One of my kids was in the school play this past month, a performance of Reckless by Craig Lucas, but – and this says pretty much everything there is to say about life out here in Chester County – 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 ’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 & 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.

But after Lucas performed in the original Broadway production of Sweeney Todd, Stephen Sondheim pushed him toward writing & Reckless did well enough as a play to end up as a film starring Mia Farrow (and with Scott Glenn & Mary-Louise Parker in the cast) back in 1995. Even before that, Longtime Companion and Prelude to a Kiss had both been successful, both on the stage & on film, in each case with Lucas adapting his own play for the screen, Prelude securing a Tony nomination & running for over 400 performances. More recently, Lucas adapted Jane Smiley’s novel for the film, The Secret Lives of Dentists, a film I liked just fine when I saw it at the multiplex.

The Dying Gaul, Lucas’ 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’s out on DVD & worth watching, but it raises for me troubling questions about the movies as a narrative genre.

I should note that I’ve always thought that narrative in poetry ceased to be necessary with the rise of the novel, particularly in the 19^th century, but that narrative in the novel itself became problematic not only once the late realists & 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 “Oprah novel” 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 – among many other things – a big red flag suggesting that something’s amiss at the movies.

The Dying Gaul 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 Campbell Scott (who starred in both Longtime Companion and The Secret Lives of Dentists, and who co-produced Gaul), his wife portrayed by Patricia Clarkson, a terrific actress, and a young gay screenwriter, played by Peter Sarsgaard. Sarsgaard’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’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) – we could imagine a long, lush gender-twisting variation of Jules & Jim and it would be a tremendous film.

But at this point one of the characters – I won’t say which – begins to play with the mind of one of the others by falsifying a chat-room identity. Why this occurs is never very clear – 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 & 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.

There’s a twist of course, tho it’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.

One moment early in the film – when the writer is asked by the producer why the script is named for the famous sculpture – haunts me the morning after seeing the flick. The writer’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 & love. By the time we get to this film’s conclusion, one of the three characters will in fact “unwittingly” echo the posture you see in the image above, everything is narratively neat & tidy.

Which is precisely the opposite of life. And what is ultimately wrong with this film. The incoherent in situ response of the character who can’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 – and it would be hard not to think of Hollywood, or at least Malibu, in The Dying Gaul where 90 percent of the action takes place in this breath-taking pomo mansion, where the “infinity” swimming pool’s edge perpetually disappears against the Pacific horizon, much of the rest “at the studio” – feels positively toxic. This is hardly Craig Lucas’ problem alone &, 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.

So, having written that note Sunday about Ubuweb and its film archives, I finally did download & watch Frank Film by Frank & Caroline Mouris 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 Ketjak one year after I first saw it at an evening of experimental animation held at the late, lamented Surf Theater in San Francisco, a little haven in those years for European & independent cinema out at the very end of the N-Judah line in the City’s Sunset District.

I had forgotten not just how directly Frank Film influenced the writing of Ketjak, I had forgotten that the film wasn’t just a one-man effort, but involved Caroline Mouris as producer & Tony Schwartz doing sound. I had forgotten – if I’d ever known – that Frank Film actually won an Oscar, for best short subject, animation, in 1973. Yes, Ketjak, that poem so disjunct that I still from people who tell me they find it too radical & alien, is in some very real sense derivative of an Academy Award-winning cartoon. If ever one needed an index of just how conservative as an institution poetry is, that’s mine. (Nor am I the only person to notice this connection of Frank Film to my work. Ubuweb’s ebook edition of 2197 uses an image that is at least based on Frank Film, if not taken directly from it, for its cover.)

And I’d forgotten, at least partly, how very simple this nine-minute film is (you can view a brief excerpt here, 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’ dad’s gas station, the other half lists objects one might find around an auto shop. Mouris’ 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 – as distinct from the more static use of the same imagery in the hands of, say, Andy Warhol).

I know that when I first saw Frank Film 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 & choosing which to focus on & 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’s earlier instances of “free writing,” such as in the Light Poems feels far less packed & 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 & Steve McCaffery, his acts of “free writing” later in his career handle opacity and density with terrific élan.)

So maybe Frank Film isn’t the finest single act of film since Dziga Vertov, but it’s a damn good one nonetheless. When I look it all these decades later, I can still see the ideas about multiplicity, complexity & layering that I was myself struggling with at that very moment in my own poetry active & alive here. When I saw Frank Film I wasn’t ready yet to try & put all these elements together – that would take place a year later, a few days after hearing the West Coast premier of Steve Reich’s Drumming, another work – as different from Ketjak as both are from Frank Film – investigating this same territory. Having Frank Film available, along with Vertov, and films by or about, just to drop a few names,

Vito Acconci
Robert Ashley
Bruce Baillie
John Baldessari
Samuel Beckett
Jorge Luis Borges
Stan Brakhage
James Broughton
Luis Buñuel
Jorge Luis Borges
William S. Burroughs
John Cage
Alexander Calder
Henri Chopin
Rene Clair
Jean Cocteau
Merce Cunningham
Guy Debord
Maya Deren
Marcel Duchamp
Tracy Emin
Ed Emshwiller
Flux Films
Richard Foreman
Terry Fox
Jean Genet
Alberto Giacometti
Philip Glass
Piero Heliczer
Henry Hills
Abbie Hoffman
Anish Kapoor
Raashan Roland Kirk
Jacques Lacan
George Landow
Fernand Leger
John Lennon
László Moholy-Nagy
Gordon Mumma
Bruce Nauman
Phil Niblock
Pauline Oliveros
Yoko Ono
Nam June Paik
Charlemagne Palestine
Robert Rauschenberg
Man Ray
Terry Riley
Aram Saroyan
Carolee Schneeman
Richard Serra
Jack Smith
Kiki Smith
Robert Smithson
David Wojnarowicz
Stan Vanderbeek
Agnes Varda
Edgard Varêse & Le Corbusier
William Wegman
Rachel Whiteread
David Wojnarowicz
Zubi Zuva

is frankly breathtaking. Ubuweb is one of the great cultural resources of the 21^st century.

I finally got around to seeing Ron Howard’s film adaptation of The Da Vinci Code and it’s every bit the disaster that the reviews said the film 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. Why the Parisian police cryptologist is rescuing the American “symbologist” (sic) is never very clear, nor why he believes her when she insists he’s in danger in the first place.

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’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’re looking at the story boards for a motion picture than a film itself.

It’s a waste of good actors, doubly so since so many of them – Tom Hanks, Audrey Tautou, Jean Reno, Alfred Molina – are terribly miscast for their roles. You want them to have the time somewhere to try & develop (rescue) their characters, even just as an acting exercise, and it makes you wish that Howard had either stripped out perhaps an hour’s worth of plot, or else given himself the extra time – this film is long & feels much longer – to do this. There are moments in the film – the bank manager’s betrayal, for example – that seem to exist entirely out of all context, because his back story is completely missing & he acts thus without motivation.

In the end, this film really fails either because Ron Howard lacks self confidence – 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’s spirit of darkness (it’s more than how you light the scene, Opie) – or because Ron Howard doesn’t have the power to make this his own film in the face of bottom-line driven execs.

So the problem is that it’s the author’s film that’s been made. As I’ve noted before in some detail, Dan Brown is a hack & 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 & his writing partners far more successfully adapted The Lord of the Rings, omitting major characters, developing one entire picture out of a couple of paragraphs. Howard & screenwriter Akiva Goldsman (Cinderella Man; I, Robot; A Beautiful Mind) collaborate instead to give us a faithful but surprisingly unguided tour of the original plot, adding in only the smallest new details to try & keep some of the book’s narrative gaps – most notably the motivations of French police captain Bezu Fache (Jean Reno) – from sinking this bloated mess even deeper.

Because it’s Brown’s film more than Howard’s, taking some extra time to develop the characters & their evolving relationship to one another is pointless – they’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 are what the book is about. If it feels like a roller coaster ride, that’s because it is a roller coaster ride.

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 – Blade Runner, Minority Report – are sometimes the flimsiest of Dick’s works, because in the movies, it’s easier to build from too little than it is to cut from too much. And, in sharp contrast to Brown’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.

This film fails as writing also, but not at the tactical level of bad dialog. It fails instead on writing’s broadest horizon: envisioning just what the experience of the film should be.

Carlisle, Pennsylvania, is further west from Philadelphia than New York is to its north. Home to Dickinson College & the one-time site of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School – where Marianne Moore taught from 1909 until 1915, back in the days when Jim Thorpe was the big man on that campus & his football coach was Pop Warner himself, Carlisle is not necessarily where you’d expect the best big poetry event of the fall to occur. But there you have it. On Saturday, the Flarf & Dusie collectives will kick out the jams big time at Dickinson College.

Reading from the Flarf gang will be Jordan Davis, Katie Degentesh, Drew Gardner, Nada Gordon, Michael Magee, Sharon Mesmer, Rod Smith, and Gary Sullivan. Dusie’s doozies will include Mackenzie Carignan, Scott Glassman, Mark Lamoureux, Marci Nelligan, Boyd Spahr, and Dana Ward. Drew Gardner will do something I don’t understand with Alarm Will Sound, a musical group at Farleigh Dickinson & Joey Bargsten will have multimedia works on display. Brandon Downing will show a film.

This event starts at 7:30 PM in the Rubendall Recital Hall at the Weiss Center for the Arts on High Street. That’s it in the photo above. This event is free.

“Don’t tell the secret,” admonish the ads for The Illusionist. Which it may in fact be, if you don’t notice the actor (or character) who appears in two separate roles (or guises), which is to say if you watch this film passively & inert. That may be what director Neil Burger (Interview with The Assassin) expects. It would explain why, for example, he chose to build this film around two strong actors, Edward Norton in the title role & Paul Giamatti, neither of whom is even remotely credible as a turn-of-the-last-century Middle European, and an actress, Jessica Biel, whose wooden performance would have been an embarrassment in a high school play. Norton & Giamatti, tho, are fabulous, especially the latter, & reason enough to pay the exorbitant sum to catch this bon-bon before it descends to Netflix.

We’re in an age when men with character-actor skills & range (Depp, Penn, Cheadle, Bill Murray, Tommy Lee Jones, Macy & 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’t seen this occasionally in the past, from Orson Welles to Jack Nicholson (I’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 & Brad Pitt. That’s a world in which Harry Ford could legitimately claim he’s deserved an Oscar (especially for The Fugitive), but thank heavens for the likes of Robert Duvall & Terrence Howard.

Occasionally one of these actors will have a leading man’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 Giamatti’s police inspector into the leading role in The Illusionist, even tho Norton has the title role. Giamatti makes every scene a work of art & the climactic collage scene at the end turns entirely on his eyes & the corners of his mouth – that is the true secret of The Illusionist.

In retrospect, it’s interesting to think of The Lord of the Rings as centering on a character actor, Elijah Wood, surrounded in part by two Leading Stiffs in Viggo Mortensen & Orlando Bloom, tho Bloom hadn’t done anything as an actor yet & 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 Pirates of the Caribbean franchise is that director Gore Verbinski doesn’t seem to know how to balance Depp’s o’er-the-top style with Bloom’s earnest-but-affectless acting. What a shame Verbinski doesn’t have the sense or skill to play these two very different models of what theater might be off of one another!

The Danish documentary Thomas Pynchon: Journey into the Mind of P. inadvertently demonstrates the problematics involved with anonymity in literature. Part of the problem is simply that the two filmmakers, Donatello & Fosco Dubini, 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 E! True Hollywood Story¹, is an attempt to identify the living person behind the books. Rather than the “magic tricks” 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 Hollywood fashion, it has not occurred to our intrepid filmmakers to actually read the freakin’ books!?!

What we get instead is a tour of some elements of the Thomas Pynchon industry – not the academic one, composed as it is of people who’ve read his works – the closest they get is a short talking-head spot with the late George Plimpton reminiscing about a review he wrote of V. – but the over-the-top fans who have their own fansites on the web & speculate – at length – that since Pynchon & 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 “Hands Off Cuba” leaflets in New Orleans & Jack Ruby gunning Oswald down on Nov. 23, 1963.

The high point of the film – or at least the furthest up they get from that low one – is some interviews with Jules Siegel & his ex-wife Chrissie Jolly. Siegel, a one-time classmate of Pynchon’s at Cornell who had also spent some time in Mexico after graduation, met up with Pynchon in Manhattan Beach, California, where Pynchon was living & writing The Crying of Lot 49. Jolly & Pynchon, according to her, fell instantly in love & carried on a romance behind Siegel’s back, which he later recounted in an article published in, of all places, Playboy. 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 & the film crew persuade a very reluctant current tenant to let them in & film the basic efficiency apartment, noting such details as the size of the bathroom (small). In passing, she also talks about Pynchon’s writing process (longhand first, followed by the typewriter), at least as it was in the 1960s – 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 & hash) and that he would walk down to the beach & spend a couple of hours there every morning “without ever getting the slightest tan,” or that he once showed up at a hotel the Siegel’s were staying in, wearing a black cape, are about the level of depth we get. That is illustrated with stock footage of George Reeves playing Superman from the 1950s TV show.

The remainder of the film is devoted to people who think 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 was Pynchon & snapped a photograph that, even blown up, is little more than generic pixels. CNN did likewise once and then decided to simply do a story on Pynchon’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 & the filmmakers focusing in on one guy in a Kansas City Royals baseball cap whom they say CNN told them was Pynchon (Siegel doesn’t believe it, preferring instead a guy who looks a lot like poet Geoffrey Young).

In fact, Pynchon’s only public appearance ever has been on the Simpsons, where you do get to hear his voice & see the portrait above. Does this mean that his skin is really yellow or that he only has four fingers on each hand?

I never have asked the poet Allen Fisher, who published some of Pynchon’s essays in chapbook form, how he got in touch with the elusive author, tho I did once ask Mimi Fariña – whom I knew somewhat during the early 1970s – 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 Lot 49 & Gravity’s Rainbow. Pynchon was, she said, selling vacuum cleaners door to door, having exhausted his earnings as a writer. It was hard to envision then & I still don’t know if Mimi was teasing me.

My point is that it didn’t really matter then & it doesn’t now, but minutiae like this have been turned by Pynchon himself into part of a great puzzle that, I think, detracts from what actually is valuable in the man’s writing. As I noted yesterday, context is one of the six functions of language &, 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’s bouts with Scientology, Hinduism or that he drinks his own urine? It’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.

Robert Duncan once told me that his own 15-year hiatus from publishing books post-Bending the Bow had been an accident. He had said it half in jest to New Directions publisher James Laughlin simply because Robert didn’t have the work ready in what Laughlin – who had been expecting maybe one big book every three years, Duncan’s rate of production since the 1940s – thought of as a timely manner. But Laughlin had told everyone & now everyone was treating it as a major position that Duncan had adopted. What that meant was that most of his readers knew that what they had heard about Duncan being diffident, imperious & impossible to work with had to be true, because look at this – he’s not going to do a book for 15 years. And in retrospect, it’s true – Ground Work 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.

Thomas Pynchon has a new novel, Against the Day, 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’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’t care to share.

¹ The only other film relating to Pynchon would appear to be a German adaptation of Gravity’s Rainbow entitled Prüfstand VII that appears never to have had American distribution.

Tsewang Dandup & Sonam Lhamo
play Dondup & the rice paper maker’s daughter

Since the age of seven, Bhutanese lama Khyentse Norbu (Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse Rinpoche) has been recognized as the present reincarnation of Jamyang Khyentse Wangpo, 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, The Cup and Travellers (sic) and Magicians, that have been international hits.

I saw The Cup when it came out in 1999, a film about the impact of the World Cup soccer championship on a group of young Tibetan initiates living in exile in Northern India. A comedy, The Cup is the antithesis of the ponderous-but-respectful films westerners tend to make about Buddhism. Seven Years in Tibet & Little Buddha 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 – financed & produced by people whom he had met in the process. If Little Buddha’s moment of scandal centers around the decision – which smacks to my mind more of Daoism’s love of paradoxical intervention – to cast Keanu Reeves as Siddhartha, The Cup is full of such moments, as when the monastery’s leaders worry that such non-Tibetan practices as failing to reserve bathing solely as a New Year’s activity will cause their young charges to lose their unique sense of their heritage.

Travellers and Magicians similarly is built of just such little clashes. The first dramatic film ever made in the nation of Bhutan, using only native, non-professional actors¹ (the Buddhist monk is played by Sonam Kinga, a major researcher in the state planning agency, for example, co-editor of the volume Gross National Happiness; Dondup is portrayed by Tshewang Dendup, a TV reporter & producer with the Bhutan Broadcasting Service), the film tells the story of Dondup, a young village official, and his attempt to get to Bhutan’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 U.S. 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 & one large U.S. Army recruitment ad.

But leaving the village takes forever & when he gets to the roadside for the bus – which appears to come every other day – 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 – some of whose drivers seem thoroughly westernized. Smoking, tapping his foot, making every known gesture of anxiety & 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.

Now, however, he is joined by yet another hitch-hiker, this one an itinerant Buddhist monk. When the monk realizes Dondup’s 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 & night arrives with a thunderstorm, the trio huddle together around a makeshift fire and monk decides to tell Dondup a story.

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’s death, and – during the only serious ride the group gets during the film, in the back of a truck – a drunken man who says little but has a great singing voice.

In the fable, the monk tells of a young student of magic who seeks to get away from his village & dull life, only to discover that his desires lead him to pain & suffering. As the group in the frame tale attempt to get to the city, Dondup and the rice paper maker’s daughter flirt seriously enough for everyone in the group to realize that future life in the village might not be so barren as the young officer imagines it to be. The monk tells Dondup that “the Buddha says hope causes suffering,” virtually the topic sentence of the film.

The frame tale is a road movie, with significant amounts of humor & just enough hints of arousal to keep it taut & exciting. The fable, a tale within the tale, is pure film noir, with elements of magic & 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 & openly spiritual without, by that fact alone, becoming preachy. It’s a distinction that Rachel Blau DuPlessis makes in the title essay of her new book, Blue Studios, between poems that tell you what to think (or that model it, “thinking hard for all of us”) & 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 & 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 & Australia & largely a western crew, and who runs not only multiple monasteries, but several non-profit foundations in the west, as well as other businesses – offering everything from mediation tapes & training to three-year retreats in Australia & tours of Bhutan. One argument that he is making, in the context of his 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.

Bhutan historically is one of the most closed societies on the planet, at least this side of North Korea. Travellers and Magicians offers some breath-taking views although, outside of the opening scenes in Dondup’s village, very little of town or city life there. The couple whom the wayward magic student meets up with in the fable are living in something like a tree house. The present day travelers are on the road in the most literal sense – their situation feels more like (tho less surreal than) Godard’s Weekend than it does the episodic adventures of Che & Alberto in Motorcycle Diaries. The Himalayas are visible throughout the frame tale – but always at a distance. So what you don’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 Closer to Eden.

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’s successful, I think, has to do with his structuralist sense of film composition. This is a film that would storyboard well – and indeed isn’t that hard to put into a synopsis. But at the same time, it is all the extra “stuff,” the breath-taking backgrounds, the dense forest, that account for much of the film’s presence. In a very real way, they are (at least partly) the tale being told.

 

¹ Tsewang Dandup, the lead actor in the frame tale, had a very minor role in The Cup, which primarily used monks & novices from the Tibetan exile community in India as actors.

The Da Vinci Code is to great literature what Indiana Jones is to great cinema. The book is a relentless plot machine – with only one real pause right up until the final 15 pages – utterly unconcerned with any details that fall outside of its pursuit of the next clue.

In case you have not noticed, we are about to be deluged with hype – the ads have already started – for Ron Howard’s adaptation of Dan Brown’s blockbuster. With a cast that includes Tom Hanks, Audrey Tautoo, Ian McKellen, Alfred Molina & Jean Reno, a script by Akiva Goldsman (Cinderella Man, I, Robot, A Beautiful Mind), & locations that include the Louvre & 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^th.

So I thought I ought to take the vaccine as early as I could & read the book, not the sort of fare I would normally pick up.

The Da Vinci Code is to great literature what Chinese take-out is to great cuisine. Easy but involving & it’ll leave you hungry again in a few hours. And beware the MSG.

I enjoyed the book, though frankly much of it is so clunky that it’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 – somebody forgot to tell them that semiotics is debased linguistics as it is.

Then, save for Sophie and her grandfather (and, in a eensy bit of back story, the albino monk Silas) none of the characters has any family. It’s not that they’re single, it’s that they’re utterly devoid of context outside of the narrative machine. This is particularly odd in that much of the story’s meaning comes from Sophie’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.

What’s true of the characters’ families is true of their personalities – only the eccentric millionaire historian/knight, Leigh Teabing, has any hint of one (and it’s so sketchy here that you know Ian McKellan has free reign to chew on all the scenic curtains in this role). You don’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:

Not even the feminine association with the left-hand side could escape the Church's defamation. In France and Italy, the words for "left"—gauche and sinistra—came to have deeply negative overtones, while their right-hand counterparts rang of righteousness, dexterity, and correctness. To this day, radical thought was considered left wing, irrational thought was left brain, and anything evil, sinister. (bold face added)

In fact, it is the right brain that is alleged to be creative, associative, improvisational; the left is said to be analytical & logical, the antithesis of irrational. But it doesn’t fit Brown’s thesis, so he simply reverses the facts.

This book is an easy target for any game of Gotcha, precisely because it has to weave so many details together in what it’s 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:

Before Langdon could even ponder what ancient password the verse was trying to reveal, he felt something far more fundamental resonate within him—the meter of the poem. Iambic pentameter.

Langdon had come across this meter often over the years while researching secret societies across Europe, 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—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.

Iambs. 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.

"It's pentameter!" Teabing blurted, turning to Langdon. "And the verse is in English! La lingua pura!"

This is a level of subtlety that one associates maybe with My Name is Earl. But if it did show on American TV, you could almost count on it being lampooned within the week on Talk Soup. This actually is a critical juncture in the plot.

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 :

The Hawker 731's twin Garrett TFE-731 engines thundered, powering the plane skyward with gut-wrenching force. Outside the window, Le Bourget Airfield dropped away with startling speed.

I'm fleeing the country, Sophie thought, her body forced back into the leather seat.

There is no way for Sophie, for example, to know what model aircraft she is in, nor the name of the field. No matter – it’s a way of showing us that Dan Brown, guy novelist, knows his machines. Or, another example:

The Depository Bank of Zurich was a twenty-four-hour Geldschrank bank offering the full modern array of anonymous services in the tradition of the Swiss numbered account. Maintaining offices in Zurich, Kuala Lumpur, New York, and Paris, the bank had expanded its services in recent years to offer anonymous computer source code escrow services and faceless digitized backup.

Or:

The Sprawling 185-acre estate of Château Villette was located twenty-five minutes northwest of Paris in the environs of Versailles. Designed by François Mansart in 1668 for the Count of Aufflay, it was one of Paris's most significant historical châteaux. Complete with two rectangular lakes and gardens designed by Le Nôtre, Château Villette was more of a modest castle than a mansion. The estate fondly had become known as la Petite Versailles.

Langdon brought the armored truck to a shuddering stop at the foot of the mile-long driveway.

Or:

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.

Langdon was pleased he was not driving.

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’t you know, he doesn’t have his Epipen 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 Kuala Lumpur or the nature of the headlights or the architect of the estate. Instead, they offer ersatz credibility.

What gets readers beyond this sort of overly built Rube Goldberg-esque 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 – the French cops, for example – have separate plot lines & motives, both in terms of what they tell other characters and how they then do (or don’t) follow through. Between the Swiss banker, the cops, the monk, the Cardinal, the knighted historian & his butler & a malevolent Teacher, always capitalized & 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’s dead grandfather.

For all the excess detail at the start of chapters, Brown’s favorite word in this novel is actually rather vague: something. As in “You and your brethren possess something that is not yours." Brown’s formal problem, chapter after chapter, is how to advance the narrative without giving away key details – in this sense, the book resembles nothing so much as the old Flash Gordon serials from the movies of the 1930s & ‘40s, with their brief episodes lurching from cliff hanger to cliff hanger. And, indeed, the Indiana Jones movies are a kind of homage to those same movies.

Intellectually, The Da Vinci Code makes the Harry Potter series look like Sartre, real novels of ideas. This poses as intellectual fair in that Robert is a symbologist & Leigh a historian & both are constantly having 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’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 & weren’t so damn lazy with his plots, The Da Vinci Code could have been a Spencer novel. But Parker’s characters have a lot more depth.

I am not, as you might have gathered, an unabashed fan of rhyme & regular meter for their own sake in poetry. When it makes sense, when it adds to the poem, it can be terrific – 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’s not a poem at all but a film, Sally Potter’s Yes.

Yes is a film that asks the question “Can a wealthy American woman in a loveless marriage find happiness in an affair with a Lebanese kitchen worker?” and the title gives away Potter’s answer, albeit with more than a little inner angst & sturm und drang along the way. At one level – perhaps its innermost core – this is a classic women’s romantic movie, the archetypal Chick Flick, done however as an art film, with lots of crazy camera angles (no Hollywood headshots with overlit sitcom livingrooms here), a score that includes Phil Glass, Tom Waits and additional music by Fred Frith, with lead characters who have no names & an occasional comic narrator in the form of a maid, portrayed by Shirley Henderson (Moaning Myrtle to Harry Potter 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 Abkarian’s accent is intended to convey the recent acquisition of his English¹) is in rhyme & meter.

It takes, at most, five minutes to recognize what’s going on, metrically, after which it tends to drown out what is being said underneath it throughout the rest of the movie. He & She are having a huge argument in an underground parking garage, but the steady beat of the iambs hints at a deeper – deeply clunky – harmony underneath. He’s shouting into his cell phone in a bombed out Beirut – and it rhymes. The notes to this film at IMDB 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.

This device could have been used more effectively – think of how riveting it is when, in the middle of Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho, lines from Henry IV pop up amidst the street hustlers & 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 – perhaps limiting them to the one character who actually sounds like the language fits her, Shirley Henderson’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 irreality that makes you feel like you’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.

 

¹ Abkarian is a French actor of Armenian descent, which is what passes for Lebanese in this film. There’s a lot of faux reality effects here like that, such as with the Havana beach scene pictured above, which was shot in the Dominican Republic since Allen felt constrained by George Bush’s ban on travel to Cuba. Ironically, Abkarian’s Beirut neighborhood scenes were actually filmed in Havana. Go figure.

Taryn Manning “in charge” in Hustle & Flow

 

If Abigail Child had a weblog, I would have hoped that she would have written about Craig Brewer’s breakout film, Hustle & Flow. Her 1972 film, Game, a 40-minute documentary following the life of a likeable New York City pimp, directly anticipates the movie that garnered Terrence Howard a best actor Oscar nomination & scored the first Oscar for a rap song, It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp. The first time I saw Child’s film was at a COYOTE Film Festival in San Francisco sometime around 1977 or thereabouts. COYOTE, an acronym for Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics, was the first attempt at a prostitute’s union in San Francisco, and Child’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 & who, at other moments in his life, was more apt to do yoga than coke.

Hustle & Flow, 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’s great Chinatown theater, The Times, where it no doubt would have been triple billed with the likes of 8 Mile & The Harder They Come. 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’s far better than a lot of the films that do.

Hustle’s pimp, as I suspect you must know by now, wants to be a rap star, but the three women who work for him – one of whom is out of commission in the last stages of a pregnancy – are about as far from a gangsta posse as one might imagine. As much as anything, this film is about how the three women respond to Djay’s dream, unrealistic as it might be for a 35-year-old hustler. Unlike most other music-centric films, at least pre-Ray, Hustle is an actor’s film even more than it is the director’s. As he was as Cameron in Crash, 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 alive right to their fingertips. His Memphis mumble & stylized do make him seem like a completely different human being than the actor who, in Crash, 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 & ghetto presumptions one can fall – it can be a simple as a speeding ticket.

Howard is surrounded by a terrific cast of supporting actors – there’s not a single weak actor in the ensemble – three of whom in particular stand out. Taryn Manning gives a chilling performance as Djay’s “prime investor,” the hooker who actually earns most of the little clan’s money. Her value as a commodity is simple – she’s white. Manning, the one-time Arizona state karate champion, comes across more street 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 Djay 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 (Ludacris, another veteran of Crash, playing a character half way between Tupac & Snoop Dog, tho without the smarts of either). As Djay slams the door after leaving the howling Lexus & her screaming baby on the porch, the two remaining women cower as if they expect him to turn on them next. Manning’s presence in the scene is wordless, but as intense as any I’ve seen on film in some time. That’s the image that I will retain from this film far longer than any other.

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 D.J. Qualls, whom I’ve seen once before in an episode of Law and Order. It’s a part with some subtext of the comic sidekick – a generation ago Michael J. Pollard would have gotten the role (as he did, say, in Bonnie and Clyde) – but Qualls makes it feel real in a way that this foil almost never does in the movies. Largely, it’s because he understates everything. The actors who don’t – Parker, Anthony Anderson & Elise Neal – never take on the depth of those who do. Taraji P. Henson, who plays the pregnant hooker, Shug, who inspires the fledging rap group by buying them a lava lamp & ends up recording the song’s hook, does the entire film looking as tho she’s about to burst into tears, without ever once doing so, and it’s that element of holding back that makes this role for her – as it is for Qualls, Manning & Howard – a breakout performance that should have a huge impact on her career.

Actor’s films differ from director’s in some fairly significant ways. For one thing, they don’t have to hang together entirely in order to work, where director-centric projects really have to cohere. The last film I saw before Hustle & Flow was Steven Soderbergh’s Bubble, a film that uses amateurs in virtually all its roles & 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. Hustle in comparison makes enormous demands on its cast & 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’t see her as ruthless enough, it jars. When Djay and his crew intrude on the repast, Neal attempts to tone down her character, but she still stands out like an emu at a duck pond. Something that askew would have burst Bubble, but here it fades fairly rapidly because scene after scene offers such depth & richness of performances that Neal’s harpy really is only one off-tone instant in a much greater whole.