Soap Box

You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture.
Just get people to stop reading them.
~ Ray Bradbury ~

Movie of the Summer of 2010: "Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World"

I will see this movie again before you see this movie if you haven't seen it already. I'm writing about this movie right after watching this movie because Ai is already asleep so you, dear reader, get excited run-on sentence me all hyper with how Scott Pilgrim filled me up it is that good. There it was. The run-on sentence. Did you catch it? Did it kill you? Do you care?

People walk out of this movie. They walked out of my viewing, a few did. That's how good it is. And I'm not even being half sarcastic. All great flicks divide, and half the people I know will hate this movie as much as the other half will go bonkers-bananas for it.  (You have been warned!) I'm not saying you had to be good at Super Mario Brothers to even slightly enjoy this movie, but I will suggest that if you can't sing the Super Mario Brothers theme music (if only the main part, even if you can't remember the wicked underwater part) it may not be for you. This is a metaphor (the Mario Brothers theme music does not actually get played in Scott Pilgrim Vs The World). It's also a limitation. It's a shame the movie not be for everyone. But then the world is full of shame and taste remains subjective. (I'm sorry but I have yet to finish a novel by Salman Rushdie.)

Scott Pilgrim, his bass guitar, his fight against the world. This flick is funny as hell. It's silly as hell. It's smart as hell. Michael Cera who is supposed to be Scott Pilgrim but is really just Michael Cera (with some awesome CG super powers) because he is always Michael Cera in every movie he appears in, but so what and what of it? Jimmy Stewart was always Jimmny Stewart and I never got tired of him or of Audrey Hepburn playing up her Audreyness, and though Cera ain't pretty and though he certainly idn't no James Stewart, he is from Canada and he is funny and he's charming and you try to do what he does at 98 pounds. 

The movie is filmed in Toronto and it's about Toronto and there is a concert at Lee's Palace, which has to be one of the great rock venues. And Casa Loma gets a role, and so many exteriors are shot at Bathurst and Bloor which has to be one of the great intersections of all time and just the fact of seeing Honest Ed's in the background, it just makes me want to write crude things expressing the extent of my pleasure... that's how excited I am. Nuff said. No. It's not. God bless Toronto cause no one else will. Everyone rags on T.O. If they're American they laugh at it as if it were Pittsburgh. If they're Canadian but not Torontonian they just hate it cause they have the mistaken impression that we think we're God's gift when really we are constantly in the New York shadow just fighting for a little cool, a little self-respect, a little transformation like you see at the new AGO or in the architectural marvel that is the OCAD building. Fighting for the kind of cache that only comes along when a director as talented as Edgar Wright (and boy do you bet I will be running out to rent Shaun of the Dead and kicking myself for not having done so already) puts your city at the centre of his visually awesome affair. 

Kieran Culkin. Tell me something: what is it about the younger brothers of once stars and how they can so surpass their elder siblings and become something really pretty great? Think Joaquin Phoenix, think Casey Affleck. Culkin's is a supporting role but he is a great actor. With little he do much. With humor he have plenty. With my vote he be nominated for Monsieur Oscar. (Never gonna happen.)

The movie has ass kicking, rock music making, nerd video game playing, wicked-ass special-effect-creating joy all over the place. I was beaming. Beaming throughout the movie like a light bulb, like a laser beam, like a kid. It was that good. I am that hyper. It is 1:15 am (perhaps my not having to wake up and teach tomorrow is having an effect on all this).

Scott Pilgrim is like a cheesy video game come to life in the best way, full of energy and fun and music and the rest. Except it's also got heart. Oh and did I mention it's funny as hell?

I could go on. I could sing the hills are alive I could dance like Michael Jackson I could get out my joystick and play an old-school video game just to hear the ping each time I get a point and relive a little of the wacky, wonderful willy wonka genius that put this movie together.

Brilliant. I'm shaking my head. Just brilliant.
Can't wait to see it again.

On Writing: The Reason We Read in the First Place

Robert Olen Butler, who won the Pulitzer for his first collection of short stories, teaches creative writing at Florida State University, often cited as one of the top ten creative writing Masters programs in North America. It's worth noting, especially for those of us taken with the 10,000 hour rule that Malcolm Gladwell made famous, that prior to his first published work, Butler says he had already written "five ghastly novels, about forty dreadful short stories, and twelve truly awful full-length plays, all of which have never seen the light of day and never will."

The first writing task Butler assigns in his course seems simple enough. He asks his students for two pages of prose, no more, and requires only that they contain a sense of yearning - that's his only directive. A sense of yearning. By this he does not mean that the piece itself (necessarily) be about yearning. He's not asking for the story of a boy longing after a girl. He wants instead that those two pages give off something to the reader - that something is the yearning he speaks of/asks for - that thing he believes all readers are seeking in fiction, the reason we go to books in the first place.

Here is where it gets interesting, because many, if not most, of his students cannot accomplish the task. Oh they can write two pages easily enough. It's that sense of yearning that is so sorely lacking. For those students, then, who can't complete the task to Butler's standard, they aren't allowed to move on to the next assignment (getting to write a short story, say). Instead Butler will force them to keep writing that two page task until the student can get it right; that is, if they can, and Butler has no qualms having them work on those two pages for the length of his course.

Over the duration of an academic term perhaps nine in sixteen students will meet the challenge. Because, Butler says, most people aren't writers. They don't know why readers go to fiction in the first place.

What blows me away about this method of teaching creative writing is how far removed it is from the writing workshops I've attended over the years, and how much Butler's methods do indeed remind me of why I read and write in the first place. Strange to think how quickly we forget (or that we even can) . But then consider every older rock band you've ever heard of discussing that new album, how they're trying to get back to why they made music in the first place.

Craft, character - all the essential elements of story  - none were mentioned or at least focused on in Butler's assignment. Instead it was yearning.

I look back on past posts about books and movies I've loved and recommended and find there is a word I badly overuse. The word is magic. It's a simple, vague and probably not overly impressive word for a writer to overuse, but so be it. Words like magic and yearning weren't meant to be dictionary defined. The oldest lesson in the writer workshop toolkit is "show don't tell" (Don't TELL us that Jack was crying, SHOW the tears streaming down his cheeks), and perhaps in the same way I'd rather just have you read the book or see the movie than try and tell you why it's magical. This is of course why I don't write academic critiques. I don't want to take the magic apart. I don't want to deconstruct. I want to leave it whole, for you to swallow like a magic pill that can take you off to another land.

But how, if you want to write, do you do that? How do you take the reader to that other place? That place we've been trying to get back to since our mommies and daddies first read us stories in bed. Butler clearly isn't pretending to have the answer, or pretending that the answer is something teachable (at least not in didactic or lecture-like form). What he is saying is that if you want to write it's an ingredient you'll need if you ever want to succeed. And as Butler explained in a talk* he gave a few months back at York University: go back to any book you've ever loved, read the first two pages and there it will be, all over those five or six hundred words - that sense of yearning.

A Pretty Perfect Saturday - Bad rhyming poem #3

[spoiler alert: the following deigns to confuse with rashers of bacon eaten and hebrew words spoken; also, no capitals where used in the writing of this ditty]

a pretty perfect saturday involves brunch
brunch because it's not quite breakfast, it's not quite lunch
also, simpsons quotes aside, there should be no breakfast on the day god commanded us to rest

and rest we shall
to laze in morning beds reading books, surfing nets or channel changing our tv sets
better still when we've unplugged our urges and opened our beaded curtains
to gaze from our pillows at the whispering rustlings of weeping willows
dazing long and lush, rushing nowhere
shnuggling our heads into the crooks and crannies of our beloveds instead

a pretty perfect saturday brunch is a shared event
halving an order of pancake sweet with eggs, homefries and salty meat
the endless coffee need not be gourmet
but it best not be a latte
the seats, though, they should be padded diner booth
good too if the joint be slightly uncouth

a pretty perfect saturday good friends the opposite side of that booth will adorn
friends that wear no masks on a Saturday morn
friends that can laugh and raise their cup
friends that deep talk as they overdo it with the ketchup

when all the grease's been sopped and the marmalade toast done
when the last of the bacon rashers have wiped up the egg yolk run
and hands are covering mugs so can you not bear the thought of another cup
that's when you know
it's time to go

a long stroll is here ideal
preferably toward a park with ravine, forest and so much green you forgot you're in a city
ain't it pretty
the dirty path underfoot
the sweet sun trying to get between the sukkah close leaves of those maple trees

one, two hours after noon now
reemereged from the enchanted forest
hugged and kissed your friends adieu
a nap the inevitable thing to do

but a shloff don't have to sleep mean
lovemaking and novel reading would not here be obscene
only tv, telephone and the internet could fuck the afternoon up
it is the sabbath after all; amen; baruch hashem

after that?
it don't much matter
rested and good
you can take on the world again
you've unwound your spring
you're ready to do your thing

From a New York Times Interview with Novelist Gary Shteyngart

The death of reading is a longstanding fear of futurists.
Maybe we’re all wrong and there’s going to be a huge comeback in 10 years where all the kids are going to drop their iKindles and start reading like crazy. “Dude, did you read the latest Turgenev? It’s so sick. This dude is like all over the subject of love and serfdom.”
That would be nice.
I don’t know how to read anymore. I can only read 20 or 30 words at a time before taking out my iPhone and caressing it and snuggling with it.

This Month's Photographer

When she isn't taking pictures for her blog (it's in Japanese but that shouldn't stop you - it's mostly visual anyway), Rie Tanimoto works in Osaka as an accountant for an advertising agency. In what spare time she has left she also teaches Japanese to (hopeless) gaijin like me. Hopeless because our coffee shop lessons would start in Japanese (when questions remained, "What did you do yesterday?" simple) and then I'd quickly cheat and switch to English. Cause she was just that interesting. And I was just that bad a student.

At the risk of embarrasing her I'll also mention that she is one of the most sincerely optimistic and happy people I've ever known. No matter what life throws her, she has the great fortune and fortitude to maintain a remarkably positive disposition, and I admire her immensely for that. And for her ability to drink beer and eat nabe with Ai and I.

She has permitted me to name her photo "The Dog Days of Summer." If you think Toronto is hot and humid in July, multiply that by about a thousand and you get Osaka in August.

Another Movie Smart, With Heart : "An Education"

 

Is there a better writer for the screen than Nick Hornby? Yes I said for the screen. I don't mean to step on toes, but I've not been mesmerized by Hornby's prose on the page. I've not actually made it through any of his novels (I don't think).  But as stories, and for my taste as movies, High Fidelity and About a Boy are two of the best films of the past decade and not just as comedies; they're both bloody works of art. I'll take either over Inception because in ten years when High Fidelity's on TV you'll stay and watch.

By luck or design, I'm not sure which, the producers of An Education got Hornby (or did Hornby get the producers?) to turn a memoir written for Granta Magazine, about a 16 going-on 17-year-old girl who has been studying so hard to fulfill her (and her father's) dream of going to Oxford until she has a relationship with a much older man in early 1960s England, into one of the best movies of last year. 

An Education is, as my brother-in-law Dan might cheekily put it, the feel-good pedophilia movie of the year. The feel-good pedophilia movie of the year that was nominated for Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Actress for Carey Mulligan, the film's star. This is a movie that blurs lines and confuses the audience at every turn. Whose right and who is evil? Who is wise and who is the fool? In terms of genre as well the movie is a head trip. Just as Hornby managed with About a Boy, a film marketed and likely remembered and referred to as a comedy but that contains a harrowing suicide attempt by a depressive character  who the movie treats sincerely and with sympathy (as opposed to Meet the Parents ridiculously), with An Education we have a movie that can get pretty damned uncomfortable it is so real and yet one that can also be very funny; or vice versa. And all the time it is so full of the joys of the style of its era.

Of course to pull off this kind of genre-blurring complexity means you need layered characters that require the best actors and An Education is a real ensemble. With Peter Sarsgaard, the chameleon I recently wrote about as the lead, you are assured of at least one character to find infinitely interesting to watch.Many a Hollywood actor (if not all) can do charming, but how many can play charming and creepy at the same time, and I don't mean Norman Bates charming - I mean genuine charm and likeability. Put him next to Mulligan, the film's true star, who plays the sometimes wise-beyond-her-years school girl to a tee - 16 one minute, 35 the next - and you get true chemistry, and some of the most uncomfortable and honest bedroom moments I've ever seen put on film. Not in a disturbing Little Children way so much as an icky, American Beauty ooh, I'm not sure how to feel sort.

That brings me to the tone of the film, which is 180 degrees from American Beauty's stodgy, overly composed scenes. The Danish director, Lone Scherfig, does something magical with An Education. From Hornby's script, she manages to keep the film light and yet give it weight. This is, I realize, a total contradiction and yet watch the movie and you'll see what I mean. That lightness is what makes An Education a seemingly small movie, especially in terms of its scope and dramatic conflict (it is, in truth, a coming-of-age story), and yet it - one scene in particular - brings me to tears every time I see it (thrice).

But back to that cast. Alfred Molina (speaking of that scene), as the girl's father, might very well steal the movie from a cast that includes Emma Thomson as bitch extraordinaire and Olivia Williams (Rushmore), who breaks your heart with her earnest performance. The gorgeous blond Helen is played with such hilarious idiocy that you aren't surprised to learn that the "dumb blond" actress who plays her, Rosamund Pike, is in real life an accomplished cellist who studied English at Oxford. But Molina! He is nothing short of real and yet hilarious as the clueless but ever loving father. Then again, I'm always a sucker for father/child relationships [see Monsoon Wedding] and Molina's father character is so dumb and so sweet and naive and fragile as the dad. You gotta love him.

You gotta love An Education.

It's not big budget. It's not cut and dry good guys and bad guys. It's just so human. And it looks so good, and with great soundtrack to boot. Now if only I could get that Juliette Greco song from the movie onto my playlist...