Searching for Bobby Fischer (1993)

USA, 109 minutes

Director: Steven Zaillian

Writers: Fred Waitzkin, Steven Zaillian

Photography: Conrad L. Hall

Music: James Horner

Editor: Wayne Wahrman

Cast: Joe Mantegna, Joan Allen, Max Pomeranc, Ben Kingsley, Lawrence Fishburne, Robert Stephens, David Paymer, William H. Macy, Laura Linney, Dan Hedaya, Michael Nirenberg

Searching for Bobby Fischer is a feel-good sports movie about chess. So you know, it doesn’t have much to do with the eccentric chess genius Bobby Fischer (who died in 2008), except that the real-life chess prodigy the movie is about, Joshua Waitzkin (Max Pomeranc), idolizes, in whispered voiceover, Fischer and all his mystique. For his part, the typically rancorous Fischer thought the movie violated his privacy by using his name without his permission and he reportedly called it “a monumental swindle.” Yeah, OK. If feeling good is what you’re looking for, you can do worse. The main problem here is the specific subject at hand. It’s possible to do chess as a sports movie—the TV miniseries The Queen’s Gambit made a pretty good job of it a few years ago—but it’s not easy. Searching for Bobby Fischer abruptly gets very “chessy” in places, with fast shots of the board and obscure chatter and jargon about openings and “bringing out the queen” and such.

But I, for one, can’t just glean the situation from the position of pieces on the board, especially when they come at us so fast. Chess is complicated and hard to dramatize visually. Making movies about it is a bit like making movies about computer hacking activities. There’s only so much you can do with someone sitting at a keyboard in a darkened room and looking up to say, “We’re in.” Fred Waitzkin, Josh’s father and a New York journalist published in the New York Times, New York magazine, and Esquire, shows his seasoning (or maybe that’s cowriter Steven Zaillian?) by injecting a fair amount of sideline nostalgic baseball lore into the story, knowing that’s easier for most of us to grasp. Ken Burns’s Baseball would come out the following year, but this movie is already onboard with the idea of New York as the capital of baseball (and everything).

“The Fetch” (1980)

This long story by Robert Aickman is reasonably conventional horror business, given that little Aickman did was ever conventional. It’s more like folk horror, as “fetch” is an obscure 17th-century term for “the apparition or double of a living person, formerly believed to be a warning of that person’s impending death.” It’s not hard to see how that sense of the word could come to be. The fetch in this story is less of a doppelganger and more of a wraith, an old woman who hides her face and trails dripping seawater wherever she goes (as she evidently comes from the sea, and to the sea must we all return). Aickman’s stories tend to be long and he takes his time getting to his points. It works because his language, however dreamlike, remains clear and straightforward, and the payoffs do come. In this first-person tale the narrator details his three strange sightings of this particular fetch, which do indeed augur deaths or, in one case, a disappearance. My favorite detail about this apparition is either the turning of the fetch’s face or the dripping seawater. She simply keeps her face out of sight, even if she’s turning to look at a far wall as she climbs a staircase. Aickman might be leaning into the smell of the seawater a little hard for him. It’s not as overbearing as the recurring “fishy” smell that we get, for example, from H.P. Lovecraft in “The Shadow Over Innsmouth,” but it seemed unusually pushy for Aickman. He is generally more reserved and holding back as a rule, setting a leisurely pace that slowly becomes hypnotic. As an article of folk horror, “The Fetch” is specifically focused on sightings of the apparition. They are the high points even when they are approached somewhat sidewise. Sometimes I think everything Aickman does is sidewise. But it’s also, when you think about it, the way most people experience the supernatural, if they do. It always happens kind of in the corner of your eye, and rarely when you go looking for it. Whatever you believe it seems most of us experience the strange and inexplicable one way or another. Most of us have an anecdote. That confusion and uncertainty about how to take it is where Aickman’s stories live.

Robert Aickman, The Wine-Dark Sea
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Infinity Pool (2023)

It’s customary to say that director and writer Brandon Cronenberg, son of David, is a chip off the old block. His first feature film, Antiviral (2012), involved obsessed fans seeking viruses that had previously infected celebrities. Skip ahead eight years to Possessor (2020), which is about assassination via a technique of body possession. And now Infinity Pool, which takes place at a resort for the ultra-wealthy in the fictional island country of Li Tolqa, a bit Central America junta and a bit Eastern Europe satellite state. The political climate is menacing and unstable, let’s put it that way. Novelist James Foster (Alexander Skarsgard) and his rich wife Em (Cleopatra Coleman) are vacationing there, coping with his years-long writer’s block. They meet a woman named Gabi (Mia Goth, the secret sauce in this stew) and her husband Alban (Jalil Lespert), who are familiar with the resort and island country. Gabi says she liked Foster’s novel and wants to get to know him. The next day, even though the resort warns its guests that they should not leave the resort grounds, the foursome takes a day for touring and debauching. Gabi and Alban have been there before and seem to know their way around Li Tolqa. On the way home Foster, who is the least drunk, takes the wheel. But he hits a local farmer with the car and kills him. Gabi and Alban advise fleeing, which they do post-haste. But within hours police are at Foster’s room pounding on the door. All four are taken in for questioning and, to cut to the chase, Foster is quickly found guilty. The punishment is extremely unusual and represents the science fiction element here. It’s there to be discovered. As it happens, Foster and a handful of others find something to like about it, even though it’s pretty horrible. It’s what brings Gabi and Alban back, for example, committing crimes to experience it again. Mia Goth, previously a revelation in Pearl, though maybe not X (and I haven’t seen MaXXXine yet), might be even better here as a young rootless rich woman with an unsettling kink for power. Cronenberg had to endure rounds of edits to get the picture’s rating down from NC-17 to R, which might give some idea of what you’re in for here. Hallucinogenic drug use is a staple and some of the picture’s best scenes and visions take place inside heads with the music playing. Brandon may not yet be up to some of the heights of David, but it looks like he might get there yet. He’s a real chip off the old block.

“The Old Man and the Sea” (1952)

“The Old Man and the Sea” was a kind of media event unto itself, Ernest Hemingway’s “last major fictional work published during his lifetime” (Wikipedia), published in its entirety first in the glamorous Life magazine with a photo of the author all over the ding-dang cover. It won a Pulitzer and “was the only work explicitly mentioned when Hemingway was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954.” The obvious comparisons and perhaps the ambitions too are stuff like Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, William Faulkner’s “The Bear,” Jack London’s Call of the Wild. If it ranks behind all of them that still puts it within range of Mount Rushmore status, for those inclined. The novella also rates comparison with Hemingway’s own “Big Two-Hearted River” in the way that it basically just observes. It feels more labored and exhausted but it’s still a reasonably good last gasp. The arc of the story—physically, literally—is out to the deep waters of the Gulf Stream from Cuba and back again. It is as simple (and Hemingwayesque) as it could be, all detail focused on what the old man fisherman must do next with his resources and skills as situations develop. As admirably as it may be done there’s little we haven’t seen from Hemingway before. There was a lot of sideline chatter at the time about writer’s block and weak recent novels. A lot was on the line commercially. Its sheer competence was greeted with relief by those under his influence. Later, more carping reviews began to complain of bonehead simplicity and other sins. I read this when I loved Hemingway very much, at 19 or 20, and swore by its straightforward compaction. More recently I didn’t find it as breezy and readable. It’s certainly straightforward and simple, but I was more bored this time by all the MacGyver making-do antics. Yes, yes, life and death, but the references to baseball seemed notably strained. All my problems with Hemingway’s valorization of the stoic are here. It’s what he does. I don’t think “The Old Man and the Sea” lives up to all the attention—a lot of what made it a big deal are more like sideline issues. So it’s hard to know what to make of it, but it’s probably as good a place as any to end a consideration of Hemingway’s shorter fiction. I probably missed a few from the ‘30s, ‘40s, maybe even ‘50s.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.
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“City of Glass” (1985)

The New York Trilogy
Under the Novels tab up there: For some years I have been working my way through a couple of lists of the 100 greatest English-language novels published in the 20th century. The first is the result of a 1998 survey of various literary hoity-toities by the Modern Library publishing empire. It’s somewhat predictable (Ulysses #1) but nonetheless has steered me to some great novels I might not have got to otherwise. The second is from Larry McCaffery, a literature professor now retired from San Diego University. I found his list on the internet early this century. McCaffery is more rooted in strains of the second half of the 20th century, unafraid of postmodernism and such, and he’s a little less predictable (Ulysses #2, after Pale Fire, the refreshing judgment that drew me to his list). These two lists share perhaps two dozen titles. Getting to the point, McCaffery’s list includes Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy, published in 1987, and lists the three titles separately (“City of Glass,” “Ghosts,” and “The Locked Room”) although really they are closer to novellas than novels. “City of Glass” and “The Locked Room” top out around 120 pages each and “Ghosts” is even shorter. But I am following McCaffery’s lead and treating them separately, though I think Auster may have intended the three together to be taken as a single novel. But what do I know? They were published separately originally and only have a certain playfully mordant noir wit and the New York City setting in common. Is a trilogy of mostly unconnected novellas any less valid? I’m not even sure how to answer that. I can say all three are fun and a pleasure to read, though somewhat arch with their conceits.

I actually encountered “City of Glass” first in the 1994 graphic novel treatment by Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli, which I picked up on the strength of illustrator Mazzucchelli’s name. Mazzucchelli also provided his impressive work to some Batman and Daredevil comics written by Frank Miller. The “City of Glass” graphic novel is worth chasing down. I like the noirish tones of the story, but it is also very busy being literary and postmodern. There’s a character here named Paul Auster, for example. The narrator is a one-time rising literary star who turned to detective fiction for money and then to detective work for some kind of spiritual solace. His name is William Wilson. This ham-handed reach for an Edgar Allan Poe reference is somewhat mitigated when the narrator, a fan of the New York Mets, reminds us it’s also the proper name of centerfielder Mookie Wilson. “City of Glass” may be a bit of a lampoon of detective fiction, but it is affectionate about it even as it ropes in further literary references to Don Quixote, the biblical Tower of Babel, and more. I put up with the grandstanding because Auster is actually a beguiling and even engrossing writer. This is good stuff. The notes of absurdity are never far and the paragraphs are often big blocks of text. But Auster’s style is easy and lucid. In 2006 Lucy Sante, author of Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York, wrote an introduction for The New York Trilogy. It’s not hard to see how it would appeal to her. “City of Glass” is based in a number of crucial ways on the geography of Manhattan. I don’t know it well myself so tended to glaze over the specific landmarks given. But “City of Glass” is an intriguing start to whatever Auster is up to here and the graphic novel is equally as good as this original text. Both are worth a shot.

Paul Auster, The New York Trilogy
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Morvern Callar (2002)

UK / Canada, 97 minutes

Director: Lynne Ramsay

Writers: Lynne Ramsay, Liana Dognini, Alan Warner
Photography: Alwin H. Kuchler

Music: Can, Aphex Twin, Ween, Stereolab, Lee Hazlewood

Editor: Lucia Zucchetti

Cast: Samantha Morton, Kathleen McDermott, Raife Patrick Burchell, Dan Cadan, James Wilson, El Carrette, Linda McGuire

In the strange alienated Scottish setting of this picture Morvern Callar is the name of a person, a young woman. Morvern Callar is a character study. As it starts, Morvern (Samantha Morton) has come home on Christmas Eve or maybe the night of Christmas Day to find her husband dead of suicide, with a note he left her on the computer. We have reason to believe it’s her husband because they live together and she wears a ring. He was an aspiring writer and left her a manuscript and instructions for approaching publishers. Another character at one point refers to him affectionately as “our Dostoevsky.” We see that Morvern is wearing a ring, but as the movie goes along, and she spends most of her time with her best friend, Lanna (Kathleen McDermott, who is excellent), it seems more like it must have been a casual boyfriend / girlfriend relationship, and not of long duration. But it’s never certain.

In many ways Morvern Callar is a movie about grief and how differently people can experience it. Morvern seems to be a case of extreme denial and we keep waiting for it to break and bring her back to a reality we understand, but that’s not the way this movie goes. Much of it for us is about just watching—in amazement, in disbelief, in shock—and at that mesmerizing level it is very good in the expert hands of director and cowriter Lynne Ramsay (You Were Never Really Here, We Need to Talk About Kevin), who takes her time making movies or perhaps is delayed getting funding for pictures that are powerful and easy to admire but not a lot of fun to watch. Morvern Callar reminds me of Terence Malick’s Badlands, traveling the strange psychological pathways of underclass youth, who just don’t know any better. It’s kind of sickening but you can’t take your eyes off it.

“New Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1984)

[spoilers] This story is, of course, outlandish and beggars belief—well, that’s Clive Barker for you. What I like is the bold way it takes on the Edgar Allan Poe original, itself outlandish and beggaring belief. Barker is having some fun with Poe and his ridiculous ideas. Namely, the “Ourang-Outang” villain of Poe’s story along with other elements of it. It’s one of a few places where Poe is found inventing the detective story with his Parisian investigator, C. Auguste Dupin, a plain forerunner of Sherlock Holmes, but with even more ridiculous examples of those good old breathtaking and unbelievable feats of logic and deduction. Arthur Conan Doyle would prove more skillful at it. Sometimes you almost don’t notice how silly the amazing deductions can be. As in the original Poe, mysterious and violent murders have occurred in Paris. They turn out to be the work of a cleverly disguised primate. Poe may have been proceeding from the ignorance of the times when he was writing (circa 1841), but Barker has to know better in 1984. We all loved Koko the gorilla, who may or may not have been able to communicate with sign language, but no ape is going to shave and dress up in human garb, walk with mincing steps, and go on killing sprees. Come on. Barker bristles with imaginative weird ideas and tosses them with gore. There’s gore aplenty here, as usual, be warned—in both Rue Morgue stories, for that matter. This Ourang-Outang, or whatever it is—Barker just calls it an ape—uses a razor to kill. What’s the beef? Inhibitions of civilization, or just everyday psychopathy (ape style)? Who knows? We should never forget that Barker came originally from the theater (now he paints, writes, and directs movies too). He is over-the-top theatrical for exactly that reason. He writes VERY BIG as well as long. He’s literate and knows his chosen field, or is learning it in these Books of Blood stories as he writes. If “Skins of Our Fathers” (also in Vol. 2) reminded me of H.P. Lovecraft, “New Murders” is obviously riffing on Poe. Barker is certainly aware of his salient traditions. He's having fun but also acknowledging his sources. He basically writes the same story here that Poe did, copying the master as it were. Barker tips this in many ways, including by making his main character a descendant of one of the principals in Poe’s original. This one’s just for the fun of it. For best effect, read the two “Rue Morgue” stories together.

Clive Barker, Books of Blood, Vols. 1-6 (Vol. 2 kindle)
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New Year memo

Happy new year to everyone except Donald Trump and MAGAs although it may be a happy new year for them despite anything I say. Thanks, voters! It’s hard to know what to say. The less said the better maybe, but watching will be more critical than ever. I seriously doubt grocery prices return to 2019 levels as promised, for example. Another devastating pandemic is more likely at this point. But I’m over here, keeping my little blog, cold comfort perhaps, too often feeling like embers of boomer view flaring up in a random breeze. I’m facing retirement this year so we’ll see how that goes. I’m not planning much different for the blog in 2025. I liked doing a couple of albums a month last year so much I’m going to try to keep it up, albeit with no countdown involved. That’s on Saturdays. Sundays are books and (increasingly, it seems) stories. Last Sundays I’m surveying the short fiction published in book form by J.D. Salinger, which is amazingly meager, only nine stories and four novellas (plus one novel, The Catcher in the Rye). I saw a 2013 documentary this year on Salinger, who died in 2010. The doc and people in a position to know (one would think) were then promising a handful or so of books of posthumous material, including a memoir of his unusually harrowing World War II experience, more Glass family stories, and other tantalizing stuff. WHERE ARE THEY? That’s my only question. Mondays are for recent movies, Thursdays for horror stories, and Fridays for classic movies of various repute. Critics like the darnedest things and so does the mass audience. Last, for your list-consuming pleasure, my list of Beatles albums ranked. YMMV—even your sense of what is and is not a Beatles album. Stay safe out there, folks.

Beatles albums ranked
UK editions, except as noted. The Past Masters collections, released in 1988, gather material not released on Beatles albums.

1. Rubber Soul (US, 1965)
2. Help! (1965)
3. A Hard Day’s Night (1964)
4. Abbey Road (1969)
5. Past Masters, Vol. 2 (1965-1970)
6. Magical Mystery Tour (US, 1967)
7. Revolver (1966)
8. Past Masters, Vol. 1 (1962-1965)
9. Beatles for Sale (1964)
10. Please Please Me (1963)
11. With the Beatles (1963)
12. Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967)
13. The Beatles (“White Album,” 1968)
14. Let It Be (1970)
15. Yellow Submarine (1969)

Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. (2023)

It’s possible that you need to know Judith Blume’s 1970 YA novel of the same name to fully appreciate this movie. I never read it but at least I remember it was a popular sensation in high school. And I have seen another picture by director and screenwriter Kelly Fremon Craig, The Edge of Seventeen from 2016, which is approximately as good. It’s 1970 here and sixth-grader Margaret Simon (Abby Ryder Fortson) is experiencing personal challenges. Her family has just moved from New York City to the suburbs of New Jersey where she has to make all new friends. She also happens to be enduring some ongoing religious issues. Her father Herb (a strangely miscast Benny Safdie) is Jewish, her mother Barbara (an excellent Rachel McAdams) was raised by blood-of-Jesus evangelicals from Ohio who disowned her when she married a Jew. In fact, Margaret has never met her grandparents on that side. As a result, Margaret’s parents have decided to leave all personal religious choices to Margaret herself. Also, her teacher has assigned her to do a study of religion for a year-long project. Margaret is definitely curious about religion, which leads to lots of conversations / prayers she has with God (as per the title). Her Christian grandparents do make an appearance, and also, maybe, something of an effort, but that piece of the story is left open-ended by movie’s end. Mostly Margaret hangs around in a clique of three other girls her age, all of them worried about starting their periods and growing their breasts (behind closed doors in their bedrooms they fly off into exercises of “We must, we must, we must increase our bust”). They worry a lot about attracting boys, starting by liking some of the worst, not knowing any better. Are You There God? is indeed a tender coming-of-age story, and heck, maybe I should go back and read the novel. I loved this movie. It’s funny and warm and often touching. It’s rated PG-13, with lots of Disneyesque family feels. I had to wince a few times, and some of the plot threads are not resolved entirely convincingly. But Are You There God? is a nice place to stop and smell the roses. Fortson is terrific as Margaret and McAdams is also great. And the picture is full of tart little life lessons for Margaret that won’t hurt any of the rest of us to relearn. The mission of this feel-good movie is to make you and your loved ones feel good. Mission accomplished.

“The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” (1936)

This story by Ernest Hemingway takes place on an African safari, which is not promising. Then it gets into Hemingway’s moralizing about courage and integrity, which is even less so. It doesn’t help, reading the story nowadays, that big game hunting has become something much more painfully perverse, especially if the game is animals in dwindling populations. But this story somehow still works with its shocking scenes and revelations. It’s a hunting party of three: a rich fool, his wife, and their guide. The guide is the obvious Hemingway hero and/or stand-in, stoic and judgmental and above it all by right of his own excellence. The rich fool, who is paying for all this, has already committed the act that brands him a coward before the story begins, earlier that day. He turned and ran from an approaching lion. The guide had to bring it down and it turned into a messy kill. Some of us might be more inclined to call turning around and running away prudent, and a lot of us think they shouldn’t even have been there in the first place, even in 1936. Take the coward thing as given, it leads to severe humiliations for the rich guy. He and his wife are not getting along. She takes the opportunity of his shame to sneak into the guide’s tent for a few hours that night. The infidelity is so blatant I’m not sure you can even call it deception. These two events may (or may not) seem unlikely if you think about them but they work in the story, casting an awful pall. The story finishes on a third terrible event, just as extreme and unlikely, as the rich guy is charged by an African buffalo the next day. There has been an incident that morning in which his cowardice was redeemed. But, apparently, it’s just some illusion, as ultimately true nature cannot forgive him, or something. Or his wife, who gets him in the head trying for the buffalo (or was she?). I don’t know. It worked for me at the same time I was moaning and groaning about all these hypermasculine rites and rules and all the immutability of it. It does get tiresome. But this story is done pretty well and worked for me in spite of all that. It’s moving in a number of ways. And I don’t mind the arrogant contempt the guide has for the rich couple, who remind me of Tom and Daisy Buchanan from The Great Gatsby. No doubt unconscious on Hemingway’s part.

The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway
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