William J Cobb on books & film

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.

Why is it that the giddiest rave reviews often somehow make their books sound suspect? I note this just having read Christopher Buckley’s rave of Tom Rachman’s The Imperfectionists in todays NY Times.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/02/books/review/Buckley-t.html?ref=books
The book does sound fun, but the reviewer’s exuberance, plus the waggish character names and plotlines, make me suspicious. A good example of this odd phenomenon—the literary equivalent of “She’s got a great personality!”—occurred last fall, when Jonathan Lethem reviewed Lorrie Moore’s new novel, A Gate at the Stairs, raving madly, the best novel ever written! (In contrast, a good friend of mine who read the book said, “It sucks.” I haven’t read it yet, but the hardback is here on my desk, and is next up in line.)

Here’s a url to my review of Jake Silverstein’s book of fiction/nonfiction, Nothing Happened and Then It Did, reviewed in today’s Dallas Morning News. Parts of it were funny, in an absurdist vein, such as the bad poet’s convention, and other chapters were amusing, such as when the clumsy reporter covers the opening of a MacDonald’s in Zacatecas, Mexico. http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/ent/books/stories/DN-bk_nothing_0418gd.ART.State.Bulldog.4c59f02.html

So here’s a quote from today’s article about the Tea Party “patriots” in the New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/15/us/politics/15poll.html?hp):
“I just feel he’s getting away from what America is,” said Kathy Mayhugh, 67, a retired medical transcriber in Jacksonville. “He’s a socialist. And to tell you the truth I think he’s a Muslim and trying to head us in that direction, I don’t care what he says. He’s been in office over a year and can’t find a church to go to. That doesn’t say much for him.”
Andrew Sullivan had a good piece in the London Times this week about the right-wing direction of the Republican party. Keep in mind he’s a conservative:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/andrew_sullivan/article7094282.ece

I know I should be reading Milton’s Paradise Lost or at least the new Ian McEwan novel, but in lieu of more intellectual pursuits, The Animal Planet program “I Shouldn’t Be Alive” most definitely deserves the Best Trashy TV award, or the most harrowing hour award, and is fast becoming my favorite show. I don’t  understand why anyone would want to watch such drivel as American Idol or Dancing With the Stars, but I Shouldn’t Be Alive, how can you not love a program about people lost in the desert, at sea, attacked by grizzly bears, and other various mayhem? The coolest thing about it are the interviews with the survivors, who provide a gritty, somber contrast to the reenactments, which are surprisingly high budget. My favorite episode? Hard to choose. They’re all good. At least that I’ve seen. But one is hard to forget: it’s about a world class runner who falls in a canyon near Moab, Utah, and breaks her pelvis, survives four days basically lying on the ground, crawling in agony, in freezing weather, until her dog finally saves her by barking at the rescue people and leading one of them to her.

Slaking my appetite for horror-flick diamonds in the rough, I watched Orphan (2009) the other night, with bigshot actors Vera Farmiga and Peter Saarsgard, which definitely fits in that most excellent category of SoBadIt’sGood. It’s like a mix between The Bad Seed (1954), one of the best of the Fifties melodramas, rife with Freudian claptrap and one truly neurotic housewife trying to corral her adorable but homicidal maniac daughter, and Donald Sutherland’s campy Nicholas Roeg horror flick Don’t Look Now (1973), with its creepy killer midget-in-red. [Spoiler Alert!] The best twist of the film is undoubtedly the little girl turning out to be a thirty-three-year-old Russian woman, which works surprisingly well, considering its high kook factor. Best moment: When Farmiga and Saarsgard have sex in the kitchen with the lights on, and three children in the house, then seem remorseful that one of them glimpsed the shenanigans. I won’t give more away, except the Saarne Institute phone call near the end made me laugh and laugh. Nothing like a campy plot twist for sheer fun.

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.