William J Cobb on books & film

So did many people read this Op-Ed by Michael Chabon in the New York Times last weekend? http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/06/opinion/06chabon.html?pagewanted=1&hp
I like Chabon’s fiction, though I usually don’t go out of my way to read it. He often comes across as rather glib and light. Here I think he seems awfully smug. The Coen Brothers’s A Serious Man addresses some of the same issues of Jewishness, only without the smug patina covering all. It’s my favorite film of the last few years. Uncle Arthur’s monologue by the empty swimming pool is heartbreaking, classic. And the son adds bathos when needed: “Dad? F-Troop is still fuzzy.”

So it took me a while to get around to watching The Road (2009), partly because I knew it would be a grim experience. The novel is one of the few books that count as a masterpiece of the 21st century, hopefully not prophetic. The film has its moments: the cinematography is moody and artsy, and at times the devastated world is beautiful in a horrific way, even if McCarthy’s description is much better. Both Viggo Mortensen and the boy actor (Kodi Smit-McPhee) are convincing, especially the boy, in moments when’s meant to be terrified. And perhaps I’m too much of a purist, but the few times when Hillcoat swerves from the novel all seem clumsy. 1) The New Family: This comes at the end. I had to recheck the text to see if I’d remembered it wrong, because in the film the mother in the final moments says something like, “We’ve been following you all along.” It goes back to the moment early in the novel when the boy says he sees another child, which you can’t really tell if it’s real or imagined. In the novel it’s definitely real. Logistically, this doesn’t make much sense. Somehow they’re walking through this bleak landscape, with no other people but the marauding cannibals now and then, and they don’t notice the family of four behind them? 2) There’s an awful moment when father/son stumble upon (it happens very quickly) a mother/son being attacked and killed/raped by the cannibals. This supplants the roasted-baby moment of the novel, which doesn’t appear in the film. But it seems clumsy and, again, logistically unlikely. It somehow violates the internal logic of the novel/film. Plus it’s straight out of The Road Warrior (1981), which is itself clumsy. 3) The dungeon scene, where father/son come upon the people being kept as food, is much longer and more detailed. It also doesn’t make much sense. In the novel you know the father looks inside the trapdoor for food, but in this version he goes through a series of rooms, with the boy, before they come upon the food-slave people, who then claw and scratch at them.
My verdict? If I didn’t know the novel so well, I’d probably rank it as a pretty good horror film. But that’s not what the novel is, at all. Part of me likes this: Film may have become the dominant medium now, but novels can still trump films for certain effects, such as philosophical mayhem.
Here’s a url to a good review of the film. I don’t agree with all of it, but I like it nonetheless:
http://www.brightlightsfilm.com/67/67theroad.php

A full moon hung in the sky over Moab, Utah the other night, framed by a few puffy, cartoon clouds. We’d spent the day looking at dinosaur tracks. My daughter, Lili, looked up and said that dinosaurs were sleeping in the clouds. “They use the trees for blankets,” she said. My little poet.

So this weekend I caught Noah Baumbach’s new film Greenberg in a St. Louis theater, the day after I rewatched the Coen Brothers’ A Serious Man, which is better, true, but also not really a fair comparison, because who can compete with the Coen Bros? (And A Serious Man would be even better seen at midwestern urban theater, as that’s the background of the film.) But I liked Greenberg and Ben Stiller is good in it, even if it’s not the kind of film you fall in love with: It does make you think. A.O. Scott praises it in a NY Times magazine piece about the Gen-X midlife crisis (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/09/weekinreview/09aoscott.html?pagewanted=2), which is both accurate and slightly off-target. Why off target? I doubt Baumbach really means a character as distinctive as Greenberg to be emblematic or archetypal. That said, sure, I know guys (and gals, unfortunately) like Greenberg, and usually can’t stand to be around them. But he’s watchable, in his passive/aggressive, shooting-himself-in-the-foot kind of way.  The party scene is worth the movie, when Ben Stiller does coke with a bunch of twentysomethings, complaining about how disconnected they are, when they appear more respectful and well-adjusted than he is. And Greta Gerwig, as the lovable & sad Florence, steals the show.
But Greenberg really made me think of the Feckless Indie Male, a subspecies I noticed often this spring term, in my student fiction: the guy who thinks too much, who doesn’t act, but gets lost in irony and posturing, leading a life of little significance. That’s between the lines of A.O. Scott’s Gen-X rant, though it’s a different generation altogether.

For years now I’ve been curious about the phenomenon/topic/fringe idea of Peak Oil, basically the warning that we will soon reach the peak of oil production: once it’s peaked, it’s only a matter of time before supplies start to dwindle, prices skyrocket, problems ensue. (My own hedge on the issue: But when? Some say the peak may be happening right now. A recent industry estimate put the peak at 2014 or so. Some industry “supply side” advocates say it’s all a myth. Who to believe? Common sense. The world uses some 80-odd million barrels of oil per day. It must run out some time.)
But the interesting way this ‘myth’ is unfolding in the headlines: The BP Gulf Coast oil spill. It’s a deep water project, the kind that is the Hope for the Future. Most of the bigger finds in the oil industry lately have been deep water projects. If these prove too costly, the Peak Oil people become “righter.” And when BP says it will clean up the spill, realize all the cost will ultimately be passed on to the consumer. Somehow, someway. They’re going to add it to the production costs, naturally.
For good reading on the issue, I always recommend Matthew Simmons’s Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock (2006). Simmons is not in my political camp, but he writes well about the issue. No histrionics, little fear-mongering, just a heavy dose of logic. James Howard Kunstler makes a living off the idea, and I find him more questionable, and far-fetched. The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-first Century (2005) is probably his most famous book, and presents a vision of civilization by the end of this century as a matter of salvaging the leftovers, with barbarians at the gate.
But deep water projects are the rage, and as this one is showing us, fraught with inherent problems. If something goes wrong at 5,000 feet deep, with pipes going down another 25,000 feet, there’s no easy fix.

I’m in the mood for some good reading right now, have pegged a few titles for summer reading out of sheer curiosity, and while casting a wary eye at the Summer Movies list, it’s a pleasant surprise to see this morning that Daniel Woodrells’ novel Winter’s Bone (2006) has been filmed and will play this summer:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/02/movies/02granik.html?ref=movies
I read Winter’s Bone at its debut and found it to be one of those offbeat, haunting books that you don’t see coming. Speed freaks in the Ozarks, scary hillbillies with meth labs, scary relatives, and a young teen protagonist that you root to leave it all behind her. It’s the kind of world where joining the military is one of the ways Out. (That’s the world I grew up in, actually: My mother was disappointed that I didn’t join the Army.) The language is sharp, lyrical, and no-nonsense. It’s not a luminous book, but one that makes us understand what it’s like to live in a world everyone else looks down upon. And as far as giving us a realistic glimpse of drug use in the Heartland, it’s much better than Nick Reding’s Methland (2009). It’s got heart, bruised and battered, toughened up.
Dan Woodrell, I’ll also note, is a nice guy, who doesn’t know me, and who offered a kind blurb for my last novel.