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Of a Feather: Short Stories, ‘Birdman,’ and ‘Olive Kitteridge’

November 7, 2014 in Book Matters, Essays, Film Matters, Reviews

“Birdman” is being touted as one of the movies of the year. Certainly it is the best one by Alejandro G. Iñárritu since his 2000 feature, “Amores Perros.” Dizzying, stagy, and constantly on the move, this show-biz comedy turns all the director’s normal delusions of grandeur on their heads – and then levitates them. Literally. The film begins with a shot of Michael Keaton levitating in a dingy backstage dressing room.

Keaton plays Riggan Thomson, a Hollywood has-been who made his fortune playing Birdman, a screen superhero remarkably like Batman, whom Keaton played twice in real life. On a quest for artistic credibility, Riggan is putting on his first Broadway production, and the film takes place entirely in Time Square’s St. James Theater in the days leading up to the show’s premiere. As director, star, and producer, Riggan is bearing what seems like the whole world upon his shoulders. His male lead (Edward Norton) is a viciously talented saboteur who’s dating his female lead (Naomi Watts) and ogling Riggan’s daughter (Emma Stone), an angry waif recently sprung from rehab. Another castmember (Andrea Riseborough) announces she’s pregnant with Riggan’s baby. Critics and moneymen are circling Riggan like vultures, and – speaking of vultures – Riggan can’t seem to shake the ghost of Birdman. Literally, of course. Such flourishes of magic realism are both funny and ominous, though we don’t get the time to determine what they presage. Instead, the film is shot in what seems like one breathless, un-ending take; we never stop racing up and down stairs, darting into murky rooms, and, on one occasion, flying out the theater’s back door and through city streets. (Riggan is naked when this takes place.)

Even when they’re not onstage, the actors are hilariously melodramatic, especially Watts and Norton. Both capable of great subtlety, here they are wonderfully (rather than tiresomely) full of themselves. We can say the same for Iñárritu. A director who often brings sanctimony to a whole new level, for once he seems unwilling to take things as seriously as his protagonists do. A winking hamminess has supplanted the phony naturalism that usually seeps through every frame of his films.

So what’s changed? Continue Reading →

This White Girl’s Books

September 16, 2014 in Book Matters, Essays

Ever since I divested myself of 90 percent of my books, I’ve been very selective about which ones I actually own. Typically these days I take them out of the library. The books that are sent to me for a gig go to Housing Works after I’m finished writing about them. But since finishing Hilton Als’ White Girls, I’ve been wanting to possess it. That is because I want it to possess me. I need to be able to hold it and write in it and embrace it as a magic talisman. What Als does in that book is treat other books, other subjects, other people as magic talismans. He weaves in and out of narrative and criticism and fiction and memoir and poetry and history to reach the heart of big ideas, and he does so with smoky, plummy eyes and smoky, plummy cardigans and smoky, plummy prose. He’s gay and far away in life (if not location) but I find myself in love with him the way I am with all souls that tender and brave-hearted. (They are rare, so rare.) He writes the way scientist-artists should, but rarely do. Edmund White does, and I like to own his books, as well. Ditto for Sherwood Anderson and Eve Babitz and Grace Paley and Marge Piercy and James Baldwin and Louisa May and Toni Morrison and E.B. White and James Joyce and Alice Walker and Pauline Kael and Leo Tolstoy and Grace Paley and Ellen Gilchrist and Adrienne Rich and, of course, Madeline L’Engle and M.F.K. Fisher.

Sometimes when I am stuck I pull their books down from my shelves and copy out passages to channel their grace and diligence and brilliance in some small way. Sometimes I decorate the covers of their books as well. Winesburg, Ohio is featured prominently in my office with a wide stripe of glitter I applied one night when I was especially inspired.

Of course I understand how complicated the concept of “owning” is, especially when it comes to the work of a black author. But the fact remains that paying for a writer’s words is the most direct way I can honor them in our unhappily capitalistic society. (G-d knows I’m grateful when someone buys mine.) And I need to own White Girls because this fall I am seriously rolling up my sleeves to recommence my own book project. I view a sacred item like Als’ work as a key to the gate I have trouble entering without permission. I have trouble entering it even with permission.

I will be grateful to join in the conversation, regardless of where my words fall. I suppose I already am grateful, in some not-small way. But I would like to soar and strut and sway and spoon and shake, just like one of Als’ ladies.  And for that I need his book, festooned with purple velvet and and purple feathers and purple pen, presiding over me from a special spot on my shelves that are so obviously altars.

‘The Graduate,’ After the Revolution

September 7, 2014 in Book Matters, Essays, Film Matters, Listing

There are few pleasures greater than revisiting a favorite film. Each time we luxuriate in its familiar glamour, we observe something new – a camera angle, a fleeting hand gesture, an aside that’s even cleverer than we remembered. Only a good book about a favorite film can actually enhance that pleasure, by pointing us to elements we’d never notice ourselves.

Pictures at a Revolution, Mark Harris’ 2008 look at the Academy Award nominees for best picture of 1968 (“Bonnie and Clyde,” “The Graduate,” “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” “Doctor Dolittle,” and “In the Heat of the Night”), is precisely that sort of book. Panoramic, insightful, chatty, and well-researched, it makes a reader feel as if she or he were in the studio board rooms, casting calls, sets, and, above all, original screening rooms of these films long before they became classics. Of the five, I’m most thoroughly and happily acquainted with “The Graduate” – mostly for the mid-sixties fashions (those fake lashes, those leopard prints!), the eminently quotable dialogue (plastics!), the staccato stammering of Dustin Hoffman, the been-there-done-that drawl of Anne Bancroft, and, oh yes, that Simon and Garfunkel soundtrack. Harris’s analysis of the film and its production – he interviewed “everyone who was anyone” who was still alive – reveals a treasure trove beneath those appealingly reflective surfaces. Continue Reading →

"All, everything I understand, I understand only because I love."
― Leo Tolstoy