→ August 14, 2011
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Exit Through the Gift Shop.

I’m nobody’s idea of an art expert, or even an art fan, but I was mostly enthralled by the documentary Exit Through the Gift Shop, even before I was fully aware of the controversy over whether the film is real or an elaborate hoax perpetrated by the guerrilla street artist Banksy, who appears in the film.

Taken at face value, the film covers French expatriate Thierry Guetta, a father of three and owner of a vintage clothing store in L.A. who happens to be related to French street artist Invader, whose specialty is mosaic pieces depicting icons from the game Space Invaders. Thierry films street artists obsessively, accumulating thousands of hours of footage of interviews and of artists creating and deploying their work (as well as many more hours of his everyday life, including footage of his wife and kids at various ages). Thierry’s obsession turns into a documentary project, but when his attempt to make a film turns out to be unwatchable, Banksy – who appears in Thierry’s life after the Frenchman has tried and failed to reach him many times – takes over the task of creating the film, leaving Thierry free to become a (mediocre) street artist in his own right. The film’s climax centers on Thierry’s quixotic effort to mount a giant exhibition in L.A. despite his lack of any real body of work or reputation, relying instead on the powers of promotion to create a buzz where none should exist.

That final third of the film is entertaining and provides it with structure and even a little narrative greed, but it was far less interesting to me than the first two thirds, which focused on various street artists (Shepard Fairey and Banksy in particular) and on the rise of the movement in general. It also hints at the debate over whether such “graffiti” is art, defacement, or something in between. As someone almost fully unfamiliar with the movement other than knowing who Banksy is and having seen Fairey’s “OBEY” images, I found the film enlightening despite no apparent educational aim.

The real question, of course, is whether the film is a hoax or not. Roger Ebert believes it isn’t, and an ongoing lawsuit over Guetta’s use of a copyrighted image of Run-DMC is tangible evidence in that direction. Guetta’s art installation did occur, and if it was all an elaborate stunt, it hoodwinked the local media along the way.

Circumstantial evidence that the film is all a prank abounds, however. The apparent lack of any means of supporting his family while Guetta jets around the world filming street artists and the patience of his wife for his ridiculous efforts both strained credibility: she’s either a saint or a moron. My wife would have divorced me after a tenth of what Debora Guetta tolerated. The various comments at the end of the film and the descriptions in the epilogue all seemed tongue-in-cheek, as if the joke is on us (despite the art dealer’s apparent reluctance to say so). There’s also the question of who actually created the art shown in Thierry’s show, as he’s never shown doing anything more than wielding a can of spray paint, and doing so without the confidence or clarity of purpose that other street artists in the film show. Could Banksy and Fairey have produced all of this derivative art to parody themselves and the street art scene’s devolution into a critically acclaimed and commercially successful medium? Of course they could have … but if so, why have they still not revealed that it was all a put-on?

Exit Through the Gift Shop is available for rental on amazon through that link or for instant streaming on Netflix. It’s worth watching just for the superficial primer on late 1990s/early 2000s street art, one which made me want to learn more about the movement, but the mystery of whether this cartoonish Frenchman really did subvert the movement he claimed to admire gives the viewer a different lens through which to watch the film.

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→ August 12, 2011
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The Corrections.

Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections made the TIME list of the 100 greatest novels published since the magazine began for its use of dark humor in an unstinting portrayal of both the modern American family and of our unending winter of discontent. It is a well-constructed novel with smart prose, one that challenges the reader often without becoming an arduous read, but ultimately suffers from its depressing outlook and the presence of only one really compelling storyline.

The Lambert family is in the final stages of full collapse as its patriarch, Alfred, approaches the end of his life, and his wife Enid seeks to bring all three of her adult children home to St. Jude, Ohio, for one final Christmas together. Alfred suffers from Parkinson’s disease that is ravaging body and mind, yet lives in partial denial of the loss of some of his faculties while living in full denial of what appears to be a lifelong battle with clinical depression. Enid herself fights a depression of her own, but one more the result of her own losing battle with a sullen, domineering husband, who clipped her wings and may have driven away all three children once they could leave the nest. Eldest son Gary is superficially successful, married with three children and a lucrative day job in banking, but is himself depressed; he’s aware of it, unlike Alfred, but tries desperately to fight it without resorting to therapy or antidepressants (although the cause of his aversion to those solutions is unclear; it may be related to his paranoia about his wife and children conspiring against him). Middle child Chip is a failed academic, a tourist of Marxism, and eventually an aide to a Lithuanian con man. If you like a single one of these characters, each of whom (except perhaps Enid, a product of her times) is at least partly responsible for his own mess, you’re a more empathetic reader than I am.

The star of the book for me is the youngest Lambert child, Denise, a talented chef with a second talent for romantic entanglements that sabotage her life and eventually leave her jobless and, coincidentally, available to clean up family messes. I’d argue that she’s the most together of any family member, certainly the most self-aware and most willing to think about what causes her bouts of self-destructive behavior, and the job loss was a little bit forced into the plot anyway. (The absence of any mention of a sexual harassment lawsuit bothered me.) Each character gets his or her own extended section, and Denise’s was by far the most interesting, both from sheer narrative greed and from my ability to empathize with her character, because she has a level of emotional depth absent from other members of her family, and less of the propensity to extinguish her own flame. And the lead-in to that section, giving us the back story on the family that ends up employing Denise in the husband’s restaurant start-up, is the single best passage in the entire book, even thought it doesn’t feature any of the Lamberts. Incidentally, Franzen, to his great credit, shows pretty strong understanding of food and food trends of ten years ago in describing Denise’s culinary exploits, including her gustatory tour of Europe that leads to, of course, some significant emotional development, particularly when she sees acquaintances from St. Jude living a wealthy yet stale life in Austria.

The book is funny and crude, sometimes at the same time, but other times the crudeness is simply offputting and pointless. Franzen can spin a phrase and make words dance in many directions, and it’s a shame to see how often he makes them tango in the gutter when he excels at wry, incisive observations. The strongest prose got me through the book despite a rather bleak outlook on life. The emotions generated by the book’s brief concluding section were very real, and yet I still felt cheated, like this final “correction” to the Lambert family dysfunction came too late – after 550 pages of downers, chemical and psychological, I wanted some small glimmer of hope for the Lamberts left standing, some argument that life, corrected, still had meaning, and Franzen just left it hanging. But if his point was to display our happiness paradox, where greater prosperity in the U.S. hasn’t led to greater happiness or satisfaction or reduced rates of clinical depression, then that open-ended conclusion serves his greater purpose. It just wasn’t the book I wanted to read.

Next up: I’m about ¾ of the way through Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Orange Prize-winning book Half of a Yellow Sun, a historical novel set during the Nigerian-Biafran war of 1967-70.

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→ August 6, 2011
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True Grit

The 2010 version of True Grit (iTunes versionicon) earned ten Academy Award nominations – winning none, so I hope it truly is an honor just to be nominated, otherwise the Coen brothers must be really pissed off – which accurately reflects the quality of the acting, the screenplay, and the visuals. It’s also an unusually mainstream film for the Coens, who seem to specialize in cult favorites or films that garner more acclaim from critics than at the box office. I enjoyed the film more for its critical aspects than for the story, and would rank it as above-average but have a hard time pushing myself to call it plus.

Mattie Ross is a 14-year-old girl whose father was robbed and murdered by a hired hand named Tom Chaney, who subsequently fled into the Indian Territories (now constituting the bulk of Oklahoma) to escape arrest. Mattie, ostensibly in a frontier town to collect her father’s body and belongings, hires the dissolute bounty hunter Rooster Cogburn – over his objections – to catch Chaney, with the condition that she accompany him on the chase. They are joined by the arrogant Texas Ranger LaBoeuf, himself pursuing Chaney for the murder of a state senator and a dog in Texas. (It is unclear which was the greater transgression.)

The Coen brothers were, as far as I can tell having not read the novel, faithful to the original work, or at least far more so than the 1969 adaptation for which John Wayne won an Academy Award. (I haven’t seen that film either.) That decision appears double-edged to me, for while it means they stuck to Mattie’s perspective and gave her character a richness it might have otherwise lacked, it also leads down the figurative and literal slope of coincidences and sentiment in the film’s final fifteen minutes. Everything is a little too clean and perfect. You knew that a snake would come into play. You knew someone would fall into the hole in the ground. The Coen brothers didn’t have to kill off a main character to make the film a little grittier, pun intended, but it seems that their loyalty to Portis’ original work won out.

Two aspects of the film stood out over all others. One, obviously, is Hailee Steinfeld, who portrays Mattie and was just 12 years old when True Grit was filmed. Her performance was absolutely critical to the movie’s success – she needs to be tough, firm, adult-like in sensibility yet still maintaining the naïveté of a child of her age; if she’s not believable, nothing that comes after in the film would matter. She must be able to boss around the grizzled, alcoholic Cogburn (played by Jeff Bridges) and yet to be vulnerable when she’s first exposed to violence or finds herself disdained (or worse) by LaBoeuf (Matt Damon). And she owns the screen in her negotiation with the dismissive horse-trader that ends with her talking him into a corner and out of his money, a scene where you would easily forget Steinfeld’s age were you not reminded of it within the dialogue. That she accomplished this at her age in her first significant film role is remarkable and justifies the passel of awards she won for her work, as well as the nomination for the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress (an award won by Melissa Leo for The Fighter).

The other aspect that stood out is the cinematography, which is not something I ordinarily notice in films unless it’s done poorly. But the Coen brothers played True Grit as a classic Western epic, filling the screen with wide-angle views of the countryside, using plot elements like having Mattie on top of a cliff while a battle rages below as an excuse for Roger Deakins to give us an expansive shot of the dusty plateau where the climactic encounter of the book occurs.

(I admit I would have loved to have seen an outtake featuring Rooster Cogburn ordering a White Russian, but maybe that’s just me.)

As for the Best Picture race of last year, I’d still give The King’s Speech the nod over True Grit; both were well-acted, but the two lead performances in The King’s Speech were better than any of the three major performances here. Both films benefited from some contrived drama – the former by altering historical circumstances, the latter through a little coincidence and some silly foreshadowing – but The King’s Speech did so more subtly.

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→ August 3, 2011
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The Secret of Kells.

The Secret of Kells is a stunning hand-drawn animated film that draws on the history of the Book of Kells and on Celtic mythology to create a mysterious and beautiful origin tale for that book, a work of religious, artistic, and cultural significance in Ireland. Nominated for Best Animated Feature in 2009, where it lost to Up (from Pixar, which has won six of the last eight such awards, including the last four), The Secret of Kells deserves a much wider audience than it’s received so far, and shows there is a place for old-fashioned animation alongside the technical marvels of CGI.

The story takes place at the Abbey of Kells, in Ireland’s County Meath, sometime between 900 and 1000 A.D., after the abbey at Iona had been sacked by Viking raiders. The Abbot of Kells, Abbot Cellach, oversees the construction of fortifications around the abbey in expectation of a similar Viking assault, yet also tries to protect his nephew, Brendan, but appears to have more than just a familial interest behind his strict treatment of the boy.

Brendan is fascinated by the work in the scriptorium and becomes fast friends with a refugee from Iona, Brother Aidan (who, like Cellach, is based on a true historical figure), an illuminator who is working on the Book of Kells, an illustrated book of the Gospels that is described in more vague terms in the movie (e.g., that it will “turn darkness into light”). Yet to help Aidan continue his work, Brendan must violate the orders of his uncle to stay within the walls of the abbey, and ends up heading twice into the forbidden forest to find materials for ink and a sacred lens*, meeting and befriending a childlike fairy named Aisling who helps him both by saving his life (several times, as she likes to remind him) and by building his confidence so that he can continue his work with Brother Aidan.

*The lens, called the Eye of Collum Cille in the movie, draws its name from the same saint for whom the church of St. Columbkille in Brighton, Massachusetts, is named – which I know primarily because I used to pass it every time I headed to a game at Boston College.

The star of the movie, despite an intriguing story and strong voicing (led by Brendan Gleeson as Abbot Cellach), is the animation, which draws heavily on ancient Celtic art while also showing more recent influences, from Miyazaki (especially our family favorite, My Neighbor Totoro) to Tim Burton to the exaggerated look of the animated humans in The Triplets of Belleville. The forest backgrounds are lush, while the winter scenes are stark and gothic – it reminded me of a classic Flash game, A Murder of Scarecrows – and Celtic images recognizable to viewers of almost any background abound in the film, including a dreamlike sequence where Brendan fights a snake in the form of an ornate Celtic knot.

Without any knowledge of the history of the Book of Kells, however, the plot is a little obtuse. What little is known of the book’s origins is incorporated into the film, but its religious and artistic significance are assumed rather than explained. (Of course, long explanations can be about as interesting as watching paint dry, so this is hardly a flaw.) The heavy of use elements of Irish mythology, from the Aislings to the pre-Christian Celtic deity Crom Cruach to the cat Pangur Bán, based on a cat in an ancient Irish poem of the same name, was less of an issue because the context of those characters filled in the blanks in our knowledge.

What The Secret of Kells is not, however, is a children’s movie. There’s plenty of implied violence in depictions of Viking raids, including the final sacking of Kells, and a flash of actual violence. Brendan’s quest for the eye of Collum Cille leads him into the battle with the snake and other dark sequences that would be scary for smaller children. It’s a wonderful movie for adults and older kids, however, replete with visual candy, outstanding Celtic-inspired music, and a story that veers from sweet to serious in just an hour and change.

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→ July 29, 2011
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The King’s Speech.

Lots of baseball content the last few days, including breakdowns of the Colby Rasmus trade, the Carlos Beltran trade, and the Kosuke Fukudome trade, plus my regular Klawchat yesterday.

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I can’t say if The King’s Speech was truly the best picture of 2010, although it was honored with the Academy Award of that name, since I haven’t seen the other contenders. It is, however, a completely worthy recipient of the honor, one of the best-acted films I have ever seen, with a screenplay that takes some fairly dry subject matter and turns it into a rousing, emotional film even though the audience already knows how the film must end.

The King’s Speech dramatizes the relationship between the stammering Prince Albert, Duke of York, later King George VI, and an Australian speech therapist, Lionel Logue, who used unconventional methods to help the Prince overcome both the stammer and his resultant fear of public speaking. The Prince avoids most public speaking duties until, in the movie at least, he is forced to surmount this obstacle when his brother Edward, Duke of Wales, abdicates the throne to marry an American divorcée. While not quite historically accurate in its chronology or its portrayals of certain secondary characters, the film avoids the less forgivable sins of lionizing (or demonizing) its central characters or crafting an excessively sentimental narrative.

Colin Firth, as the titular King, and Geoffrey Rush, as Logue, both deliver command performances. Firth won the Oscar for Best Actor with a tense portrayal that conveys a constant sense of anxiety whenever he’s asked to speak in any kind of difficult situation, often evoking that dread through slight changes in his facial expression or a sudden explosion of temper (where the rage is merely a cover for an inner fear). But while Rush was challenged less by his role, his performance seemed totally effortless, exuding a calm confidence when his character is at work that proves superficial in the handful of scenes when he’s outside that sphere. (Rush won the Oscar for Best Actor in 1996 for another brilliant performance as a musical prodigy who suffers a breakdown due to schizoaffective disorder in the marvelous film Shine.)

No other character receives close to the screen time of the two leads, although there’s talent in abundance. Derek Jacobi is somewhat wasted as the sycophantic Archbishop of Canterbury, while Helena Bonham Carter provides a cornucopia of pained, worried expressions as Albert’s confident wife Elizabeth. I didn’t even recognize Guy Pearce as the rakish yet vaguely effeminate Prince Edward. The film also reunites Firth with Jennifer Ehle, who plays Logue’s wife Myrtle here but is best known for playing Elizabeth Bennet to Firth’s Mr. Darcy in the BBC’s canonical adaptation of Pride and Prejudice.

Where screenwriter David Seidler and director Tom Hooper succeed most is in the film’s pacing. The story requires scenes of struggle for Prince Albert, but aside from the first, which introduces the film’s main dramatic element to the audience, we are never forced to endure the embarrassment for long. And while they sacrificed some historical accuracy by condensing the time Logue and the Prince worked together and by delaying the benefits the Prince received from the therapy until the final speech, it gave the film the necessary tension to allow that final speech – after England’s declaration of war on Germany in 1939 – to become an emotional crescendo that closes the film.

The most touching scene, other than the King’s success and the applause he receives from his inner circle (after they all clearly doubted his ability to do it), was when he returns from his coronation and his two daughters see him in full regalia. The two young actresses playing Princesses Margaret and Elizabeth (the current Queen Elizabeth II) are asked to do very little in this film, but their expressions are priceless: he left the house as “Daddy,” but returned as a king, and I doubt there’s a little girl in the world who wouldn’t be impressed to see her father in that costume.

Two interesting side notes on this film: The writer delayed pursuing production of the film at the request of King George VI’s widow Elizabeth (known to my generation as the Queen Mother or the “Queen Mum”), who asked him to wait until after her death because she found the memories of that period too painful; and (per Wikipedia) nine weeks before filming began, someone discovered several of Logue’s notebooks from that time period, allowing the writer to incorporate some of that material into the final version of the script.

Next film in the queue is True Grit. Several of your top suggestions, including Inception, The Lives of Others, and The Social Network, aren’t available for rental on iPad, so they’ll have to wait a bit.

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→ July 26, 2011
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Winnie the Pooh.

I’ve got a new column up on how relievers are overvalued in trades and I appeared on today’s edition of the ESPN Baseball Today podcast.

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We took our daughter to see the new Winnie the Pooh movie on Saturday, as the two original books (Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner) are among our favorites. The books are largely sweet and gentle as you might expect given Pooh’s reputation, but there’s a fair amount of dry wit sprinkled throughout the books, with somewhat sharper characters than you might expect if you’ve only seen earlier Pooh films, such as the supercilious Rabbit or the disdainful Eeyore. (Obvious disclaimer: I work for ESPN, which is owned by Disney, which is the studio behind this film.)

The movie, produced by Disney Animation Studios (which is, of course, run by two Pixar executives, Ed Catmull and John Lasseter), has the hand-drawn look and feel you’d expect from a Disney film with some nods to the drawing style of Ernest Shepard’s original illustrations. It draws from three stories from the two books – “In Which Eeyore Loses a Tail and Pooh Finds One,” “In Which Piglet Meets a Heffalump,” and “In Which Rabbit Has a Busy Day and We Learn What Christopher Robin Does in the Mornings” – although only the first one has its story survive the transition more or less intact. The three are intertwined with new elements, including the Jasper Ffordian construct of having the characters interact with the printed words and letters in multiple scenes, in a single story arc that sees Pooh in search of honey for his noisily empty tummy, Eeyore in search of his tail, and all of the animals in the forest setting a trap for a monster called the “Backson” that they presume has kidnapped Christopher Robin. That Backson stands in for the mysterious Heffalump – the “backson” bit in the book was just a misunderstanding of Christopher Robin’s sign, not a creature – but a hint of the grotesque in a song and animation sequence that seems to allude to the interludes like Salvador Dali’s segment in Hitchcock’s Spellbound … or the dream sequence in The Big Lebowski.

Much of the grown-up humor in Milne’s books is in the tone of the descriptive text – it always reminds me a bit of Wodehouse’s style – that might not translate well to the screen, or might leave the movie a bit too sedate if they tried, even with the narration from John Cleese*. To compensate, the movie contains far more physical comedy than the books, including Rabbit (probably the character most changed in appearance from the books) standing in front of a door that is about to be violently opened, with predictable results. But those scenes earned some pretty substantial laughs from the youngest audience members, so they served their purpose even if it occasionally did feel like Bugs Bunny was about to make a cameo.

*It amuses me no end that Cleese, the front man for the greatest and perhaps most subversive comedy troupe in history, has now become a beloved elder statesman, appearing here and as the lead sheep in Charlotte’s Web.

The great strength of the film, though, is the voices. Jim Cummings voices both Pooh and Tigger, giving the latter the same voice he uses for the Disney character Pete while adding Tigger’s trademark lisp, while the former is as good an approximation of the classic Pooh voice as you might find. (And tell me he doesn’t look like a certain GM currently working in Los Angeles.) Craig Ferguson’s Owl is haughty and imperious as Owl should be, but beyond those two Disney stuck with professional voice actors rather than bigger names, such as choosing Tom Kenny, the voice of Spongebob, for the underutilized Rabbit. The decision points to an emphasis on quality and even legacy over short-term commercial gain; these are iconic characters whom viewers expect to sound and act in certain ways, and it looks like the way to achieve that is to use professional voice actors over celebs.

They did bow to celebrity with the theme song, although if you’re looking for a cute voice you could do a lot worse than Zooey Deschanel, who does two other songs in addition to the classic “chubby little cubby all stuffed with fluff” tune. The film also features seven original songs by Robert Lopez, co-creator of Avenue Q and The Book of Mormon, although I’d only call “The Backson Song” memorable.

The film runs a quick 69 minutes and is preceded by the short film The Ballad of Nessie, a very cute take on how the Loch Ness Monster came to be, animated in a distinctly Seussian style. Winnie the Pooh did bother the Milne purist in me for some of the modern flourishes, but judged on its own merits it’s a wonderful film for the preschool (or kindergarten, in our case) set, right up there with My Neighbor Totoro among our favorites.

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→ July 22, 2011
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One of Our Thursdays is Missing.

I’ve made no secret of my affinity for the novels of Jasper Fforde, whose primary series starring the literary detective Thursday Next taps Fforde’s boundless knowledge of classic literature and his talent for both high- and lowbrow humor. That series, which wrapped up a long story arc at the end of book four and started fresh in book five, reached its sixth book in a planned eight this spring with the release of One of Our Thursdays Is Missing, a slight departure from the first five books in the series in content and perspective.

Fforde steps a little out of the box in One of Our Thursdays is Missing by switching protagonists on us from the real Thursday Next to the written Thursday Next – that is, the fictional character of Thursday who appears in the Thursday Next novels that exist within the Thursday Next novels. If you’ve read anything in the series, you probably know what that means. If not: Within the Fforde universe, there is the physical plane and there is BookWorld, the plane of existence populated by the characters (and settings) of books, where Edward Rochester and Miss Havisham and Harry Potter are real (if not quite physical) characters who are merely playing the parts written for them by authors in our plane. It’s much less confusing if you read the Thursday Next series in sequence, though.

The change in protagonists necessitates something of a change in style from Fforde, with a plot that loosely parodies mysteries (including a fairly obvious sendup of Agatha Christie and her imitators towards the end) and conspiracy thrillers as the written Thursday traverses Fiction Island to try to figure out where the real Thursday is – and whether Racy Novel and its leader, Speedy Muffler, are trying to thwart the peace talks with Comedy and Women’s Fiction. This structure, essentially a meta-novel without the regular novel as a wrapper, gives Fforde copious opportunities to mock the cliches of various genres and even delve into matters literary, such as the way authors must warp reality to make it compact and readable, or philosophical, such as the BookWorld’s questions about its own creation and the reasons for its existence. He’s also relying more heavily than ever on puns, many provided by Mrs. Malaprop herself, and extends his satirical weaponry to cover more and more current fiction, with Potter and “Urban Vampires” getting their due alongside the classics of the western canon. (Example: the island of “Books Only Students Read,” which is where Pamela and Tristram Shandy reside.)

Fforde is one of a short list of authors who craft settings that are real enough to let me get lost in their books (something that quite literally happens to Thursday in book two, Lost in a Good Book), which is the main reason why I can’t seem to put his books down. They are funny and the plots are always interesting, but the main appeal I find in his books is how effortlessly he creates setting after setting, first devising BookWorld and then building it out from book to book. In One of Our Thursdays is Missing, he’s forced by his own story to build it out more than ever, discussing transportation (including a dubious taxi service) and even going more into BookWorld’s social structure. The disconnect from the real world is the book’s one drawback, although the written Thursday does get a quick sojourn into reality, with the book seeming less substantial because we are, in the end, dealing with characters who’ve been flattened twice by writing. But Fforde’s wit and imagination are still on full display from start to finish, including a brilliant play on the twist ending.

If you’re intrigued by my description of the series but have never read Fforde, I’ll offer two suggestions. You can start the Thursday Next series with book one, The Eyre Affair, but before delving into that you should at least familiarize yourself with the plot of Jane Eyre (you can watch the movie or just read a summary of the story), or else the key event in Fforde’s book won’t make much sense. Or, if you just want a taste of his writing style, check out The Big Over Easy the first of his two Nursery Crimes books, set in another part of BookWorld populated by characters from children’s books and, of course, nursery rhymes, where detectives Jack Spratt and Mary Mary attempt to answer the question of whether Humpty Dumpty fell … or was pushed.

Next up: John Le Carré’s The Russia House.

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→ July 21, 2011
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Man on Wire.

New post over on ESPN on Leonys Martin and a few other prospects, plus today’s Klawchat transcript and today’s Baseball Today podcast.

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The documentary Man on Wire
 won the Oscar for the best long-form documentary in 2008 and has the honor of being just one of two films with at least 100 reviews to hold a perfect critics’ rating on rottentomatoes.com, the other being Toy Story 2. The film uses the narrative style of one of my favorite genres in fiction, the heist or con story, to describe the event that captured national headlines and launched its protagonist into global stardom.

If you’re unfamiliar with the story, in 1974, French tightrope walker Philippe Petit and a few of his friends brought about a ton of equipment up to the unfinished roofs of the Twin Towers and strung a wire between them, after which Petit spent about 45 minutes walking, sitting, and lying down on that tightrope, about 450 meters above the ground, attracting a crowd of gawkers and, eventually, the authorities. (The film’s title comes from the police report on the incident, where the first three words under the heading “Complaint” are those of the title, written in capital letters.) It was an audacious, foolish, and incredibly wonderful achievement, and a beautiful memory of a time when those towers stood for something other than 9/11.

Petit’s history with the towers actually predates their construction; he relates first learning of the plans to build the towers and immediately realizing that conquering them was his life’s dream. Fortunately for us, he had a trove of archival footage, both still and video, which is incorporated into this documentary, which gives us a window into his preparations for the stunt, the relationships between members of the team, and the fact that fashion in the 1970s was awful even in France. (Men + overalls = regret.) The narrative jumps back to Petit’s first efforts as a tightrope walker, including his walks between the towers of Notre Dame and between two arches on the Sydney Harbour Bridge, before plunging into the long-planned caper in Manhattan, including how they got all that gear past security and how team members were nearly caught in both towers the evening before the walk.

The most impressive part of the movie for me wasn’t Petit’s exploits or the explanation of how his ragtag team managed to sneak all that equipment to the tops of the towers, but of the reactions of two of the NYPD officers on the scene. Both men, shown in interview clips from 1974, make it clear that they recognized right away that they weren’t just watching some criminal or mischief-maker, but were witnessing history, watching one man do something so amazing that people would still talk about it thirty-plus years later. To be able to remove oneself from the moment, and to subdue the natural indignation of the officer of the law towards one who would so flagrantly mock it, is a testament to both of these men and to the wonder that Petit’s endeavor inspired.

Although the effort ends in victory, as Petit completes his walk and ends up serving no jail time, the film ends with bittersweet notes due to Petit’s loss (or perhaps repudiation) of his devoted lover, Annie, and the apparent (and not well-explained) decline of his friendship with the one team member who stuck it out to the end. That friend, Jean-Louis Blondeau, breaks down in tears twice in the film’s final segments, but has had harsher words elsewhere for his former colleague, accusing Petit of fabricating various too-good-to-be-true anecdotes in the film. (Blondeau is professional photographer, and I imagine much of the archival footage was his.) The lover, the still-pretty Annie Allix, is gracious in accepting that Petit’s walk in the clouds altered his life forever, and perhaps realized through his betrayal of her that he would never be as committed to her as she was to him – or as he was to himself. Petit is charming, but beneath that charm lies a self-assured nature that might be megalomaniacal in other contexts, such as the sentiment that perhaps the towers were built specifically for him to climb and walk.

Man on Wire is exquisitely made and paced, never dragging, rarely wasting words or time (aside from the pointless “reenactment” of Petit’s post-walk “celebration” with a female admirer that looks more like an outtake from Benny Hill), giving everyone his or her say even while Petit is the star of the show. Most importantly, the directors allowed the event to speak for itself, rather than larding the film with opinions from people uninvolved in the preparation or execution of the walk. The images and Petit’s words will transport you to that foggy morning in August, 1974, but with the benefit of the backstory behind this amazing achievement.

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→ July 18, 2011
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The Big Knockover.

Dashiell Hammett is best known today for his signature detective Sam Spade (from The Maltese Falcon) and for the crime-solving duo Nick and Nora (from The Thin Man), but was also a prolific writer of short stories, many of which haven’t been published since their original appearances in pulp magazines like Black Mask. The Big Knockover is one of three major collections of Hammett’s stories currently in print, including nine short stories (two of which together form a sort of two-part novella) and the beginning of an unfinished novel.

That unfinished novel, Tulip, is the star piece in the collection is the least Hammett-like and the least readable. In its fifty-ish pages, making it roughly the length of most of the stories in this book, Hammett speaks to the reader through a character who writes for a living but is caught in a post-midlife introspection that has him questioning his choices in his career, including what I take as a fear of historical obsolescence after the wave of post-modern/realist works that were all the critical rage during Hammett’s own heyday:

“But couldn’t you just write things down the way they happen and let your reader get what he wants out of ’em?”
“Sure, thats’ one way of writing, and if you’re careful enough in not committing yourself you can persuade different readers to see all sorts of different meanings in what you’ve written, since in the end almost anything can be symbolic of anything else, and I’ve read a lot of stuff of that sort and liked it, but it’s not my way of writing and there’s no use pretending it is.”
“You whittle everything down to too sharp a point,” Tulip said.” I didn’t say you ought to let your reader run hog-wild on you like that, though I can’t see any objections to letting them do your work for you if they want to, bu –”
“Not enough want to make it profitable,” I said, “though you’re likely to get nice reviews.”

I’m not sure if Hammett ever could have finished Tulip, although he wrote the last few paragraphs; the story has no plot at all, instead just relying on an extended, meandering dialogue between the writer, Pop, and the character Tulip, who wants more than anything to give Pop the material for some new story or book, even though Tulip’s stories themselves may be mostly fiction. Dialogue tends to read quickly, of course, but the lack of any narrative greed made Tulip slow going overall, and would be of interest only to Hammett completists or those who, like me, wished for more of a window into the writer’s soul.

The remaining stories in The Big Knockover are pulp detective stories, and in general lacked the austerity and tension of his best novels or even of the stories starring the same detective found in the collection The Continental Op, which I recommend very highly if you’re into detective fiction at all. In The Big Knockover, the plotting is mostly Hammett with familiar patterns and the usual double-crossing, but the language is gussied up for what I presume was the mass market. The long series of nicknames for crooks appearing in the title story was the last straw for me, names like “The Shivering Kid” and “Paddy the Mex” … that much egg salad just distracted me from what was going on underneath the silly language. And one story, “Dead Yellow Women,” is so full of racist language and stereotypes aimed at Asians that I nearly gave up in disgust. The strongest one in the collection is the opener, “The Gutting of Couffignal,” about a major heist on a wealthy island enclave reminiscent of Fitzgerald’s West and East Egg, where Hammett uses weather and a wide cast of characters to build and sustain tension until the end of the story.

Next up: Jasper Fforde’s One of Our Thursdays Is Missing, book six in the Thursday Next series, which is living up to expectations through the first third.

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→ July 17, 2011
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In Bruges.

You’ve probably seen my midseason prospect rankings update by now, but if not … there it is.

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I’m a few weeks behind on this, but I watched the dark comedy In Bruges (currently just $4.69 on DVD at amazon) a few weeks ago on my last work flight. I’d seen positive reviews of the film when it was in theaters and kept it in my queue for years, but finally got back into watching movies regularly when I got an iPad last month and have a hell of a list to work through. As for In Bruges, it absolutely had its moments, driven mostly by a really strong performance by Colin Farrell, but by the end of the movie I was kind of wondering what the point of all the violence was – unless the point was that there is no point at all.

Farrell plays Ray, a young hit man who bungled his most recent job by accidentally killing a child who was hidden behind the man he was paid to assassinate. His boss, Harry (Ralph Fiennes), has sent him to Bruges along with the more experienced Ken to await instructions on their next job … which turns out to be for Ken to kill Ray over the death of the child. Ken wrestles with his conscience over the assignment now that he’s gotten to know Ray. Ray, meanwhile, is completely despondent over his mistake (but not over the death of the target) and contemplates suicide in between attempts to seduce the drug-dealing Chloe, an incompetent effort that leads to a confrontation with an American couple in a restaurant that, of course, ends up interfering with everyone’s plans. It is a screwball comedy at heart, except that in this one half the characters end up maimed or dead.

The strength of In Bruges is subtle, living in the layer beneath the obvious plot about contract killings and before the carnage at the end of the film. Ray isn’t cut out emotionally for his line of work, between his remorse and his short temper – and he absolutely hates Bruges, or as he calls it, “fookin’ Broozh.” Ken, meanwhile, wants to play the tourist, turning the trip (which was sold to them as an escape from the authorities) into a relaxing sojourn. Harry is a little bit of a stock character – the ruthless gangster/loving family man character has been around long enough that he’s totally expected – although his interactions with Ken when the latter refuses the assignment provide some of the film’s best dialogue.

When the shooting starts in earnest at the film’s end, though, we’re given a ten-minute stretch of action film where the plot is resolved through violence and a few funny coincidences, as well as a concluding meditation on the point of the violence that felt a little tacked-on. Within the span of those ten minutes, we go from that dark comedy to a chase-and-shoot (although, again, they do mix in a hilarious scene where Harry and Ray are standing off with a very angry and even more pregnant hotelier in between that) to light philosophy. Would the film have been better with a less violent climax? Or simply a more comic one? Shouldn’t the philosophizing have permeated more of the film (or did it, and I just missed it)? Most importantly, does it make any sense to say you enjoyed the first 90% of a film but not the ending when the ending was, in terms of plot, properly executed?

As for what’s next … I’ve got a long list of films to catch up on, but I’m open to suggestions. I’m particularly light on anything in the last five years – that is, since my daughter was born.

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