay for Tang!). Declining real income, necessitating two-income households. Increases in federal agricultural subsidies. (See what I meant about complex systemic issues?) Unless Pollan presents some evidence that Friedan invented TV dinners, I’m not buying it.

Here’s what feminism IS responsible for, though: removing the stigma around men who do traditionally female things… like cook.

To be fair, the “form of oppression” thing is just one sentence in a much longer piece. And the book review that’s currently got him in hot blog water, Pollan largely quotes that book’s author. So he’s hardly Rush Limbaugh out here. Maybe he’s just naïve about the gut reaction some of us have whenever we hear someone waxing romantic about the days when marital rape wasn’t illegal.

I’m trying to go by Jay Smooth rules here (what you said vs. what you are)… So, Michael Pollan: I’m sure that you’re a lovely person and you have deep respect for all of the people in your life and for women in general. I don’t think you’re sexist, anti-woman or anti-feminist. But saying that the fight to dismantle patriarchy is responsible for the level of corn syrup in my ketchup – that kind of is.

Lessons from Vietnam

I’m about 100 pages into David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest, the 1972 account of how the U.S. got involved in the war in Vietnam. But, while the focus is on the Kennedy and Johnson administrations’ foreign policy, it’s so much more than that. Even only a sixth of the way through the book, its lessons are obvious, and similar to one of the lessons Kennedy/Johnson Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara recounted in the documentary “The Fog of War” – namely, understand your enemy.

During the early 1960s, many in the Kennedy Administration were paralyzed by the possibility of being painted as pro-Communist. Further, they were so obsessed with the advancement of communism in Cuba and China that they tended to view the civil wars in Southeast Asia as a referendum on Western capitalism vs. emerging communism (maybe or maybe not backed by the USSR). They made their decisions based on that assumption, ignoring the basic concept of nationalism in Vietnam, Laos, etc.

Even McNamara admitted, long after ordering hundreds of thousands of Americans into Asia, that the U.S. misjudged the nature of the conflict – seeing Vietnam as a Soviet proxy rather than a nation fighting for independence from its colonial masters. I’ve never seen explored the racism inherent in U.S. policy from this period: the fact that western “experts” found it inconceivable that a population of nonwhite people could be willing and capable of fighting for their own freedom – oh, no, they simply must be Soviet props. And, 60,000 dead American soldiers later, we saw how that played out.

It’s not just academic for me, this decades-old war. In the wake of the Christmas Day attempted plane attack (which is apparently worse than the Richard Reid shoe-bombing attempt, the D.C. sniper, the anthrax mail attacks and even 9/11), I’ve been wondering about something I’ve been trying to articulate for at least a year, asking people who have far more foreign policy knowledge than I do – basically, I this really about us? Or are terror attacks on Westerners instead about extremists who use convenient targets to influence the establishment of Muslim theocracies in the Afghanistans, Saudi Arabias and Yemens of the world?

I absolutely believe that Al-Qaeda is evil and that we must keep fighting them. But… I’m not convinced that our foreign policy and military experts are truly looking at this conflict through our enemies’ eyes.