When the guy on the next barstool tells you a story, he starts at the beginning, hits stride in the middle, and has a big finish waiting at the end. If he started in the middle and backtracked to the beginning, you’d drift away and start counting the swizzlesticks, or something. He understands this: Why have professional storytellers forgotten it? Or has it become irredeemably square to tell a story in a linear fashion? I’m not arguing that every story needs to be linear, but I find it annoying that so many books and films are now burdened with flashbacks and fractured time frames that add nothing to the story. Today’s filmmaker, handed the script for “Gunga Din,” would no doubt turn in something resembling “Rashomon.”
Last year, I enjoyed and admired “Michael Clayton,” but questioned the need to open the film with a scene replayed near the end. Did writer/director Tony Gilroy fear he’d lose the audience if something didn’t blow up real good right after the opening credits? As it turns out, Gilroy was just getting warmed up. His new film, “Duplicity,” keeps interrupting itself for flashbacks that are meant to deepen the intrigue, but serve only to push the movie’s running time past the two-hour mark. (My dismay increased every time some variation of LISBON: 6 MONTHS AGO flashed on screen.) At ninety minutes, you might’ve enjoyed a timely update of screwball comedy; at two hours plus, this strange mash-up of “Last Year At Marienbad” and a caper film exhausts the audience’s good will.
Then again, perhaps I’m too focused on a pet peeve, and being too hard on Gilroy, and the real problem with “Duplicity” is that the genre setting it shares with “Michael Clayton” -- the world of corporate espionage -- simply feels inconsequential when the stakes are less than mortal. The whole sub-genre of the corporate-espionage tale may well be played out, frankly. Seeing Cold War tradecraft employed in this manner has begun to seem (to me, anyway) reductive and banal. In the novels of John LeCarre, for instance, when Smiley and Karla spar, it’s thrilling and awful, and there is the spectre of a mushroom cloud in the air. Gilroy is smart and skillful, and he can get you just as excited about beauty products -- but he lets the film drag on long enough that you have time to remind yourself: They’re beauty products.
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
Monday, March 23, 2009
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
Logrolling In Our Time
Fellow Detroit Noir contributor Michael Zadoorian is getting a lot of ink for his new novel, The Leisure Seeker. I haven't read it yet -- the subject matter is too close to my current life -- but you should pick it up immediately. The most recent rave is from the L.A. Times.
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
El Wah *
The last time it was so cold for so long here in the Detroit area had to be winter ’93-’94. I was living in a tiny second-floor room above a hair salon in a house in downtown Ann Arbor. I’d just moved to town and had no money, few friends, and a research lab job with no fixed schedule. The week the deep freeze really hit, I did what I only wish I could do this year: I did not leave home.
It was the only thing to do. Going to work meant a twenty-minute walk, and the mean temperature during that week was below zero Fahrenheit. Not life-threatening for a block-long jaunt to, say, the party store (cigarettes, beer, cold cuts, canned soup) or the library (getting to this in a second) -- but obviously lethal, I was certain, for any greater distances.
I used the time well. I hauled James Ellroy’s L.A. Quartet home from the library. The Black Dahlia. The Big Nowhere. L.A. Confidential. White Jazz. And read All of it.
If you’ve read any Ellroy, you might question the wisdom of attempting to read over a thousand pages of his machine-gun prose over five days’ time while snowbound. Well, good call, neighbor. (I hasten to add that I’d never read anything by him before.) I read all day every day. I read most of the night. I read while sober, while half-bombed, while hung over. I slept fitfully. The trapped odor from the permanents being administered downstairs crept up through the vents. I upset furniture. I stopped using articles when I spoke. I jolted awake from catnaps and re-read entire chapters, convinced I’d been hallucinating.
It was great.
As I neared the final pages of White Jazz, we had a freak thaw -- a day in the mid fifties. All that ice became water, rushed through the streets with nowhere to go. Knee-high geysers over the gutter drains.
It was beautiful.
Now I’m finally reading American Tabloid. I’ve put off reading this book since it was published, in 1995, and put off reading The Cold Six Thousand since it was published, in 2001, because they are the first two books of Ellroy’s Underworld USA Trilogy, and I’ve heard over and over, through the years, that the final volume was nowhere on the horizon, and I finally tired of making due with one of his earlier potboilers or later miscellanies once a year or so, holding out hope that I could someday read all three books of his Magnum Opus on a bender, as I’d done with the L.A. Quartet.
I’m not even reading my own copy. I was, once again, in a library, during a cold snap, saw Ellroy on display, and pounced. My iced-in nostalgia was running high; Ellroy’s not getting any younger; neither am I. “If the trilogy is never finished,” I thought, “at least I'll have read the first two books.”
Kizmet. What I discovered yesterday is that the final book, Blood’s A Rover, has a publication date of September 15th, 2009.
Is this old news? At least now I can read American Tabloid and The Cold Six Thousand without the nagging fear -- and at a normal, middle-aged-human pace....
Eh. We’ll see about that.
*"El Wah” is a joke from that Ann Arbor cold snap/L.A. Quartet week, and probably only funny if you’re housebound in or near Canada, living on Campbell’s and Old Milwaukee, and reading so much your eyes feel like they’re bleeding.
It was the only thing to do. Going to work meant a twenty-minute walk, and the mean temperature during that week was below zero Fahrenheit. Not life-threatening for a block-long jaunt to, say, the party store (cigarettes, beer, cold cuts, canned soup) or the library (getting to this in a second) -- but obviously lethal, I was certain, for any greater distances.
I used the time well. I hauled James Ellroy’s L.A. Quartet home from the library. The Black Dahlia. The Big Nowhere. L.A. Confidential. White Jazz. And read All of it.
If you’ve read any Ellroy, you might question the wisdom of attempting to read over a thousand pages of his machine-gun prose over five days’ time while snowbound. Well, good call, neighbor. (I hasten to add that I’d never read anything by him before.) I read all day every day. I read most of the night. I read while sober, while half-bombed, while hung over. I slept fitfully. The trapped odor from the permanents being administered downstairs crept up through the vents. I upset furniture. I stopped using articles when I spoke. I jolted awake from catnaps and re-read entire chapters, convinced I’d been hallucinating.
It was great.
As I neared the final pages of White Jazz, we had a freak thaw -- a day in the mid fifties. All that ice became water, rushed through the streets with nowhere to go. Knee-high geysers over the gutter drains.
It was beautiful.
Now I’m finally reading American Tabloid. I’ve put off reading this book since it was published, in 1995, and put off reading The Cold Six Thousand since it was published, in 2001, because they are the first two books of Ellroy’s Underworld USA Trilogy, and I’ve heard over and over, through the years, that the final volume was nowhere on the horizon, and I finally tired of making due with one of his earlier potboilers or later miscellanies once a year or so, holding out hope that I could someday read all three books of his Magnum Opus on a bender, as I’d done with the L.A. Quartet.
I’m not even reading my own copy. I was, once again, in a library, during a cold snap, saw Ellroy on display, and pounced. My iced-in nostalgia was running high; Ellroy’s not getting any younger; neither am I. “If the trilogy is never finished,” I thought, “at least I'll have read the first two books.”
Kizmet. What I discovered yesterday is that the final book, Blood’s A Rover, has a publication date of September 15th, 2009.
Is this old news? At least now I can read American Tabloid and The Cold Six Thousand without the nagging fear -- and at a normal, middle-aged-human pace....
Eh. We’ll see about that.
*"El Wah” is a joke from that Ann Arbor cold snap/L.A. Quartet week, and probably only funny if you’re housebound in or near Canada, living on Campbell’s and Old Milwaukee, and reading so much your eyes feel like they’re bleeding.
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