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She's Broken. We've Known It for Years.

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Lawrence Meyers is writing about what’s wrong in Hollywood this week and next.

Here’s the diagnosis regarding Hollywood’s present malady:

1) Movies operate in a statistical environment of extreme uncertainty


2) Uncertainty creates fear


3) Fear creates a desire to control


4) Desire to control has resulted in a multi-layered, needlessly expensive studio bureaucracy, resulting in sub optimal risk management.


5) The goal of each individual level of the bureaucracy is to insulate itself from criticism from the layer above it.


6) This results in the hiring of the most expensive, but not necessarily most talented or suitable, creative team
to manufacture product that audiences are losing interest in and are not designed to achieve maximum ROI.

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I Can't Believe It

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Writing and performing believable characters. D.G. Myers writes, “At all events, critics say this kind of thing all the time (‘the character comes to life,’ ‘the character just never seems real’), but only now do I realize that I have no idea what they mean.”

Music

We're doing leprechauns wrong

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For your St. Patrick’s Day enjoyment, one of my favorite Irish songs, done by my favorite Irish group, the Clancy Brothers & Tommy Makem.

I suspect I may have posted this clip before. I don’t care. It’s only once a year, and this song embodies one of my favorite aspects of Irish culture—the joyous hyperbole of Hibernian rhetoric. C.S. Lewis recalls in Surprised By Joy how his father (an Irishman, of course) used to launch into Ciceronian philippics denouncing the horrific misbehavior of his sons, to the point where sometimes they had to restrain themselves from laughing. One of my favorite stretches of my own writing was Father Aillil’s curse against Erling’s enemies, near the beginning of The Year of the Warrior. One of the reasons I enjoy inhabiting Aillil’s skull is the opportunity to declaim on the large scale, unrestrained by reason or good taste.

Ireland has opened the world’s first Leprechaun Museum. Judging from the story (which might, I’ll grant, provide an incomplete description) it seems to be primarily an exercise in feeling very small, walking around among giant-sized furniture. If that’s the idea, I’d say it misses the point of leprechauns entirely. Continue reading We're doing leprechauns wrong →

Publishing

Lessons to be Learned Here

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In this article on Russian censorship of independent publishers, the writer reports:

Two years later he found himself in much more trouble over Vladimir Sorokin’s Blue Lard, a heartwarming narrative in which clones of Khrushchev and Stalin enjoy some tender sexual moments together. In fact Blue Lard had been published in 1999 but it was not until 2002 that anybody took offense. Moving Together, a pro-Putin youth movement flushed copies of Sorokin’s works down a giant toilet erected outside the Bolshoi Theater, apparently as part of a battle against “…immorality, cynicism, and the humiliation of our culture.” Sales exploded, reaching a total of 100,000.

. . . [Ad Marginem’s publisher, Alexander Ivanov, said of their arrest over publishing this book,] “We felt danger, but our main sensation was… surprise at the idiocy of the situation, that we had to discuss literary issues with the police. It seemed to me that they themselves were a bit shocked by this investigation.”

(via Books, Inq.)

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It's shamed I am. Shamed.

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Am I a hypocrite?

Apparently.

Am I for sale?

It would appear so.

As you may recall, I groused a while back about the new animated Disney movie, How to Train Your Dragon. Not merely because of the historically inaccurate horned helmets on the Viking characters, but because of my intense weariness with the innovation—which long since became a cliché—of the sympathetic, victimized dragon.

Dragon

Guess what? One of our local IMAX theaters (the one at the Minnesota Zoo), has asked the Viking Age Club and Society to be there in costume for the opening, next Saturday. And I’ve agreed to participate.

My price? A free ticket to a movie I’m not even particularly interested in.

It’s for the good of the club, I tell myself. To raise our public visibility and attract new members.

So I’m taking a bullet (or, more authentically, an arrow) for the group.

I’m a hero.

That’s how I intend to look at it, anyway.

Now the only question is, why did they invite us for the 20th, when the official opening is a week later? Sneak preview?

I’ll keep you posted. As it is, we’re scheduled to be at the Great Clips IMAX Theater at the Minnesota Zoo from 9:00 to 10:00 a.m., this Saturday.

For those of you in the area, who wish to come and rub it in.

Update: I just found out this is a special preview. My source wasn’t sure if it was open to the public or not. So if you come to mock me, you may not get in at all. Which only serves you right.

Non-fiction

Irish Comfortable Familiarity with Death

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Great Irish Lives is a collection of Irish obituaries from a people who appear to relish the news of someone stepping into the great beyond. Suzanne Strempek Shea, writing the review, quotes from one obit, “We believe there is no doubt that Mr O’Connell expired on Saturday, the 15th of this month, at Genoa. He yielded up his latest breath at the distance of many hundred miles from the remains of [his] humble dwelling….” She then writes:

Don’t let language stop you from reading, and learning. The obituary of James Augustine Aloysius Joyce, Jan. 13, 1941, includes the story of his meeting as a student with W.B. Yeats, whose obit resides nearby. The back-and-forth: “We have met too late,” the budding novelist said, “you are too old to be influenced by me,” to which the poet answered, “Never have I encountered so much pretension with so little to show for it.”

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DreamWorks To Film "The Help"

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DreamWorks has acquired the rights to produce Katheryn Stockett’s debut novel, The Help, is a good read in Southern literature. They hope to begin filming this summer in Mississippi. The book is good, and the author has consulted the script, so the movie may be passable.

Book Reviews, Creative Culture