The above quotation, taken from my favorite moment in the movie Wonder Boys, is spoken by Quentin Morewood (Rip Torn), an author of considerable renown (and pretension).
The fact that I am quoting a line about writing from the movie version of a novel instead of the novel itself may seem kind of stupid. This hasn’t escaped my attention. But unfortunately, I haven’t read the book (even though I own a copy) so there you go. Yes, I am lazy. Anyway, my point is this:
We are all writers. And by “we” I’m not just referring to my fellow bloggers, but to everyone. Everybody writes. My next-door neighbor, my grandmother, the garbage man, Gary Oldman, everyone. It doesn’t take much to write a check or a grocery list or a thank-you letter to a friend. So I’m not sure why it takes so much effort on my part to write a measly blog entry.
Why haven’t I written recently? Well, actually, I have. Two weeks ago I decided to use my commute time to and from work to immerse myself in the three re-release soundtracks for the original Star Wars trilogy, and the experience inspired me to pontificate on what it is about Star Wars that I love so much, given that it’s really just the first two of six (six!) movies that don’t piss me off (which is to say that even Return of the Jedi is beyond help—-and the ewoks are the least of its problems-—considering that my childhood hero, Han Solo, is completely and inexcusably emasculated somewhere around scene 24).
So I wrote this extended essay on what Star Wars means to me, but in the end I realized I was boring even myself. Needless to say, I scrapped it. (FYI, I came to the conclusion that it’s the mythology of Star Wars—-the alternate universe in which it exists, if you will—-that defined so much of my childhood through epic action figure battles [and the melodramas that emerged within them], reading the old Marvel comic book series, listening to the various storybook LPs on my Fisher Price record player, endlessly reenacting various scenes from the movies with my brother, etc. As such, the movies were almost peripheral to my veneration-—rather than the focus of it. Indeed, I’ve probably watched Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back fewer than a dozen times each, as opposed to, say, Ghost World, which I’ve watched approximately four gazillion times and counting.)
I also wrote about a recent influx of new music into my life from two disparate sources. First, from the inestimable Westy/Bony/Ghosty/Whoknowswhathisnextpseudonymwillbe (who sent NINE CDs full of the best music I’d never heard of before, from bands with names like The Futureheads, The Magic Numbers, Erectus Monotone, Soup Dragons, Blinker the Star, Twin Princess, Orange Peels, Eggstone, Sentridoh, Idaho, The Lassie Foundation, Eugenius, etc., etc. Staring at these CD inserts reminds me of that pages-long list of great [fictional] band names in Wilson and Shea’s Illuminatus! Trilogy). Second, from the aforementioned Steve of “likes Steely Dan a lot” fame. Incidentally, Steve’s taste in music has been mostly redeemed in my eyes, because after we got into some deeper conversations about music he has begun providing me with a series of compilation disks that include songs by Bauhaus, Catherine Wheel, Blur, Cocteau Twins, The Feelies, Hüsker Dü, The Jesus and Mary Chain, Love & Rockets, Luna, etc. I’m sure Steve’s relieved by this, because my opinion of other people’s opinions is Very Important and should be taken Seriously.
Then, thanks to the inspiration of W/B/G/W and Steve (and two much-anticipated tax refunds from the U.S. government and the fine state of New Jersey) I placed an order with Amazon for Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians, Björk’s Music from Drawing Restraint 9 (for a new film by wacko/Björk-boyfriend Matthew Barney), and The Amorphous Androgynous’s Alice in Ultraland.
This last one is one of the best new albums I have heard in years. YEARS. The Amorphous Androgynous is the same two guys as The Future Sound of London, and with FSOL’s radical departure from their norm (if such a thing can be quantified in their case) with the 2002 release of The Isness (which had a companion disk called The Otherness released by The Amorphous Androgynous—confused yet?), I knew that Alice in Ultraland was going to be something special. Basically, imagine Syd Barrett, Roger Waters, David Gilmour, et al., starting from scratch—only in 2006 instead of 1965. This album has reminded me why I love Pink Floyd so much (which is sometimes hard to remember after twenty years of listening to the same thirteen albums that are practically as old as I am), but at the same time it doesn’t sound like an album that was created in a time warp, either. It’s entirely contemporary, it just happens to be grounded in the early psychedelic sound of Pink Floyd, The Moody Blues (specifically “Timothy Leary’s Dead” and the rest of In Search of the Lost Chord), Jefferson Airplane, and so on. At this point in my life it’s rare that I’ll find an album I can’t stop listening to, but I listened to Alice in Ultraland a dozen times before I finally pulled it out of my car’s CD player. It’s that awesome.
I also ordered some new books, since Julie is able to get me a significant discount at her place of work. So I recently read Jessica Abel’s La Perdida, Kim Deitch’s Boulevard of Broken Dreams, and Vaughn and Guerra’s Y: The Last Man vol. 6, Girl on Girl. I’m still waiting for Nibot and Coover’s Banana Sunday and Richard Sala’s Mad Night to arrive, but I can be patient.
And I saw V for Vendetta last night with Tom and Steve. Alan Moore’s comic book on which this movie is based remains one of my favorites. I don’t know why, for sure. Perhaps for sentimental reasons. Aside from picking up an Archie Comics Digest every once in a while, I didn’t start reading comic books with regularity until October 1985, when my dad bought me a copy of G.I. Joe #42 off a spinner rack in Hill’s department store. It was a defining moment in my childhood. From there I branched off into other Marvel titles, including The Amazing Spider-Man (natch), The 'Nam, X-Factor, The Silver Surfer, and The Punisher (while avoiding The X-Men and its various spinoffs—though I honestly don’t know how, The Fantastic Four, The Avengers, Captain America, Thor, and a few of the other Marvel “staples”). These books were okay for a 13-year-old (since that’s what I was), but it’s not mind-blowing stuff, either. Just comics. Then I discovered Daredevil. Or, more to the point, I discovered Frank Miller’s Daredevil. In the very first issue I picked up, Daredevil wasn’t even wearing his costume. If you were never a comic geek then let me tell you that this never happened—especially in the ’80s. And I didn’t know what to make of it. But I knew it was awesome.
Then came Watchmen. I didn’t read any DC Comics (Batman, Superman, Justice League) so I’d never heard of Alan Moore (who had written Swamp Thing for them). But you couldn’t walk into a comic book shop in 1986 without being assaulted by the image of a blood-stained smiley-face button or Rorschach’s iconic facemask. So I picked up a copy of the much-hyped issue 11 (as you can see, it took me a while to jump the hurdle of buying my first DC comic), and once again I had NO IDEA what I was looking at. But I liked the fact that there were no ads in the book. So I waited and soon the trade paperback came out. And it blew my mind.
V for Vendetta (the book) did as well. Now, I wholeheartedly subscribe to the idea that movies based on books (or comic books) are their own thing. If you want something that faithfully follows its source material, just read the source material. What’s the point of making something new out of it if the new thing isn’t actually new? Thus my love for the movie version of Ghost World, as an example. So I have no complaints that the movie V for Vendetta departs slightly from the book V for Vendetta. Nonetheless, I was disappointed.
The book has a power and moments of emotional resonance that were only intermittently present in the movie. In the book, Evey’s incarceration, for example, and her reading of Valerie’s letter combined to form a lasting impression on my life. Certainly the scene in which Natalie Portman’s head is shaved will stick with me, but other aspects of her imprisonment were smoothed out. It didn’t last as long, she was not starved to the point of emaciation, the torture was less extreme. I don’t mean to imply that I was looking forward to some good old-fashioned pain and suffering and that my bloodlust was disappointed by its absence. On the contrary, I feel that if the movie is trying to make some point about the uses of torture in our contemporary world, it failed. Alan Moore’s original story had been defanged, in a sense. Then, at the same time, many aspects of the movie's story were entirely overwrought. V’s emergence from the burning Larkhill facility, for example. And don’t get me started on the Wachowski brothers and their need to utilize their trademark “bullet time” slow motion effect ad nauseam. Was the movie really made better with the use of “dagger time”? Or “rain time”? Not to mention the fact that the sound effects for the falling rain (when Evey steps out into it) were completely ridiculous. With each raindrop that fell a major auditory explosion burst from the speakers. Can we just focus on Evey’s sudden euphoric feeling of freedom, please?
I also didn’t like the ending.
Am I complaining too much? Am I being too critical? Perhaps. I will say that the actors chosen were spot-on. Natalie did a fine job as Evey (though as one reviewer pointed out, she was probably a bit too pretty for the role), Stephen Rea was great as Finch, Tim Pigott-Smith perfectly embodied my worst “conservatives gone mad!” nightmare as Creedy, and you couldn’t ask for a better guy hiding behind a rigid Guy Fawkes mask than Hugo Weaving. But this was definitely a movie groomed with a blockbuster pedigree in mind, and that alone made me dislike it a little bit.
One thing is certain: despite having integrity out the wazoo and a rock-solid system of beliefs, it’s nonetheless pretty evident that Alan Moore is nuts. But I think I’m going to support his wishes when someone talks about making Watchmen into a movie. I just don’t want to see it.
So there.
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