William J Cobb on books & film

So being a diehard Cormac McCarthy fan (and more than just a little bit suspicious), I feel the hand of God or Fate or Providence in the fact that one of my students this semester was an actor (Baby Eater No. 3! he notes) in John Hillcoat’s film of The Road (2009), and he has directed my attention to an article published in Penn State’s campus newspaper The Daily Collegian that gives a bit more information about his role, and includes some humorous inside dope, such as his mother (like, Thanks, Mom!) drawing his attention to the casting call, which asks for “very pale, skinny bearded men.” Here’s the url:

http://www.collegian.psu.edu/archive/2009/02/09/student_takes_road_trip_appear.aspx

The only sad part of that story is that the scene was cut from the film in the editing process. I’m sure Andy was bummed. I would have been. It’s like you were going to be on “Who Wants to Be a Famous Cannibal?” and they canceled the show. I’ve already written how I wasn’t surprised to hear that scene was excised from the film, considering it comes late in the novel and, in my phrasing, “seemed a bit much.” But still I’m going to ask Andy if he has a copy of the cut scenes, and if possible, post it here. I’ve seen a lot of bad movies lately . . . . I bet it’s better than Jeepers Creepers (now showing on Netflix) or The A-Team (via DirecTV). Of the two, The A-Team (2010) is really the big-budget stinker, with Liam Neeson slumming in the role of Hannibal and (The World’s Most Sexiest Man) Bradley Cooper as “Face.” I actually kind of liked the original trashy TV show, which was making fun of itself and having fun with the absurdity of its premise, but this overdone remake actually takes the idiotic premise seriously, and ruins all the fun. I would have been better off staying home and playing on Party Poker or washing my hair, which really needs it.

George Peppard played the original Hannibal on the TV show, and did a great job in the role full of comic bluster and machismo, vanquishing bad guys each week, somehow managing not to kill anyone, because everyone knows that’s kind of a downer on network TV shows. For cineastes Peppard is probably now most famous for playing (the heterosexual version of) Paul Varjak opposite Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961): During the filming, he was reportedly despised by other cast members and Hepburn herself, gossip revealed by a recent biography of Hepburn.

So the quirkiest angle of the success of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006) was that we could all recognize what Discovery Channel shows Cormac had been watching, once you realize that the mysterious cataclysm that has befallen the world is some kind of “impact event,” to use the scientific (or quasi-scientific) term for a big asteroid/comet hitting the earth and causing mass destruction. One of the most intense (happy, almost) moments of the novel occurs when the father and son stumble upon a doomsday bunker of sorts in a back yard, one that is stocked with Canned Goods for the Apocalypse, one that saves their lives. After the grimness of the novel leading up to that moment, it’s a ray of light in a bleak world.

Enter the Discovery Channel’s and the National Geographic Channel’s new programs about just the kind of people who would build such bunkers, “Doomsday Preppers” and “Doomsday Bunkers”—as opposed to Doomsday Debunkers, which would be a different program altogether. “Doomsday Preppers” is amusing in a queasy, gruesome, black-humor mode: Most of these people look like they need a diet and some yoga to chill out, and perhaps some visits with a therapist, as well (not that it would help). One woman expects the government to declare martial law and “take over” in the next year or two: Take over what? Doing my laundry? I hope so. Answering my email? Go for it. Somehow, I’m guessing that’s not what she means by the things they would “take over.” It frankly seems part of the nutty Obama-is-after-our-guns myth that has been promoting gun sales to record levels, even though Obama is doing no such thing.

A TV critic in the NY Times has some funny (and some serious) observations about these programs, here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/12/arts/television/doomsday-preppers-and-doomsday-bunkers-tv-reality-shows.html?scp=1&sq=dooms%20day%20preppers&st=cse

But I think the reality behind these preppers is: They actually want the Apocalypse to come. Not in a rational way, but in an irrational, religious-extremist kind of way. If you spend much of your time & energy (& money) preparing for such an event, won’t you be somewhat chagrined if/when it doesn’t happen? That’s what fuels the phrase, “It’s not If, but When.” If the phrase is edited to be “Probably Never or in a Long Time or When We Least Expect It Is More Accurate,” it’s not much of a selling point.

We all want something big to happen in our lives. But some more than others.

So I’m home sick today, and one of the few pleasures for a working stiff on these sick days is catching up on mindless TV. It beats trying to figure out why in the world so many people are transfixed by a fraud like Herman Cain and his bogus 9-9-9 plan. In the category of not-so-mindless TV, HBO’s Boardwalk Empire is well into its second season now, and is much better than the first. The plot is cookin’. While the first season seemed too one note—especially for Jimmy Darmody (“Jimmy’s been in the war. Jimmy’s seen some things.”), played by Michael Pitt, like a young Marlon Brando—the second season has great, complicated plots, and Jimmy has risen into a major gangster, who might be about to take a fall. Paz de la Huerta is being underutilized, in my humble opinion, but Agent Nelson Van Aldren (played by the up-and-coming Michael Shannon, who had a wicked role in Revolutionary Road) is doing a great job in that plotline. For those not in the know, it’s set in the early Twenties, all about Prohibition, and is like a period-piece Sopranos.

Then there’s the grab-bag of Netflix. Lately I keep trying to watch B-movie horror flicks, and don’t make it through most of them. One in the so-bad-it’s-good category, was The Awakening. It’s so absurd you have to like it: Dorks (somewhat overaged dorks, at that, for a rave) get invited to a rave by a sexy girl, while plucky archeologist uncovers an amulet that (you guessed it!) unleashes an evil Aztec demon god. Mayhem ensues. Much blood and gore, low-budget style. It’s not My Dinner With Andre, that’s for sure.

For days now I’ve been pinned by a boulder of work and only last night realized I had to saw off my arm like that (dubiously motivated) Aaron Ralston dude in 127 Hours . . . . So I watched the second episode of Out of the Wild: Venezuela, my new favorite show. (In fact the only show I’m watching right now. Everything else seems awful. Even Wrong Turn 2, featuring reality TV show contestants attacked by cannibals, was a disappointment.) But Out of the Wild most definitely doesn’t disappoint. It’s like Survivor meets I Shouldn’t Be Alive.  (I’ve seen the first two episodes in the last week, on Discovery Channel.) Here’s the set-up: A motley crew of volunteers get choppered down to an awesome highland plateau near Angel Falls in Venezuela, then have to hike out of the jungle, bitten by mosquitos, eating snakes for breakfast, munching on tropical plants, and generally looking tired, grouchy, and sodden. There’s no prize money. They have a GPS thingy they can press if they want to give up, and a chopper will come swoop them away. No hokey teams, no immunity idols. I’ve only seen Survivor once but I’ve seen clips of later shows, which looked more like bikini shoots. This one is no babe parade. They all look a little bedraggled and swarthy, even the blonde. Two of the guys hate each other and after only a few days are ready for some serious manslaughter, if not aggravated homicide. One of them would drive me up the wall, I can tell. But he’s the one catching the snakes for breakfast, so maybe I’d make nice. It’s one of the few ‘reality’ shows where they actually do look in physical danger. It’s almost cruel to watch them, hungry and bitten and miserable. But the landscape is gorgeous and dramatic, too. What’s not to like?

So I actually watched a bit of “Watson” the computer on Jeopardy, and it was obvious the computer seemed to have a huge advantage in timing, that he wasn’t pressing that buzzer gadget that slowed the humans down, particularly noticeable on the easier questions. ABC News reported last night that yes, the computer could answer in 1/100th of a second, faster than the humes (let’s invent a word!) could press that buzzer. Which is in effect cheating, if normally the humes are competing with each other for buzzer timing. Here’s a piece in the NY Times about the show: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/17/science/17jeopardy-watson.html?_r=1&src=me&ref=homepage

But a better comparison here, and one that will give you a more complicated perspective, is the fascinating/wacky nonfiction book, Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity Is Near (2005) all about advances in A.I. and bold predictions for the future (Immortality, anyone?). It’s not a great book, but it’s charming in its loopyness. “Watson” actually reinforces some of his arguments, about the advances in computer power and abilities, including the reverse-engineering of the human brain, a way to get computers to have the creative and deductive power of humans. He’s very sanguine about it, but I find it a bit scarier, myself. And totally fascinating.

I noticed two good pieces on the (embarrassing) political choices we face in less than a month, Gail Collins in the NY Times, dissecting the weirdness in Connecticut:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/07/opinion/07collins.html?hp, plus another piece, which includes Jon Stewart on The Daily Show having fun with Christine O’Donnell:

http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/07/night-watch-talk-of-witches-and-an-apology/

Since everyone seems to be apologizing to someone, I’ll apologize to Jon Stewart for dissing him, because he made me laugh out loud. You get extra points for laughter, big time.

I’ve actually seen Christy O’Donnell in some of these sound bites and I can agree that she comes across as a likable-enough airhead, but Good Lord, not for a senator. I love the “I’m not a witch. I’m you” approach. It should be a slogan for our Wacky 2010 Election. Palatino in New York comes across as a thug, Angle in Nevada as a kook, and now we have a Witch, to boot! The fact that O’Donnell hasn’t been able to handle her own finances well enough makes her seem like another Reality Show Sleaze looking to turn a pretty face into stardom. Only in this case, she’d be one of only 100 voices on legislation for our entire country.  Unfortunately, I agree that in some cases, the Democrats have put up candidates who seem only slightly better. There should be a new reality show called, “Who Wants to Be a Politician?” We could give Immunity Idols (congressional districts) to some, and others, let’s just vote them off and let them make a bad scifi movie as punishment, like Sarah Palin, who would make a good alien/human hybrid cancer that takes over a country.

So with yesterday’s news that CNN fired Rick Sanchez over his angry (actually, I heard the thing, and it was more so a Poor Pitiful Me game he was playing) rant against his own network and Jon Stewart, among others, let’s take a breath and look at several examples of an acronym I just couldn’t make work: Media Phonies Against Obama, or MPAO.

Jon Stewart, who certainly has had many funny moments on The Daily Show and tends to be at least mildly amusing, is promoting his Return to Sanity event, but is starting to smell like he’s feeding from the same trough as Glenn Beck. He condemns Obama for what he hasn’t done, when it’s clear that Obama has tried (& succeeded, in some cases, and in others, failed) to do the right thing on several fronts, but is fighting the good fight against entrenched forces. His modest attempts to improve our healthcare system are labeled “Obamacare” and attacked by well-funded Rightwing forces. In the shameless category of Disinformation, MSNBC even had a headline last week (or “deck,” the text below the headline, to be more accurate) that referred to the (completely fictional) “death panels.”

Bob Woodward was on the ABC Nightly News hawking his latest book about the inside workings of the White House, Obama’s Wars (a deceptive title if there ever was one, considering both Iraq and Afghanistan are wars Obama inherited: he’s been in office less than two years, correct?), which he slanted horribly in the soundbite with Dianne Sawyer. He focused on one quote in which Obama essentially said American can and will absorb the brunt of terrorist attacks. What would Woodward have Obama say? “We’ll crawl in a hole and hide”? Hard to do with 300 million plus population. But what was not glossed over apparently in the book is Obama’s effort to get out of Afghanistan, to resist the U.S. military’s demands for an open-ended war. Woodward obviously thought that was less important in the soundbite category than trying to slant his words. He grinned smugly as he made it seem Obama was somehow treating terrorism lightly.

Jon Stewart tends to make easy jokes about complex issues, and sure, that’s the nature of late night comedy. But I admire Obama for standing in there and trying to do the right thing, not for laughs or ratings, but because he was elected to do a difficult job in a difficult moment in history. He doesn’t tend to whine (actually, I like him best when he shows real anger) or get giggly (the way Jon Stewart does). I’m not a huge fan of his economic team, but the idea that he could somehow completely overhaul our financial system is not simply disingenuous (which it is, in part), but rather dumb/dim. Wall Street power is not mythical. Banks and investment houses have vigorously fought his modest financial reforms, but he did succeed in something. The same with health care. It may not be perfect, but it’s something in the right direction.

And yes, I’m sure the Democratic Party officials wouldn’t be keen for that as a bumper sticker phrase: Obama: Something in the Right Direction. (Of course I did have a bumper sticker that read, “Kerry/Edwards—Para un America más fuerte,” but that’s another story.) In this era of Know-Nothing politics and Tea Party idiocy, perhaps that’s what we’re left with. Something. Anything.