Till Human Voices Wake Us

My Helena Bonham Carter film festival drags on, with Till Human Voices Wake Us, a 2002 Australian film written and directed by Mark Cantori. At first I found this film very slow going and dull, but at about the halfway mark it kicked in and became very intriguing, with its mixture of memory, hallucination, and the poetry of T.S. Eliot.

The title comes from the last line of Eliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock: "Till human voices wakes us/and we drown." The theme of being asleep and drowning runs all the way through the film, as does the act of forgetting.

Guy Pearce is Samuel Franks, a Melbourne psychologist, who is first seen teaching students about the difference between passive memory loss, such as forgetting where you put your keys, and acting memory loss, such as repressing a bad event. As we find out, Pearce has reason to forget, as returning to his home town in the outback for his father's funeral rekindles memories of a sweet romance he had when he was a teenager.

In flashbacks we see young Sam (Lindley Joyner) and Silvy (Brooke Harmon), a pretty girl who wears braces on her legs. They both like to do things like read poetry and look at the moonlight reflected on the water. A tragedy unfolds though (and though I knew nothing about the film beforehand this was obviously telegraphed) and Silvy drowns, her body never found.

These flashbacks are intercut with Pearce meeting Carter on a train, and then saving her from drowning when she falls from a railroad bridge into the river. He brings her back to health, and he slowly realizes that she seems to share memories with his dead Silvy. The film then takes on the qualities of a ghost story, as it isn't apparent what we are seeing is reality or just the fantasies or dreams of Pearce. As such, it is very gripping, and ends with sweet melancholy, much as Eliot's poem does.

This is not a film to see if you are sleepy, as most of it is quiet and reserved. Comparing films to poems is not something I do lightly, as it is an overworked phrase, but Cantori does construct this film much like a poem, telling the story with fragmentary images. The performances are low key but solid. Till Human Voices Wake Us is very worthwhile.

Roger Angell

This week's New Yorker had an annual favorite of mine: Roger Angell year-end essay on the baseball season. This year's article is titled "Daddies Win," with its subhead, "Can we love the Yankees now?"

Angell is the long-time fiction editor of The New Yorker, but as a sideline has been writing stunning literary baseball pieces for almost fifty years. I discovered him quite by chance, and fortunately early in my life. Some relative got me a gift of his book The Summer Game, presumably because as a boy any book about baseball would have seemed a good bet. It was a collection of his pieces covering baseball from 1962 to somewhere in the late sixties or early seventies, mostly long, comprehensive season summations, and a game-by-game description of that year's Fall Classic. Most of these contests he covers as a sportswriter, in the press box, but not always: his essay on the 1964 World Series was covered in various New York City bars, where he watched with the hoi polloi.

I ate that book up, along with the follow-ups Late Innings and Season Ticket, and then it dawned me on I didn't have to wait for a compilation, I could simply read his articles as they appeared in the magazine, and began to scope the newsstands in late November/early December, when they usually appeared. Once the issue comes out, I put aside everything and settle in for a good read.

Unfortunately, Angell's pieces are not quite what they used to be. For one, they're much shorter. At his heyday, the essays may run over 5,000 words, maybe even 10,000. The piece in this week's issue is more like 2,500, and in a more breathless prose. He doesn't even mention any of the National League playoffs, for instance. Of course, this may be due to his age--he's 89 years old, and, not to be morbid, this is one annual pleasure that I can't imagine will last too much longer.

Baseball attracts the most literary of fans, and Angell is one of its more literary chroniclers. He's constantly throwing in classical and literary allusions. For instance, in describing the Tigers-Twins play-in game of this year: "Their manager, Jim Leyland, stood in the late going with one foot up on the step of the dugout and the same gaunt Dorothea Lange expression on his face that we saw back in 1991," or describing A.J. Burnett as a "Tom Joad with beads." This is all done with a cheerfulness, not pedantically. Angell also is a master of describing the mechanics of action, such as he does with Cliff Lee's delivery: "He throws with an elegant flail, hiding the ball behind his hip or knee and producing it from behind his left shoulder, already in full delivery. His finish brings his left leg up astern like a semaphore, while his arm swings back across his waist."

As I think back I remember some of my favorites of his. There was "Up at the Hall," his mid-summer visit to baseball's Hall of Fame. He had been reluctant to go, but ended loving it. His best season recap has to be "Not So, Boston," a deconstruction of the 1986 season. For Angell, this had a lot of personal resonance, as his two favorite teams, the Red Sox and the Mets, faced each other in the World Series. I remember much about the article, such as his recalling a reaction to a critical play in the Red Sox-Angels ALCS, shouting "oh no!" and disturbing a sleeping pooch at his feet, or when Dave Henderson hit a key home run in the Series writing "Hendu!" on his scorecard. The best was the title itself, a palindrome that struck deep in the heart and psyche of Red Sox Nation.

Fight Club

I hadn't seen Fight Club since it premiered ten years ago, and I was no more impressed with it yesterday than I was then, but it occurred to me that it couldn't be made today--9/11 changed everything.

The acclaim from some quarter for this film baffles me. Oh, I get it what it's saying about the emasculation of men in a consumer society. But I found the message unappealing and wrong-headed, and the posturing whiny. If your idea of a good time is a men's encounter group, a la Robert Bly in the woods beating on a drum, then I can see the fascination. But to me, Fight Club was pseudo art, as well as pseudo sociology. It was, to cop from Shakespeare, sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Just today I was reading comments about it on Jeff Wells' Hollywood Elsewhere, where supporters cited it as the best film of the 90s. Wrong, it wasn't even the best film of the month (I'd give that to Three Kings) but it certainly is of the 1990s. It came out in 1999, in October, the last few months of the go-go decade, when Brad Pitt could say of his generation that they'd had no great depression, no great war. Now, ten years later, we're flirting seriously with a great depression, and though the war in Iraq and Afghanistan may not be great, it has worked its way under the collective skin of Americans. Perhaps sad to say, but ten years later worrying about losing our manhood by shopping in an Ikea is the least of our worries.

Then, of course, there is the ending, a symphony of destruction involving buildings tumbling to the ground. We are told they are empty buildings, but it's clear to me that the ending would have been rewritten in a post-9/11 world. I would imagine the whole movie would have been rethought as well.

Beyond this, I've never thought it was good just as a movie. The plot concerns a disaffected office drone, Edward Norton, who meets a man on a plane (Pitt) who awakens his inner wild man. They start Fight Club, which is simply men getting a chance to beat each other in fisticuffs. The whole idea of this is abhorrent to me, so I guess I would have been the target of their scorn, but I fail to see the appeal of the entire enterprise. It seems to me that a man's goal would be to become more civilized, not less, but that's just me I guess.

Anyway, Pitt's crusade goes beyond the fight clubs and into first petty vandalism, and then terrorism. Then we find out that Pitt isn't who we think he is, a twist that seems to exist simply for the sake of existing--it doesn't really add to the plot or to the message. Besides that, it doesn't make sense. Fincher attempts to explain it, but it all one can do is cast one's mind back at scenes that don't add up. It's like a showy magic trick.

But I do admire some of the film, particularly some of the dialogue, which has at times a charming brio: "Fuck Martha Stewart!" or Norton saying if given a chance he'd fight William Shatner. The rules of Fight Club have become part of the lexicon: "The first rule of Fight Club is you don't talk about Fight Club," and Helena Bonhan Carter's line: "That's the best fuck I've had since grade school" is a fanboy favorite. Some of Pitt's sermons, such as when he tells his followers that they've been lied to, made to think they'd be movie gods or rock stars, but they won't, or on the mark, but did someone really have to tell them that? They couldn't figure it out for themselves?

Fight Club, to me, masquerades as a great film, but is in reality a shell game, the kind of product that the characters so assiduously come to shun.

Duma Key

It's been a long while since I've experienced the pleasures, as well as the frustrations, of reading a Stephen King novel. I picked up his Bram Stoker Award-winning novel from 2008, Duma Key, and blew through it's 769 pages almost as quickly as a Florida thunderstorm.

The book contains many of King's familiar themes, but it is in a unique setting. Instead of Maine, or Colorado, he's set up horror camp on Florida's west coast, the fictional key of the title, located just off shore from Sarasota (I read that King winters there, so he got in his research while making trips to the local Starbucks and multiplex I'm sure). Though the location is a lot sunnier, it is not exempt from the primeval malevolence that King specializes in. It seems that off the shore of this idyllic, undeveloped island is an evil as old as time itself.

The story is narrated by Edgar Freemantle, a building contractor from Minnesota. He's hurt horribly in an accident, losing his right arm and sustaining severe head damage. On the long difficult road to recovery his marriage ends, and he's advised to get away and rents a house on Duma Key to take up a long suborned interest in art. When he gets there he moves into a house he dubs "Big Pink" and starts sketching, then painting, and he realizes that what he paints is coming from some unknown source, and the resulting pictures are telepathic and psychic. In a certain way, he's painting with his phantom limb.

At the other end of the road live an old lady whom he discovers owns the island, along with her caretaker, Wireman, who becomes his best friend. Together they unearth a mystery that involved the old lady when she was a girl, and the pieces of the mystery include some spooky dolls, birds that fly upside down, and a ship that lies off the coast and seems to be manned by ghosts. It's white-knuckle stuff, especially the last few chapters, which involve Freemantle in a cistern with a couple of skeletons (and I almost forgot the alligator that emerges out of the tar-filled swimming pool).

King is a controversial figure among people of letters. Some insist he should get credit for writing literature, not just pulp. I'm of the opinion that Frank Zappa was about music--there's two kinds, good and bad, and that goes for writing. King is not William Faulkner, he's not even Ernest Hemingway, but so what? I think his incredible prolificness inspires envy (it certainly does in me), and some many cite a prolixity that calls out for an editor, but his writing is so fluid that it's hard to object. He has some turns of phrases that are just perfect, such as something having a "green smell," and knows how to build and alleviate suspense. At a certain point in the book Edgard lets us know at a departure from a beloved character that this would be the last time he would see her and the news hits us in the solar plexus.

What creeps into Duma Key, along with ghosts from the watery depths, are some of King's old standbys. Edgar is not physically described, and at first I pictured a Minnesota contractor as someone I'd see at a Rotarian meeting. But it became apparent rather quickly that Edgar is just a stand-in for King, especially since I've gotten to know him from his columns in Entertainment Weekly. I can't imagine any other building contractor having a near encyclopedic knowledge of pop culture, particularly of rock and roll. Consider this sentence,which could come straight from his column: "I turned on the radio and the The Bone: J. Geils doing "Hold Your Lovin." J. Geils was nothing special, only great--a gift from the gods of rock and roll."

But later in that same chapter, King forgets about trivia and gets into serious fright mode, returning to one of his favorites: twin girl ghosts (who can forget The Shining?) "I came to the head of the stairs and looked down, and there at the bottom were two small dripping figures. Then the lightning flashed and I saw two girls of about six, surely twins and Elizabeth Eastlake's drowned sisters. They wore dresses that were plastered to their bodies. Their hair was plastered to their cheeks. Their faces were pale horrors."

Precious

Precious has engendered a lot of punditry, both by film critics as well as those called upon to express opinions on all manner of social and cultural facets of American life. As such, it has been both wildly over-praised and unfairly vilified. I would never pretend to know how it fits in with the black experience, and frankly that doesn’t concern me. What interests me is was it a worthwhile experience watching it in a movie theater. For the most part, yes.

It is instructive that Oprah Winfrey signed on as an executive producer and endorsed it on her TV show. Oprah is the queen of daytime talk shows, and she is also the queen of good-intentioned, middlebrow entertainment, which is essentially what Precious is–an earnest tale of moral uplift with a sympathetic protagonist. At certain moments it is brilliantly moving, especially when focused on the two main performers, and at other times it wallows in a kind of self-satisfied Afterschool Specialness.

The story concerns the title character, an obese African American girl in Harlem in 1987. Played by Gabourey Sidibe, she would seem to have no hope. She is illiterate, although somehow gets good grades in school (albeit she is 16 and still in junior high). She is pregnant with her second child, both the result of rape by her father. Her daughter has Downs Syndrome, and is cruelly nicknamed “Mongo.” Her mother, scarily portrayed by Mo’Nique, is a lazy monster, telling Precious she is worthless, stupid and unloved, and there is nothing in the girl’s life to indicate otherwise.

Her school principal gets her transferred to an alternative school, where she meets a teacher, played by Paula Patton, who is like someone out of a fairy tale. Not only is she beautiful, patient, and dedicated, she’s even a lesbian! When Precious hears Patton and her partner talk she says “they talk like a TV station I don’t watch.” Precious also gets support from a caring welfare case-worker, unglamorously played by Mariah Carey, who more than makes up for Glitter (I wonder how she took the news that her character would have a slight mustache).

Thus this film is very pro-government, the kind that would play well in the Obama White House but might draw suspicion from a “tea party.” I share the opinion that the system can work sometimes, but I doubt it’s this rosy. Of course, any pencil-pushing bureaucrat would seem like an angel when contrasted with the brutality of Precious’ mother, a character that ranks right up there with Medea and Joan Crawford in the pantheon of bad mothers. The greatness of Mo’Nique’s performance is that though this woman is vile there is a human being there–she has no visible redeeming features, but she is human. In the climactic scene, the best scene in the film, Mo’Nique lays bare the psyche of her character, and it’s not a pretty sight. But it’s certainly believable, given all the tabloid stories about abusive mothers through the years.

As for Ms. Sidibe, well, she’s remarkable. A woman who had never acted professionally before gives such an assured performance. At the start her face is a mask of impenetrability, but over the course of the film her features soften, and when she can finally laugh it’s as though a weight has been lifted from the audience. It can’t have been an easy thing to play–her character faces so many setbacks that it’s almost too much to bear, especially a medical one near the end of the film that felt like piling on. But I never found a false note in Sidibe’s work. I sincerely hope that this is not a one-shot deal for her.

Where the film suffers is in the over-direction by Lee Daniels. He tries to busy things up a bit too much. Precious has many daydreams, and they don’t always work, especially one where she inserts herself into an Italian film (I think it was Two Women). A scene showing bits and pieces of speeches by great black leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. and Shirley Chisholm seemed unnecessarily didactic, and I thought most of the scenes involving her classmates were like an updated version of Room 222.

There were some touches that were daring, and have created quite a fuss, particularly one in which Precious looks into the mirror and imagines her ideal self, and she sees a white girl. This has caused some consternation in the black press, and I can understand why. But I think the scene seems right, given that Precious hates herself as the film begins, and her walls are covered with posters of white stars like Stevie Nicks. It is also counterbalanced by a scene toward the end where Precious looks into a mirror and sees herself exactly as she is, which is also entirely appropriate.

I liked Precious, and give it a B, or three stars, whatever system you may choose. I wouldn’t call it one of the best of the year, although Oscar nominations for Sidibe and Mo’Nique will be well-deserved. But I think I was relieved to find that the film wasn’t simply a catalogue of ghetto misery.

Ashlynn Brooke

The first thing one notices about adult film star Ashlynn Brooke, even before her pneumatically constructed body, is her interesting face. There's something a bit wrong with it--I think it's that her eyes are a little too far apart, giving her a space-alien look. This quirk of visage doesn't have a bit of negative effect on her as a sexually exciting performer, however. In the grand scheme of things pornographic, it probably adds to it.

Ashlynn is twenty-four years old and has made in excess of eighty films in the last three years, but I hadn't seen too much of her until I just took a look at a compilation of her scenes titled I Love Ashlynn (with the "love" represented as a heart symbol). This has given me a good overview of her talents and her general performing style, which is sort of a casual, good ol' girl in cut-off jeans and flip-flops (although some of the scenes have her in stockings and heels, but they aren't as effective).

She's from Oklahoma (in one scene this is mentioned and, on her knees before her co-star, she dutifully recites the first line of the famous Broadway show tune bearing the same name of her home state). I can easily imagine her sitting barefoot in the bed of a pickup truck, taking a long swig of cold beer on a hot summer night. She is petite, like most porn stars, but also like most porn stars appears to be long and lean, with legs that won't quit. Although she is an itty-bitty thing, her voice is surprisingly deep, marinated in a whiskey coating. When called upon to look straight into the camera (as in the above scene from the film Handies) she has a tendency to cock her head, her eyes half-shut, letting the viewer in on her private little game.

Her only fault, such as I can see, may be her breasts, which are not natural (when asked in Handies if they are real she replies with a smirk, "They're really mine"), and the surgical stars are plainly visible. They chip away at the patina of a small-town Midwestern girl, and push her into the realm of the cosmetically enhanced of Porno Valley, California. I would have liked to have seen her pre-boob job, when the picture I have in my head was complete.

Levi Johnston's Fifteen Minutes

Sarah Palin is a great example of how arbitrary celebrity is--she was an obscure governor until the whim of a dotty presidential candidate turned her into a megastar, who now dominates our airwaves like Billy Mays never did. And if the fact that she is a celebrity is a noodle-scratcher, how do we justify that Levi Johnston, a sidebar in the Palin sideshow, is some kind of star?

Palin's fame was based on John McCain's choice, but Johnston had to have that, plus one other thing: knocking up Palin's daughter. Without one of these, Johnston would be continuing his uneventful life as an inarticulate laborer in Wasilla, Alaska. But because both one-in-a-million shots happened he's parlayed them into something of a career, going on talk shows and now posing for nude photos in Playgirl (sorry ladies, word is we don't see the full monty).

I find all of this amusing. For the odious Palin, I relish that this young man, who was brought on stage at the Republican National Convention in a public shotgun wedding, has turned on her, and makes vague threats about information he knows. Of course it's all a bit unseemly--if he knows something, he should tell it, and stop being coy, but this is small potatoes compared to what Republicans do all the time. I just find it funny that this woman, who certainly has images of the White House dancing in her head, is bedeviled by the hockey-playing stiff whom she can't shake. He is the father of her grandchild. Holiday meals will be a trial from now on for the Palin family.

When and if Palin's star dims (I would imagine it will right around the time she bottoms out in the Iowa caucus, if not before), so too will Johnston's. I hope he's saving his money, or really does have something juicy to say, enough to put in a book that will get pawed over by the punditry. Eventually he will probably be back in Alaska, after finding that Hollywood can be tougher even than Sarah Palin.