Steven Hart's Blog, page 12
September 21, 2012
XXL History
David Armitage says “big” history is once again in style. Since he isn’t necessarily referring to page count or avoirdupois, I wonder if my book qualifies.
September 20, 2012
Not-so-middling Earth
This new trailer for The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey has me thinking Peter Jackson was put on this earth for the express purpose of showing up John Boorman, Stanley Kubrick, and every other big-name director who contemplated taking a crack at The Lord of the Rings.
I’ve watched the trailer several times now with the alternate endings (thoughtfully compiled in the clip above) and it has me remembering the evening, ten-plus years ago, when a friend invited me to a screening of the Lord of the Rings preview reel Jackson had prepared for the Cannes film festival. At the time, I knew Jackson chiefly as the splatter auteur behind Brain Dead. He’d shown unexpectedly depth and discipline with Heavenly Creatures (and, with his casting of Kate Winslet, an eye for talent) but the followup, The Frighteners, had been more than a bit of a mess. Meanwhile, I’m old enough to have seen Ralph Bakshi’s bungled attempt at an animated version of The Lord of the Rings in the theater, and let’s just say my hopes weren’t very high.
The half-hour preview started on exactly the right note, with a hobbit-sized Peter Jackson sitting in Gandalf’s wagon. The montage of scenes carried through to the Mines of Moria sequence, with everything from the bucket falling falling down the well to the fight with the cave troll and Gandalf turning to face the Balrog. After that came another montage, leading up to Frodo in Mount Doom, turning and announcing that he wasn’t going to destroy the ring after all. As I recall, Frodo’s eyes were like black marbles, so the climax obviously underwent some rethinking.
At any rate, I left the screening eager to see the whole film, and since then I’ve been a complete fool for all three movies. I’m getting some of that same buzz from this Hobbit trailer, and I can hardly wait for December to roll around. This time I’ll be able to go with Eldest Daughter, who got hooked on Middle-earth watching the extended DVD versions.
Meanwhile, I wonder if that Cannes preview reel is posted anywhere online? I’d love to see it again.
Bobby and Neil
My consolation for seeing the summer come to an end is to have not only a new Bob Dylan album to appreciate — Tempest, his best since “Love and Theft” — but a fresh Neil Young release, Psychedelic Pill, coming to banish the stale aftertaste of Americana, a disc that’s already faded from memory only a few months after its appearance. Talk about a banner fall!
Since I started listening to both artists in roughly the same year — 1975, when Blood on the Tracks knocked me sideways, and I had the previous year’s On the Beach and the new Tonight’s the Night and Zuma to obsess over all all in a batch — I’m struck by the difference in the way each man has aged. Dylan, 71, is only about five years older than Neil Young, but for the past two decades his voice has gone from craggy to croaking. Young sounds older, but not in the same way. From Neil Young and Everybody Knows This is Nowhere to Americana, Young’s alley cat yowl is instantly recognizable. Play Tempest after Blood on the Tracks — or even Oh Mercy — for someone untutored in His Bobness and try to get him to believe he’s hearing the same guy.
So what has Neil Young been doing that Bob Dylan hasn’t? Since Young acknowledged in his recent New York Times interview that he’s only just sworn off marijuana, while Dylan has been a heavy cigarette smoker much of his life, maybe this is another argument for legalizing pot. Is there any evidence for dope being easier on the vocal chords than tobacco? Inquiring minds want to know.
September 19, 2012
The life and crimes
James Lee Burke hits the nail on the head when he talks about how good crime stories have become the last refuge of the sociological novel. I like to point out that Dashiell Hammett’s first novel, Red Harvest, came out in 1929, the same year as Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, and which novel do you think had more real observations to make about contemporary life? Hammett showed his readers a grimy industrial city where the wealthy and the criminal class had come together to destroy a labor union, and in the aftermath continued in a state of dangerous balance, corrupt from top to bottom and ready to collapse at a touch. As Burke himself notes, James T. Farrell’s 1930s novels about Studs Lonigan were, at heart, crime stories. John D. MacDonald never enjoyed much critical esteem for most of his career, but a book like Bright Orange for the Shroud, centered on a semi-legal real estate scam in mid-1960s Florida, will tell you more about what was turning sour and mean in mid-twentieth-century America than most other novels of its time.
This will no doubt come as a shock to Tom Wolfe, who wore out the shoulders of his ice-cream suits while patting himself on the back for paying attention to American society in The Bonfire of the Vanities, A Man in Full, and his other notebook-dump novels. Those novels had their virtues, but Wolfe didn’t seem to grasp that someone like MacDonald could pack just as much sociological observation into a slender paperback original, all without getting into pissing matches with John Irving.
September 18, 2012
Glen Romney Glen Mitt
Before he turned into a conservative whackaloon, David Mamet created the perfect Mitt Romney speech for the film version of Glengarry Glen Ross. And Alec Baldwin played the perfect Mitt Romney.
There’s no underestimating the Democratic ability to pluck defeat from the jaws of victory, but even with all the Daddy Wingbucks money, attack ads, and racist appeals, Mittens still can’t close the deal. So when Romney goes down in flames in November, I picture another replay of Glengarry, this one with the voters as Jonathan Pryce, Al Pacino as the conservative movement, and Kevin Spacey as Mitt.
September 17, 2012
September 1, 2012
August 31, 2012
Dyin’s no way to make a livin’
An old white guy talking to an imaginary black man in an empty chair. That’s a pretty good metaphor for the entire conservative reaction to President Obama. Metaphors aside, I haven’t been so embarrassed to be a fan of a man’s work since Ted Nugent went off his rocker. To go from Dirty Harry to Elwood P. Dowd is a pretty sad way to end a career.
August 30, 2012
The original Bernstein moment
One of the greatest moments in any movie, ever. And it only takes about a minute.
A Bernstein moment
Glassworks has always been my favorite Philip Glass disc, but it became immortal when I played the lovely “Opening” for my eldest when she was about six years old. I had just played her “Evenstar,” Howard Shore’s beautiful song from his soundtrack music for The Two Towers, and she responded with a slow, pensive dance that matched the mood of the piece. Then “Opening” came on, and after a few movements she stopped and said, “Daddy, this music is making me chilly.”
