William J Cobb on books & film

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.

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.