National Treasure

The biggest surprise about National Treasure (Jon Turteltaub 2004)--apart from having inexplicably become a commercial hit--is that it's so literal minded. In times like these you'd expect even the dumbest Hollywood hacks (and this film's writers are responsible for bottom-of-the-barrel concoctions like Snow Dogs, Bad Boys II and the blatantly racist Rush Hour) to find some kind of cultural resonance in the idea of national treasure. But no, treasure here is pretty much just treasure which may be just as well considering that there's nothing American about any of it. Not to mention that the historically incorrect Templar-Mason link is presented as fact.



Still, you might hope for some goofy B-movie entertainment but National Treasure is generally too pedestrian for that. Not that it's any worse than, say, a Boston Blackie or Charlie Chan film, just twice as long and ten times as loud. There's just enough character quirks and somewhat not-dull dialogue clearly grafted on to the hunt shenanigans that I'm willing to bet an uncredited script doctor was brought in to pump it up. Too bad he or she couldn't have been given the entire thing; certainly they couldn't have made a less implausible mess.

another documentary

Even if you think it’s completely accurate and honest, Uncovered: The War on Iraq (Robert Greenwald 2004) is still likely to leave you feeling just the slightest bit dubious. Relying as it does on a lengthy parade of former CIA officers and analysts with a few diplomats thrown into the mix creates more an impression that they’re pleading their own case. “Hey, this debacle isn’t our fault. We gave the proper people or people connected to the proper people the properly dubious or well at least qualified statements that Iraq didn’t have any WMD. And oh yes, they’re lying but we didn’t.”

The thing is that it was perfectly clear at the time that the Bush administration was indeed fabricating a reason for war; just ask most of the civilized world starting with Canada and France. Uncovered instead presents technocrats discussing job details. Now certainly these are the people that have a good idea of how it worked and what happened but it tends--unlike oh say Fahrenheit 9/11--to leave out much of the context. Interviews with more journalists and politicians were certainly needed and perhaps even, gasp, an Iraqi or two.

There are other problems with Uncovered. I’m not sure what was the point to starting the film with a long stream of the witnesses identifying themselves--possibly to impress viewers?--but it did nothing except leave me wondering what, indeed, was the point. Are they going to sing “We Are the World”? Each person is always IDed later (except for a few voice overs) so this whole section should have been clipped. Then there’s the terrible choice in music. It sounds so much like the accompaniment to local TV news shows that I thought this was meant as a parody until it becomes obvious that it’s not.

The most troubling lapse is the portrayal of the war. Most of the film is somewhat haphazardly shot talking heads (complete with wildly varying audio quality) but come war time we get a series of crisp, elegantly done still photos. At best this is simply an astonishing aesthetic blunder but the overall tone is much worse. “The deliberate violation of moral and intellectual standards created staggering losses and harsh suffering for millions of people in both countries” instead becomes “Hey, look at the purty pitchers!” Most likely the point was to present striking images but when war becomes something of a minor inconvenience you have to wonder about the film overall.

Stone Reader

1. It’s great to see R.A. Lafferty mentioned, even if only in passing.

2. Odd that Moskowitz never really describes Stones of Summer though from the brief bits that pop up that might be just as well. Looks like it might be one of those overly literary quasi-autobiographical, slice-o-life tales but then again maybe not. Moskowitz does address this briefly when he notes that his friends couldn’t finish the book though he’s right that in a way it doesn’t matter what the book is in any “objective” sense. My library has a copy of the original 1972 edition so I’ll find out sometime (it’s checked out right now). By the way, the first hardcover, the reprint hardcover and reprint paperback all have slightly different text, supposedly done or approved by Mossman. I have no idea if the first paperback was a simple reprint.

3. I also read nearly all of Alistair Maclean’s novels when I was a kid (probably about 12-14 but almost certainly not much older than that). The Thin Red Line was also a book sale discovery. I picked it up for a quarter and am not sure why I started to read it but discovered it’s one of, if not the, great war novels. It also seemed completely unfilmable though I didn’t know that there had been an earlier movie and a few years later would be a second.

4. The film needed to lose about 20 minutes; you’d think somebody who makes commercials would be a bit more taut. The music is terrible.

5. I know Moskowitz needed to build some kind of suspense and story but really if he’s spending the money to make a movie then why not just hire a private investigator and be done with it? Considering how easy he finds Mossman the PI certainly could have done it very quickly. I also started to become curious how much of the film was actually made at the time of the events. Big chunks are clearly staged so perhaps much of the first quarter to third was done after he realized there was enough material then went back to film it. Of course that’s just a wild guess so don’t anybody come away thinking that’s what happened.

6. It’s a strange feeling to see bits of the literary life as I know it on the screen, from the various publishing aspects to the readers’ sharing of titles. Of course some of these people are the type of overbearing, NPR-listening, “intensity of language” nitwits that I avoid but many of the others are fascinating. There’s an entire film about Robert Gottlieb waiting to be made, maybe even John Seelye.

7. Why all the focus on the hardback publisher when it looks like the paperback was published by Avon? Did he think it so far removed from the author to be unpromising or was that just too much material for the movie?

8. Why are the Mossman segments so brief? Moskowitz seems a bit nonplussed during those scenes so maybe he wasn’t as impressed with Mossman as he had expected. Mossman initially comes off as a kind of blustery small-town intellectual but the more he talks the more interesting he becomes. Moskowitz may be on-screen for more or less two hours but he’s almost a non-entity; Mossman is much more vital and idiosyncratic.

9. Interesting that the focus is on such a narrow conception of literature as being predominantly novels and even those in realistic, psychologically complex conceptions. Mossman is different, talking up Casanova and Twain’s autobiographies among other things. Moskowitz’s shelves seem pruned for maximum impressive impact. He mentions a few science fiction writers and there’s a very brief glimpse of a few SF and mystery paperbacks but does he just read “serious” novels?

10. Doing a bit of background checking, I came across this nice line in Ebert’s review: “Surely P. G. Wodehouse is as great at what he does as Shakespeare was at what he did.”

CrossGen

CrossGen started during the time I wasn't reading comics so by the time I got interested again it sounded like a good move. Non-traditional stories, innovative delivery formats, new business structuring: Just an all-round shake up. But then I started reading some of the actual work--primarily in the Forge and Edge compendia--and it became clear that all this fuss had very little result. Most of it was fairly bad with far-fetched premises, tedious explication, overly realistic and static art, bland dialogue, etc. And like almost all comics today, everything took too long, probably the result of thinking comics are movie storyboards. I remember liking bits of Mystic which seemed somewhat drily humorous and Negation which seemed promising in a mindless-action-film way. The rest was mostly useless, even the highly praised Ruse was like the pitch for a series rather than a fully worked out one. Even CrossGen's frequent claim that they had no superheroes was only true in the strictest sense, ie not really true at all but they could pretend. As for the rest, their differing delivery forms may or may not have been a good idea but didn't matter to me personally and the ideas behind their business model almost guaranteed the resulting work would be limited. Certainly things got better towards the end with things like The Crossovers, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and especially Abadazad but that was pretty much in spite of everything else CrossGen had done.



Anyway, the Comics Reporter ran a piece that's accurate as far as I can see (didn't follow the bankruptcy that closely) and a good corrective for all the publicity coming in the wake of the Disney deal. It's great that Abadazad will keep going in some form though most of the other CrossGen work deserves quiet oblivion.

RIP John Balance

http://www.thresholdhouse.com/index2.html

Benshi a hit in Mexico

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/getarticle.pl5?nn20041113f1.htm

another fragment

Nat Gertler et al The Factor (2004) - This collection of short pieces is intended to show how a superhero affects the lives of numerous people, all told without ever showing the hero. It’s an intriguing idea bolstered by a variety of art styles (from 17 different artists) but fatally undermined by clumsy writing and pointless stories. For instance, an elderly woman is mugged and calls on the hero for help; barely even a vignette, it’s weighed down by tedious exposition. Or an arrogant, money-grubbing movie star who becomes a nice guy when he plays the hero in a movie is like Harlan Ellison at his worst. You also have to wonder when a Japanese spy claims that they’re only good at air and sea combat because they live on an island; presumably the character should know a bit about Japanese history so the ignorance here would be Gertler’s. There are a couple of good stories--one about a low-level crook who may or may not running a protection scam, another cleverly told through websites and email--but mostly The Factor has nothing to say about people or comics or stories.