The Lovely Bones: a Movie Review

THE LOVELY BONES: B-


Get there on time: The Lovely Bones opens with good story telling—in fact, a gripping 30-45 minutes of murder mystery, after which there will be at least an hour-long coffee break for you because you were wise enough to read this review.

It’s hard to imagine what director Peter Jackson and the other writers were thinking when they inserted all that digital afterlife crap into the endless, tiresome, trite, Harlequin-drenched, dime-store philosophy of a middle. Edge-of-the-seat suspense dissolves into a boring heap of redundant images and soapy talk-overs, during which respectable viewers will go to the john, or hike part of the Appalachian Trail, even if it's night, or just step outside to smoke ‘em if they’ve got ‘em. (The movie’s middle could cause people to take up the fatal habit).

When should the savvy viewer make his break? After the third minute or so in digitized heaven. From there to the beginning of the movie's climax and denouement, it’s a quicksand of the tried and trite, as Peter Jackson and Co. try to use electronics to re-invent Alice’s adventures in the rabbit hole.

Find out what time the final 30 minutes will begin; come back then to be sure you don’t miss the other good stuff. As mysteriously as it disappeared, genuine suspense returns, along with a couple of nice turns against predictability.

If you hadn’t already, you will realize that sinkholes make good symbols. Also, there’s more than one outcome for a bad guy, and I’d never have thought of this one. What an ingenious way to avoid the moral complexity and responsibility of capital punishment. Of course, we could also argue it's an irresponsible gesture at justice, the avoidance of a statement.

The acting is excellent, one more reason not to dismiss the movie out of hand. Young Saoirse Ronan (Atonement) makes a good lead and does as much as anyone could with the schlock she's forced to read in the middle. Mark Wahlberg and Rachel Weisz do just fine as her parents and as Hollywood’s requisite beautiful couple.

In supporting roles, Susan Sarandon delivers once again, adding humanity to Grandma Lynn’s main function as comic relief. Stanley Tucci contributes a spooky dimension in his superb embodiment of the Creepy Psycho; he should be remembered (fondly?) for this role. Michael Imperioli (The Sopranos, Law and Order) is surprisingly believable as a compassionate, yet competent cop. As Susie Salmon’s sister, Rose McIver is much more than eye candy, especially in the last half-hour.

So who knows if you should go? If someone important to you wants to see it, don’t say no too hastily. But take some kind of medication for that middle hour-plus, yet something that leaves your senses intact for the excellent last half-hour. If only this were the 1950s and I could in good faith say, “Pick up an extra pack of Luckies on the way . . . .”

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Avatar: movie review

Who needs Pandora?
Who needs a booby-trapped box?
Let's save this guy.


Avatar: B-

I finally gave in and went to see Avatar in 3D, expecting to leave after 15 minutes because of motion sickness or boredom or irritation. However, I had no problem with vertigo except for a couple of flying scenes, during which I simply closed my eyes for a few seconds. I must admit the movie was visually spectacular, and I never stopped wondering how anyone conceived of these images and techniques, never mind implementing them.

In the end, however, I’m afraid Avatar is typical sci-fi/fantasy fare—special effects, a lot of message, and caricature instead of characterization. Considering it for awards alongside genuine achievements like Hurt Locker, The Road, A Serious Man, and others is one more red flag about the quality of American intellectual life.

I don't really follow entertainment news, so maybe I've missed any uproar about Avatar’s offenses to this or that group, including the American military-industrial complex and mainstream culture. As always, those targets deserve to be examined by, and take some hits from, the art and science communities.

However, the pseudo-intellectual assault by Avatar is so hyperbolic and one-dimensional that it’s fatuous, yet bothersome. The movie would have us believe that, except for scientist Sigourney Weaver, hero Jake Sully and one female helicopter pilot, there are no good guys in the U.S., just psychopathic land developers and killers-in-uniform. I wonder how many of the film’s creators live in areas cleared--nay, ravaged—by precisely the unthinkable means portrayed in Avatar.

Oddly, I also found much about Pandora’s jungle people to be laughable in a way that could be insulting to native peoples of North and South America as well as Africans—or any non-industrial culture. In addition to their harmony with nature, the indigenous humanoids of Pandora have mouse ears, long tails, and noses that appear crushed by multiple boxing matches. I cannot be sure their language sounded more odd to me than any foreign language, but I found it hard to take seriously, I suppose in the context of their other features.

Like The Book of Eli, this movie owes much to the tradition of American westerns of the 1950s. “A stranger rode into town.” It offers native peoples about as much dignity as those old flicks did, or maybe less, and its heroes are even less believable and more one-dimensional than the old B movies, western or otherwise.

In short, Avatar is extraordinarily skillful and original in terms of technique, but in depth and complexity of theme and characterization, in creative uses of language, it amounts to just one more cartoon.

It’s also one more reason for the political Right to flap its feathers about a simplistic, laughable or even treasonous Hollywood Left, which is their way of flapping about creative, thinking people with legitimate ideas and axes to grind. Maybe Glen Beck and Rush Limbaugh were secret partners in the production of Avatar. It's a flick that gives them ammo. (And you thought the Right had a monopoly on paranoia).

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"Ulysses" by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Ulysses by Alfred, Lord Tennyson : The Poetry Foundation [poem] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.

As Brenda requested yesterday, here is Lord Tennyson. I hope a few people can use a memory refresher on the famous "Ulysses." It's a fine work and makes an interesting companion to Richard Wilbur's "Still, Citizen Sparrow," posted here two days ago. Both poets see heroes as solitary figures who do work that others cannot (Tennyson) or will not (Wilbur).

Tennyson's Ulysses speaks of his citizens in much the same way Wilbur sees sparrows or carrion, and Ulysess wants none of it:

It little profits that an idle king,

By this still hearth, among these barren crags,

Match'd with an aged wife, I mete and dole

Unequal laws unto a savage race . . .

His son, Telemachus, tries to bring order among these ruffians (or sparrows and Wildebeests, if you read Monday's visitor comments). For that, Ulysess offers a supreme example of damning with faint praise (the "He" is Telemachus): "He works his work, I mine." I hear, "Telemachus is a good boy, and somebody has to carry out these dull functions, but I'm too lofty for that." (I wonder if Richard Wilbur would have made Telemachus the hero of this poem . . .).

Here is Ulysses' famous conclusion about setting out for one final adventure:

We are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;

One equal temper of heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

And here is one way to paraphrase the guts of Ulysses' monologue, taken as a whole: "I am Ulysses The Great, adventurer, warrior, hero, bored with daily life among mere citizens. I was made for greater things, even in old age, wandering till I drop." Are we hearing gallantry we should admire or arrogance we should judge?

"Ulysses" is a dramatic monologue, in which the speaker is an identified character in a dramatic situation. Such a poem is like an excerpted speech by one character to another in a play, or one end of a telephone conversation.

Professor Robert Langbaum has said of dramatic monologues (especially Robert Browning's) that they are not likely to produce a feeling of resolution or tidy conclusion in the reader, but a tension between sympathy (which involves respect, not condescending pity) on the one hand and judgment on the other (usually judgment in a moral context).

In cruder terms, it's okay to feel in part that Tennyson's Ulysses is a wonderful old leader, full of spirt and spunk; but he's also an egocentric, bombastic old fart. He's not one or the other; he's both, though each reader might tilt one way more than the other.

When Ulysses speaks of "unequal laws" for a "savage race," isn't that admirable realism from a man looking back over his life? Surely any leader of any society has, with cause, felt that way about his people. And surely we must respect an important man who, in his final years, says with conviction:

I am a part of all that I have met;

Yet all experience is an arch wherethro'

Gleams that untravell'd world . . .

But the same guy has a patronizing, if not contemptuous attitude toward his dutiful, responsible son and toward the citizens in whose name Ulysess carried out his great adventures and became heroic.

In short, the sizing up of a human, even one widely accepted as a hero, is complex; it's not a greeting card. That's probably true for every serious piece of literature in which characterization is a factor.


And so, on a lighter note, it is for both good reasons and bad that we might urge senior citizens to climb into the Winnebago one more time and "Hit the Road, Jack." Behold now the other end of the aging spectrum:

YouTube - Hit The Road Jack - Sungha Jung

Ulysses by Alfred, Lord Tennyson : The Poetry Foundation [poem] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.

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"Still, Citizen Sparrow" by Richard Wilbur

http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88v/wilbur-sparrow.html

Although I predict that several of Richard Wilbur's poems are canon-fodder (that is, immortal--I couldn't resist playing with Falstaff's words) I especially admire "Still, Citizen Sparrow," which offers the scavenging vulture as a hero in whose shadow mere sparrows are told to be still.

In "Still" as the opening word, there is more muscularity of language, more purposeful ambiguity and layered meaning, than I find in many entire poems, especially those we politely call "conversational." First and foremost, I hear "Still" as "Be still," an instruction to the chattering sparrows, who are that most mediocre of things, "citizens." Shut up and behold the hovering vulture lording ("Lord"?) it over you as he does his necessary, purgative work.

However, that doesn't hold up grammatically; we'd need a semicolon or period after "citizen sparrow." So the literal and grammatically sensible meaning is probably, "Even so, citizen sparrow . . . ." It's an introduction to the more elaborate argument that follows. It's as if the sparrows have proposed their own cuteness and the vulture's grotesqueness, whereupon Wilbur's speaker is offering a counter-argument. "Oh yeah? You talkin' to me, twerp? Well, consider this about Mr. Ugly Vulture . . . ."

I won't continue with this kind of attention to detail or I'll never finish. But do, please, take time to admire a couple of gems within the crown:

". . . lumber again to air / Over the rotten office . . . ." What could better capture the rhythm of the buzzard's flight and the brutal accuracy of its mission than "the rotten office"? Remove it by eating it: ". . . bear / The carrion ballast up . . ." and because he's the hero who does the dirty work, he can "at the tall // Tip of the sky lie cruising."

". . . the frightfully free // The naked-headed one . . . ." Maybe he's "frightfully" free because what he does seems, or is "unnatural." As Wilbur himself gives us (albeit in the voice of his sparrows), it amounts to cannibalism, by virtue of which the hero "mocks mutability." Death? I laugh at it. In fact, I eat Death and cruise on.

". . . childheart . . . bedlam hours . . . slam of his hammer . . . " All of those "am" sounds are verbal sledge hammers against the chirpy multitudes of small beings. Oh, Buzzard, stop preparing for heroism--we sparrows can't sleep (or chatter) with the slam of your hammer going on and on.

And these bits speak for themselves, I think:

How high and weary it was . . .

He rocked his only world, and everyone's.
Forgive the hero, you who would have died
Gladly with all you knew . . .

We sparrows didn't know much, did we? Trash collectors and undertakers probably know a lot more, and, odd as it may seem, the poem is an apotheosis of those who tidy up after us, including our corpses. And, Presto!--the hero, the lofty, silent one, solitary Noah among us nattering nabobs of sparrow-hood.

As something of a cynic about heroes, I don't know how much I agree with Wilbur's argument, but I admire its creative logic and presentation, the power of its imperatives ("Do this; do that"), the poem's passion bucking against the constraints of its formal structure, and the global perspective of its theme.

Besides, what could I say in rebuttal? "Yo, Buzzard-Dude, us sparrows are here too, all cute and chirpy and stuff. We matter." Oh yeah. That's compelling. "Lit . . . tle bird . . . up high in banana tree . . . ." Or darting in the orchard aisles. Move over.


http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88v/wilbur-sparrow.html

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Poetry: What Is It?

We Real Cool - Poets.org - Poetry, Poems, Bios & More




the singer








the stand-up






















a scene





Dadgummit, Brenda, in your comments last time, you've steered me completely off course. My response to you got so long that I'm turning it into today's post.

So the Richard Wilbur poem waits at least another day, and the shorter, but not simple Gwendolyn Brooks poem goes up today. It's famous enough that many might already know it, but it's poetry, it's rock-hard, it's musical, and it has something to say, maybe something quite daring.

But first, here again is "The Ineffable" by Bilgere or "Brenda's guy”:

http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php?date=2010/01/25

What I find, as I do with so much of the "School of Accessibility," is that most of the poem could just as reasonably have been prose. Why has the poet chosen to break his writing into lines, chosen to call them verse? In Bilgere’s “The Ineffable,” I think the piece became poetry about 70% of the way into itself. Or, let’s say it becomes a poem somewhere in the last stanza.

That endless set-up, in language that’s actually prose, is true of many poems out there today. Some, of course, never do become poetry. Maybe that's OK; it's certainly popular. But if I go to poetry, I want frequent nuggets that will stand up to examination by a competent, demanding gemologist—let's say at least a nugget every three lines (this mathifying is absurd, I realize, but bear with me).

What do I mean by a nugget? As Justice Potter Stewart said about pornography, “I know it when I see it.” Bilgere’s lines have appealing, witty images, and I like its overall theme about fantasy. I've been the victim of that kind of self-deception, and I know others who have. But I see no reason that the piece could not, should not, be a prose short story.

In fact, we now have additional categories: flash fiction, sudden fiction, prose poem, ultra-talk. So why forcibly break one’s words and sentences into lines trying to be, claiming to be, poetry? Does the writer have that much contempt for prose? It can be as deep and as moving as poetry, and it pays better, by a lot.

Let me repeat: I enjoyed “The Ineffable.” I have some respect for its way of couching important psychology in humor. But I doubt that I’ll ever admire it the way I do so much of Dickinson, Hopkins, Yeats, Keats, Frost, Plath, Dylan Thomas, or more recently, Seamus Heany, Philip Larkin, Elizabeth Bishop, Gwendolyn Brooks, Theodore Roethke, Richard Wilbur, Kay Ryan, and on and on. In their work I find a gift in almost every line, the kind that Emily Dickinson said would blow off the top of your head--that's when you know you're in the presence of poetry--not at the end of a long, prosy build-up, which can resemble a joke on Comedy Central.

Let’s go there. As I’ve said before, I respect a lot of stand-up comics. I’ve recently realized how much they have in common with poets, alone on a stage, risking everything in what they say and the way they say it. But should we call them poets? Of course, in their case, “comedian” doesn’t have the clout of “poet” (or “physician,” or “philosopher” or “taxidermist”); but let’s then get a new word for stand-ups rather than stealing “poet” from the poets.

In the same light, why not write fiction and call yourself a fiction writer or novelist? I don’t get it.

Can we have narrative poetry? Yes, of course. But remember, Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" is narrative. Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" is a story. Surely there's no doubt that they are poems. Ditto Browning's "My Last Duchess," since Brenda mentioned it.

Also, I did refer to vast shades of grey, where Frost might be at times (but that's most likely to happen only if we don't hear his rhythms, which is most likely to happen in his blank verse poems). Even Whitman’s bombastic chanting and repetition are closer to what we usually mean by “poetry” than many of today’s poem-chats.

The whole matter is treacherously subjective. One person's music is another person's drone; one person's verbal gem is another's piece of gravel. But I’m not sure the issue of conversation and prose, on the one hand, compared to poetry on the other is sufficiently prominent and honest. There was a flurry of commentary and challenge a few years ago, when Sharon Olds, Billy Collins, Tony Hoagland and others were rising to prominence, but the topic seems to have evaporated.

It’s understandable that poets don’t want to challenge each other much on such debatable grounds; their status in our culture is too precarious for them to fight among themselves. But I think the talk—dare I say the “conversation”— could be more thorough and probing than it is, at least as far as I know.

Of course, the flip side of that coin would be universities that fire their writers-in-residence because they don't belong to this or that school of verbal aesthetics. There's no winning. That's why we turn to poems like "We Real Cool" by Gwendolyn Brooks:

We Real Cool - Poets.org - Poetry, Poems, Bios & More

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On the Light Side of Darkness: Mastication and Stephen Crane's poetry

When I am once again the last at a table to finish a meal, I think of my junior high health class and the advice to chew 32 times before swallowing.

I don’t always make it to 32, but I come pretty close. I don’t think it’s an obsession; I just like my food moist and ready to go down without a fight, like canned dog food.

Is Alpo still on the market? There was one kind of dog food, maybe Alpo, that was a dead ringer for corned beef hash. Is it still on the market?

At a Wendy’s yesterday, I watched a guy chomp 12 times and swallow. What a barbarian. And when his half-chewed chickens come home to roost, as acid reflux or autoerotic self-strangulation, I’ll have to pay his doctor bills. So will you, all because he thought he was too busy to chew.

By the way, one of my favorite Banjo aphorisms is: If you think you love her, don’t watch her eat.

Why is dinner together such a popular dating and mating activity? How can you concentrate on romance when you’re counting the other’s chomps or wondering whether she'll wield her fork like a wand?

And please don’t feed me any of those perverted theories about our cannibalistic tendencies when grandma says, “You’re so sweet I could just eat you up.”

Suddenly I’m thinking of a Stephen Crane poem. Of course he’s better known for The Red Badge of Courage, but he wrote some 99 poems—or “poems,” curiosities—and whatever they are, I’ve found two of them memorable, if grim.

Here’s one that’s thinly connected to my deep and probing metaphysics above, and here’s also one that’s not, one that’s just worth thinking about.


In the Desert by Stephen Crane

A man said to the universe: by Stephen Maria Crane


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HEMINGWAY'S HOUSE, KEY WEST, FLORIDA

Here’s one of the tour guides at the Hemingway house in Key West. I liked her a lot. She had probably memorized most or all of her talk, and was forcing the rise and fall in her inflection, just a little. Yet her delivery sounded fairly fresh, as if she were interested in her own material. It was all enhanced by her chipped front tooth and soft southern accent, features I found appealing.

Here are a few facts or “facts” I’d forgotten or never learned about Hemingway.

There were four wives. I remembered only the last one by name, Mary, who stayed with him for 16 years, until his death.

He got the fine Key West house—one of the largest and, at 16 feet above sea level, Key West's highest house—as a wedding present from the family of his second wife, Pauline, who replaced the ceiling fans with overwrought chandeliers and had a $20,000 swimming pool built for a house that cost a small fraction of that, expensive though it was. When Hemingway fell for a journalist who came to interview him, he and Pauline divorced, but the house went to him after her death.

There were multiple cats, most of them six-toed, apparently. Their six-toed descendants remain on the property, visited weekly by a vet.

The study where he wrote was in an attached building and contained a typewriter—with paper in it—on a table that served as a desk. I’d read once that he wrote standing at a lectern, but I guess that was wrong, or in a different place, different time. However, the guide confirmed what I'd read earlier: he worked from 6:00 a.m. to about noon, producing about 300 words per day.

I think the head that looked out from a wall over two bookcases was an antelope trophy.

Hemingway was bipolar. I’d read “back in the day” that his suicide by shotgun, in Idaho, was the consequence of his trying to live up to the Hemingway code: boxing, dozens of shrapnel wounds from his days as a World War I ambulance driver in Italy, deep sea fishing, bull fights, big game hunting, and heavy drinking.

Those chickens had come home to roost by 1961, shortly before he turned 62; he could no longer be the man or person he believed in, and despair overtook him. Or so I read a few decades ago.

So, yes, we can reduce all that to the label, “bipolar.” Doctors must engage in such reduction to treat the disease, if not empathize with the human. Hemingway’s father and a brother also committed suicide, so, even as a layman, I find the diagnosis of a genetic component very plausible.

But the old explanation paints a clearer picture of Hemingway, the human. It’s easy to over-romanticize it, but I hope it has some accuracy and remains in the literature about him. His code was extreme, maybe silly, and almost certainly permitted sexist, racist, and anti-Semitic thinking. But it’s also true that many of his war wounds were received when, already full of shrapnel, he stopped halfway across a field to try to get a fallen soldier to the ambulance. In that effort, Hemingway was hit by machine gun fire.

I’ve never been to a bullfight or a boxing match or gone deep sea fishing (I get motion sickness, and I'm not especially interested anyway). But at least with the matadors and the boxing, I can accept that Hemingway saw art and philosophy in it, as well as the brutality. I don't see what's wrong with urging "grace under pressure." As for living close to death in order to live intensely, I've often joked that if that's what it takes to get me to live intensely, then I should get out my parachute and head for a small airport. (I don't).

When it comes to boxing, by the way, Joyce Carol Oates also has seen the art and philosophy in it and has written eloquently about it. Isn't boxing the sport that relies the least on external forces? Unless there's a fix or a bad ref, the better boxer wins. Ditto for chess. Not so for team sports, where there are too many variables.

Of the few major Hemingway novels and several stories I’ve read, The Sun Also Rises is by far his best work. I won’t spoil anything by admiring again its brutally effective last few lines, which conclude with, “Isn’t it pretty to think so.” For anyone, that should explain a lot about a lot, don’t you think?

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