Center Stage: Turn It Up (2008)

That's right a straight to dvd sequel to a little known Australian dance movie. And I L.O.V.E. it. The first one is one of my go-to cheesy dance movies and this one just gets added to that list. It manages to do what the Step Up duo didn't in that the Center Stage pair are separate entities that don't immediately relate to each other. Cooper shows up in the second but there is no awkward moment where we sort of have to explain what the last movie was all about--that's right Step Up 2: The Streets, I noticed your pitiful writing in of a dance-off between characters past and present and Center Stage is better, much better. This one also pulls in street dance with the ballet without making either seem stupid or uptight. And, of course, there is the end dance number that re-tells the whole thing. G.E.N.I.U.S. I need to own it immediately.

Coraline (2009)

Cute! I loved the stop-motion animation and the story is fun. There are some things to forgive or overlook--a few forced plot points and Dakota Fanning being involved with anything--but it's essentially a kids' movie so you have to move on and understand kids would like it. Anyway, there isn't much to say other than I loved the cat, I love Neil Gaiman, the movie is cute, and now I sort of want to read the book . . . although I bought Neverwhere so that will be first (not to mention the still-not-finished-and-still-sort-of-not-totally-engaging 2666).

6 Movies and a Book

A bunch of satisfying fluff, three disappointing Oscar nominated movies, and a frustrating book.

Step Up 2: The Streets (2008): Not as good as the first one but good enough and great for 30 minutes of Wii Fit's free step. Nothing like people dancing to get you to forget your calves hurt a lot. The plot isn't genius but it's standard and satisfying. I thought it ended a bit abruptly.

The Manchurian Candidate (1962): I've never been a Sinatra fan and this didn't change my mind. I figured it out, for what that's worth, early on and it simply failed to have much of an impact. I'm vaguely curious to read the book to see if it is more successful in terms of suspense.

Persepolis (2007): Eh. Interesting enough I guess but it doesn't quite go far enough. Something crucial is missing to form a complete story arc. I am interested in this book, too, just to see if the movie misses something. I do, however, love the animation and the use of color.

Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist (2008): If they showed that gum one more time! And the vomit? Gross. The movie was cute enough but it could have been brilliant. The problem, well one of them, is that is just gives up at a certain point. Someone who has some influence thought "Dude! Wouldn't be it super cool to have them have sex at Electric Lady Studios and have the equalizer register the noise!" Problem is from the moment she falters and then goes into the studio, the whole movie falters and the moment looks incredibly contrived, as does the moment at the party where they confront the toxic-boy/girlfriends, as does the escalator moment. So this movie filled with cute honest moments winds up looking hollow. Just for a quick look at an equalizer.

Alfie (1966): Ugh. I only made it to the halfway mark, well not quite even the halfway mark. I just couldn't tolerate it and, on top of that, it was immensely boring. I always hear how likable Michael Caine makes the character. How great it is that this complete womanizing cad can be made human. Um, no. I hated him and I didn't like the women he was involved with so I didn't care about any sort of relationship they were having. And I was particularly annoyed with his use (or lack thereof, rather) of pronouns. All women were "birds" so apparently the appropriate pronoun is then "it." I can get past "birds." Whatever. But "it"? Even birds have genders. And it's just so sickeningly sexist. Especially for 1966! Ugh. Gross.

Shall We Dance? (Shall we dansu?) (1996): This is the Japanese movie, not the JLo/Richard Gere movie. I think the plot is the same (I've not seen the American one) but I also think it makes more sense in the Japanese context in which ballroom dancing is really seen as odd. It's cute and funny but a little long at over 2 hours for a basic romcom.

Firmin by Sam Savage (2006): A fluff book that was to be a reward for slogging through 3 of 5 books of 2666. It's a cute premise and cute packaging (there is a bite taken out of the side of the book--albeit one too large to have been taken by a rat). I hated it until page 74. The book is only 164 pages long. The first 74 pages is nonsense. Pure nonsense. So, the book is about a rat named Firmin who somehow knows how to read and just happens to be born in a used bookstore. Ok. Whatever. But the first 74 pages are filled with nonsense. I can't even explain how stupid some of it is. But at page 74, it all turns around because Firmin is taken in by a hippie deadbeat author and the book has a relationship around which to revolve. That makes all the difference. The book actually becomes endearing at this point. Too bad it's almost half over. The second half, the endearing half, moves a little too quickly. I wish the whole book were like the second half.

2666 by Roberto Bolano (2008); "2. The Part about Amalfitano" and "3. The Part about Fate"

I reassert my opinion that this book is very uneven. I enjoyed parts of each section but skimmed through others.

Part 2 focuses on Oscar Amalfitano, who appeared briefly in Part 1 as a tour guide of sorts for the critics, and his family. Here I must, again, complain about the fact that women's voices in this novel are not regularly heard except through letters to men with whom they have abruptly severed sexual relationships. Amalfitano's wife, Lola tells her life's story through letters to him after she has left him and their daughter, Rosa. Lola's life is interesting and parallels the search for an author in Part 1 as she goes in search of a poet but we don't get her story first hand. Because this is the second instance and echoes the silencing of Liz, it bothers me all the more. The remainder of the section follows Amalfitano as he moves with his daughter from Spain to Mexico and as he goes through something of a mental break. Not incredibly interesting

Part 3 focuses on Oscar Fate (a little trite given Amalfitano's first name is Oscar . . . not to mention Fate as a last name . . . . ) who is an African-American journalist working for an Af-Am-centric publication. This section gets very boring very quickly as Oscar is working on a report about a founding member of the Black Panthers--the entirety of a speech the man gives is documented and I find that incredibly boring and unnecessary. Bolano seems to lack a certain grasp on the idea of brevity and synopsis. Anyway, Oscar then gets recruited to cover a boxing match in Mexico in Amalfitano's city (the same city to which the critics chased Archimboldi) and gets tangled up in some dubious dealings involving Amalfitano's daughter Rosa and her shady friends. This section is interesting but ends on a strange note with narratives bouncing back and forth between times and possibly points of view, not a narrative strategy in the book so far. So far, this is the best book in terms of consistency and being concise and honestly making me want to continue the book (after the Black Panther speech that is). Maybe the rest of the book will follow? I look forward to seeing how these narratives come together, or don't. At any rate, I've only read 349 pages of 898 so a lot is left to happen.

Catching Up Again: 5 Movies

The MacKintosh Man (1973):
My love of Paul Newman is certainly a documented fact. I just wish all of the movies he was in could measure up to his acting ability. The MacKintosh Man (whose tagline gives away a piece of information not revealed (or true) until the middle of the movie) is a mess of a spy movie. If you were the dumbest person alive, you might not figure out the whole thing before it's done but, with even a tiny bit of sense or experience with spy movies, you'll know the grand secret long before the movie thinks you should. All of that, of course, results in a spy movie with a significant lack of suspense. No need to see it.

Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975):
No, I hadn't seen this one in its entirety until recently but I had seen most of it. I liked it well enough but will admit to falling asleep in the middle of it for a bit . . .

The Pianist (2002):
I am not a devotee of Adrian Brody. I just don't really get it. And The Pianist really failed to connect with me on an emotional level. I just didn't care. And I didn't believe that he was tortured by not being able to play piano for all of those years. It's fine but not wonderful.

The Best Years of Our Lives (1946):
Wow, the movies I've seen recently are lackluster or just plain bad. This one falls into the just plain bad category. It's long and boring. Very long and very boring which resulted in me only making it through half of it.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008):
This is a beautiful movie. Cate Blanchett and Brad Pitt have to be two of the most beautiful people alive. It has it's problems and isn't perfect by any stretch of the imagination, which is only magnified by all of the hype surrounding it even before it was released. It is, for example, not as good a movie as The Dark Knight. But, on its own merit, it is a good, enjoyable movie.

2666 by Roberto Bolano (2008); "1. The Part about the Critics"

First, put a ~ on the n in Bolano. And I'll avoid any spoilers.

Second, no, I'm not finished with the whole book. I'm going to try to write about each book (5 in all) because I am certain that by the time I get to the end of this almost-900 page monstrosity not only will it be five years from now but I will have forgotten everything from the beginning of the book.

Starting with the title. I wish someone knew how to pronounce it. It is "twenty-six, sixty-six" (my preference, I think) or "two-six-six-six" or "two thousand six hundred sixty six" or "two six sixty six" or . . . . Of course, all translated from Spanish but the same configurations apply. The New Yorker has a "National Reading 2666 month" (right--in a month. Ha!) and discusses the title but with no real conclusions. Here and here.

I love the epilogue: "An oasis of horror in a desert of boredom" --Charles Baudelaire. I need to find the source but it might be the title of a paper one day.

So this part, as indicated by the title, is about the critics. Four critics, only one of whom is a woman, who study the same author (who is a bit Pynchon- or Salinger-esque in reclusivity): Liz Norton (British), Jean-Claude Pelletier (French), Piero Morini (Italian), and Manuel Espinoza (Spanish) study Benno von Archimboldi (German). Arguably, the critics are the preeminent Archimboldi scholars and they supposedly spend a lot of time writing and conferencing on the author. Slightly interesting is Bolano's choice to have only European scholars and an European author when he was Chilean.

I was incredibly interested at first. How many books are written on literature scholars? Not many. And how many actually dare to show them at a conference? Not many. And how many show the relationships between scholars. Not many. So that drew me in along with all of the hype and the great physical packaging of the three book boxed set. But these scholars, unfortunately for my attention span with the book, engage in a sort of scholarship that I don't appreciate and that I find sort of useless academically. They chase the author. The actual physical author. They are interested in his life, where he is, etc. I love Salinger, love DeLillo, am intrigued by Pynchon (mainly because I don't understand the books enough to love him). But their personal lives do not come into play in my scholarship. I would never dream of taking a trip to New York to find Pynchon and can't imagine that finding the man would actually accomplish anything. And this is not only because when faced with an author I can do little more than say my name for an autograph but because I study fiction. I'm not looking to write a biography.

Another fact that tested my tolerance is the treatment of women. Norton is not on equal footing with the men academically. She stumbled into her study of the author. And, of course, she must, absolutely must, have a physical relationship that causes problems and turns sour not to mention the emotional baggage she brings into that relationship. And the narrator (third person omni), at first, paid little heed to her and her opinions on the relationship but offered the other side in detail. Toward the end of this book, he does resolve that a bit and pays more attention to her but the damage has been done. There aren't many other women in the book so far. An old publisher who only makes a brief appearance, a Mexican woman who is maybe (probably) sexually exploited and deserted, a woman or two referred to in a story, and a hoard of Mexican women killed but only referenced in passing toward the end of the book.

Another odd thing is the attention paid to dreams by the narrator. Several times the reader is told about the dreams of the main characters. They're maybe interesting but I'm not sure what to do with them.

2666 is certainly not like other South American/Latino books I've read. This is not Garcia Marquez's magical realism (which right now just makes me want to read that instead). I would be interested to know if this is a strain of Latino literature I've missed or if it's something new or if it's just Bolano (which really just makes me want to go back to school for Latino lit).

So far the book is good. Not quite the brilliant espoused by critics and it definitely tests my interests. It's a dense read and the tiny sections instead of chapters tend to make me read fewer pages in one sitting. Add that to the plot and thematic trouble and it's going to take me a while to get through it. I like it but I'm really questioning whether all the hype isn't just because the author died, left the book unfinished, and the sheer ginormous size of it. It might help, too, if I had already read The Savage Detectives instead of piling it on my nightstand.

So, forward I go (after a brief respite with some Winterson and Obama, I think).

Gentleman's Agreement (1947)

I am beginning to have a clear picture of the films Paul Haggis must have in his collection. Those he admires most and after which he models his writing.

Gentleman's Agreement is ostensibly about anti-Semitism and how terrible it is with Gregory Peck going under-cover as it were as a Jew to write a magazine article about the impacts of anti-Semitism. The problem is that it's about a gentile going under cover as a Jew to expose gentile beliefs and most of the movie is spent on conflicts between Peck and his in-on-it fiance (who he's known for about 5 minutes) because of the considerable strain it puts on their relationship and the way she chooses to handle anti-Semitism by not handling it. While Peck wants to fight every fight, the fiance would rather turn her nose up at it but not say anything in the moment. Then we get the real Jew in on the action who is only visibly persecuted once in the film and has trouble finding an apartment (but there is no on-screen confrontation). The trouble with the whole movie is that while it does expose some of the horrible things done to the Jewish population, it's really all about liberal gentile guilt. The terrible things are done to Peck who we know isn't Jewish so those people watching the movie who are anti-Semitic would think oh that's terrible that one of ours is being treated that way not oh that's terrible that we treat Jews that way.

In addition to those considerable problems, the movie is preachy and speech-y (a la Haggis). The movie turns around when the fiance learns she must take some form of action and rents her place to the Jewish friend thus resolving the conflict between she and Peck. Unfortunately, the whole movie comes off as condescending. No, we shouldn't tolerate any sort of hate or hate crime but slugging men in restaurants is not the answer either. I understand this movie was forward for its time and caused considerable trouble for those involved thanks to McCarthy era witch-hunting but it doesn't hold up and shouldn't be used as a model for social action movies now.