Kyle Michel Sullivan's Blog: https://www.myirishnovel.com/, page 212

Every Best Picture in under 3 minutes...

From 1927 on to 2014.

Alan Rickman -- 1946-2016

Gone too soon.
This article originally appeared in Vulture.
There had, of course, been American action movies before 1988, but the golden age of the action genre began with Alan Rickman’s performance as Hans Gruber in Die Hard.You can pinpoint his impact on the genre even more specifically, to a particular moment in the film, when Gruber, the dapper terrorist, is interrogating Mr. Takagi, the genial head of the firm that occupies Nakatomi Plaza. Gruber prods Takagi to reveal the code to the building’s vault. Takagi, calmly and even cordially, explains that he doesn’t know the code. “I’m going to count to three,” Gruber says. “There will not be a four.” Mr. Takagi, now flustered, says, “Get on a jet to Tokyo and ask the chairman. I’m telling you, I don’t know it. You’re just going to have to kill me,” to which Gruber says, “Okay,” and does. This is the precise moment that we, the audience, know that Gruber is a different breed of villain—and that Rickman is about to show us something we’ve never seen in an action film before.

At the time, Rickman, who died today at age 69, was a 42-year-old British actor who’d never before appeared on the big screen. With Hans Gruber, he delivered a performance that now stands as one of the most indelible villains in screen history, as well as the single best piece of acting in any action film ever, period. What distinguishes Rickman’s performance is simple: Rickman is an excellent actor. This had never been a qualification for movie villains before. It had certainly not been a qualification in the nascent genre of American action thrillers. We’d seen oleaginous European bad guys, sure, and trigger-happy psychopaths, but never a character whose elegance and savagery are so convincingly and dexterously intertwined.

Rickman’s line-readings in the film are now legendary—you could pick any of five or six as his best—and he elevated simple gags, like “He won’t be joining us … for the rest of his life,” to moments of menacing poetry. Appropriately, many of Gruber’s most memorable scenes in the film are themselves explicitly about acting: for example, on the roof, when he seems to gull John McClane by claiming to be a cowering fellow American hostage named “Clay, Bill Clay.” And, of course, Gruber’s whole plot is a feat of acting—he’s not really the principled terrorist he presents to the FBI, but simply a greedy crook looking to get his hands on a vault full of millions. Gruber is a thief wearing masks on top of masks, and as the movie rolls, he strips each mask away. Legendarily, producer Joel Silver and director John McTiernan cast Rickman after seeing him onstage as Valmont in a production of Dangerous Liaisons, a performance about which the New York Times wrote, “Alan Rickman was an ideal Valmont, a snake disguised as a seductive fox.” (It’s telling that many still consider Rickman the definitive Valmont, even when compared to John Malkovich’s iconic onscreen performance in the same role.) Gruber is, in many ways, that same snake and that same fox: a German Valmont, armed with a gun, his lust directed not at virtuous women but at negotiable bearer bonds.

Simply put, in this one role, Rickman did what few actors in film history have managed to do: He broke the rules, then wrote new rules for everyone after him to follow. Hans Gruber isn’t the faceless, disposable thug of, say, the Dirty Harry franchise; he isn’t the sneering, scenery-gobbling Bennett in Commando; he isn’t Blofeld, scarred and grimacing and stroking a furry white cat. Rickman brought Shakespearean-level acting chops to in a film about a New York cop trapped in a building full of bad guys. And he introduced to action films the notion that the villain can be just as compelling, if not more so, than the hero—and that, in the hands of the right kind of enormously skilled actor, he can be a figure of devilish complexity. It goes without saying, perhaps, that actors as enormously skilled as Rickman turn out to be in very short supply.

Imagine trying to play an action-film villain in the wake of Die Hard—imagine being, say, Dennis Hopper, no slouch onscreen and an actor known to convincingly bring the menace (see Frank Booth), but whose gibbering bad guy in 1994’s Speed pales in comparison to Gruber. Or John Malkovich, playing Mitch Leary in 1993 in In the Line of Fire—a performance that earned Malkovich an Oscar nomination but with which, as with Valmont, he couldn’t best Rickman’s work. In fact, Rickman’s Die Hardperformance was the reason why actors like Hopper and Malkovich were being cast as bad guys in action films in the first place. Hans Gruber is permanently perched atop every list of the Greatest Action-Movie Villains—all of which, frankly, should simply read: (1) Hans Gruber and (2) All the Other Ones—for one very good reason: No actor before him was ever expected to be that good, and no actor after him has ever managed it. Rickman, among his many other career accomplishments, single-handedly lifted the American action genre to the outskirts of art. He redefined what was possible. No matter the role or the venue, that’s the ultimate legacy an actor can achieve.

Limiting and unlimiting...

It is really hard to juggle a full-time job that sometimes has me travel with all of the things one needs to do to get your writing noticed to actually being able to write while still maintaining a life. Every now and then it just overwhelms me and I have to step back and let myself breathe. You know, I haven't seen a movie in a theater since Quantum of Solace came out? Three years ago.

I haven't done a sketch in months. I'm making myself take time to read, because to be a decent author that's practically a requirement...and I'm finding I look for excuses not to finish the book. I do Facebook and Mandy and I have 3 scripts posted on InkTip to keep track of and writing seminars to view and books articles about writing to read...and now I'm trying to get myself back to being more active -- like walking or hitting the Y -- and can't work it into my schedule.

I guess I could stop sleeping; that's a waste of 6-7 hours a day. And I could drop working this blog; that's half an hour, there, mainly because I have to keep going over it for typos. Which still slip past. And there's family and you have to shop for food and fix the food and on and on...

I've worked myself into some nice headaches, the last couple weeks. Tension-related and handled by a double-dose of Advil. I'd probably feel a lot better if I could get done with OT and do a couple of paintings I've been planning on.

I want to do a series called Apostles. Mainly Kodalithic black and white faces with one spot of color on them. Acrylic on canvas. I'd like to work up a set of twelve and have the images I want to use as samples for them. I miss doing art...

Maybe that is what I need to feel human, again...

Charles Perrault was not immune...

Today was Charles Perrault's birthday, so I stole this from Wikipedia:

(He) was a French author and member of the Académie Française. He laid the foundations for a new literary genre, the fairy tale, with his works derived from pre-existing folk tales. The best known of his tales include Le Petit Chaperon Rouge (Little Red Riding Hood),Cendrillon (Cinderella), Le Chat Botté (Puss in Boots), La Belle au bois Dormant(The Sleeping Beauty), and Barbe Bleue (Bluebeard).[1] Some of Perrault's versions of old stories may have influenced the German versions published by the Brothers Grimm more than 100 years later. The stories continue to be printed and have been adapted to opera, ballet (such as Tchaikovsky's The Sleeping Beauty), theatre, and film. Perrault was an influential figure in the 17th-century French literary scene, and was the leader of the Modern faction during the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns.
Turns out the classic fairy tales we know today -- Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Puss in Boots, Little Red Riding Hood, and the like -- were trashed by the classicists of his time, even though they were hugely popular. This came after he lost his job in the King's Court. Lost his income as a writer. And he even had his work rewritten by others (Brothers Grimm, I'm talking to you).

He's like the precursor for today's screenwriters.

Formatting for fun...

I've changed up some of the structure in The Vanishing of Owen Taylor. Away with the clever names for each chapter; I'm using Roman numerals in their place. I also broke up a couple of the longer chapters, so now I have 14 as opposed to 9 in the first part, albeit with about the same number of pages. I'm also doing away with starting each chapter at the top of a new page; now it just rolls along, with spaces above and below the numbers, and feels a lot better.

Moving almost all of the set-up to later helps a lot. I now have Jake reminisce about Dion just before he arrives to the guy's office. It adds more to the moment, especially since Jake still has feelings for him. I also cut out 80% of the explanation of what happened to Jake and Tone prior to this book. It's going to come out as the story goes along, so the details up front weren't necessary.

I've begun setting up the basic structure for the look of the book. I'm working in Courier, but the final font will probably be Times New Roman or Palatino, both of which are smaller and tighter. I did a quick rough to see how it would work out and came up with a final volume of around 280 pages, including spacing pages, table of contents, and copyright page. That's not so bad.

I'm going through each chapter twice, smoothing it over before I head along to the next one. It's helping me keep the story in my head without referring to my now out-of-date outline. My hope is, it's becoming a more emotional journey for Jake by clearing away the clutter. I won't know till I'm done...and I may ask for another editing pass-through. Depends on what I can afford.

I also made meatloaf and spaghetti sauce, today. Enough for 10 meals, and it cost me about $22 for the makings. I'm back into cheap mode.

Like I was ever out of it.

(PS -- I fucking HATE Chrome. I delete my browsing history from Safari? All passwords stay in place. I delete my history from Chrome, I have to sign back in to EVERYTHING.)

The more things change...

If you want to see just how little politics has changed in the last 70 years, check out this movie. It was made in 1947 and has commentary on the minimum wage, corrupt politicians, a group of people out to make sure America stays white, natural born and Christian, and even jabs the gullibility of the voting public.


As I was watching it, this evening, I was reminded too damn much of what's going on in this year's election...and it's spooky. This is the full movie, recorded off a Spanish TV station so it's got subtitles, and it gets a bit goofy in a very 1940's way, but it's still a lot of fun. And Loretta Young hangs tough through the whole thing; she deserved her best actress Oscar.

Tomorrow it's back to the rewrites...

Reading, again...

I'm in the middle of Willa Cather's My Antonia, and it is amazing. The book reads comfortable and warm, like a fleece jacket on a brisk Spring day. Her style is simple but not plain and meanders along with a willfulness I find fascinating. Even more interesting, it's being presented as the reminiscences of an orphan boy growing up in a small town in Nebraska, during the late 19th Century.

It's nice to read something I like, without reservation, after the last few books I tried to get into. One was a mystery by Donna Leon that went on and on and on about the casual life in Venice, Italy without any mystery. Nor was there anything in her style to keep me going, so I stopped after 80 pages.

Two others were books written for a gay audience that supposedly were on the dark side but were really quite juvenile. One dealt with a gay vampire that chooses a young man to be his mate and came across as a bad bloodsucker rendition of Buffy the Vampire Slayer without one ounce of that show's cool. The other used ancient Mesopotamian Gods mixed in with a few Greek and Roman and Egyptian ones to show their world was one big orgy, where the main god-guy was supposed to be gay but really did not like sex with men. Made him sick and scared. Weird.

I read them because I said I'd review them for a site. And did. And tried to be nice about it. But neither one was worth better than 2 1/2 stars. Nor were they truly erotic, even though they were seriously trying to be.

I dunno; maybe I'm jaded by my own writing. I've been told my work is vicious, at times, which I took as a compliment even though I don't think it was intended as one. OT's got a hard streak in it, but I now see this as preparation for what Place of Safety will be like. Reading Cather's book shows me you can do that without being harsh.

Something I want to strive for.

Guess I'm Chroming...

Several of the websites I visit have begun to work erratically, with YouTube even saying my version of Safari is no longer supported. So I migrated everything to Chrome and it's doing better, overall. But I hate being forced to change my ways when I don't want to.

Of course, that leads me to wondering why I don't change my ways. Like procrastination and reticence on pushing my writing. Procrastination is just a writer's curse. You don't want to face the blankness of a page awaiting your brilliance, so you do anything but that and make excuses for yourself.

As for reticence, it's uncertainty that fuels my inability to sell myself, far more than fear. I've never thought I'm good enough to be successful at my work -- be it art, photography, film, or writing. In one part of my brain, I knew I'd do fine; but the more dominate part kept screaming, You've got to be kidding me. You, a writer? When you have typos and and questionable grammar in every sentence, and have never done well at expressing your thoughts?

It's pretty rough, at times. I can accept praise...so long as I remind myself of the mistakes I've made and the ways I could have done better. And that is in anything I do -- from cleaning my apartment to keeping my brother in his home to sketches I work up. Like any artist, I can see every screw-up.

Something that finally got me started on knowing it wasn't just me being like this was working at Heritage Book Shop. Part of the store's inventory was original artwork from illustrators like Arthur Rackham (left) and Kay Nielsen (below).

Rackham would sometimes use white paint to cover his mistakes, his version of Liquid Paper. Usually to cover art detail he didn't feel he needed, anymore.

Kay Nielsen did something similar in her work, using a light paint to cover a dark error and painting over it. It wouldn't show up once the art was transferred into print, but you can see if you look closely.
I'd always been of the school where there are no mistakes in art, and if there is one, make it part of the work. These two didn't, and turned out lovely images. They nudged me to see there is nothing perfect that was not once imperfect.

Corrections, it seems, are always necessary.

Red, red wine...

Makes me sleepy, so does NOT loosen the floodgates holding back my creativity. Maybe because I wound up with a Pinot Noir instead of a Burgundy. I like Burgundy more; it's not as gentle and more like a wine ought to be. Not as dry as a Cabernet, but not a wine cooler, either. This red I'm drinking is just two steps removed from Sangria.

I'm not really a wine snob. Normally I only drink it with a steak of some kind. Fact is, I prefer beer. Once this is gone, I think I'll get some Guinness. The bottles are acceptable...but I would really love to hit Ireland, again, and have it room temperature as I dig into a decent Irish stew. There's a pub right by Connelly train station in Dublin that served both up right...and the brewery, itself, has a lovely stew, too.

What's so funny about my obsession with Ireland is, I have no Irish blood in me, from what I can tell. My main lineage is French-Norwegian with Dutch and maybe some Scots, depending on how the name was spelled when the family first came over to the States. My mother remarried and my step-father, who was full-blood Irish, adopted me so I could get military benefits...so my last name became my middle one -- Michel.

But I was raised around his mother, who was full blood Irish...of the lace-curtain variety. VERY Catholic. Lots of children who went on to marry other good Roman Catholics. Not so different from the side of my family in Pennsylvania, who are half Lithuanian and also Catholic but are more Russian Orthodox, albeit mingled in with the Roman kind.

My step-grandmother and step-grandfather owned a liquor store in San Antonio and did well with it. Had a nice two-story house on nearly an acre of land on the city's East Side. Their children went to Catholic schools, for which they had to pay; religious schools didn't get taxpayer funds, back then. And Mummo (what we called that grandmother; my mother's mother was Nana), she ran everyone's life. I was around that side so much, I pretty much adopted the persona. Didn't hurt I look Irish Catholic, and with a last name like Sullivan, who was going to question it? Gave me a foundation, even if it was built on a falsehood.

Made for quite a mess, tho', in so many ways...mainly Catholic...

(PS -- the photo is actually of Scotland, but it looks Irish enough, just like I do...)

Pushing to break the mold...

I'm trying like crazy to keep from falling into my old habits...habits that tended to make it harder for me to complete a project. I've got a solid streak of laziness and apathy in me that has to be beaten down, constantly, or I'd never get anything done. I think it's true of all writers...hell, all artists. Mingle in my own psychoses and I'm amazed I've achieved what I have.

I'm a ten-times better writer now than I was ten years ago, too. And have more confidence in my work than I used to. Not a huge amount more, but enough for even me to notice. Criticism still wounds but doesn't damn near destroy me like it used to. And I can accept that sometimes I don't know it all (hard to believe considering my commentaries on facebook...which is an evil site that drags me away from my work far too often; damn you, Mark Zuckerberg).

Good thing is, I've actually made some money off my books, now that I've self-published 5 of them. Not a lot, but enough to declare as income and write off my expenses...of which there were a lot more than I made. But I don't care, anymore. I'm never going to make back what I sank into David Martin...mainly due to hiring an artist to do the illustrations.

I'm nearly ready to embark on doing it all, again, with OT. Maybe have it out in late February or early March, depending on the job. I'm only slated to travel the first two weeks of next month, so far, so that should give me time to get it going. And I've pretty much decided to work it up in hardcover as well as paperback and e-book. Maybe print some as limited first editions...like #1 of 25, signed. I'll decide that later.

I'll also decide whether or not I want to do some sketches for it like were done for novels in the 19th century. I keep thinking about that and wondering if they would be an asset to the book...but haven't really thought about it, much.

Right now, I just need to make it as tight and solid as I can.