4 posts tagged “books”
I got lots of books for Christmas. Victory!
This struck me as an appropriately confused perspective on what constitutes proper behavior for an audience of recorded media:
At last the music tied itself up with a neat bow, and ceased. Zellaby stopped the machine by a switch on the arm of his chair, opened his eyes and regarded Alan.
"I hope you don't mind," he apologized. "One feels that once Bach has started his pattern he should be allowed to finish it. Besides," he added, glancing at the playing-cabinet, "we still lack a code for dealing with these innovations. Is the art of the musician less worthy of respect simply because he is not present in person? What is the gracious thing? Should I defer to you, or you to me, or should both of us defer to genius--even genius at second-hand? Nobody can tell us. We shall never know. The world of the etiquette book fell to pieces at the end of the last century, and there has been no code of manners to tell us how to deal with anything invented since. Not even rules for an individualist to break, which is itself another blow at freedom. Rather a pity, don't you think?"
From The Midwich Cuckoos (1957) by John Wyndham
Old Gordon Zellaby is correct to believe that we, as a society, "shall never know" how to conduct ourselves with such things, as some goddamn propriety on the part of movie theater patrons is still impossible to come by.
Let me preface with this; I hated Lady In The Water. I thought that it elevated M. Night Shyamalan from the didactic prostelatizing of Signs to a new level of ego-maniacal crazy. The movie created a fantasy world that seemed vague and unformed, with words like "narf" and "scrunt" conjuring more the harried hackwork of an ill-prepared father begged for a bedtime story than something that had gestated within a great writer. Shyamalan (or "Night" as he's referred to by Bamberger, and without irony) even cast himself as a messianic writer, someone who would inspire revolution a generation after his untimely death. He cast Bob Balaban as an unsympathetic film critic ("Mr. Farber"). "What kind of person could be so arrogant as to presume to know the intentions of another human being?" a character asks in regard to the critic, shortly before Shyamalan feeds him to the scrunts.
Shyamalan was begging for it, and he got it from the legitimate press and catty blog critics alike. After the success of The Sixth Sense and Signs, and the admirable performance of Unbreakable and The Village, Shyamalan was no longer a hot commodity.
In Sports Illustrated writer Michael Bamberger's book on the production of the film, The Man Who Heard Voices or: How M. Night Shyamalan Risked His Career On A Fairy Tale and Lost, Bamberger is embarrassingly confessional about his immediate infatuation with Shyamalan, sparked at a Philadelphia dinner party at which Shyamalan was the guest of honor (or at least of caché). An outsider to filmmaking, he can't help but be taken with Night's success, his bravado, his chest hair.
The book goes into detail about Shyamalan's departure from Disney, a departure that didn't stem from Disney's refusal to make the film with him (they offered to) but from their lack of unquestioning, wild-eyed enthusiasm for his crazy little mermaid script. It's fascinating stuff, and Bamberger doesn't try to dress it up too much in the guise of the misunderstood artist. It reads as a tantrum, as does a lot of the man's behavior.
When Shyamalan gets approval at Warner Brothers, the book shifts into production and the arrival of Christopher Doyle, an inebriated madman and unquestionably one of the best cinematographers alive (I'll talk a lot of shit about Lady In The Water, but its cinematography is gorgeous). Paul Giamatti is brought on board, and seems to be the book's sane focal point for a while, the only professional on set that has a sense of humor about what they're up to (hearing him casually laugh off his supporting role in the abysmal Planet of the Apes remake is one of the many great moments captured).
Bamberger's book is unquestionably too kind to its subject, too chuffed with being taken into the inner circle that "Night" guards so carefully that he never quite convinces the reader that he can give an honest assessment of the man's odd tantrums and quirks. Bamberger says as much when he writes in his new afterword (the hardcover was released to coincide with the film's release) that he objected to the publisher's request to add the words "and lost" to the end of the subtitle. What else could Lady In The Water's dismal reception (critically and financially) be interpreted as but a loss? I admit that I wouldn't have bought the book without thinking that it was a tell-all exposé on the craziest movie I saw in 2006 (and I saw Inland Empire).
That said, Bamberger doesn't even try to be unbiased, and the feeling that he describes as he and his wife finally see Lady In The Water, that feeling that they weren't quite sure if they loved it or not, but they were sure that they didn't want to talk to Shyamalan, is priceless. Also really interesting (and humanizing) is the story of an NYU student who was brought as a guest to an early screening, and promptly wrote a review of the film on Ain't It Cool News (Bamberger's obliviousness to what that site represents is really fascinating). Night arranges to meet with the kid, and after a little bit of lecturing (it really is an asshole thing to do), he asks him what he can fix about the film. It's a great moment, one in which the kid's embarrassment and Night's frustration both coalesce into something really effective.
In reading the book, I realized that I was absolutely fascinated with how this terrible movie got made. I would never want to read a book about how other movies that I hated, like Transformers or Bringing Down The House, were made. No, I was drawn to the book because whatever it is, Lady In The Water is an artist's spectacular failure, the singular vision of one crazy, egotistical, and fascinating guy. It made me want to see the film again, if only to relive the revulsion, something I would never say of many other films, even films that I liked (I liked the new Harry Potter a lot, but I don't ever need to see it again). I was drawn into Bamberger's adoration of "Night". Scary stuff.
I spent the day reading Cormac McCarthy's The Road. Huzzah unemployment.
Man oh man is that a good time. McCarthy's post-apocalypse is one of brutal desolation, in which you simultaneously yearn for human contact and dread the possibility of the other (what with the cannibals and all). A father and son wander through the ashes of the southeastern United States (thanks Wikipedia) in which the concept of "long term goals", beyond the immediate survival of you and yours, is the subject of derision. We don't get any of the "commentary" that comes with this kind of dystopia (or is it anti-utopia?), as in a Dawn of the Dead or Children Of Men, but rather a crucible in which we see the real stuff of man.
There is a maddening faith, and a deeply unsatisfying ending, but I fail to see how else it could have wrapped up. Well, that's not true.
John Hillcoat, who directed The Proposition, will direct the film adaptation. That will be really exciting.
