Okay Readers

To touch upon one of the happier aspects of my unwanted but perhaps inevitable experiment with online dating, I've taken a survey of what women are reading in a five-mile radius of my domicile.

What is this scientific method? I scroll to an algorithmically-approved woman (whose eyebrows appeal) and click through to her profile. I swoop straight for the books section for close textual analysis and here, all too often, we lose the plot. But, if our tastes in authors are felicitous (and she reaches a height of no more than 5'8"), I message after a period of time between ten minutes and three weeks. 

An aside that emphasizes how much I care about literature: I mistakenly had a picture of my bookcase up as my main profile photo for a weekend, which is too on the nose even for me. 

As we say at my place of employment, let's put these issues in different buckets. 

Back button and recoil from keyboard cussing out OkC algorithms:

Ayn Rand

Just no:

Paulo Coehlo (my Christ, The Alchemist is the OkLady Bible*)

Tom Robbins (I never find a Michael Robbins fan)

Chuck Palahniuk (this is not just poor taste, it's passé poor taste)

Mary Oliver (poetry for non-poetry readers)

"I enjoy novels and non-fiction"
"I read over 20 books in 2015"

"I'm not used to reading but I love NPR" 

"Too many to name" (but if you had to try...) 

*Tangentially: my younger cousin's high school English teacher decided her class would read The Alchemist instead of The Great Gatsby....in a generation, we will have the country we deserve.

Deadly combinations:

Eat Pray Love and Lean In

Me Talk Pretty One Day and No One Belongs Here More Than You

Henry David Thoreau and Thich Nhat Hanh

Say no to hipsters and self-help.

I probably ought to be okay with but actually am not:

Jeffrey Eugenides (can Eugenides be the next guy we all agree sucks, now that we've turned viciously on Franzen?)
Haruki Murakami (is Murakami just grown-up Harry Potter? (somehow this is most damaging if they only list 1Q84))

Malcolm Gladwell (especially Outliers--at least read the filet of this overrated muppet)

Hardest call to make, on OkC as in life:
Raymond Carver (he often appears in an otherwise respectable list and I just want to tell her, "let's embrace Lish's other children, the Hannah, the Holland, my god the Hempel--we can do better than old Ray!")

Regularly occurring combo I almost get judgy about till I realize this is also me:

J.D. Salinger and Wes Anderson (oh aren't you precious with your kittenish Franny and Zooey cuddled up next to your Criterion of The Royal Tenenbaums--wait, shit!)

If you put an age range down to 25 you have to deal with:

Harry Potter (I can only hope there are fewer than two exclamation points after Potter and it doesn't appear at the exclusion of all other novels...and, anyway, don't the books have individual titles? can I at least get a hot take on how Prisoners of Azkaban is great and Goblet of Fire is trash?)

You think everyone is talking about this but OkEveryone is not:

Elena Ferrante (two months till I even found someone who listed it...and then she was too tall.)

For posterity, here's what I list:

In Search of Lost Time to White Girls. Autobiography of Red to Bluets. Sleepless Nights to Light Years. Wuthering Heights to Birds of America.* Another Country to The Emigrants.

*Combo added because a friend said, "why don't you put something down someone might have actually read?" That's right, Wuthering Heights is the most popular book I could think to list.

But let's keep it positive! On to the winners' bracket...

Piqued my interest enough I had to message:

Mary Ruefle 

Tess of the d'Urbervilles (went with the quote about the imperfect perfection of Tess's lips)

Raymond Chandler
Autobiography of Red (if I can't have at least one awkward cocktail (or--dare to dream--a non-awkward cocktail) with a woman who shares with me same damn obscure favorite book of poetry I'll quit the game) 

Through my astonishing condescension let me say, in the end, that I credit the folks who read anything in 2015. They're more worthwhile than those who list no literature at all.

Except for the Ayn Rand fans.

Worse Than I Thought

As #WTTnation already knows, I have been writing less here not merely because of laziness and ennui but because of my exciting role as a film reviewer for the Sonoma Index-Tribune. Or, as I like to call it, THE paper of record for Sonoma county.

There is much to love about Sonoma, which possesses those beautiful, mustard-colored hills and an editor who is willing to publish my writing. But only two or three movies open there every week, which has resulted in a cinema-going transition from seeing mostly films that appear at Landmark Theatres to almost exclusively films that appear at AMC Theatres. This has been harder than I thought it would be.

While I'm quite pleased by how often I've been able to write about men not wearing their shirts, the treatment of women in most of these films is troubling. Had I not been to see them, I would have thought that these blockbusters were entertainments I might have enjoyed in the right mood. But to actually sit through these grating, two-hour-plus moneymakers is to see how repellant gender roles are across Hollywood.

While Mad Max: Fury Road and Spy are duly credited for Charlize Theron and Melissa McCarthy's badassery, the rest of the summer is a string of gendered insults, from the breasts-first roles for Alexandra Daddario and Sofia Vergara in San Andreas and Hot Pursuit to the grim celebration of co-dependent relationships in Insurgent to the head-smacking backstory of Black Widow's sterilization in Avengers: Age of Ultron....And, at the very bottom, beyond repellant and to the point of doing actual harm to viewers, is Jurassic World, which ought to be boycotted by sentient beings for the disgusting, demeaning, entirely unacceptable depiction of the Bryce Dallas Howard character (and her high heels). And I didn't even see Entourage. 

At any rate, here are all the reviews I've written since early March. After you've read them (they're so short—each one is just like reading 15 tweets in a row!), check out my ranking of the the first 21 reviewed films from best to worst (or, perhaps, least to most alarming portrayals of women). The titles are listed with the corresponding zinger I had the hardest cutting because of word limit restrictions for the column.

Did Like

1. Far from the Madding Crowd
Matthias Schoenaerts is the finest shepherd in cinema history—he can mend my fence or cover my haystacks any day ifyouknowwhatImean. And his neckwear, my god in heaven!

1a. Magic Mike XXL
Though Jada Pinkett Smith’s MC is no McConaughey replacement, she does get the line, “We’re gonna see if there’s still some magic in that Mike.” And C-Tates responds as would any great, with a lil headstand bump and grind. 

3. Mad Max: Fury Road  
In case you’ve wondered what Rose Huntington-Whiteley has been doing since starring in Transformers: Dark of the Moon, the answer is nothing. 

4. Inside Out 
Riley: Broccoli on pizza is delicious—what is WRONG with you?

5. Spy
Director of Photography Robert Yeoman is alternating between lensing Paul Feig and Wes Anderson pictures, how rad is that job?

Didn't Make Me Want to Die

6. Wild Tales
Pedro Almodóvar produced this but it's more schematic and neatly ironic than he would allow in his best films…despite the manic presence of the Argentine Bradley Cooper channeling bad weddings past. 

7. Furious 7
In their series of standoffs, Statham and Diesel develop a very Hamilton-Burr relationship, if the two Alexanders had the good sense to always keep each other alive for potential sequels.

Did Make Me Want to Die a Little

8. Cinderella
Fair criticism is leveled at Cinderella for accepting her fate as an altruistic servant but that role does include an expansive attic space—its monthly rent in the Bay Area would be incalculable, regardless of whether or not you’re locked into it. 

9. The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel
Richard Gere is so wooden should have played a memoirist writing about his past adventures as a totem pole. [Fuck, how could I not have included that one? #regrets]

10. Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation 
The only truly inspired moment in the film is casting Tom Hollander (the boob politico from the fantastic In the Loop) as the prime minister of England, though I give the filmmakers no credit for this coincidence. 

11. Monkey Kingdom 
Ah, what might have been if we were allowed to see the macaque polyamory or learn more about their rampant herpes infestations.  

12. Southpaw 
Despite the screeching melodrama, there are funny moments. A fellow ward of the state looks at the broken man and asks Billy's daughter, “Is that your dad?” and she replies, “I don’t know anymore.” LOLZ!

Oh God Why
 
13. Minions 
[No extra zinger here, all the words I had about this incoherence went into the review...and there eight films below Minions on this list!]

14. San Andreas
Director Brad Peyton (who cut his teeth in the disaster genre with Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore) chooses all cheesy vertical shots of toppling buildings and heaving chests. 

15. Ted 2
The level of discourse for this film is “Eff Scott Fitzgerald” jokes though, as with his Oscar hosting fiasco, MacFarlane would probably defend himself by saying, “This is all I ever do, it’s not my fault if people think it’s funny.”

16. Hot Pursuit
It’s the kind of film that makes one reflect, in amazement, “maybe Identity Thief wasn’t THAT bad.”

17. Insurgent
Director Robert Schwentke, who most recently helmed R.I.P.D., has thrown down a gauntlet of worst two consecutive films (well, there is screenwriter Akiva Goldsman, who has chased Winter’s Tale with this dreck).

18. Avengers: Age of Ultron 
It’s the latest from schlock auteur Joss Whedon, who alternates Marvel films with Shakespeare adaptations shot in his backyard like a rich, Middle Aged sinner buying indulgences from the church.  

19. Ant-Man
The only remotely entertaining part of the film is Michael Peña’s monologues in which his voice inhabits other characters. The one of four screenwriters who came up with that idea gets to feel the least embarrassed about appearing in the credits. 

20. Jurassic World
Five screenwriters labored over the script, apparently being paid per insertion of the word “asset” as it relates to dinosaurs or human beings. “Asset out of containment!” shouted ad infinitum. 

21. The Longest Ride
Black Mountain College is shown as a place for rich people to look at artists like animals in cages and perhaps buy an abstraction by one of the elephants. As Nicholas Sparks, the Thomas Kinkade of screenwriters, has our plucky protagonist explain, “I love art, the culture it brings...”

 

So, I'm looking forward to the fall season I guess?

Stupid Fucking Dead Man [White Elephant Blogathon]

[This year the WTT is participating in the White Elephant blogathon, coordinated by Philip Tatler of the Diary of a Country Pickpocket blog, wherein film writers exchange cult movies at random and write about whichever film they receive. Check out links to all the 2015 White Elephant pieces here.]

Dead Man was simply a bad draw. I have—let me scan that filmography again—never liked a Jim Jarmusch picture. Many people say that this is his finest film and I might share that opinion…but from me that’s not the same thing as praise. I tried to trade Dead Man to a white elephant friend of mine for Showgirls 2: Penny's from Heaven but he wouldn’t let me. Perhaps I ought to have tried harder to acquire something easily mockable across a thousand or so words.

My disaffection for Jarmusch bewilders. I like films that are black and white by choice. I like taking apart genre constructions. I like to laugh (but, perhaps crucially, I don’t embrace deadpan humor). I would go so far as to say I love much slow cinema of recent vintage—Our Beloved Month of August, Silent Light, Norte, the End of History are among my favorite films of the past decade. I’ve done Satantango and Shoah across multiple sittings. I wish Assayas’ Carlos were longer! 

But I also wish I’d been assigned Colin Farrell’s Dead Man Down or Sean Penn’s Dead Man Walking or 50 Cent’s Dead Man Running or Tom Everett Scott’s Dead Man on Campus. But plain old Dead Man has always been waiting for me, fated, at the end of the line for this stupid fucking white (elephant) man.

By not liking Dead Man, I find myself in all sorts of awful positions, like agreeing with Roger Ebert’s dismissal instead of throwing roses at its feet like many critics I respect. I'm heating my takes like an Amazon Movie Reviewer instead of a serious cineaste. I cannot find a friend who dislikes it and I've grown to believe that the movie is like a Magic Eye autostereogram that remains stubbornly 2-D for me alone. 

J. Hoberman wrote, “This is the Western Andrei Tarkovsky always wanted to make,” more praise that chilled me to the core. Jarmusch himself is quoted as “not liking” Westerns. You don’t say! The director might as well superimpose his arched white eyebrows onto every frame of the film. I read a couple compare and contrast pieces tying Dead Man to The Wild Bunch, which made me all the bitterer that my fellow white elephanter did not write down that other off-the-top-of-my-head-cult-Western that treats gun violence in an opposite (that is to say, entertaining) manner.  

To watch Dead Man I sat as straight as I could in a kitchen chair—the futon was too risky, no matter how assiduously I'd caffeinated. Perhaps I ought to have burned cigarettes between my fingers all evening like a long haul truck driver... 

At any rate, this film, Dead Man, which mocks attempts at introduction. Ohioan Bill Blake (Johnny Depp, who was doing that placid/reactive shtick long before Pirates) is heading West in an awful suit and no great hurry. He is or is not an unwitting reincarnation of William Blake, the poet and painter and Romantic and alleged early adopter of the free love moment and writer of that one poem you might have read about “The Tyger.” 

The arch opening sequence has Blake falling in and out of sleep on the train from the Erie to a town with the not-at-all-on-the-nose name of Machine. Jarmusch gives a full fadeout each time Depp nods off in his seat, as if the camera is closing its eyes too. And, every time he wakes up, there is an establishing cut to the gears of the train that, in a television serial, might increase excitement but here only roused my first tetchiness with the director’s methods.

Blake is on the rails for many days or, if you go by the growth of his beard, no time at all. Because this is a scare quotes Western and because it is aggressively slow-paced, Jarmusch helpfully punctuates most sequences with gunshots to help keep you awake. I tripped over them like the multiple snooze buttons on my alarm clock. The first fusillade is from men massacring buffaloes out the window of the train and these offhand gunshots go on throughout the film, every ten minutes or so.

I want to praise Crispin Glover, the soot-faced train fireman who accosts Blake with the one quote I take from the film: “Why is it that the landscape is moving, but the boat is still?”

The rest of the supporting cast in the film is mostly familiar faces with longer hair than usual: Billy Bob Thornton’s like barn hay, John Hurt’s appropriately lank, Gabriel Byrne’s in dignified waves, Iggy Pop’s hanging under a bonnet, etc. But none of these cameos satisfy as much as Bill Murray riffing with GZA and RZA in Coffee and Cigarettes. I mean, I also really enjoy Michael Madsen’s performance in the “Black Widow” video but I don’t require an entire film of such ham sandwiches.

Allow me to get even fussier: I hate Robert Mitchum’s presence in Dead Man. He plays the Machine factory magnate who tells Blake that he won’t be getting the position in the accounting department he’d been promised. His chewy scene with Depp is the ultimate degradation of beef-it’s-what’s-for-dinner era Mitchum, who looks much the worse for wear (as they say, your jowls never stop growing as you age). He spouts sub-Louis L’Amour clunkers like “The only job you’re goin’ to get is pushing up daisies from a pine box,” and parodies the indelible glower of his youth.  

  

Mitchum is one of the best and most important actors in film history. It is simply unacceptable to depict him before an ironic oil portrait of himself with a cigar and a shotgun to bring him down to size. If an artistically irrelevant figure like, say, Johnny Depp wants to appear in a film standing next to an ironic oil portrait of himself, he can do so. But I repeat: Robert Mitchum should not be brought down to size by Jarmusch or anyone else. 

And there are so many more slow minutes after the Mitchum sequence left me so embittered! Mostly it’s Depp getting shot in the chest (very gently) and meeting his traveling companion for the duration of the film: a man called Exaybachay/“He Who Talks Loud But Says Nothing”/Nobody (Gary Farmer). Nobody is full of droll lines like, “stupid fucking white man,” which are accurate if not terribly creative (Blake is out there in the forest spooning fawns, after all). Watching their sequences is like watching all the interminable two-characters-walking-together-through-the-woods scenes from a whole season of Game of Thrones at once, without the benefit of interruption by roaring dragons or upmarket whores.

They are playing a long game of who said it: William Blake or a Native American sage? It’s sort of fun but not the same thing as good writing. “The eagle never lost so much time as when he submitted to learn from the crow,” could be Blake or a Blackfoot or could be an aimless non sequitur.

Another sonic irritant is the jagged soundtrack provided by Neil Young, his electric guitar and his electric guitar’s reverb. His riffs are incomplete thoughts, random ten-second bursts I Chinged into two hours of film (when put all together, the theme is rather good). 

 

In defense of Jarmusch, I think the main problem with the dialogue could be William Blake, dead poet. My second punishment, after the film, was reading this guy afterward.

Every Night and every Morn
Some to Misery are born
Every Morn and every Night
Some are born to Sweet Delight,
Some are born to Endless Night.

Digital commons provide thousands of lines of Blake that oscillate between nursery rhyme claptrap and fortune cookie hoo-ha. I read from “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell” and got as far as I could before I was too discouraged to continue. “The crow wish’d everything was black, the owl that everything was white. / Exuberance is Beauty. / If the lion was advised by the fox, he would be cunning.” Right then. If “Auguries of Innocence” is any indication, Blake might be a most excellent writer AND illustrator of Hallmark bereavement cards. “Joy and woe are woven fine, / A clothing for the soul divine. / Under every grief and pine / Runs a joy with silken twine.”

But back to the film (I must constantly guard against calling it Deadpan). More horseback riding, more crispy Robby Müller cinematography, more tedium—there is no threat that Blake will be caught by the bounty hunters sent after him. He cannot die until he reaches the sea. At some point he gets face paint and a way cooler coat...passes some totem poles...I swear I was awake the whole time...

When they arrive at last at the inky, Styxian body of water, Nobody says, “I prepared your canoe with cedar boughs” and, after that one nice shot of his arm dripping blood into the water, Blake floats off into eternity under one more staccato burst of gunfire and jangling guitar. I think I’m supposed to feel whoa that’s deep man but instead I want to have Jarmusch to tell me something I don’t already know.

I’m a dead man. That’s why I spend as much time as I can on writing, because my end is as certain as William Blake’s—the bullet is in my chest already. I just want to die having read better poetry and seen better films than this one. I only wish is that, after the film ended and I finally slept, I had kept better track of my dream world, its mood and pictures, taking note of whether the landscape moved while I laid still.