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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Oh, pretty sparkles!

I apologize for not posting these in a more timely fashion. It’s been a crazy few weeks. Sparkle wasn’t very good, but Sparkle kinda was.

During one of the arguments Whitney Houston’s character in Sparkle has with her daughters about why they shouldn’t try to make it in the music industry, she says, “Was my life not enough of a cautionary tale for you?” It’s a startling moment, to say the least. When Houston uttered it, the film set must have shuddered with sad recognition. Because the life of Houston, who drowned earlier this year in a hotel bathtub after an accidental overdose of prescription pills, was certainly a cautionary tale. Continue…

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Bourne Again

Yeah, so that headline is probably going to be used in a few hundred reviews today. So be it. Using a cliche for the review is apropos.

The three previous Bourne movies were big deals, popular among both average and uppity filmgoers, because they were actually thrilling spy thrillers made with virtually no special effects, directed by the auteurs Doug Limon (The Bourne Identity) and Paul Greengrass (The Bourne Supremacy and Ultimatum), and all written tautly by Tony Gilroy with moral ambiguity and character development. And they starred not just Matt Damon, one of the great actors of his generation, but also a host of brilliant others, from Joan Allen to Albert Finney, from Chris Cooper to David Straithairn. If it weren’t for the success of The Bourne Identity, the gritty reboot of James Bond with Daniel Craig would never have happened the way it did. So, after Damon and Greengrass decided they were done, whoever was chosen to reboot the franchise faced two difficult tasks: Make a movie as good as any in the previous trilogy. Don’t make a movie that feels like a cynical exploitation of goodwill earned by the previous trilogy.

Oops. Continue…

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Touchingly Intouchable

I saw this on a lark because I wasn’t able to make it to the screenings for anything that came out this week. Amazing.

The Intouchables is best movie I have seen this year. Granted, the high-brow movies that are expected to win awards don’t usually arrive in theaters until September, so the competition hasn’t been fierce. However, I’m pretty sure that come December, I will still love The Intouchables, and I will still be telling everyone that they have to see it. Continue…

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