Life on the Mississippi (1883)

 

A friend and I once compared notes on 19th-century writers and found that we had completely opposite reactions to Charles Dickens and Mark Twain. For me, as much as I've tried, even the relatively shorter works of Dickens such as A Tale of Two Cities or even A Christmas Carol are deadly turgid, impenetrable, exhausting to try and crawl through. My eyes glaze over paragraph by paragraph. This was a popular writer? Whereas Twain, particularly in his nonfictional memoir/travel books, is basically as refreshing as a nice drink of water, for me one of those ideal kinds of reading matter for places like airplanes, dentist waiting rooms, and motel rooms late when sleep is impossible. Life on the Mississippi is a later volume of this type of Twain's work (The Innocents Abroad came first, then Roughing It, which I think is the best), chronicling all things Mississippi River, including Twain's own career as a riverboat pilot when he was a young man. (In fact, Samuel Clemens's pseudonym comes from riverboat parlance, which is explained here, though his reasons for adopting "Mark Twain" is only obliquely covered.) It comes with a wonderfully discursive structure—much like the river itself, I suppose, or at least that probably had to be his excuse this time around—rambling easily from factual history to various legends and anecdotes and dipping frequently into the intricacies of the piloting trade.

In case it's not at the library. (If you happen to be flush, do yourself a favor and get the Library of America edition, which also includes Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, and Pudd'nhead Wilson in a single volume that is physically a pleasure to read.)
 

District 9 (2009)

 

USA/New Zealand, 112 minutes
Director: Neill Blomkamp

Writers: Neill Blomkamp, Terri Tatchell
Photography: Trent Opaloch
Production Design: Philip Ivey
Art Direction: Emilia Roux
Costume Design: Dianna Cilliers
Cast: Sharlto Copley, Jason Cope, Nathalie Boltt

It's probably no coincidence that the aliens in this Peter Jackson-produced feature film debut for director Neill Blomkamp, late of "Halo," look an awful lot like Alan Moore's old comic book antihero, the Swamp Thing. They are certainly at once as ugly and as sympathetic, in this story of space travelers disabled by some equivalent of a flat tire on the shoulder of the galactic roadway, here on good old Earth, and subsequently marginalized and abused by our friends the human beings. If you can get past the fast-paced verite chaos of the pseudo-documentary style, which is not that much to ask with a story as forward-propelled as this one quickly becomes, your heart will not only find its way in, but likely break as well. I appreciated that, and also the spectacle—the giant spaceship hovering over Johannesburg (yes, Johannesburg) maintained an impressive brooding presence over all the proceedings, not least because, as the narrative found its ways to inform us, it had done so for decades, with no explanation (hence the response of fear and hostility on the home planet). As for the allegory, well, it's about as obvious as it gets, but that doesn't mean it doesn't work. Works pretty well, actually. If the whole thing gets a little squishy in the second half—and that's literally as well as figuratively—there's still an awful lot of functioning pathos on display here, and sadly believable too. I only hope that the obvious sequel, if it comes, can measure up.

"Bleach" (1989)

 

"Negative Creep" At the time, for sure, this had its partisans, but I recall the big Sub Pop PR machine tending to lumber more significantly behind Mudhoney's eminently worthy self-titled first album. After Soundgarden, Mudhoney was the band that cognoscenti pegged, ironically or otherwise, as most likely to succeed and deliver them to limousines and the finest crystal (and note: ironic it all turned out to be, just not in the ways intended). As for me, I was busy getting all het up about Tad's God's Balls, which seemed to me then (and now) the ideal shotgun wedding of punk and metal, with no small degree of lovely ecclesiastical white-trash detritus cluttering up the proceedings (hey, head honcho Tad Doyle is from Idaho, after all). All of these albums came out at about the same time, along with product from more or less forgotten entities such as the Fluid, in a shotgun blast of Sub Pop discharge. But of course Bleach is the one that ultimately brands you prescient if you championed it ardently enough and have the documentation to back yourself up when the time comes to apportion credit for foresight. It's good, make no mistake—damn fine sludge all around, in fact. No one I know is arguing against the fact that Sub Pop knew exactly what they were doing in matters of selecting the right bands to record and promote.

Sabotage (1936)

UK, 76 minutes

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Writers: Charles Bennett, Ian Hay, Helen Simpson, E.V.H. Emmett; based on The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad
Photography: Bernard Knowles
Cast: Sylvia Sidney, Oskar Homolka, Desmond Tester, John Loder

Hitchcock's work in the '30s, most of it based in the UK, often strikes me as a bit stodgy, if not outright soporific. But I put most of that off on the film technology of the time, particularly the studio-centered requirements of the early sound era for static cameras. Setting that aside, this one seems remarkably modern, its focus on mysterious agents with German accents who infiltrate the UK for purposes of "sabotage" standing in surprisingly well for today's ultra-conservative Islamist agents who infiltrate the U.S. for purposes of "terrorism." (The dictionary definition that opens the movie could apply as well to either term.) More surprising perhaps are its refreshing elements of heartlessness—you will see a bomb handed off for delivery to a young boy who encounters all kinds of nice people along the way, including a friendly street salesman, a kindly woman with a devilish cute puppeh, not to mention a whole freaking parade, even as the clock ticks toward the fatal hour. That's pure Hitchcock. The whole production is beautiful, murky black and white set in high-relief contrast, shot frequently from unexpected angles. If the proceedings here grow occasionally clunky, they are as often enlivened by Hitchcock's burgeoning sensibility, which we would come to know so well in subsequent decades after he had relocated to the U.S.

Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport (2000)

UK/USA, 122 minutes, documentary

Director/writer: Mark Jonathan Harris
Photography: Don Lenzer
Narrator: Judi Dench

I generally try to give all things World War II a wide berth, in the spirit of Godwin's Law first and foremost, but also because, truth time, Tom Brokaw's tiresome "Greatest Generation" business gets on my nerves (if its advocates think it was so great back then, why are they so opposed to returning the tax structure of the time, the shared sacrifice that contributed so much to making it work? But now I'm already getting sidetracked). I do appreciate everything accomplished then, the sheer scope and scale of it all, but I've heard about it all my life. All you people born after 1960, how excited are you to hear some more about JFK and/or the freedom marches and/or the Beatles? Thought so. But just when you think there's nothing new to be said about something, along comes something like this to prove you (me) wrong and encourage you (me) to STFU. This one is actually further complicated for me by the very element that makes it work—namely, the children, the presence of which, as with adorable aminals, can so often be used for cheap manipulation. But there's little of that here, and in fact this stark, simple, straightforwardly told account of the rescue of thousands of Jewish children does indeed in the end provide new insights into the unique horrors of the time, the enormous cruelties and the tremendous courage that rose to them. In the face of Hitler's increasing oppression of the Jewish citizens of Central Europe and their subsequent forced relocations (to death camps, as we now know), foster families in the UK in the late '30s opened their homes to children for the duration of the intolerable conditions. The stories of getting these kids out of harm's way and into the UK offer nice doses of intrigue and excitement, but the core of this film is rightly its focus on the agony and the courage of the parents forced to this extremity, giving up their children to save them. Some of the stories are shocking, and all of them are wrenching.

Astral Weeks (1968)

To recap: Van Morrison, at 21 a retired principal of rock 'n' roll pioneers Them intent on leaving the music business, lets Them manager/producer Bert Berns talk him into coming to New York to record demos. Berns advances him a one-way airfare. The results of their sessions included "Brown-Eyed Girl" and tracks that appeared variously on Blowin' Your Mind, T.B. Sheets, and elsewhere. Then Bert Berns dies suddenly; his widow and her lawyers effectively prevent Morrison from recording or performing in the New York area (and no airfare home, remember). Morrison travels on to Boston, where he works out the song cycle that would become this album. Many Van Morrison fans put this on their short list of his best, and I think it's pretty good too. But his recent traumas vibrate from this music like a dentist riding a jackhammer, which in the end amounts far more to anxiety than serenity. I mean, I never listen to this music to relax. It's not a bit relaxing.

T.B. Sheets (1967)

This is not entirely a product of its times, but rather a 1974 release that amounts to a subset of the infamous Blowin' Your Mind (the photo of Van Morrison used for that album cover makes a cameo on this cover). But it's the one I discovered as an uncanny kind of revelation in the early '80s. The title song alone, clocking in at nearly 10 minutes and pretty much about exactly what the title indicates, will be "blowin' your mind" no matter how you interpret that term. Then there's "Brown Eyed Girl," which does the same thing in an entirely different way, this one brilliant salvation delivered from the radio. This and everything Van Morrison recorded on his strikingly odd trip to New York City in 1967, bizarrely abandoned to the fates when he was just 21 and already a seasoned veteran of rock 'n' roll, manages to touch the sacred in any number of profound, deeply unsettling, and beautiful ways. A lot of people do well to touch the sacred once in one way in the course of entire careers.

Stevie (2002)

USA, 140 minutes, documentary

Director: Steve James

I like documentaries for many different reasons—I think they can do all kinds of things that fictional films simply can't—and this to me is of a very particular variety, not often encountered: the variety that has a terrible truth to tell, a truth so terrible that you sense it almost immediately. And then almost immediately wish you didn't have to endure it, coming down on you like heavy weather, like a flood slowly swallowing your house. On something of a lark, filmmaker Steve James (Hoop Dreams) detours from his life—now established, with a wife, a kid, a career, though not exactly straight-up American middle-class—to look up a young man, the titular Stevie, whom he had mentored 10 years earlier as part of a Big Brother program in southern Illinois. What he finds is not good. In fact, it's awful, just about every bit of it, raw and blisteringly painful. This is long for a documentary, over two hours, but once in I found myself wishing there were more—maybe just wishing things could be different. Yet in spite of all of Stevie's problems, all his off-putting characteristics, he remains a likeable enough and even somewhat sympathetic character. And more: as James takes pains to show, he is in fact actually liked, loved even. Therein lies the rub. Oh, don't watch this. It will only wound you.

Seymour: An Introduction (1959)

J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye was among the first novels that opened the world of literature to me. This was unexpected not least because I encountered it nearly 20 years after it was first published, long past its troubled-youth use-by date (S.E. Hinton or maybe Easy Rider were more the fashionable choices of my time). The strong sales across multiple generations is, in fact, one of the elements that make it so unique. For those of us so affected, the three additional slight volumes of Salinger's work available all these years were never enough. Now, with news of his death, speculation is rife that finally there may be more to come, though the rumored 15+ manuscripts could as well be incinerated, or may not exist at all. So we'll have to wait a little longer to see about that. In the meanwhile, I paid a visit to my favorite piece of his, which was actually the last of his I encountered and usually the most frequently derided, the second half of the one with the unwieldy title, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction. It's another Glass family entry, about which, honestly, I am mostly indifferent (although if that's what all 15 of those manuscripts contain, and they get out, I'm still going to check into them). The knock is that it's a self-indulgent rant. I don't think so. It's certainly a blast of language, long sentences, long paragraphs, footnotes, asides, digressions, intellectual name-dropping, stuttering and jabbering through to its points, complete with an offering of "this unpretentious bouquet of very early-blooming parentheses: (((())))." That's what first appealed to me about it, back when I adored all things gonzo in writing (Hunter Thompson, Lester Bangs, Kerouac's The Subterraneans, so on and so forth, bleeding across the mediums with Bob Dylan). Now it reads to me like a shrewd portrait of a writer whose only weapon against the world and all its agonies is words and keyboards and cigarettes deep into the night, madly flailing to make the pain stop, grasping blindly for the sense of it all. In the end, it doesn't end, it only stops—"Quickly. Quickly and slowly"—which, sadly, is how Salinger's life, and perhaps even life itself, feels to me in so many ways at this particular moment.

In case it's not at the library.

Star Trek (2009)

USA, 127 minutes

Director: J.J. Abrams
Writers: Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman
Photography: Daniel Mindel
Cast: Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Leonard Nimoy, Karl Urban, Zoe Saldana, Simon Pegg, John Cho, Anton Yelchin, Winona Ryder

J.J. Abrams, as I was mentioning to my brother Joel in a dream the other night, has done something that I and any other reasonable person would have snorted at as impossible: taken the old characters and premise of "Star Trek" TOS ("the original series") and twisted them back into vitality. "Reboot" seems to be what they call such Hollywood projects nowadays. I and any other reasonable person had long since entirely given up on TOS, if not the frakkin' franchise itself, to which I (if not any other reasonable person) clung tenaciously, all the way through "Voyager." (They did lose me with "Enterprise," I think, although I still plan to give it a more systematic opportunity one of these days.) At any rate, I and any other reasonable person should probably have realized that Abrams was the right person for this job, given his competent-plus work on the first few seasons of "Alias" and more importantly all of his work on "Lost." So, in short, here it is all back again as fresh and invigorated as ever: Kirk, Spock, Bones, Scotty, Chekhov, Sulu, Uhuru, and the big Enterprise boat itself. Amazing, on those terms alone. The strategy is bold as the original mission itself: an incidental accident of time travel in the first 10 minutes effectively wipes away all of the baggage of TOS except for Leonard Nimoy (a fanboy will be happy to explain the details, whether or not he approves of the move), which leaves the rest of the movie free to rock and roll the chemistry of the new cast. And that is exactly what is done here. The action, refreshingly light on CGI gimcrackery, is fast-paced and energetic and engaging every minute of the way. I don't know what if anything Abrams can do next with the franchise, but then again, I've been saying that for years now about "Lost" and he hasn't disappointed me yet (as close as he has come). For this Star Trek, no colon after the title is required. It's the real deal. I even have to think Gene Roddenberry himself is grinning ear to ear somewhere at this turn of events.