Dueling Brandos

I didn’t come up with that, the great Time Out New York critic Adam Feldman did. But it’s so awesome. Meaning, both the quote and the movie.

While a great deal of the press about The Master is focused on how it is supposedly a fictional retelling of the birth of Scientology, I think this does a disservice to both the film and to Scientology. A comparison: The Social Network was a fictional retelling of the birth of Facebook: The protagonist was a character named Mark Zuckerberg, and many plot points in the film actually happened. But the film was fiction; it was only based on a true story. While The Master may have been inspired by L. Ron Hubbard’s early days, it is not about him, nor Scientology, nor even about the birth of religion. The Master is about the relationship between two men, Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix), a restless, somewhat disturbed, somewhat animalistic drifter, and Lancaster Doss (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a charismatic, charming, and narcissistic metaphysicist. Through this relationship, writer and director Paul Thomas Anderson explores what it means to be human, what it means to have control, and what it means to relate to other people. The resulting film is weird, disturbing, fascinating, entertaining, and profound. Continue…

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How To Survive A Plague

An amazing movie, and I did a Q&A with its director.

Toward the end of David France’s extraordinary documentary about the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, or ACT-UP, and its off-shoot the Treatment Action Group, or TAG, playwright and ACT-UP founder Larry Kramer says, “We, ACT-UP, got those drugs out there. It’s the proudest achievement that the gay population of this world can ever claim.” Kramer, who is notorious for his incendiary rhetoric, is not being hyperbolic. If not for ACT-UP’s constant, innovative, and angry activism in the late ‘80s and early ’90s, the speed at which the FDA and NIH developed, tested and approved drugs for HIV and AIDS would have remained snail-like, leading to even more pain, suffering and death than AIDS was already causing. Continue…

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More fun than actual a cappella

My boyfriend and I laugh and laughed and laughed.

Why college campuses, especially on the East Coast, are overpopulated with a cappella groups is a mystery to me. Virtually no one who isn’t on a college campus pays to see a cappella groups. No one buys their albums, and I don’t know anyone who can name an a cappella group that isn’t native to their alma mater. But they’re a staple of college entertainment, both real and ironic. Because, even though some a cappella can be awesomely inventive (think Bobby McFerrin), a lot of it can be irredeemably cheesy (think the worst numbers on Glee). This makes it a great subject for the hybrid teen comedy-competition genre, and that’s how Pitch Perfect came to be. Very, very loosely based on a nonfiction book about competitive a cappella groups, the film is written by 30 Rock writer Kay Cannon and directed by Avenue Q’s Jason Moore; it’s Bring It On crossed with Glee with an injection of Bridesmaids. It’s not perfect, but it’s a damn funny crowd-pleaser. Continue…

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Plagiarism isn’t interesting

Dreadful. And stupid.

I think that few things are duller than a plagiarism scandal. I’ve worked as an editor, a literary agent, a journalist, and I currently teach writing, so I take plagiarism very seriously – no one should ever put their name on the words written by someone else. It’s lazy and dishonest. But as moral crimes go, it’s up there with money laundering and illegal dumping on the list of seriously un-dramatic transgressions. But since writers are inherently navel-gazers and since plagiarism is one of the worst crimes we can commit (right after making stuff up and saying it’s true), too many writers think that there’s something profound and exciting about stealing words. Rarely, if ever, is that true. And that’s the main problem with The Words, Brian Klugman and Lee Sternthal’s shallow and pretentious drama about a writer who passes off someone else’s novel as his own. Continue…

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“My prostate is asymmetrical.”

My God, this movie was weird. And, yet, I kind of loved it. It made me want to write a novel.

A few years ago, I was reading Don DeLillo’s Libra, a speculative novel about the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and I remarked to a literary critic that none of DeLillo’s characters spoke like recognizable people, and they all spoke alike in their staccato pretentiousness. But there was one exception: Oswald’s wife, Marina, had brilliantly authentic monologues about her life with Lee. And the critic told me that Marina sounded so real because DeLillo had simply taken her Warren Commission testimony and pasted it in his narrative. DeLillo, whatever his philosophical acuity and structural innovation, doesn’t write believable characters; they’re all simply puppets for his ideas and word play. And that word play can be seductive. David Cronenberg, in adapting DeLillo’s 2003 novel Cosmopolis, was clearly taken in by the language, reproducing DeLillo’s dialogue almost word for word. And that means that nothing that the characters say is believable as a human utterance. This is the main reason – but not the only one – that Cosmopolis is such a weird, discomfiting, ultimately entrancing cinematic experience. Continue…

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