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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Thursday, December 14, 2006</span></h2>

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<p class=MsoNormal align=center style='margin-bottom:12.0pt;text-align:center'><img height="262" id="_x0000_i1025" src="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/images/lh3.googleusercontent.com/proxy/hstGm6dMG4TxxeBdPD6IbXMG5hoc0qAkvhAfsaeUkW-UHx8aL-mXZ5kvzSy6oi6I8eklYbBifwC3gzgq_hiAC139i-x_Mcy7JqzjJCiT9vvRDBWK7Dae5E4i5WI%3Ds0-d" width="454"></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>One of my kids was in the school play this past month, a performance of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0114241/"><span style='color:windowtext'>Reckless</span></a> </i>by Craig Lucas, but &#8211; and this says pretty much everything there is to say about life out here in Chester County &#8211; it was one of the other parents, herself a Conestoga grad, not the drama department director, who recognized that Lucas was likewise a graduate (class of &#8217;69) of Conestoga High. Which is how my son ended up performing a couple of weeks back with the actual author in attendance. Later, Lucas spoke to anyone who wanted to stay, not just about the play and his subsequent career in the theater and film, but also about the isolation he had felt as a kid growing up gay, liberal, Jewish &amp;<i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'> </i>adopted in Chester County in the 1960s. He and some friends had protested the war in Vietnam, for example, and been suspended from school. And he was not voted most likely to succeed. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>But after Lucas performed in the original Broadway production of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Sweeney Todd, </i>Stephen Sondheim pushed him toward writing &amp; <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Reckless </i>did well enough as a play to end up as a film starring Mia Farrow (and with Scott Glenn &amp; Mary-Louise Parker in the cast) back in 1995. Even before that, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0100049/"><span style='color:windowtext'>Longtime Companion</span></a> </i>and <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105165/"><span style='color:windowtext'>Prelude to a Kiss</span></a> </i>had both been successful, both on the stage &amp; on film, in each case with Lucas adapting his own play for the screen, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Prelude </i>securing a Tony nomination &amp; running for over 400 performances. More recently, Lucas adapted Jane Smiley&#8217;s novel for the film, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0314630/"><span style='color:windowtext'>The Secret Lives of Dentists</span></a>, </i>a film I liked just fine when I saw it at the multiplex.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0384929/"><span style='color:windowtext'>The Dying Gaul</span></a>, </span></i><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Lucas&#8217; first effort as director, played locally in theaters a year ago, getting fairly decent reviews, but audiences more along the lines what you would expect for an art house indie with a gay theme. It&#8217;s out on DVD &amp; worth watching, but it raises for me troubling questions about the movies as a narrative genre. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>I should note that I&#8217;ve always thought that narrative in poetry ceased to be necessary with the rise of the novel, particularly in the 19<sup>th</sup> century, but that narrative in the novel itself became problematic not only once the late realists &amp; early modernists (especially Joyce) demonstrated that realism was just an effect, the predictable consequence of a series of devices, but also because cinema proved an even more effective narrative medium. So if, in fact, we find ourselves in an era in which the psychological dimensions of the &#8220;Oprah novel&#8221; have returned with a vengeance, when memoirs are a hotter genre among the trade presses than fiction itself, and when a poet like Alice Notley thinks to return narrative to poetry, it is &#8211; among many other things &#8211; a big red flag suggesting that something&#8217;s amiss at the movies.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>The Dying Gaul </span></i><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>is in fact three films in sequential order, albeit presented as if it were a single tale. The first is a psychological portrait of a film producer, played by <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001714/"><span style='color:windowtext'>Campbell Scott</span></a> (who starred in both <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Longtime Companion </i>and <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Secret Lives of Dentists, </i>and who co-produced <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Gaul</i>), his wife portrayed by <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0165101/"><span style='color:windowtext'>Patricia Clarkson</span></a>, a terrific actress, and a young gay screenwriter, played by <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0765597/"><span style='color:windowtext'>Peter Sarsgaard</span></a>. Sarsgaard&#8217;s character has written a screenplay which the producer wants him to develop further, on the single condition that he convert its characters from gay to straight. But at the same time, both the producer and his wife are seriously coming on to the young playwright, who only a couple of months earlier lost his longtime lover to AIDS. This is by far the deepest, and most serious of the three plays in the picture. It&#8217;s a terrific relief to see three three-dimensional people in a motion picture, not a single
thunderbolt or superhero costume in the crowd. It makes me long for the rebirth of Truffaut (who is even invoked by name) &#8211; we could imagine a long, lush gender-twisting variation of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Jules &amp; Jim </i>and it would be a tremendous film.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>But at this point one of the characters &#8211; I won&#8217;t say which &#8211; begins to play with the mind of one of the others by falsifying a chat-room identity. Why this occurs is never very clear &#8211; the ostensible reason in the script seems not that logical and its explanation so quickly passed over in the film that the three of us watching had to verbally check out that, yes, that was a discussion, all ten seconds of it, about using a private detective to check the background of one of the other characters, a detail never again mentioned. This part of the film is a psychological thriller, as the three characters find themselves increasingly deep in a mystery. Narratively, it moves the story forward, but it feels much thinner &amp; less well conceived than the characters themselves. As a viewer, you begin to sort through the obvious plot options: A will do X to B, B will to do Y to C, etc.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>There&#8217;s a twist of course, tho it&#8217;s been foreshadowed as heavily as a pistol on the mantelpiece, and it sets in motion the third, again very different movie, in which the stories come to their violent, lethal conclusion. Perhaps because character motivation in the second film seems so unclear, the third whirls past far quicker, as if the story had spun largely out of control. The conclusion ends the film or at least the sense of narrative motion, but hardly addresses the story. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>One moment early in the film &#8211; when the writer is asked by the producer <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>why </i>the script is named for the famous <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dying_Gaul"><span style='color:windowtext'>sculpture</span></a> &#8211; haunts me the morning after seeing the flick. The writer&#8217;s response is basically incoherent, although it seems clear enough that his screenplay is autobiographical, that the trip to Europe with the lover dying of AIDS did take place, and that the sculpture in some ways embodies all of his emotions of grief, despair &amp; love. By the time we get to this film&#8217;s conclusion, one of the three characters will in fact &#8220;unwittingly&#8221; echo the posture you see in the image above, everything is narratively neat &amp; tidy. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Which is precisely the opposite of life. And what is ultimately wrong with this film. The incoherent <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>in situ </i>response of the character who can&#8217;t get enough distance from his own life to understand its arc is a far truer picture than the chess-move-perfect closure of the final frame. Why is it that even an independent feature about how Hollywood changes scripts to pull away from reality must echo the very process it damns? Right now the triangle between film, narrative and life, at least from the perspective of Hollywood &#8211; and it would be hard not to think of Hollywood, or at least Malibu, in <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Dying Gaul </i>where 90 percent of the action takes place in this breath-taking pomo mansion, where the &#8220;infinity&#8221; swimming pool&#8217;s edge perpetually disappears against the Pacific horizon, much of the rest &#8220;at the studio&#8221; &#8211; feels positively toxic. This is hardly Craig Lucas&#8217; problem alone &amp;, indeed, his one real failure here is that his attempt to counter the system of plotwise irreality at the heart of the Dream Machine falls short, succumbing to the very disease it diagnoses. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Monday, November 27, 2006</span></h2>

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<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>So, having written that note Sunday about <a href="http://www.ubu.com/film/"><span style='color:windowtext'>Ubuweb</span></a> and its film archives, I finally did download &amp; watch <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a href="http://www.ubu.com/film/mouris.html"><span style='color:windowtext'>Frank Film</span></a> </i>by <a href="http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/mouris.html"><span style='color:windowtext'>Frank &amp; Caroline Mouris</span></a> for the first time in over 30 years (and for just the third time ever). I had forgotten just how deeply and directly this film influenced my writing of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a href="http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/10742.html"><span style='color:windowtext'>Ketjak</span></a> </i>one year after I first saw it at an evening of experimental animation held at the late, lamented Surf Theater in </span><st1:City><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>San   Francisco</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>, a little haven in those years for European &amp; independent cinema out at the very end of the N-Judah line in the City&#8217;s Sunset District.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>I had forgotten not just how directly <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Frank Film</i> influenced the writing of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Ketjak, </i>I had forgotten that the film wasn&#8217;t just a one-man effort, but involved Caroline Mouris as producer &amp; Tony Schwartz doing sound. I had forgotten &#8211; if I&#8217;d ever known &#8211; that <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Frank Film </i>actually <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academy_Award_for_Animated_Short_Film#1970s"><span style='color:windowtext'>won an Oscar</span></a>, for best short subject, animation, in 1973. Yes, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Ketjak, </i>that poem so disjunct that I still from people who tell me they find it too radical &amp; alien, is in some very real sense derivative of an <a href="http://www.awn.com/mag/issue4.01/4.01pages/kenyonoscar.php3"><span style='color:windowtext'>Academy Award-winning cartoon</span></a>. If ever one needed an index of just how conservative as an institution poetry is, that&#8217;s mine. (Nor am I the only person to notice this connection of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Frank Film</i> to my work. <span class=SpellE>Ubuweb&#8217;s</span> ebook edition of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a href="http://www.ubu.com/ubu/silliman_2197.html"><span style='color:windowtext'>2197</span></a> </i>uses an image that is at least based on <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Frank Film, </i>if not taken directly from it,<i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'> </i>for its cover.)<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>And I&#8217;d forgotten, at least partly, how very simple this nine-minute film is (you can view a brief excerpt <a href="http://www.acmefilmworks.com/dir_folders/dirMouris/mouris.html"><span style='color:windowtext'>here</span></a>, or download the whole from Ubuweb, which is what I recommend, tho Macs will require some special software to run it). Mouris uses two sound tracks, one of which consists of him telling his autobiography in a low-key, not quite humorous fashion (imagine a mellow version of a Robert Ashley opera sans music), the other of which consists of Mouris reading lists, sometimes of numbers, but mostly of objects related to the narrative of the autobiography. On the screen while this is going on is a peripatetic, constantly evolving collage mostly of images taken from popular magazines, really using that 24-frames-per-second possibility to show what is almost a Busby Berkeley dance of tires while one half of the sound-track discusses Mouris&#8217; dad&#8217;s gas station, the other half lists objects one might find around an auto shop. Mouris&#8217; imagery fits right into the collage work being done, especially on the West Coast under the rubric of funk art, at that moment in history &#8211; as distinct from the more static use of the same imagery in the hands of, say, Andy Warhol).<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>I know that when I first saw <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Frank Film</i> at the Surf Theater in 1973, I felt that the experience, and especially the sound track, was far more disjunct than it feels to me know, watching it on a five-year-old PC monitor. Not overwhelmingly so, but close enough to make the experience completely exhilarating. For one thing, I think that we all, and perhaps me more than most, have gradually learned over the decades how to hear multiple simultaneous soundtracks in a way that we can integrate, picking &amp; choosing which to focus on &amp; which to treat as more ambient, than was the case when this aesthetic effect was still so new as to feel unnamable. (Another example of this same process at work: Jackson Mac Low&#8217;s earlier instances of &#8220;free writing,&#8221; such as in the <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Light Poems </i>feels far less packed &amp; disjunct than his own chance poetics at the time he composed those poems, yet because he was able to learn from younger writers like Clark Coolidge &amp; Steve McCaffery, his acts of &#8220;free writing&#8221; later in his career handle opacity and density with terrific élan.)<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>So maybe <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Frank Film </i>isn&#8217;t the finest single act of film since <a href="http://www.ubu.com/film/vertov.html"><span style='color:windowtext'>Dziga Vertov</span></a>, but it&#8217;s a damn good one nonetheless. When I look it all these decades later, I can still see the ideas about multiplicity, complexity &amp; layering that I was myself struggling with at that very moment in my own poetry active &amp; alive here. When I saw <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Frank Film </i>I wasn&#8217;t ready yet to try &amp; put all these elements together &#8211; that would take place a year later, a few days after hearing the West Coast premier of <a href="http://www.emusic.com/album/10859/10859929.html"><span style='color:windowtext'>Steve Reich&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Drumming</i></span></a><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>, </i>another work &#8211; as different from <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Ketjak </i>as both are from <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Frank Film </i>&#8211; investigating this same territory. Having <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Frank Film </i>available, along with Vertov, and films by or about, just to drop a few names, <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'><a href="http://www.ubu.com/film/acconci.html"><span style='color:windowtext'>Vito Acconci</span></a><br>
<a href="http://www.ubu.com/film/ashley.html"><span style='color:windowtext'>Robert Ashley</span></a><br>
<a href="http://www.ubu.com/film/baillie.html"><span style='color:windowtext'>Bruce Baillie</span></a><br>
<a href="http://www.ubu.com/film/baldessari.html"><span style='color:windowtext'>John <span class=SpellE>Baldessari</span></span></a><br>
<a href="http://www.ubu.com/film/beckett.html"><span style='color:windowtext'>Samuel Beckett</span></a><br>
<a href="http://www.ubu.com/film/borges.html"><span style='color:windowtext'>Jorge Luis Borges</span></a><br>
<a href="http://www.ubu.com/film/brakhage.html"><span style='color:windowtext'>Stan Brakhage</span></a><br>
<a href="http://www.ubu.com/film/broughton.html"><span style='color:windowtext'>James Broughton</span></a><br>
<a href="http://www.ubu.com/film/bunuel.html"><span style='color:windowtext'>Luis Buñuel</span></a><br>
<a href="http://www.ubu.com/film/borges.html"><span style='color:windowtext'>Jorge Luis Borges</span></a><br>
<a href="http://www.ubu.com/film/burroughs.html"><span  style='color:windowtext'>William S. Burroughs</span></a><br>
<a href="http://www.ubu.com/film/cage.html"><span style='color:windowtext'>John Cage</span></a><br>
<a href="http://www.ubu.com/film/calder.html"><span style='color:windowtext'>Alexander Calder</span></a><br>
<a href="http://www.ubu.com/film/chopin.html"><span style='color:windowtext'>Henri Chopin</span></a><br>
<a href="http://www.ubu.com/film/clair.html"><span style='color:windowtext'>Rene Clair</span></a><br>
<a href="http://www.ubu.com/film/cocteau.html"><span style='color:windowtext'>Jean Cocteau</span></a><br>
<a href="http://www.ubu.com/film/cunningham.html"><span class=SpellE><span style='color:windowtext'>Merce</span></span><span style='color:windowtext'> Cunningham</span></a><br>
<a href="http://www.ubu.com/film/debord.html"><span style='color:windowtext'>Guy <span class=SpellE>Debord</span></span></a><br>
<a href="http://www.ubu.com/film/deren.html"><span style='color:windowtext'>Maya <span class=SpellE>Deren</span></span></a><br>
<a href="http://www.ubu.com/film/duchamp.html"><span style='color:windowtext'>Marcel Duchamp</span></a><br>
<a href="http://www.ubu.com/film/emin.html"><span style='color:windowtext'>Tracy <span class=SpellE>Emin</span></span></a><br>
<a href="http://www.ubu.com/film/emshwiller.html"><span style='color:windowtext'>Ed <span class=SpellE>Emshwiller</span></span></a><br>
<a href="http://www.ubu.com/film/fluxfilm.html"><span style='color:windowtext'>Flux Films</span></a><br>
<a href="http://www.ubu.com/film/foreman.html"><span style='color:windowtext'>Richard Foreman</span></a><br>
<a href="http://www.ubu.com/film/fox.html"><span style='color:windowtext'>Terry Fox</span></a><br>
<a href="http://www.ubu.com/film/genet.html"><span style='color:windowtext'>Jean Genet</span></a><br>
<a href="http://www.ubu.com/film/giacometti.html"><span style='color:windowtext'>Alberto <span class=SpellE>Giacometti</span></span></a><br>
<a href="http://www.ubu.com/film/glass.html"><span style='color:windowtext'>Philip Glass</span></a><br>
<a href="http://www.ubu.com/film/heliczer.html"><span style='color:windowtext'>Piero <span class=SpellE>Heliczer</span></span></a><br>
<a href="http://www.ubu.com/film/hills.html"><span style='color:windowtext'>Henry Hills</span></a><br>
<a href="http://www.ubu.com/film/hoffman.html"><span class=SpellE><span style='color:windowtext'>Abbie</span></span><span style='color:windowtext'>  Hoffman</span></a><br>
<a href="http://www.ubu.com/film/kapoor.html"><span class=SpellE><span style='color:windowtext'>Anish</span></span><span style='color:windowtext'> <span class=SpellE>Kapoor</span></span></a><br>
<a href="http://www.ubu.com/film/kirk.html"><span class=SpellE><span style='color:windowtext'>Raashan</span></span><span style='color:windowtext'> Roland Kirk</span></a><br>
<a href="http://www.ubu.com/film/lacan.html"><span style='color:windowtext'>Jacques Lacan</span></a><br>
<a href="http://www.ubu.com/film/landow.html"><span style='color:windowtext'>George <span class=SpellE>Landow</span></span></a><br>
<a href="http://www.ubu.com/film/leger.html"><span class=SpellE><span style='color:windowtext'>Fernand</span></span><span style='color:windowtext'> Leger</span></a><br>
<a href="http://www.ubu.com/film/lennon.html"><span style='color:windowtext'>John Lennon</span></a><br>
<a href="http://www.ubu.com/film/moholy.html"><span class=SpellE><span style='color:windowtext'>László</span></span><span style='color:windowtext'> <span class=SpellE>Moholy</span>-Nagy</span></a><br>
<a href="http://www.ubu.com/film/mumma.html"><span style='color:windowtext'>Gordon <span class=SpellE>Mumma</span></span></a><br>
<a href="http://www.ubu.com/film/nauman.html"><span style='color:windowtext'>Bruce <span class=SpellE>Nauman</span></span></a><br>
<a href="http://www.ubu.com/film/niblock.html"><span style='color:windowtext'>Phil <span class=SpellE>Niblock</span></span></a><br>
<a href="http://www.ubu.com/film/oliveros.html"><span style='color:windowtext'>Pauline <span class=SpellE>Oliveros</span></span></a><br>
<a href="http://www.ubu.com/film/ono.html"><span style='color:windowtext'>Yoko Ono</span></a><br>
<a href="http://www.ubu.com/film/paik.html"><span style='color:windowtext'>Nam June Paik</span></a><br>
<a href="http://www.ubu.com/film/palestine.html"><span style='color:windowtext'>Charlemagne Palestine</span></a><br>
<a href="http://www.ubu.com/film/rauschenberg.html"><span style='color:windowtext'>Robert Rauschenberg</span></a><br>
<a href="http://www.ubu.com/film/ray.html"><span style='color:windowtext'>Man Ray</span></a><br>
<a href="http://www.ubu.com/film/riley.html"><span style='color:windowtext'>Terry Riley</span></a><br>
<a href="http://www.ubu.com/film/saroyan.html"><span style='color:windowtext'>Aram Saroyan</span></a><br>
<a href="http://www.ubu.com/film/schneeman.html"><span style='color:windowtext'>Carolee Schneeman</span></a><br>
<a href="http://www.ubu.com/film/serra.html"><span style='color:windowtext'>Richard Serra</span></a><br>
<a href="http://www.ubu.com/film/smith_jack.html"><span style='color:windowtext'>Jack Smith</span></a><br>
<a href="http://www.ubu.com/film/smith_kiki.html"><span class=SpellE><span style='color:windowtext'>Kiki</span></span><span style='color:windowtext'> Smith</span></a><br>
<a href="http://www.ubu.com/film/smithson.html"><span style='color:windowtext'>Robert Smithson</span></a><br>
<a href="http://www.ubu.com/film/transgression.html"><span style='color:windowtext'>David <span class=SpellE>Wojnarowicz</span></span></a><br>
<a href="http://www.ubu.com/film/vanderbeek.html"><span style='color:windowtext'>Stan <span class=SpellE>Vanderbeek</span></span></a><br>
<a href="http://www.ubu.com/film/varda.html"><span style='color:windowtext'>Agnes <span class=SpellE>Varda</span></span></a><br>
<a href="http://www.ubu.com/film/varese.html"><span class=SpellE><span style='color:windowtext'>Edgard</span></span><span style='color:windowtext'> <span class=SpellE>Varêse</span> &amp; Le Corbusier</span></a><br>
<a href="http://www.ubu.com/film/vienet.html"><span style='color:windowtext'>William <span class=SpellE>Wegman</span></span></a><br>
<a href="http://www.ubu.com/film/whiteread.html"><span style='color:windowtext'>Rachel <span class=SpellE>Whiteread</span></span></a><br>
<a href="http://www.ubu.com/film/wojnarowicz.html"><span style='color:windowtext'>David <span class=SpellE>Wojnarowicz</span></span></a><br>
<a href="http://www.ubu.com/film/zubi.html"><span class=SpellE><span style='color:windowtext'>Zubi</span></span><span style='color:windowtext'> <span class=SpellE>Zuva</span></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span class=GramE><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>is frankly breathtaking.</span></span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> Ubuweb is one of the great cultural resources of the 21<sup>st</sup> century. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Friday, November 24, 2006</span></h2>

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<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>I finally got around to seeing Ron Howard&#8217;s film adaptation of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a href="http://www.sonypictures.com/homevideo/thedavincicode/index.html"><span style='color:black'>The <span class=SpellE>Da</span> Vinci Code</span></a> </i>and it&#8217;s every bit the disaster that the reviews said <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0382625/"><span style='color:black'>the  film</span></a> was when it first came out. If you have never read the book, this flick, just released to DVD in time for your heretical holidays, very probably is going to seem unintelligible, moving as rapidly as it does, virtually leaping from plot point to plot point without the slightest pause for reflection. The characters have no opportunity to gain any real sense of connection with one another. <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Why </i>the Parisian police cryptologist is rescuing the American &#8220;symbologist&#8221; <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>(sic) </i>is never very clear, nor why he believes her when she insists he&#8217;s in danger in the first place. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>The essence of this story is that three sets of people, each with very different motives, are racing to solve the very same mystery, a puzzle in the form of a treasure hunt, the object the secret, literally, of the Holy Grail. Even in the book, the narrative is complicated to the edge of intelligibility because one of the three operates parasitically, letting the others do all the work, intervening just enough to make everyone&#8217;s actions a little muddy. Here, to squeeze everything into two-plus hours, Howard has drained the monks of any inner life they might have had, so that we are given just enough detail about their actions to understand that Our Heroes are at risk. But everyone feels instead as if they have been trimmed back to stick figures. The result seems more like you&#8217;re looking at the story boards for a motion picture than a film itself.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>It&#8217;s a waste of good actors, doubly so since so many of them &#8211; Tom Hanks, Audrey <span class=SpellE>Tautou</span>, Jean Reno, Alfred Molina &#8211; are terribly miscast for their roles. You want them to have the time somewhere to try &amp; develop (rescue) their characters, even just as an acting exercise, and it makes you wish that Howard had either stripped out perhaps an hour&#8217;s worth of plot, or else given himself the extra time &#8211; this film is long &amp; feels much longer &#8211; to do this. There are moments in the film &#8211; the bank manager&#8217;s betrayal, for example &#8211; that seem to exist entirely out of all context, because his back story is completely missing &amp; he acts thus without motivation. <o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>In the end, this film really fails either because <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000165/"><span style='color:black'>Ron Howard</span></a> lacks self confidence &#8211; he has shown in the past that he knows better, even if he is a relentlessly Hollywood director, not the sort of brooding type who might have had more intuitive sense about the film&#8217;s spirit of darkness (it&#8217;s more than how you light the scene, <span class=SpellE>Opie</span>) &#8211; or because Ron Howard doesn&#8217;t have the power to make this his own film in the face of bottom-line driven execs. <o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>So the problem is that it&#8217;s the author&#8217;s film that&#8217;s been made. As I&#8217;ve noted <a href="http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2006/04/da-vinci-code-is-to-great-literature.html"><span style='color:black'>before</span></a> in some detail, Dan Brown is a hack &amp; the book itself is little more than a hyperactive plot machine. But it was a monster success and is no doubt what audiences expect. Yet consider, instead, how Peter Jackson &amp; his writing partners far more successfully adapted <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Lord of the Rings, </i>omitting major characters, developing one entire picture out of a couple of paragraphs. Howard &amp; screenwriter <span class=SpellE>Akiva</span> <span class=SpellE>Goldsman</span> (<i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Cinderella Man; I, Robot; A Beautiful Mind)</i> collaborate instead to give us a faithful but surprisingly unguided tour of the original plot, adding in only the smallest new details to try &amp; keep some of the book&#8217;s narrative gaps &#8211; most notably the motivations of French police captain <span class=SpellE>Bezu</span> <span class=SpellE>Fache</span> (Jean Reno) &#8211; from sinking this bloated mess even deeper.<span style='mso-spacerun:yes'>  </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Because it&#8217;s Brown&#8217;s film more than Howard&#8217;s, taking some extra time to develop the characters &amp; their evolving relationship to one another is pointless &#8211; they&#8217;re hardly any deeper in the book, although there readers get to see quite a bit more from the perspectives of Sophie, Silas, the Bishop, the banker, even the butler than we do in the film. And, contra Tolkien (or for that matter, Harry Potter, the other big film adaptation franchise of late), the myriad plot points <i style='mso-bidi-font-style: normal'>are </i>what the book is about. If it feels like a roller coaster ride, that&#8217;s because it <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>is </i>a roller coaster ride. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>So often when films fail, it is because of bad writing. The producers spend a fortune on stars, sets, special effects, but appear to have forgotten to hire a writer. The variable history of Philip K. Dick stories as motion pictures could itself become a film course in the strategies of adaptation. The tales that work best as film &#8211; <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Blade Runner, Minority Report </i>&#8211; are sometimes the flimsiest of Dick&#8217;s works, because in the movies, it&#8217;s easier to build from too little than it is to cut from too much. And, in sharp contrast to Brown&#8217;s bad book, few viewers of a Dick film are sitting in the theater with checklists ascertaining the veracity of the translation from page to screen. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>This film fails as writing also, but not at the tactical level of bad dialog. It fails instead on writing&#8217;s broadest horizon: envisioning just what the experience of the film should be. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Thursday, September 28, 2006</span></h2>

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<p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:black'><img height="240" id="_x0000_i1025" src="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/images/lh4.googleusercontent.com/proxy/v_QZBefQtKii0qCVbE1oFCMPMqNVG9FQk3G3aNrcd0JtoTXJ8UC5Uf82TY_CIh_haPW4s9osp1kx1QneqLoWE2Ox8LYoQ79bNJyqEsFNzqORotAl%3Ds0-d" width="300"><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'><a href="http://www.carlisle-pa.com/index.shtml"><span style='color:black'>Carlisle</span></a>, </span><st1:State><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Pennsylvania</span></st1:State><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>, is further west from </span><st1:City><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Philadelphia</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> than </span><st1:State><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>New York</span></st1:place></st1:State><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> is to its north. Home to </span><st1:place><st1:PlaceName><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'></span></st1:PlaceName><span style='font-size: 10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> </span><st1:PlaceName><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Dickinson</span></st1:PlaceName><span  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> </span><st1:PlaceType><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>College</span></st1:PlaceType></st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> &amp; the one-time site of the </span><st1:place><st1:PlaceName><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Carlisle</span></st1:PlaceName><span  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> </span><st1:PlaceName><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Indian</span></st1:PlaceName><span  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> </span><st1:PlaceName><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Industrial</span></st1:PlaceName><span  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> </span><st1:PlaceType><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>School</span></st1:PlaceType></st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> &#8211; where <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marianne_Moore"><span style='color:black'>Marianne Moore</span></a> taught from 1909 until 1915, back in the days when Jim Thorpe was the big man on that campus &amp; his football coach was Pop Warner himself, <a href="//maps.google.com/maps?oi=map&amp;q=Carlisle,+PA"><span style='color:black'>Carlisle</span></a> is not necessarily where you&#8217;d expect the best big poetry event of the fall to occur. But there you have it. On Saturday, the <a href="http://www.dickinson.edu/news/nrshow.cfm?978"><span style='color:black'>Flarf &amp; <span class=SpellE>Dusie</span>  collectives</span></a> will kick out the <span class=GramE>jams</span> big time at  Dickinson College. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><st1:City><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Reading</span></st1:place></st1:City><span  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> from the Flarf gang will be Jordan Davis, Katie Degentesh, Drew Gardner, Nada Gordon, Michael Magee, Sharon <span class=SpellE>Mesmer</span>, Rod Smith, and Gary Sullivan. <span class=SpellE>Dusie&#8217;s</span> <span class=SpellE>doozies</span> will include Mackenzie <span class=SpellE>Carignan</span>, Scott Glassman, Mark Lamoureux, Marci <span class=SpellE>Nelligan</span>, Boyd Spahr, and Dana Ward. Drew Gardner will do something I don&#8217;t understand with </span><st1:place><st1:PlaceName><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Alarm</span></st1:PlaceName><span  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> </span><st1:PlaceName><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Will</span></st1:PlaceName><span  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> </span><st1:PlaceName><span   class=GramE><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Sound</span></span></st1:PlaceName></st1:place><span class=GramE><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>,</span></span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> a musical group at Farleigh Dickinson &amp; Joey <span class=SpellE>Bargsten</span> will have multimedia works on display. Brandon Downing will show a film.<o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>This event starts at </span><st1:time Hour="19" Minute="30"><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>7:30  PM</span></st1:time><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> in the <span class=SpellE>Rubendall</span> Recital Hall at the <a href="http://alpha.dickinson.edu/departments/music/facilities/weiss.htm"><span style='color:black'>Weiss Center</span></a> for the Arts on High Street. That&#8217;s it in the photo above. This event is free.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Thursday, September 07, 2006</span></h2>

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<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>&#8220;Don&#8217;t tell the secret,&#8221; admonish the ads for <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a href="http://www.theillusionist.com/"><span style='color:black'>The Illusionist</span></a>. </i><span class=GramE>Which it may in fact be, if you don&#8217;t notice the actor (or character) who appears in two separate roles (or guises), which is to say if you watch this film passively &amp; inert.</span> That may be what director Neil Burger (<i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Interview with The Assassin</i>) expects. It would explain why, for example, he chose to build this film around two strong actors, Edward Norton in the title role &amp; Paul <span class=SpellE>Giamatti</span>, neither of whom is even remotely credible as a turn-of-the-last-century Middle European, and an actress, Jessica <span class=SpellE>Biel</span>, whose wooden performance would have been an embarrassment in a high school play. Norton &amp; <span class=SpellE>Giamatti</span>, tho, are fabulous, especially the latter, &amp; reason enough to pay the exorbitant sum to catch this bon-bon before it descends to Netflix. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>We&#8217;re in an age when men with character-actor skills &amp; range (Depp, Penn, <span class=SpellE>Cheadle</span>, Bill Murray, Tommy Lee Jones, <span class=GramE>Macy</span> &amp; Spacey in addition to these two) get to take on leading roles, which means that, for male actors at least, this is an exceptional moment. Not that we haven&#8217;t seen this occasionally in the past, from Orson <span class=SpellE>Welles</span> to Jack Nicholson (I&#8217;d include the early DeNiro, before he started mailing in every performance), but all too often these have been exceptions while most of the leading roles have gone to good looking stiffs, from Rock Hudson to Robert Redford to Paul Newman to Keanu Reeves, Ben Affleck &amp; Brad Pitt. That&#8217;s a world in which Harry Ford could legitimately claim he&#8217;s deserved an Oscar (especially for <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Fugitive</i>), but thank heavens for the likes of Robert Duvall &amp; Terrence Howard. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Occasionally one of these actors will have a leading man&#8217;s looks, like Depp, Norton, Matt Dillon or Samuel L. Jackson, but that can be a distraction. It would not take much editing to turn <span class=SpellE>Giamatti&#8217;s</span> police inspector into the leading role in <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Illusionist, </i>even tho Norton has the title role. <span class=SpellE>Giamatti</span> makes every scene a work of art &amp; the climactic collage scene at the end turns entirely on his eyes &amp; the corners of his mouth &#8211; <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>that </i>is the true secret of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Illusionist. </i><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>In retrospect, it&#8217;s interesting to think of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The</i> <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Lord of the Rings </i>as centering on a character actor, Elijah Wood, surrounded in part by two Leading Stiffs in <span class=SpellE>Viggo</span> Mortensen &amp; Orlando Bloom, tho Bloom hadn&#8217;t done anything as an actor yet &amp; Mortensen used his role as Aragorn to transform himself from a film heavy into a leading man. (Robert Mitchum may have been the last man to have pulled that off, tho Humphrey Bogart is sort of the icon of the move.) One of the conundra confronting the <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Pirates of the Caribbean </i>franchise is that director Gore <span class=SpellE>Verbinski</span> doesn&#8217;t seem to know how to balance <span class=SpellE>Depp&#8217;s</span> o&#8217;er-the-top style with Bloom&#8217;s earnest-but-affectless acting. What a shame <span class=SpellE>Verbinski</span> doesn&#8217;t have the sense or skill to play these two very different models of what theater might be off of one another!<i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'> <o:p></o:p></i></span></p>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Wednesday, August 16, 2006</span></h2>

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<p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:black'><img height="262" id="_x0000_i1025" src="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/images/lh3.googleusercontent.com/proxy/GBJIsAMLpvvNul49YBDndpF_ufc4zDozQd5vB9qD348Mpu59h7EIaylHSdIy24rtwyjCVA25R5e-8yD0LRlNAtRry7VHNnxy%3Ds0-d" width="397"><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span class=GramE><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>The Danish documentary <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a href="http://www.realfictionfilme.de/filme/thomas_pynchon/index.php"><span style='color:black'>Thomas Pynchon: Journey into the Mind of P</span></a>.</i></span></span><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> </span></i><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>inadvertently demonstrates the problematics involved with anonymity in literature. Part of the problem is simply that the two filmmakers, <span class=SpellE>Donatello</span> &amp; <span class=SpellE>Fosco</span> <span class=SpellE>Dubini</span>, have about 45 minutes of actual information, but have determined to pad it out to a full-length feature 90. But the real problem is that they have no there here. The film, the closest I suspect Pynchon will ever get to his own <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>E! True </i></span><st1:place><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Hollywood</span></i></st1:place><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> Story</span></i><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>&#185;, is an attempt to identify the living person behind the books. Rather than the &#8220;magic tricks&#8221; that I suggested yesterday with regards to reading anonymous works of literature, this is an attempt to learn something concrete about a real human being who is very determined to remain very private indeed. And, in E! True </span><st1:place><span  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Hollywood</span></st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> fashion, it has not occurred to our intrepid filmmakers to actually <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>read the <span class=SpellE>freakin</span>&#8217; books!?!<o:p></o:p></i></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>What we get instead is a tour of some elements of the Thomas Pynchon industry &#8211; not the academic one, composed as it is of people who&#8217;ve read his works &#8211; the closest they get is a short talking-head spot with the late George Plimpton reminiscing about a review he wrote of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>V. </i>&#8211; but the over-the-top fans who have their own <span class=SpellE>fansites</span> on the web &amp; speculate &#8211; at length &#8211; that since Pynchon &amp; Lee Harvey Oswald were in Mexico at roughly the same time in the 1950s, therefore Pynchon must be in hiding because of what he knows about the assassination of JFK. This is accompanied with much stock footage of Lee Harvey Oswald passing out &#8220;Hands Off Cuba&#8221; leaflets in New Orleans &amp; Jack Ruby gunning Oswald down on </span><st1:date Year="1963" Day="23" Month="11"><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Nov.  23, 1963</span></st1:date><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>The </span><st1:City><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>high point</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> of the film &#8211; or at least the furthest up they get from that low one &#8211; is some interviews with Jules Siegel &amp; his ex-wife Chrissie Jolly. Siegel, a one-time classmate of Pynchon&#8217;s at Cornell who had also spent some time in </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Mexico</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> after graduation, met up with Pynchon in </span><st1:place><st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Manhattan Beach</span></st1:City><span  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>, </span><st1:State><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>California</span></st1:State></st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>, where Pynchon was living &amp; writing <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Crying of  </i></span><st1:place><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Lot</span></i></st1:place><i  style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> 49. </span></i><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Jolly &amp; Pynchon, according to her, fell instantly in love &amp; carried on a romance behind Siegel&#8217;s back, which he later recounted in an article published in, of all places, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Playboy. </i>The film follows Chrissie as she wanders the narrow streets that lead down to the beach before finding the one where she had her tryst with Pynchon. She &amp; the film crew persuade a very reluctant current tenant to let them in &amp; film the basic efficiency apartment, noting such details as the size of the bathroom (small). In passing, she also talks about Pynchon&#8217;s writing process (longhand first, followed by the typewriter), at least as it was in the 1960s &#8211; and that he thought seriously about attending the 1968 Democratic Convention to protest the war in Vietnam. But other than that, his preferences for drugs (weed &amp; hash) and that he would walk down to the beach &amp; spend a couple of hours there every morning &#8220;without ever getting the slightest tan,&#8221; or that he once showed up at a hotel the Siegel&#8217;s were staying in, wearing a black cape, are about the level of depth we get. <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>That </i>is illustrated with stock footage of George Reeves playing Superman from the 1950s TV show. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>The remainder of the film is devoted to people who <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>think </i>they have seen  Thomas Pynchon, including an Aussie journalist who staked out an uptown Manhattan residence (whose address he had gotten by tracing details in public records related to the death of Pynchon's parents) until he decided that a certain 60ish male walking down the street with an eight-year-old son <i>was</i> Pynchon &amp; snapped a <a href="http://www.suntimes.co.za/1998/06/07/lifestyle/l7miss.gif"><span style='color:black'>photograph</span></a> that, even blown up, is little more than generic pixels. CNN did likewise once and then decided to simply do a story on Pynchon&#8217;s reclusiveness while showing many people walking down the streets of Manhattan before telling the audience that one of the people they had just seen was Pynchon, without identifying which one. The film ends with Siegel &amp; the filmmakers focusing in on one guy in a Kansas City Royals baseball cap whom they say CNN told them was Pynchon (Siegel doesn&#8217;t believe it, preferring instead a guy who looks a lot like poet Geoffrey Young). <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>In fact, Pynchon&#8217;s only public appearance <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>ever </i>has been on the <span class=SpellE><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Simpsons</i></span>, where you do  get to hear his voice &amp; see the portrait above. Does this mean that his skin is really yellow or that he only has four fingers on each hand?<o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>I never have asked the poet Allen Fisher, who published some of Pynchon&#8217;s essays in chapbook form, how he got in touch with the elusive author, tho I did once ask Mimi <span class=SpellE>Fariña</span> &#8211; whom I knew somewhat during the early 1970s &#8211; what Pynchon was doing then (he had been the best man at her wedding, her husband having also been part of the Cornell writing scene in the 1950s). This was during the silent period between </span><st1:place><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Lot</span></i></st1:place><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> 49 </span></i><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>&amp; <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Gravity&#8217;s Rainbow. </i>Pynchon was, she said, selling vacuum cleaners door to door, having exhausted his earnings as a writer. It was hard to envision then &amp; I still don&#8217;t know if Mimi was teasing me. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>My point is that it didn&#8217;t really matter then &amp; it doesn&#8217;t now, but minutiae like this have been turned <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>by Pynchon himself </i>into part of a great puzzle that, I think, detracts from what actually is valuable in the man&#8217;s writing. As I noted yesterday, context is one of the six functions of language &amp;, if you make a point of hiding a part of the context, you can pretty well count on readers foregrounding exactly that one element. Do we really need to know about J.D. Salinger&#8217;s bouts with Scientology, Hinduism or that he drinks his own urine? It&#8217;s Salinger who has made these tidbits a part of his fiction, precisely by making his actual life a mystery. Pynchon has made the same mistake. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Robert Duncan once told me that his own 15-year hiatus from publishing books post-<i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Bending the Bow </i>had been an accident. He had said it half in jest to New Directions publisher James Laughlin simply because Robert didn&#8217;t have the work ready in what Laughlin &#8211; who had been expecting maybe one big book every three years, </span><st1:City><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Duncan</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>&#8217;s rate of production since the 1940s &#8211; thought of as a timely manner. But Laughlin had told everyone &amp; now everyone was treating it as a major position that </span><st1:City><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Duncan</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> had adopted. What that meant was that most of his readers knew that what they had heard about Duncan being diffident, imperious &amp; impossible to work with had to be true, because look at this &#8211; he&#8217;s not going to do a book for 15 years. And in retrospect, it&#8217;s true &#8211; <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Ground Work </i>is only now being read as something more than as an afterthought to that career ending hiatus. The non-decision not to do a book for 15 years became instead a large part of the context that adhered to his writing. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Thomas Pynchon has a new novel, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Against_the_Day"><span style='color:black'>Against the Day</span></a>, </i>forthcoming this November. You can even read a passage by clicking that link. At 1060 pages from a novelist who is now 69, it may well be the last big book we ever get from Pynchon, and it&#8217;s only his sixth one. It would nice to imagine that people will read it for what it is, and not as a cryptogram for deciphering what the author doesn&#8217;t care to share. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'><span style='mso-spacerun:yes'> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>&#185; The only other film relating to Pynchon would appear to be a German adaptation of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Gravity&#8217;s Rainbow </i>entitled <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0254718/"><span class=SpellE><span style='color:black'>Prüfstand</span></span><span style='color:black'> VII</span></a> </i>that appears never to have had American distribution. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Friday, August 11, 2006</span></h2>

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<p class=MsoNormal align=right style='margin-bottom:12.0pt;text-align:right'><span style='color:black'><img height="163" id="_x0000_i1025" src="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/images/lh6.googleusercontent.com/proxy/rOui27QMNC2Ksj4T77_ViNwxzLwo2pOYqCrHcmPVMMjQTesbzXTn9iS-rxAUqXmf4iLeAItoGYsKot1vlLsY0Jl6qn1QYl01B4k%3Ds0-d" width="240"><br> 
</span><span class=SpellE><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Tsewang</span></span><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> <span class=SpellE>Dandup</span> &amp; Sonam <span class=SpellE>Lhamo</span><br>
play Dondup &amp; the rice paper maker&#8217;s daughter<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Since the age of seven, Bhutanese lama <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khyentse_Norbu"><span style='color:black'>Khyentse Norbu</span></a> (<span class=SpellE>Dzongsar</span> Jamyang Khyentse Rinpoche) has been recognized as the present reincarnation <span class=GramE>of<span style='mso-spacerun:yes'>  </span>Jamyang</span> Khyentse <span class=SpellE>Wangpo</span></span><span class=articleclosingbio><i><span style='color:black'>, </span></i></span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>one of the two founders of Khyentse lineage of Tibetan Buddhism, a non-sectarian version that seeks to integrate the best of all forms of Tibetan Buddhist practice. Khyentse Norbu also is a world-class filmmaker, having made two motion pictures, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a href="http://www.the-cup.com/frameset.html"><span style='color:black'>The  Cup</span></a></i> and <a href="http://www.travellersandmagicians.com/"><span class=SpellE><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='color:black'>Travellers</span></i></span><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='color:black'> </span></i><span style='color:black'>(sic) <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>and Magicians</i></span></a><span class=GramE>, that</span> have been international hits. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>I saw <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Cup </i>when it came out in 1999<i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>, </i>a film about the impact of the World Cup soccer championship on a group of young Tibetan initiates living in exile in </span><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Northern India</span></st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>. A comedy, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Cup </i>is the antithesis of the ponderous-but-respectful films westerners tend to make about Buddhism. <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120102/"><span style='color:black'>Seven Years in Tibet</span></a> </i>&amp; <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0107426/"><span style='color:black'>Little Buddha</span></a> </i>are not atypical instances of the problem. Khyentse Norbu, then a thirtyish student at the London School of Oriental and African Studies, actually served as a consultant to director Bernardo Bertolucci (indeed, the monk who comes to Seattle to find the young initiate in the film is called Lama Norbu). It was working with Bertolucci that eventually led Khyentse to make his own film six years later &#8211; financed &amp; produced by people whom he had met in the process. If <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Little Buddha&#8217;s </i>moment of scandal centers around the decision &#8211; which smacks to my mind more of Daoism&#8217;s love of paradoxical intervention &#8211; to cast Keanu Reeves as Siddhartha, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Cup </i>is full of such moments, as when the monastery&#8217;s leaders worry that such non-Tibetan practices as failing to reserve bathing solely as a New Year&#8217;s activity will cause their young charges to lose their unique sense of their heritage. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span class=SpellE><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Travellers</span></i></span><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> and Magicians </span></i><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>similarly is built of just such little clashes. The first dramatic film ever made in the nation of Bhutan, using only native, non-professional actors&#185; (the Buddhist monk is played by Sonam <span class=SpellE>Kinga</span>, a major researcher in the state planning agency, for example, co-editor of the volume <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Gross National Happiness; </i>Dondup is portrayed by <span class=SpellE>Tshewang</span> <span class=SpellE>Dendup</span>, a TV reporter &amp; producer with the Bhutan Broadcasting Service), the film tells the story of Dondup, a young village official, and his attempt to get to Bhutan&#8217;s capital where he has an opportunity to get a passport to America, a nation about which he has obviously fantasized a great deal. In the </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>U.S.</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> he hopes to wash dishes or pick apples for a living, an obvious downward move for a college educated government bureaucrat. When he receives permission from the village leader to make the trip (under false pretenses of attending a religious festival), he dances around his room playing air guitar, his walls covered with pinup posters &amp; one large U.S. Army recruitment ad. <o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>But leaving the village takes forever &amp; when he gets to the roadside for the bus &#8211; which appears to come every other day &#8211; he just misses it. So instead he hopes to hitch a ride. At that moment, however, a peasant with a bundle of apples that he hopes to sell at the festival walks up, presenting the problem that they now represent too much volume for a normal passenger car &#8211; some of whose drivers seem thoroughly westernized. Smoking, tapping his foot, making every known gesture of anxiety &amp; frustration imaginable, Dondup decides to walk back up the road so that future drivers will come upon him first, an old hitch-hiking strategy I recall from the 1960s. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Now, however, he is joined by yet another hitch-hiker, this one an itinerant Buddhist monk. When the monk realizes <span class=SpellE>Dondup&#8217;s</span> frustration, he chooses to walk down the road and join the apple man waiting for a ride a hundred or so yards hence. But, as no ride comes &amp; night arrives with a thunderstorm, the <span class=GramE>trio huddle</span> together around a makeshift fire and monk decides to tell Dondup a story.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>From this point forward the film intersperses the two narratives, one of Dondup attempting to get a ride to the city, the second of this fable, which is told in pieces over the next two days as the group eventually swells to six travelers with the arrival of an a rice paper maker (also on his way to the festival to sell his wares) and his beautiful daughter who has just dropped out of school to help her dad after her mother&#8217;s death, and &#8211; during the only serious ride the group gets during the film, in the back of a truck &#8211; a drunken man who says little but has a great singing voice. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>In the fable, the monk tells of a young student of magic who seeks to get away from his village &amp; dull life, only to discover that his desires lead him to pain &amp; suffering. As the group in the frame tale attempt to get to the city, Dondup and the rice paper maker&#8217;s daughter flirt seriously enough for everyone in the group to realize that future life in the village might not be <span class=GramE>so</span> barren as the young officer imagines it to be. The monk tells Dondup that &#8220;the Buddha says hope causes suffering,&#8221; virtually the topic sentence of the film. <o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>The frame tale is a road movie, with significant amounts of humor &amp; just enough hints of arousal to keep it taut &amp; exciting. The fable, a tale within the tale, is pure film noir, with elements of magic &amp; the supernatural. Balancing the two narrative lines is difficult enough, but the real challenge for Khyentse Norbu is how to create a film that is deeply &amp; openly spiritual without, by that fact alone, becoming preachy. It&#8217;s a distinction that Rachel Blau DuPlessis makes in the title essay of her new book, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a href="http://www.uapress.ua.edu/NewSearch4.cfm?id=133172"><span style='color:black'>Blue Studios</span></a>, </i>between poems that tell you <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>what</i> to think (or that model it, &#8220;thinking hard for all of us&#8221;) &amp; poems that are themselves demonstrations of thinking as an active, ongoing, indeterminate process (DuPlessis herself is a great example of the latter, as are, say, Bob Perelman, Lyn Hejinian &amp; Barrett Watten). Before you conclude that the monk is a stand-in for Khyentse Norbu himself, you have to remember that this director is a Buddhist monk who himself went to London to learn cinema, who uses post-production facilities in New Zealand &amp; Australia &amp; largely a western crew, and who runs not only multiple monasteries, but several <a href="http://www.siddharthasintent.org/index.html"><span style='color:black'>non-profit foundations</span></a> in the west, as well as other businesses &#8211; offering everything from mediation tapes &amp; training to three-year retreats in Australia &amp; tours of Bhutan. One argument that he is making, in the context of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>his </i>world, is that there is more to cinema than Bollywood. In the film, the final decision of the village official does not point toward the idea that there might be only one (or even any) right answer here. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><st1:country-region><st1:place><span  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Bhutan</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> historically is one of the most closed societies on the planet, at least this side of </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>North Korea</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>. <span class=SpellE><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Travellers</i></span><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'> and Magicians </i>offers some breath-taking views although, outside of the opening scenes in <span class=SpellE>Dondup&#8217;s</span> village, very little of town or city life there. The <span class=GramE>couple whom the wayward magic student meets up with in the fable are</span> living in something like a tree house. The present day travelers are on the road in the most literal sense &#8211; their situation feels more like (tho less surreal than) Godard&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Weekend </i>than it does the episodic adventures of Che &amp; Alberto in <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Motorcycle Diaries. </i>The </span><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Himalayas</span></st1:place><span  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> are visible throughout the frame tale &#8211; but always at a distance. So what you don&#8217;t get is a sense, say, of what a nightclub, should such exist, in the capital might be like, as you glimpse the Mongolian rock scene in <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Closer to </i></span><st1:City><st1:place><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Eden</span></i></st1:place></st1:City><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>. </span></i><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Khyentse Norbu says that he does not think of himself as a film director who happens to be a monk, but rather as   monk who may have a few movies in him yet to do. A large reason why he&#8217;s successful, I think, has to do with his structuralist sense of film composition. This is a film that would storyboard well &#8211; and indeed isn&#8217;t that hard to put into a synopsis. But at the same time, it is all the extra &#8220;stuff,&#8221; the breath-taking backgrounds, the dense forest, that account for much of the film&#8217;s presence. In a very real way, they are (at least partly) the tale being told.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>&#185; <span class=SpellE>Tsewang</span> <span class=SpellE>Dandup</span>, the lead actor in the frame tale, had a very minor role in <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Cup, </i>which primarily used monks &amp; novices from the Tibetan exile community in </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span   style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>India</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> as actors. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Friday, April 28, 2006</span></h2>

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<p class=MsoNormal align=center style='text-align:center'><img height="272" id="_x0000_i1025" src="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/images/lh4.googleusercontent.com/proxy/uRubzDaXgAuFFm0xLZPH4C2n8IJM2sm4ZmUQnFzmw2wIjIhlwkLYObWcI-mo9z49r4epF02c13n8XtWPsxQVIsdyi3J6l3Ir%3Ds0-d" width="418"></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'><a href="http://www.danbrown.com/novels/davinci_code/reviews.html"><span style='color:black'>The <span class=SpellE>Da</span> Vinci Code</span></a>  </span></i><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>is to great literature what <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Indiana Jones </i>is to great cinema. The book is a relentless plot machine &#8211; with only one real pause right up until the final 15 pages &#8211; utterly unconcerned with any details that fall outside of its pursuit of the next clue. <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='mso-spacerun:yes'> </span></i><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>In case you have not noticed, we are about to be deluged with hype &#8211; the ads have already started &#8211; for <a href="http://www.sonypictures.com/movies/thedavincicode/"><span style='color:black'>Ron Howard&#8217;s adaptation</span></a> of Dan Brown&#8217;s blockbuster. With a cast that includes Tom Hanks, Audrey <span class=SpellE>Tautoo</span>, Ian <span class=SpellE>McKellen</span>, Alfred Molina &amp; Jean Reno, a script by <span class=SpellE>Akiva</span> <span class=SpellE>Goldsman</span> (<i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Cinderella Man, I, Robot, A Beautiful Mind</i>), &amp; locations that include the Louvre &amp; Westminster Abbey, Sony Pictures is really hoping that it has its ducks all in a row, ready for a monster hit to trigger the summer film season a little early this year, coming to every damn screen at your local multiplex on May 19<sup>th</sup>. <o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>So I thought I ought to take the vaccine as early as I could &amp; read the book, not the sort of fare I would normally pick up. <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><o:p></o:p></i></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>The <span class=SpellE>Da</span> Vinci Code </span></i><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>is to great literature what Chinese take-out is to great cuisine. Easy but involving &amp; it&#8217;ll leave you hungry again in a few hours. And beware the MSG.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>I enjoyed the book, though frankly much of it is so clunky that it&#8217;s likeable just for how cobbled together the whole project is. To begin with, protagonist Robert Langdon is a Harvard symbologist. The best I can make out about this imaginary discipline is that it must be one part art history, one part religion, one part debased semiotics &#8211; somebody forgot to tell them that semiotics is debased linguistics as it is. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Then, save for Sophie and her grandfather (and, in <span class=GramE>a</span> <span class=SpellE>eensy</span> bit of back story, the albino monk Silas) none of the characters has any family. It&#8217;s not that they&#8217;re <span class=GramE>single,</span> it&#8217;s that they&#8217;re utterly devoid of context outside of the narrative machine. This is particularly odd in that much of the story&#8217;s meaning comes from Sophie&#8217;s quest to find the truth out about her family, but the whole idea is something that has been so devalued by the rest of the novel that it feels like an afterthought when it finally shows up in Scotland, a bit of wrap-up needed at the end to get the whole shebang under a shiny bow. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>What&#8217;s true of the characters&#8217; families is true of their personalities &#8211; only the eccentric millionaire historian/knight, Leigh <span class=SpellE>Teabing</span>, has any hint of one (and it&#8217;s so sketchy here that you know Ian <span class=SpellE>McKellan</span> has free reign to chew on all the scenic curtains in this role). You don&#8217;t need a personality if you have a puzzle to solve. As an author, Brown is an architect rather than a writer, so consumed with getting his clues all lined-up that he can commit a howler like the comment about the left-brain in the following:<o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in;mso-layout-grid-align:none;text-autospace:none'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:TimesNewRoman'>Not even the feminine association with the </span><i><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:"TimesNewRoman\,Italic"'>left-hand </span></i><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:TimesNewRoman'>side could escape the Church's defamation. In </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:TimesNewRoman'>France</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:TimesNewRoman'> and </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:TimesNewRoman'>Italy</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:TimesNewRoman'>, the words for &quot;left&quot;&#8212;</span><i><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:"TimesNewRoman\,Italic"'>gauche </span></i><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:TimesNewRoman'>and </span><span class=SpellE><i><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:"TimesNewRoman\,Italic"'>sinistra</span></i></span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:TimesNewRoman'>&#8212;came to have deeply negative overtones, while their right-hand counterparts rang of </span><i><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:"TimesNewRoman\,Italic"'>right</span></i><span  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:TimesNewRoman'>eousness, dexterity, and correctness. To this day, radical thought was considered </span><i><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:"TimesNewRoman\,Italic"'>left </span></i><span class=GramE><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:TimesNewRoman'>wing,</span></span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:TimesNewRoman'> <b style='mso-bidi-font-weight:normal'>irrational thought was </b></span><b style='mso-bidi-font-weight:normal'><i><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:"TimesNewRoman\,Italic"'>left </span></i></b><b style='mso-bidi-font-weight:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:TimesNewRoman'>brain</span></b><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:TimesNewRoman'>, and anything evil, </span><i><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:"TimesNewRoman\,Italic"'>sinister. </span></i><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:"TimesNewRoman\,Italic";mso-bidi-font-style:italic'>(bold face added)</span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:TimesNewRoman'><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>In fact, it is the right brain that is alleged to be creative, associative, improvisational; the left is said to be analytical &amp; logical, the antithesis of irrational. But it doesn&#8217;t fit Brown&#8217;s thesis, so he simply reverses the facts. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>This book is an easy target for any game of Gotcha, precisely because it has to weave so many details together in what <span class=GramE>it&#8217;s</span> author hopes will be a credible net of connections. The material here on the Fibonacci series, in particular, made me cringe. So did this passage on iambic pentameter:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in;mso-layout-grid-align:none;text-autospace:none'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:TimesNewRoman'>Before Langdon could even ponder what ancient password the verse was trying to reveal, he felt something far more fundamental resonate within him&#8212;the meter of the poem. </span><i><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:"TimesNewRoman\,Italic"'>Iambic pentameter.<o:p></o:p></span></i></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in;mso-layout-grid-align:none;text-autospace:none'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:TimesNewRoman'>Langdon had come across this meter often over the years while researching secret societies across </span><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:TimesNewRoman'>Europe</span></st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:TimesNewRoman'>, including just last year in the Vatican Secret Archives. For centuries, iambic pentameter had been a preferred poetic meter of outspoken literati across the globe, from the ancient Greek writer Archilochus to Shakespeare, Milton, Chaucer, and Voltaire&#8212;bold souls who chose to write their social commentaries in a meter that many of the day believed had mystical properties. The roots of iambic pentameter were deeply pagan.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in;mso-layout-grid-align:none;text-autospace:none'><span class=GramE><i><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:"TimesNewRoman\,Italic"'>Iambs.</span></i></span><i><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:"TimesNewRoman\,Italic"'> Two syllables with opposite emphasis. Stressed and unstressed. Yin yang. A balanced pair. Arranged in strings of five. Pentameter. Five for the pentacle of Venus and the sacred feminine.<o:p></o:p></span></i></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in;mso-layout-grid-align:none;text-autospace:none'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:TimesNewRoman'>&quot;It's pentameter!&quot; <span class=SpellE>Teabing</span> blurted, turning to Langdon. &quot;And the verse is in English! </span><i><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:"TimesNewRoman\,Italic"'>La lingua <span class=SpellE>pura</span>!&quot;</span></i><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:TimesNewRoman'><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>This is a level of subtlety that one associates maybe with <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>My Name is Earl. </i>But if it did show on American TV, you could almost count on it being lampooned within the week on <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Talk Soup. </i>This actually is a critical juncture in the plot. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Nothing quite reveals Brown as a clumsy carpenter so much as the way he likes to contextualize the opening of a chapter, giving way too much detail before turning to the character at hand, as in :<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in;mso-layout-grid-align:none;text-autospace:none'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:TimesNewRoman'>The Hawker 731's twin Garrett TFE-731 engines thundered, powering the plane skyward with gut-wrenching force. Outside the window, Le <span class=SpellE>Bourget</span> Airfield dropped away with startling speed.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in;mso-layout-grid-align:none;text-autospace:none'><i><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:"TimesNewRoman\,Italic"'>I'm fleeing the country, </span></i><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:TimesNewRoman'>Sophie thought, her body forced back into the leather seat.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>There is no way for Sophie, for example, to know what model aircraft she is in, nor the name of the field. No matter &#8211; it&#8217;s a way of showing us that Dan Brown, guy novelist, knows his machines. Or, another example:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in;mso-layout-grid-align:none;text-autospace:none'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:TimesNewRoman'>The Depository Bank of </span><st1:City><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:TimesNewRoman'>Zurich</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:TimesNewRoman'> was a twenty-four-hour </span><span class=SpellE><i><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:"TimesNewRoman\,Italic"'>Geldschrank</span></i></span><i><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:"TimesNewRoman\,Italic"'> </span></i><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:TimesNewRoman'>bank offering the full modern array of anonymous services in the tradition of the Swiss numbered account. Maintaining offices in </span><st1:City><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:TimesNewRoman'>Zurich</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:TimesNewRoman'>, </span><st1:place><st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:TimesNewRoman'>Kuala Lumpur</span></st1:City><span  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:TimesNewRoman'>,  </span><st1:State><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:TimesNewRoman'>New  York</span></st1:State></st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:TimesNewRoman'>, and </span><st1:City><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:TimesNewRoman'>Paris</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:TimesNewRoman'>, the bank had expanded its services in recent years to offer anonymous computer source code escrow services and faceless digitized backup.<o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Or: <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in;mso-layout-grid-align:none;text-autospace:none'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:TimesNewRoman'>The Sprawling 185-acre estate of Château <span class=SpellE>Villette</span> was located twenty-five minutes northwest of </span><st1:City><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:TimesNewRoman'>Paris</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:TimesNewRoman'> in the environs of </span><st1:City><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:TimesNewRoman'>Versailles</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:TimesNewRoman'>. Designed by François <span class=SpellE>Mansart</span> in 1668 for the Count of <span class=SpellE>Aufflay</span>, it was one of </span><st1:City><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:TimesNewRoman'>Paris</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:TimesNewRoman'>'s most significant historical châteaux. Complete with two rectangular lakes and gardens designed by Le <span class=SpellE>Nôtre</span>, Château <span class=SpellE>Villette</span> was more of a modest castle than a mansion. The estate fondly had become known as </span><i><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:"TimesNewRoman\,Italic"'>la Petite </span></i><st1:City><st1:place><i><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:"TimesNewRoman\,Italic"'>Versailles</span></i></st1:place></st1:City><i><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:"TimesNewRoman\,Italic"'>. <o:p></o:p></span></i></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in;mso-layout-grid-align:none;text-autospace:none'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:TimesNewRoman'>Langdon brought the armored truck to a shuddering stop at the foot of the mile-long driveway.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Or: <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in;mso-layout-grid-align:none;text-autospace:none'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:TimesNewRoman'>The Range Rover was Java Black Pearl, four-wheel drive, standard transmission, with high-strength polypropylene lamps, rear light cluster fittings, and the steering wheel on the right.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in;mso-layout-grid-align:none;text-autospace:none'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:TimesNewRoman'>Langdon was pleased he was not driving.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>This kind of awkward, creative-writing class prose is almost a twitch for Brown. Sometimes the details are plot driven, as when two police officers note that a minor character once skipped out on a hospital bill after having been treated for anaphylactic shock. It sets you up  from that point forward to be on the watch for peanuts. And, wouldn&#8217;t you know, he doesn&#8217;t have his <span class=SpellE>Epipen</span> when he needs it forty chapters later. But in virtually every passage cited above, Brown is just setting the scene in the most wooden way imaginable. We do not need to know about </span><st1:City><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Kuala Lumpur</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> or the nature of the headlights or the architect of the estate. Instead, they offer ersatz credibility.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>What gets readers beyond this sort of overly built Rube Goldberg-<span class=SpellE>esque</span> kind of language is the degree to which Brown can build plot upon plot. Virtually everyone in this novel, save for our symbologist protagonist and his cryptologist companion, has an agenda that is not quite what it seems. Even the minor characters &#8211; the French cops, for example &#8211; have separate plot lines &amp; motives, both in terms of what they tell other characters and how they then do (or don&#8217;t) follow through. Between the Swiss banker, the cops, the monk, the Cardinal, the knighted historian &amp; his butler &amp; a malevolent Teacher, always capitalized &amp; never revealed until the final scenes, the plotline of the two protagonists (who relate quite differently to their quest) is situated into at least eight other active narratives, all of which are doled out piecemeal, as tho every tale was a mystery here. Then there is the less active but more powerful quest set up by Sophie&#8217;s dead grandfather. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt;mso-layout-grid-align:none;text-autospace:none'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>For all the excess detail at the start of chapters, Brown&#8217;s favorite word in this novel is actually rather vague: <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>something. </i>As in &#8220;</span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>You and your brethren possess something that is not yours.&quot; Brown&#8217;s formal problem, chapter after chapter, is how to advance the narrative without giving away key details &#8211; in this sense, the book resembles nothing so much as the old Flash Gordon serials from the movies of the 1930s &amp; &#8216;40s, with their brief episodes lurching from cliff hanger to cliff hanger. And, indeed, the <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Indiana Jones </i>movies are a kind of homage to those same movies. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt;mso-layout-grid-align:none;text-autospace:none'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Intellectually, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The <span class=SpellE>Da</span> Vinci Code </i>makes the Harry Potter series look like Sartre, real novels of ideas. This poses as intellectual fair in that Robert is a symbologist &amp; Leigh a historian &amp; both <span class=GramE>are constantly having</span> to explain the history of this or that clue to the wide-eyed cryptologist Sophie. But Robert is a symbologist about as seriously as Harrison Ford&#8217;s Jones is an anthropology professor. The result is a great romp through the scenery of ideas, but virtually absent ideas as such. As an author, Dan Brown is closer in spirit to Mike Hammer than to Umberto Eco. Indeed, closer to Mike Hammer than to Stephen King or Elmore Leonard or Walter Mosley. If Robert Parker had an interest in history &amp; weren&#8217;t so damn lazy with his plots, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The <span class=SpellE>Da</span> Vinci Code </i>could have been a Spencer novel. But Parker&#8217;s characters have a lot more depth.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Thursday, March 23, 2006</span></h2>

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<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>I am not, as you might have gathered, an unabashed fan of rhyme &amp; regular meter for their own sake in poetry. When it makes sense, when it adds to the poem, it can be terrific &#8211; I can think of poets who have used it well within the past half century, tho I could count them on the fingers of two hands. 99.99 percent of the time these hoary devices of bygone centuries simply pose a large red flag of incompetence, a sign that the writer is not paying attention either to language or the world. I have a new exhibit for my argument, tho curiously it&#8217;s not a poem at all but a film, Sally Potter&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a href="http://www.yesthemovie.com/index.jsp"><span style='color:black'>Yes</span></a>. </i><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Yes </span></i><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>is a film that asks the question &#8220;Can a wealthy American woman in a loveless marriage find happiness in an affair with a Lebanese kitchen worker?&#8221; and the title gives away Potter&#8217;s answer, albeit with more than a little inner angst &amp; <span class=SpellE><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>sturm</i></span><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'> und <span class=SpellE>drang</span></i> along the way. At one level &#8211; perhaps its innermost core &#8211; this is a classic women&#8217;s romantic movie, the archetypal Chick Flick, done however as an art film, with lots of crazy camera angles (no Hollywood headshots with <span class=SpellE>overlit</span> sitcom livingrooms here), a score that includes Phil Glass, Tom Waits and additional music by Fred <span class=SpellE>Frith</span>, with lead characters who have no names &amp; an occasional comic narrator in the form of a maid, portrayed by Shirley Henderson (Moaning Myrtle to <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Harry Potter</i> fans). Virtually all of the dialog in this overly talky film (She, portrayed by Joan Allen, talks to God when filming herself with a video camera, He is the most eloquent man alive, even if the thickness of Simon <span class=SpellE>Abkarian&#8217;s</span> accent is intended to convey the recent acquisition of his English&#185;) is in rhyme &amp; meter. <o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>It takes, at most, five minutes to recognize what&#8217;s going on, metrically, after which it tends to drown out what is being said underneath it throughout the rest of the movie. He &amp; She are having a huge argument in an underground parking garage, but the steady beat of the iambs hints at a deeper &#8211; deeply clunky &#8211; harmony underneath. He&#8217;s shouting into his cell phone in a bombed out </span><st1:City><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Beirut</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> &#8211; and it rhymes. The notes to this film at <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0381717/"><span style='color:black'>IMDB</span></a> </i>suggest that Potter wanted her cast not to think of Shakespeare but rap. Yet it sounds like bad A.E. Houseman or Miller Williams instead.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>This device could have been used more effectively &#8211; think of how riveting it is when, in the middle of Gus Van <span class=SpellE>Sant&#8217;s</span> <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>My Own Private Idaho, </i>lines from <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Henry IV</i> pop up amidst the street hustlers &amp; druggies of Portland. But to reach this same level of intensity here, Potter would have had to have been far more sparing in her application of these treacly measures &#8211; perhaps limiting them to the one character who actually sounds like the language fits her, Shirley Henderson&#8217;s narrating maid. But casting the device throughout the entire film is like giving everyone in the audience a valium before viewing, it lends what follows an overall coating of <span class=SpellE>irreality</span> that makes you feel like you&#8217;re not watching a story, but rather the stylistic frou-frou overlaid on top of a tale that is hiding somewhere underneath. The result is a film in which the whole remains forever a jumble of unassimilated parts. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>&#185; <span class=SpellE>Abkarian</span> is a French actor of Armenian descent, which is what passes for Lebanese in this film. <span class=GramE>There&#8217;s</span> a lot of faux reality effects here like that, such as with the </span><st1:City><st1:place><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Havana</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> beach scene pictured above, which was shot in the </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span   style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Dominican Republic</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> since Allen felt constrained by George Bush&#8217;s ban on travel to </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span   style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Cuba</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>. Ironically, <span class=SpellE>Abkarian&#8217;s</span> </span><st1:City><st1:place><span   style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Beirut</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> neighborhood scenes were actually filmed in </span><st1:City><st1:place><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Havana</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>. Go figure.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Tuesday, March 21, 2006</span></h2>

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<p class=MsoNormal align=right style='text-align:right'><span class=SpellE><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Taryn</span></span><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial'> Manning &#8220;in charge&#8221; in <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Hustle &amp; Flow<o:p></o:p></i></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><o:p>&nbsp; </o:p></i></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>If <a href="http://www.abigailchild.com/"><span style='color:black'>Abigail Child</span></a> had a weblog, I would have hoped that she would have written about Craig Brewer&#8217;s breakout film, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a href="http://www.hustleandflow.com/"><span style='color:black'>Hustle &amp; Flow</span></a>. </i>Her 1972 film, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Game, </i>a 40-minute documentary following the life of a likeable New York City pimp, directly anticipates the movie that garnered <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0005024/"><span style='color:black'>Terrence Howard</span></a> a best actor Oscar nomination &amp; scored the first Oscar for a rap song, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>It&#8217;s Hard Out Here for a Pimp. </i>The first time I saw Child&#8217;s film was at a COYOTE Film Festival in  </span><st1:City><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>San Francisco</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> sometime around 1977 or thereabouts. COYOTE, an acronym for Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics, was the first attempt at a prostitute&#8217;s union in San Francisco, and Child&#8217;s film certainly fit their political agenda, breaking through all the stereotypes of the pimp as exotic Other, showing a fairly straightforward guy who was scrambling for a living &amp; who, at other moments in his life, was more apt to do yoga than coke. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0410097/"><span style='color:black'>Hustle &amp; Flow</span></a>, </span></i><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>which I just got around to seeing last weekend, is in the genre of struggling artist makes good against all odds, a film that at one time could have shown at San Francisco&#8217;s great Chinatown theater, The Times, where it no doubt would have been triple billed with the likes of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>8 Mile </i>&amp; <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Harder They Come. </i>You can almost count on the probability that it will show up in due time in rotation on some cable network like VH1 or MTV or Spike. It&#8217;s far better than a lot of the films that do.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Hustle&#8217;s </span></i><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>pimp, as I suspect you must know by now, wants to be a rap star, but the three women who work for him &#8211; one of whom is out of commission in the last stages of a pregnancy &#8211; are about as far from a <span class=SpellE>gangsta</span> posse as one might imagine. As much as anything, this film is about how the three women respond to <span class=SpellE>Djay&#8217;s</span> dream, unrealistic as it might be for a 35-year-old hustler. Unlike most other music-centric films, at least pre-<i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Ray, Hustle </i>is an actor&#8217;s film even more than it is the director&#8217;s. As he was as Cameron in <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Crash, </i>for which he also easily could have received an Oscar nomination, Terrence Howard is on a terrific roll right now in which his sensitivities as an actor bring his characters <span class=GramE>alive</span> right to their fingertips. His Memphis mumble &amp; stylized do make him seem like a completely different human being than the actor who, in <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Crash, </i>was struggling to make his way into the upper middle-class as a TV producer only to have it threatened when events reveal to him (if not to his wife) just how rapidly back into racial stereotypes &amp; ghetto presumptions one can fall &#8211; it can be a simple as a speeding ticket.  <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Howard is surrounded by a terrific cast of supporting actors &#8211; there&#8217;s not a single weak actor in the ensemble &#8211; three of whom in particular stand out. <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0543383/"><span class=SpellE><span style='color:black'>Taryn</span></span><span style='color:black'> Manning</span></a> gives a chilling performance as <span class=SpellE>Djay&#8217;s</span> &#8220;prime investor,&#8221; the hooker who actually earns most of the little clan&#8217;s money. Her value as a commodity is simple &#8211; she&#8217;s white. Manning, the one-time </span><st1:State><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Arizona</span></st1:place></st1:State><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> state karate champion, comes across more <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>street </i>than any of the amateurs Larry Clark ever coaxes into his films. There is one scene, one of the most powerful in the film, when <span class=SpellE>Djay</span> has just thrown out Lexus, played by Paula Jai Parker, and her child, after Lexus has challenged his efforts to make a demo tape to give to rap star Skinny Black (<span class=SpellE>Ludacris</span>, another veteran of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Crash</i>, playing a character half way between <span class=SpellE>Tupac</span> &amp; Snoop Dog, tho without the smarts of either). As <span class=SpellE>Djay</span> slams the door after leaving the howling Lexus &amp; her screaming baby on the porch, the two remaining women cower as if they expect him to turn on them next. Manning&#8217;s presence in the scene is wordless, but as intense as any I&#8217;ve seen on film in some time. That&#8217;s the image that I will retain from this film far longer than any other. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>A more minor role belongs to that of Shelby, the white boy music nerd who leaps at the chance to work on a record, performed by <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0702809/"><span style='color:black'>D.J. Qualls</span></a>, whom I&#8217;ve seen once before in an episode  of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Law and Order. </i>It&#8217;s a part with some subtext of the comic sidekick &#8211; a generation ago Michael J. Pollard would have gotten the role (as he did, say, in <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Bonnie and Clyde</i>) &#8211; but Qualls makes it feel real in a way that this foil almost never does in the movies. Largely, it&#8217;s because he understates everything. The actors <span class=GramE>who don&#8217;t &#8211; Parker, Anthony Anderson &amp; Elise Neal &#8211; never</span> take on the depth of those who do. <span class=SpellE>Taraji</span> P. Henson, who plays the pregnant hooker, <span class=SpellE>Shug</span>, who inspires the fledging rap group by buying them a lava lamp &amp; ends up recording the song&#8217;s hook, does the entire film looking as tho she&#8217;s about to burst into tears, without ever once doing so, and it&#8217;s that element of holding back that makes this role for her &#8211; as it is for Qualls, Manning &amp; Howard &#8211; a breakout performance that should have a huge impact on her career. <o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Actor&#8217;s films differ from <span class=GramE>director&#8217;s</span> in some fairly significant ways. For one thing, they don&#8217;t have to hang together entirely in order to work, where director-centric projects really have to cohere. The last film I saw before <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Hustle &amp; Flow </i>was Steven <span class=SpellE>Soderbergh&#8217;s</span> <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a href="http://www.bubblethefilm.com/"><span style='color:black'>Bubble</span></a>, </i>a film that uses amateurs in virtually all its roles &amp; demands very little from them, and which manages to make it work because its self-contained nature casts the film very much into the Grant Wood mode Soderbergh is after. <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Hustle </i>in comparison makes enormous demands on its cast &amp; when it gets a tone wrong, as when Elise Neal overplays her role as an upwardly mobile manager, complaining at dinner to her husband that her bosses don&#8217;t see her as ruthless enough, it jars. When <span class=SpellE>Djay</span> and his crew intrude on the repast, Neal attempts to tone down her character, but she still stands out like an <span class=SpellE>emu</span> at a duck pond. Something that askew would have burst <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Bubble, </i>but here it fades fairly rapidly because scene after scene offers such depth &amp; richness of performances that Neal&#8217;s harpy really is only one off-tone instant in a much greater whole.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
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