I know scientists of all stripes choose to study things that may seem obvious to us in order to thoroughly understand why they happen, but somehow this one seems like a high school science fair project. A researcher “suspects novels can sometimes be life-changing.” Yes. Yes, they can be.
In other research news, people will judge a body by his facial hair. An online poll shows the soul patch and chinstrap beard are the most offensive.
I finally streamed Adaptation on Netflix, and now I’m going to talk about it. Adaptation is one of those movies they tell writers they need to see, and indeed it has much to say about writing and the creative process, not to mention the movie business. But I’m not sure I consider the film a success.
Adaptation, released in 2002, is based (in a sense) on a book called The Orchid Thief, by journalist Susan Orlean (played here by Meryl Streep). The book, about an orchid poacher in Louisiana, was apparently very well received by the right sort of people. Some Hollywood idiot acquired the movie rights, in spite of the fact that the story is basically a think piece in which nothing much happens. The job of adapting this non-story for film fell upon Charlie Kaufman (played by Nicholas Cage), who had previously made a splash with the script for a very strange movie called Being John Malkovich.
The movie starts with Kaufman verbalizing his determination not to vulgarize the purity of the book by adding extraneous elements like a romance or action scenes. Which is essentially an impossible task, and he knows it in his heart (his interior dialogue, presented in voice-over, is frighteningly similar to my own, I might add). Gradually he hits on the idea of focusing the script on his own struggle to write it, and what we see on the screen is that story. But adapted. By the addition of romance and action scenes.
For someone interested in writing, there’s considerable interest in watching each script writing principle Kaufman discusses (with a fictional twin brother, Donald) appear before our eyes. Donald is writing a thriller script, and he talks about fooling the audience by making one character seem like two—precisely what Kaufman is doing. The action picks up—absurdly—as the script becomes entirely Donald’s kind of story.
It’s certainly a fascinating film, worth seeing more than once, and I’m sure it deserved all the accolades and prizes it received. But in my personal view, a movie fails if you have to go to Wikipedia to find out how to feel about what you just saw.
Cautions for language, brief nudity, sex and violence.
M. Leary has an interesting article (probably more interesting if you have already seen the movie, which I have not) on the few references to gods and deity in Marvel’s The Avengers.
Not one to sit on his duff when justice can be served, Captain America begins preparing to do his thing. “Wait,” Black Widow says. “You might wanna sit this one out, Cap. These guys are basically gods.” To which, the Captain replies, “There’s only one God, ma’am. And I don’t think he dresses like that.” And out of the plane Captain leaps, his fall to earth surely cushioned by his ideological purity.
Leary makes the valid point that whenever you pull God into the conversation, you can’t just side-step him. Somehow, a simple reference draws in a world of meaning.
“…They even make virtues out of ‘humility’ and ‘turning the other cheek’ and ‘loving everybody.’ Because it alleviates their guilt. It’s much nicer to pretend to yourself that your passivity makes you a saint, rather than just another gutless puke who won’t take a stand for what’s right.”
The passage above kind of encapsulates my ambivalence about the novel HUNTER: A Thriller
I usually do a synopsis of a novel’s opening chapters when I write a review, but the peculiar structure of this story makes that hard to do without spoiling the central surprise (if surprise it is). So I’ll mostly talk about the concepts underlying the story.
The central problem of this book is the early release of dangerous felons into society. Our justice system, as Bidinotto paints it (and he says all the atrocities in the story are based on true events) is that in order to take pressure off the courts and prisons, we’ve set in place a system that automatically pleas down criminal charges, and then shortens even those abbreviated prison sentences through early release for “good behavior.” This early release is facilitated by a naïve network of social service agencies staffed by do-gooders eager to let the prisoners out, proud of their “success” in rehabilitating them. But when those prisoners kill again, these do-gooders feel no responsibility. Continue reading Hunter: A Thriller, by Robert Bidinotto
Mike Cosper talks about telling great stories and making films to the best of your ability.
They say that anything worth doing is worth doing badly. This is as true of filmmaking as it is of anything, and it’s the final thing that I’d say to a Christian who wants to be the next Spielberg or Soderberg. If you want to make films, then make films. Make them badly. Make them with iPhones and flip cameras, edit them on a laptop or in a computer lab at your middle school. Make lots of them and don’t worry about whether or not they’re good until you’ve made 10 or 20. Even then, don’t worry when they’re bad. Look for the things you’ve done well and figure out how to apply those lessons to the entire next project.
Gunnar Sønsteby. Photo credit: Arnephoto.
I was planning to post something about Occupied Norway today anyway (you’ll find it below), but it happens that one of Norway’s last living Resistance heroes died today. He was named Gunnar Sønsteby, and he was the most decorated man in Norwegian history. If you followed my advice and watched the movie, “Max Manus,” Sønsteby was one of the characters portrayed in it. But he could have carried a movie all on his own.
OK, here’s a strange story.
A while back, I posted a piece I called Survival Story. It concerned a strange character I discovered in a Norwegian-language book I read about my ancestral community, Kvalavåg, in Norway. During World War II, one of the German occupation officers who served there was a Jew named Konrad Grünbaum, who ended up in the Wehrmacht due to a clerical error.
One of the commenters on that post was an actual descendent of Grünbaum’s. He contacted me through Facebook and asked if I had any further information. I didn’t, but promised to check with my relatives over there.
And they came through, past all hope. As it happened, an article on Grünbaum had been published in the Haugesunds Avis newspaper back in 1986. The article was illustrated by a photo of part of Kvalavåg which Grünbaum took during the war. Because of that, my relatives kept a couple copies, and they were happy to send one to me. I have forwarded it to my correspondent, and it’s on its way to him by mail.
My translation of the article can be read below:
THE GERMAN IN KVALAVÅG
By Ida Nydstrøm (July 23, 1986)
Konrad Grünbaum, a Jew by birth, is now 70 years old and a retired city council member in Fürth. He lived in that city before the war as well. He was a metal worker in a factory, and an active member of the SAJ: The Socialist Labor Youth. Continue reading Concerning Norway and World War II
First of all, I’ll just start by saying thumbs up on this one. Killer Swell isn’t the greatest private eye story I’ve ever read, but it drew me in and kept my interest. The characters were well-drawn and realistically layered, for the most part.
In this first novel of an ongoing series, Noah Braddock, San Diego surfer/private eye, is approached by the mother of his former girlfriend. The girlfriend, whom he had deeply loved, broke up with him years ago under pressure from her parents, when she went off to college. But now she’s gone missing, and they’re desperate enough to come to Noah for help.
And he, of course, can’t resist the appeal, even coming from them. But things get messy very quickly, and soon he’s forced to delve deeply into his lost love’s personal life, discovering things he’d much rather have never learned.
I’ve often written about the archetype of the American private eye. Particularly the fact that he’s often a figure of male fantasy. What guy, in his heart, doesn’t sometimes dream of living unfettered, setting his own hours, having uncommitted sex with a series of dangerous dames, and being the Spillaneian Jury?
Noah Braddock seems like a prime example of this paradigm. He combines two occupations that appeal to every guy’s inner Peter Pan—the P.I. and the surf bum.
And yet, Noah is an oddly responsible man. I thought his strength of character, oddly, a weakness in his character, if “character” is understood in its purely literary sense. It seemed odd to me that a guy this mature would choose a lifestyle that might as well have a sign reading “Perpetual Adolescent” taped to it. He seemed to me more suited to conventional police work (though he tells the reader he tried that and got bored) and a traditional marriage.
But that’s just my quibble. Others may disagree. I enjoyed Killer Swell, and will probably return to the Noah Braddock series.
The usual cautions for language and adult themes apply.
Naomi Riley blogging (on a team of bloggers) for The Chronicle on Higher Education has criticized dissertations written by students in the Black Studies department. She argued in bold words that the ideas kicked around in Black Studies dissertations were vapid, hunting for racism in every tiny microcosm of America culture. Many Chronicle readers were outraged. Riley responded in part by writing:
I find the idea that there is something particularly heinous in criticizing graduate students or dissertations to be laughable at best. Just because they are still called students doesn’t mean they’re not grown-ups. When someone in their 30s (me) criticizes the dissertation topic of someone in their 20s, that’s “bullying“?
Feel free to entertain yourself by reading the posts and comments, but to cut to the chase, Alan Jacobs lays it all out. In short, he explains how hard it must be for the Chronicle to hire a blogger for the sake of diverse, atypical thinking, and then have to fire her for diverse, atypical thinking. Gotta hate it.
At The Smart Set, Paula Marantz Cohen ponders what is laughingly known as the “character” of the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley:
The exhibition “Shelley’s Ghost: The Afterlife of a Poet,” now at the New York Public Library, is the sort of exhibit that doesn’t necessarily tell you anything you didn’t already know about this poet’s short and messy life. What it does do, by virtue of placing the manuscripts and artifacts into a relatively confined space (the smallish gallery to the left of the main exhibition room on the ground floor of the Library), is give us the facts in a more concentrated and vivid way than we might otherwise receive them. The exhibit demonstrates, with dramatic succinctness, that Percy Bysshe Shelley and some of those he hung out with were pretty [expletive deleted] people.
I’ve always had it in for Shelley, Byron, and that whole set. There’s something about them that, for me, encapsulates the most obvious hypocrisy within (I won’t say of) liberalism—the kind of persons who justify lives of complete selfishness through the loud proclamation of principles which [they insist] promote the improvement of society as a whole. It’s the moral equivalent of “I gave at the office.”
I’m not saying that all, or even most, liberals are like this. I know there are many liberals who deny themselves in order to live consistently with their principles. It’s just that when conservatives get caught in this kind of behavior (and heaven knows they do) they tend to be discredited and to lose their jobs. Liberals get a slap on the wrist at most, and go on to write bestselling books, star in movies, or have long, powerful political careers.
Or [and] they get memorialized, like Shelley, as secular saints.
Tip: The American Culture