William J Cobb on books & film

After months of working too hard and sometimes grueling revisions, I’ve pretty much completed my new novel, The Bird Savior, and will return to posting about books and film again. I’m ready to think/write about something else.
Although I already have the next idea for a novel percolating. It never ends.

When I can’t sleep, which is often, I watch horror films. (Yes, this makes total sense.) And I’ve noticed an odd trend of late in a number of horror/suspense films, including several big budget howlers: Taken (2008, with Liam Neeson playing a most unconvincing action figure), Wanted (2008, with Angelina Jolie, among others, and should get Most Improbable Shooting Effects award), Hostel (2005, perhaps deserves Grossout Award), and Hostel II (2007, perhaps Prettiest Girls Murdered in Most Gruesome Ways Award). Since I end there with Hostel II, let me add that it’s the lesser-disgusting of the Hostel flicks, but what they did they do to poor Wiener Dog from Welcome to the Dollhouse (1995)? (A great Todd Solondz film, that.) It’s the same actress grown up—Heather Matarazzo—and she didn’t deserve it. I won’t describe it, but the young college girl she plays probably never imagined this is how her European Tour would end.
But the truly odd trend that links these films is that they portray/imagine a Europe peopled with heartless, pseudo-chic creeps. In Taken Liam Neeson’s daughter is kidnapped by a sex-slave ring. In Hostel the males/females are sold to freaky rich creeps who like to torture people for fun. Wanted inhabits its own kooky niche, with Morgan Freeman being the leader of a ring of  assassins called The Fraternity, and is nutty in the way that Comic Book flicks generally are. Now I’m hardly any great globe-trotter, but I’ve been to Europe a couple times and have spent months in places like Poland and Norway, and generally THEY think of US as the violent prone maniacs, not vice versa. Perhaps this is the American way of lashing back at cliches.

So I’m reading the morning papers and come across this little gem:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/35781194/ns/technology_and_science-wireless/
And what I’m thinking? It’s a phone! A tiny little gadget so we can all blab blab blab to each other, or worse yet, text our lives away. I suppose there is a greater waste of time than spending the precious hours of your life keyboarding unnecessary little messages to each other, but I can’t think of it at the moment. Recently some bs media spokesfool said, “Texting is the way we communicate now.” O God: The end is near. And I’m not a complete Luddite, though I sympathize with those who are. I can’t be, actually working in the world, and having a family. We broke down and got a cellphone after our daughter was born, in case “something happened” (Paranoia Age meets Gadget Fix). And I hate the cell, the way conversations overlap, cut out, and are overall grossly inferior to the old-fashioned landline phone. But it’s my main phone now, for better or worse. It works in the car! Great Caeser’s ghost. Such progress, I can’t contain myself.
I’m not immune to the hype: I almost ordered an iPad because, frankly, it sounds kind of cool. But then again, is it worth it? That’s for each of us to judge, and I decided no, for now at least. And for all the Gadget Age hype, most of my friends and my many students do not annoy me in the least with their cells, PDAs, etc. But the media constantly does, hyping Twitter until you wish the damn thing had never been invented, simply so we wouldn’t have to hear about it constantly.
I want to write an update of Apocalypse Now, only I won’t have any global warming or oil depletion or terrorism. No, it would just be a vision of a nation of  isolated souls texting each other about this brave new world of disassociation and virtual friendships.

So I haven’t seen Lars Von Triers’s Antichrist yet but will as soon as it hits DVD, and in the meantime, the wits at The Onion have shown what a Danish tourism ad would look like if done by Von Triers. Actually, I like his films. If ‘like’ is the right word. I thought this was pretty funny:
http://www.theonion.com/content/video/denmark_introduces_harrowing_new

Watching Public Enemies it was hard to shake the feeling that I was watching a poor man’s Coen Brothers film. Perhaps first I should admit I’m an unabashed Johnny Depp fan. He’s the one pretty-boy actor (well, maybe Leo DiCaprio included) who consistently makes good films, even such Disney charms as that Pirates series. But he couldn’t save the clumsiness of Public Enemies. Somehow it just didn’t make Dillinger interesting or dramatic. Even though his life was legend.
On the other hand,  A Serious Man is vintage Coen Brothers. (And just released on DVD.) I won’t give it away, but the Second Rabbi scene has its hilarious, absurd moments. I like when Larry asks the Rabbi, “What about the Goy?” And the Rabbi says, “Who cares?” It’s not a tremendously flattering picture of Jewish life, or Goyim, for that matter. But that’s what makes it so good. The pot smoking scene with the sultry neighbor woman is also worth the watch. I’ve heard they are currently doing a remake of True Grit starring Jeff Bridges, which should be fun. The original is semi-awful, a good reason to remake.

Here’s the url to my review of Adam Haslett’s novel, Union Atlantic, which appears in the Dallas Morning News today. It’s a fast-paced read, a tale of creepy bankers, of which there seems to be no shortage in these times:
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/ent/books/stories/DN-bk_unionatlantic_0214gd.ART.State.Bulldog.4b9f072.html

So I’m always suspicious (being at heart a Smartass Skeptic) of movie blurbs and call-out quotes, but several people had told me how “scary” Paranormal Activity was, and I was home late, wanting a movie to escape into a scary world of monsters and ghosts and clammy hands that grab in the dark . . . and somewhere I saw that quote “One of the scariest horror movies ever made.” Yeah right. There are a couple good & scary moments in the film, such as when the gal gets yanked out of bed and dragged down the hallway, but for the most part it’s like The Blair Witch Project meets The Amityville Horror, with less scenery-chewing than Blair Witch, and less old-fashioned goofy fun than Amityville. (Note: I’m a sucker for The Amityville Horror as a cautionary real estate nightmare. The 1979 version, not that putrid remake. Right before we closed on buying a house in Colorado, I asked my wife, “What if it’s haunted?” And I know The Amityville Horror was to blame for my second-thoughts. I like when James Brolin gets all freaky chopping the wood. I’m just like that at my Colorado house, and it turns out it’s not even haunted!)
Don’t believe the hype.
Now all I hear is how “great” Avatar is. I’m sure to be amazed.

I actually had two reviews appear on Sunday, one in Pennsylvania and one in Texas. I feel like I’m going coast-to-coast, almost. This one is about Matthew Flaming’s The Kingdom of Ohio, which appeared in the Dallas Morning News. As the review suggests, my quibble would be that the novel never quite adds up to much, but that’s not the whole story. Do novels really need to ‘add up’ to something? The best ones do. Yes. But The Kingdom of Ohio was certainly clever, and a fun read. Isn’t that good enough? Most films are nothing more than “mildly amusing wastes of time,” to quote myself from an earlier entry. Anyway, here’s the url:
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/ent/books/stories/DN-bk_ohio_0110gd.ART.State.Bulldog.4ba8b34.html

This review appeared in print yesterday. I did it as a favor for a Centre County Reads project, that chose Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon as their 2010 book. It’s a hardboiled, gin-joint read, fun in part to glimpse the sexual politics of 1930. Sam Spade seems to sleep with every available female in the storyline, and isn’t shocked about the gay crime partners in the least. The review appeared in the Centre Daily Times, the local paper for the State College, Pennsylvania area, and here’s the url:
http://www.centredaily.com/497/story/1719314.html

So I was offline for almost a month, spending the holidays in Colorado, no landline phone, no Wifi, no email, no mornings spent perusing The Daily Mail or any other mildly amusing waste of time. The air tasted cleaner. I felt stronger. I talked to my neighbors . . . . Which is all true, although I would also add that it wasn’t that big of a deal. The internet is like indoor plumbing now, something you take for granted in a normal household. It did free up my mornings a bit. I tend to wake up and read the New York Times and a few other news sites to see what’s going on in the world. And is that necessary? I don’t know. Like anything else, you can get addicted to Information.
For Christmas my family received one of those framed gadget-things that display jpeg-images in a slideshow, and it seemed to land on my shoreline as one-too-many gadgets. I have iphoto and Picasa to display my jpegs on my laptop, and now I’m supposed to read the directions to setup this gadget to do the same thing? I’m over this Gadget Age. It’s draining the time of our lives.