2011: First Metrics

While simultaneously waiting for my CZP editor's notes on A Rope of Thorns (the rewrite itself needs to be over by mid-January) and vaguely starting to plan out Chapter One of A Tree of Bones, I need to finish the first short story of the year, which also happens to have a January deadline attached. Thus:

"Lagan"
Words added: Roughly 900
Words total: 1,358
Needs to be: 4,000/5,000
Research: Supplies for long sea voyages; the Great Pacific Garbage Knot; East Timor; piracy. How big a salvage vessel needs to be, with how large a crew.

Got some good plot twists, a beginning and (amazingly) an ending. The rough shape is there, in other words--I even have head-casting for some of the characters. Now, to the grind!

You See, I Love Her (Him, Them, It)

Last night was Josef von Sternberg night on TCM and, as it turned out, insomnia night at my house; I was up 'til four A.M. for no discernible reason, which mainly sucked, though it did allow me to see the tail-end of Shanghai Express, all of Morocco, the climax of The Shanghai Gesture and part of Macao. This last was interesting in terms of sheer contrast, since it had Jane Russell very clearly cast in and utterly failing to fill the Marlene Dietrich role, which I guess every von Sternberg movie just has to have.

(Who is it in The Shanghai Gesture, though? Poppy Charteris is far too young, while the part of Mother "Gin-Sling" [actually "God-Damn" according to the play, which I used to have a copy of] would have been better played by Anna May Wong, who von Sternberg used to good effect in Shanghai Express [though Ona Munson does as well as can be expected, especially with a shellacked dead black octopus glued to her head]. So...maybe Miss Pomeroy, the affable Joisey ex-chorus girl who warns Poppy that "we've all got feelings, but the least we can do is make things comfortable for each other." She comes closest overall to the unrepentant "adventuress" template von Sternberg carved out for Dietrich, a person who's tough but not hard, unflappable, flip, very aware of her physical charm, and lives her life--however limited--with incredible style.)

Okay, so: With Morocco, Dietrich's first U.S. movie, she's coming straight from her triumph as Lola-Lola in The Blue Angel; she's young, has just shed her baby fat, and is so ridiculously beautiful she's all but incandescent. This makes her perfect to cast across from Gary Cooper, then at his most handsome and virile--American's single biggest male box-office star, so powerful he was able to change the film's title from Amy Jolly (her character's name), because he rightly thought it would detract from or scale down his own role in the mix. Apparently, he an von Sternberg didn't get along--he resented the fact that they spoke German together, cutting him out--but he and Marlene did, becoming life-long friends and possibly lovers. That friendship would lead her to agree to take her first film not directed by von Sternberg, co-starried with Cooper again in Desire, which also destroyed she and von Sternberg's working relationship, guaranteeing they would never work together again.

In a way, though, Cooper was right to insist that he and Dietrich get "equal billing"--his Tom Brown, French Foreign Legionnaire, is truly the dynamite to Amy Jolly's spark, the missing other half of her soul. Von Sternberg plays a lot with Cooper's lankiness, cheating roofs, doorways and windows to make him tower over everybody around him, Marlene in particular (especially on the few instances when they stand side-by-side, and he idly pans down to show the height of her spiked heels). Cooper's eyes are heavy-lidded like hers, his lips equally lush, his skin oddly juicy and fine, although everything else about him is unmistakably masculine. When their gaze connects, which is often, neither of them can do anything but smile.

One of Dietrich's lures, here as always, is that it's never a question of "if" her characters are going to have sex with the men they glom onto. Her presence is unique in 1930s films, offering glamour without effort and sin without guilt, which is only abetted by von Sternberg's constant fetishization of her through shot composition, make-up, constume and staging. Her first performance in the Morocco vaudeville club where she and Cooper meet is done completely in male drag, at once unconvincing (spotless tux tailored to show off her curves, her blonde hair unconfined by the silk top hat, high heels instead of men's shoes) and arousingly perfect (her understanding of nuance and gesture, the way she brushes male attention off and goes straight for a woman she doesn't even know in the audience, flirting with her, kissing her on the mouth, then throwing a flower she's begged to Cooper [who wears it behind his ear for the next three scenes!]), after which she changes into a cut-up-to-here circus leotard with stockings and a feather boa to hock apples to the customers. When rich patron Adolphe Menjou gives her a thousand-franc note for one, while Cooper has to borrow two weeks' pay to buy his, she slips Cooper her apartment key as his "change".

So they collide like two meteors, this heartless ladies' man who doesn't think mauch of ladies and the woman who'll give it away, but only to the guys she wants to, and only because she's bored with making people pay for it. Neither thinks the affair will last--in fact, they both spend an amazing amount of time and effort trying to talk themselves out of considering it more than just a fling. When Cooper's bird-dogging with his CO's wife gets him sent out to die in battle, Dietrich allows Menjou to make her his kept woman, mainly to convince herself she doesn't care one way or the other. That works fine until the regiment drums start up in the distance, and she gets a crazy look in her eye, rushing headlong out of Menjou's get-to-know-my-mistress dinner party and going up and down the line until somebody tells her what's happened.

An hour or so later, she strides back in. "Tom's been wounded. I have to go to him."
Menjou: "Very well, we can send a telegram, go in the morning--"
Dietrich: "I'm going now."
She disappears upstairs. Menjou turns back to his guests, telling his chauffeur to bring around the car and his valet to pack a bag. With a gallant little shrug, he says: "You see...I love her. I'll do anything to make her happy."

He can't, though, and he knows it. Just like he knows before she does that in the end, she'll take off her spike heels and go marching off into the desert with the rest of the camp followers, leaving him behind forever.

Ah, it's a great damn movie! Everybody's insane and beautiful and screwed to the nines. They really do not make 'em like that anymore.;))

Film Countdown

Naturally I saw a lot of movies over the holidays, because what else are you gonna do when you're sick and/or at loose ends? They were, in no particular order:

Dark House, a crappish horror movie in which Jeffrey Combs plays William Castle and claims to have invented "3-D holograms" that need a computer system to filter themselves through--a system vulnerable to possession by ghosts! Not great on any level, though certainly watchable, and it does do a neat-o 180 degree POV turn near the end.

Fantastic Mister Fox, which was actually really great, so much so that I went out and bought myself a copy of it on Boxing Day. Now, I am not a fan of Wes Anderson in general--my favourite part of Rushmore remains the stupid-ass joke which has Jason Schwartzman saying to Luke Wilson, in response to: "These are my O.R. scrubs", "Oh, are they?" So that should tell you how surprised I was to love each and every part of this extremely silly yet weirdly engaging film, which constantly contrasts threadbare stop-motion animation with George Clooney's smooooth vocals and every character's tendency to suddenly randomly spin 'round and start acting like a genuine animal in the middle of a scene. (See the early scene in which Bill Murray tries to dissuade Clooney from buying a tree within easy stealing distance of Boggis, Bunce and Bean, Clooney responds with "The cuss you say?", and they spend thirty seconds snarling at each other like they're about to start tearing out throats before Clooney just snaps: "BUY it!")

The Merchant of Venice, Michael Radford adaptation. See my review in comments, here (http://handful-ofdust.livejournal.com/365918.html?thread=1623134#t1623134). What else can I say--it's damn hard going, but it's also beautiful, and very worth your time.

The A-Team, OTOH, manages to make LOUD LOUD ACTION very, very boring. Best thing about it: Sharlto Copley, hands down, though I also like that they seem to acknowledge that Face is really only charming in his own mind. The sting at the end with John Hamm is slightly funny, too.

And speaking of John Hamm...I really liked The Town, which I realize puts me in the minority, but there ya go. Personally, I think that Ben Affleck's lack of charisma as the main character is perfectly in character--both he and his lady-love are cautious, wounded people, surrounded by loud freaks who've given up and surrendered to Charlestown's constant downward momentum. Jeremy Renner's quite something, as always, and I enjoyed the silence/noise dynamic Affleck played with during the heist sequences. Plus, Pete Postletwaite, looking absolutely like he's just about to die and rocking the house nonetheless. (Secondary honors go to Chris Cooper in his one scene, plus every actual Bostonian Ben saw fit to cast.)

And hey, you know what's really depressing? The Road. As I sort of thought it would be. It's also amazing and weirdly gorgeous, in its own dirt-hued way, but there were a lot of scenes I watched with my hands firmly over my face. Jesus, though--Charlize Theron, not to mention Robert Duvall. And Viggo, getting thinner and thinner and thinner. Kodi Smit-McPhee I'd already been introduced to via Let Me In, but here he's a raw nerve. By the end, it made me both want to hug Cal hard, and wonder at the same time if I'd have the strength to kill him quickly, if and when. (I remember at the time it came out how people roundly mocked the whole cannibalism angle, like "oh, THAT would never happen!" As though horrible fucking things weren't already going on every day all over the globe, without the world having even ended yet! No, believe you me...pretty much from the day that we first turn on the taps and water doesn't come out, things are going to spiral pretty fucking quickly.)

After that, we had a brief side-bar into Redacted, which I saw enough of to know I'd like to see the rest, and Despicable Me, which I saw enough of to know I could happily live the rest of my life without finishing it. Followed by Salt, which was both interesting and harrowing--Angelina makes a fine ticking time-bomb, though I really do wonder if a guy could have gotten away with some of the things they have her do. There's a fair deal of trading on people's ideas about her innate feminine weakness/emotionalism, and the shock which comes from her subverting those same ideas. But because it's a deep cover narrative (this is not much of a spoiler), she's constantly running game which causes us to doubt she has any attachments at all, to anyone/-thing. This is where Angelina's icy hauteur comes in particular handy. Also: Makes a lot of sense that this is the same screenwriter behind Equilibrium, since she's essentially a test-run for the same sort of emotionless human weapon Christian Bale plays so well. Without the drug, though, which eventually does throw it all off-track...

The only thing we saw in the theatre was True Grit, which I liked unreservedly, and would probably like to see again. Some say it's not a "real" Coen Brothers film. I say: Man, a fuckin' frontier dentist-vetrinarian wearing a bear enters stage right halfway through, toting a corpse Hailee Steinsfeld's already cut down from a high, high tree and asking, in a sonorously strange voice: "Dooo either of yoooou neeed...medical attention?" Yeah--it's pretty Coen Brothers. Everyone's a chatterbox, nobody listens, they've all got blinkers on like whoah, and we end up with an OT3 that probably only became clear to Mattie ten years on, retrospectively; she probably woke in the middle of the night going: "Really, brain? Really? Well, I'm damn well not goin' to Texas!"

Then we have two British horror films--Salvage, which is indie and gritty and set in Liverpool, and The Broken, which is upscale, rather beautiful, and set in London. Both satisfy, though only for a little while. Oh, and I also saw Hidalgo, which probably bears talking about further. But I'm tired, so--there we stop.;)

You?