Save the Titanic

TCM had Titanic on Saturday night, and I watched large chunks of it. It's so much nicer to watch this three hour plus movie when it isn't interrupted with on toward an hour of commercials.

So if Avatar wins Best Picture a week from when this post goes live...

Well, not only will it be wrong on its own terms, but it will demean Titanic. Which is really everything that Avatar was not. Three hours, but oh, does it move. None of the toe-tapping of Avatar. When I turned to Titanic at around 12:28 AM, I was utterly rapt for the next 40 minutes; couldn't go for the dental floss until the movie was over at 1:32. Serious minded, but with a constant twinkle in its eye. Oh, the bad husband character played by Billy Zane is a bit of an unwanted buffoon, but there's a subtle pleasure to David Warner's performance as the valet that gives compensation. Kathy Bates is a joy, Gloria Stuart is a wonder, the music by James Horner is such a delight. No, the special effects aren't as good. The artificially inserted air vapor looks weird and artificial. But it has the biggest effect of all, which is real heart. It's like the song says, "my heart will go on." If there's a cliche, like "guy drops keys to lock, Jack must dive down, get key ring, find right key before he and Rose drown," you don't mind because your heart is in it. When Sam Worthington proclaims "at first, it was just a job, and then it became love," it's just a boring cliche in a boring movie.

It was a wonder to watch this unfold on the mammoth screen of my beloved Loews Astor Plaza, now 5 1/2 years gone but it will live in my memory forever, and Titanic is that kind of movie. Avatar doesn't hold a candle to it, it's not even a little teeny tiny Hanukkah candle against the brilliant lustre of Titanic.

So please, let's not have an Oscar for Avatar sitting on James Cameron's shelf next to the one for Titanic.

Triptych

I mentioned here that I had gone to DC to see some theatre, and I'm overdue to talk about what I saw.

Why do I go to DC to see theatre when there's so much in New York? Well, it's hard for me to make time for it when I'm home because there's so much else calling on my time, and then when some show I really regret not seeing makes its way to DC, I see it as my little last chance theatre and try and see if I can force myself to take advantage of the opportunity Before It's Too Late.

So this trip was a BITL for The Four Of Us, a show about writers and writing that had played off Broadway and of course has some professional relevance. And then I decided to add in a well-reviewed show called In the Red and Brown Water at the Studio Theatre, which is my favorite DC venue, and then added in a second show at the Studio that was just opening called That Face, about which I knew very little, but in for a dime in for a dollar.

In the natural way of things I liked most the show I knew nothing about.

That Face is written by the Christopher Paolini of British playwrights, someone named Polly Stenham who was 19 years old when she wrote it and ended up on the West End. It's very oedipal, thank you to the Washington Post review for giving me the word which was eluding me on my own after I saw the show. You've got a drug/alcohol addled mother of two, the father having escaped to a rich banker job in Hong Kong, a daughter in prep school, and a son who's essentially abandoned his life entirely in order to "care for" his mother. When the daughter's schooling is endangered by her involvement in a hazing incident, daddy is called back from Hong Kong to help resolve the situation. There's very little I'd disagree with in that Post review, except to say that on balance I tipped toward rather enjoying myself while the tenor of the review is mixed. The writing is sharp. The acting is good. The dynamic between the son and the mother is totally weirded out. My main objections are to that weirded out relationship, which I bought into near to totally while watching the play but kept resisting in the discussion with self afterwards. Ultimately, if I can buy into the Harper/Tolliver relationship in the Harper Connelly books by Charlaine Harris, then I should let myself buy into this weird relationship, and if I let myself do that I can let myself recommend the play. That being said, the cast really does have to be on top of their game, and if you stumbled across another production of this where the actors weren't walking the tight rope as adroitly as the Studio cast does...

In the Red and Brown Water was quite nicely reviewed by the Post and has been a popular show at the Studio with a multi-week extension, but the best I can say is that I kind of admired it but in no way liked it. It's like the Fish Tank of plays. Another young girl, this one a track star with the potential to get a scholarship, but tied up in all sorts of family drama and boyfriend drama and other drama. As with that movie, the character's thrust upon us without a lot of motivation or explanation for the choices she's making. The writing style is rather arch. The characters constantly break the third wall to announce things like "Oya cries" or "I walk in like a cat in the jungle ready to pounce." Not my cup of tea.

And then there's The Four of Us, NY Times review here. From what I've seen of the critical response, it's been up and down. Even just in Variety, the original review and the NY review aren't entirely in agreement. But it does have that professional resonance. You've got two young writers, one a playwright and the other a novelist, who are friends. The novelist sells his novel -- doesn't just sell it but sells it for $2 million when all of the global and foreign sales are accounted for. This causes some tension in the relationship, though the play isn't just about that. It moves back in time to show some of the pre-success relationship. It moves forward in time to show how the playwright ultimately resolves his own feelings toward his friend.

One of the risks you have when you're watching this sort of thing and know something about the subject is the easy ability you have to find every little flaw in what's being presented. Think the Pelham 123 remake from last summer. The good news on this play is that I can assure you all of the little details are dead-on. Maybe not a surprise; the playwright Itamar Moses is known to have known the author Jonathan Safran Foer. Examples: One scene is set in a music camp the two writers attended as teens and one of them talks about how he likes to go into record stores and go to where his CDs would be and envision them sitting there on the shelves in their proper alphabetical order. I've gone to bookstores with writer Andrew Gudgel and seen him put his hand in that space between Simon Green and Peter Hamilton, thinking this exact same thing. We get little snippets of the questions asked of the writer while he is on book tour, and they are very much the kinds of questions and answers that you get on book tour. He talks about moving from an agent who submitted the book to one publisher at a time to one who sends it out to many people at once, thus getting the auction fever going. Not once did I find myself shaking my head at some really silly piece of something in the play.

But I wasn't totally a big fan of the play, either. All the little details were right, but when they were added up together I wasn't sure if the play's big picture reveals about life were anything special. The play uses a very specific milieu to come to a much more general and perhaps more generic view of friends and friendship and the writing process. I wish the play had been insightful on something big as it was on all things small. Since I didn't think the play was going anywhere special on the macro side of things, I found the writing to be a little too leisurely. If I know where you're going, why not get there? Most of the scenes went on a beat or two too long than I thought they needed to. It was a 1:40 play which probably could have come in ten or twenty minutes shorter. I was seeing with a Sunday matinee crowd that skewed old, your 40-something blogger one of the younger attendees. I was getting a little bleary-eyed during the play, it looked like the man next to me was getting a little bleary-eyed, and somebody a row back and a seat or two over. Maybe I was tired, maybe that's what happens when you're 60% older than I am, or maybe it's what happens when every scene could be just a little bit tighter.

Not a bad play. It's a two-person play that travels well and could easily enough show up somewhere where you are. It will give the real goods on some parts of the creative trade. But I do wish it had been just a little bit better.

out on video

The Damned United is now out on video. I saw this in London during last year's London Book Fair, it had a brief run in the US, not surprising considering the Britishness of it. I liked it quite a bit, and I felt I should give it another quick shout out now that you can buy or queue.

Inglorious Basterds

So as I expected when I did my post on the Oscar nominations, Inglorious Basterds did find it back into a movie theatre in New York City, so the studio could show off its wares nicely to the Oscar voters. This is definitely one of the nice things about living in New York, one of the reasons why I live here and not elsewhere. And to my happy surprise, when I got to the Landmark Sunshine on Tuesday night Feb. 23 to see, not only was it there, but it was on the bigger downstairs theatre the Variety Screening Series rents out and not one of the smaller theatres upstairs. So if any of the 20ish people at the 7:15 showing were Oscar voters, the studio was indeed putting its best foot forward.

Well, the movie was such a delight on so many levels that I was pretty much kicking myself not to have seen it when it first opened, maybe even on a bigger screen.

First and foremost, I now have my rooting interest for Best Supporting Actor. Christoph Waltz is a German actor not much known on these shores, with credits that don't go much beyond "German spy" in Goldeneye. Here, he plays a role that we've seen in film dozens of times before, the Nazi officer who hunts Jews and kills people. I certainly can't say that we sympathize with him, because after all he hunts Jews and kills people. But he does play the role with a kind of relish, a delight, a joie de vivre, an elan, an aplomb, a distinctiveness, that we just never see from an actor playing this role. He chews up the scenery, he steals the show, but lurking beneath it all there's a constant self-awareness that what he's about is a nasty business, that he isn't someone you want to cross. It's a masterfully modulated performance, an indelible work of true screen genius. So come March 7 when I shall be live-blogging the Oscars, I'll be in the Christoph Waltz camp.

Waltz's presence in the movie is an example of the deeply essential German-ness of a lot of the casting. The young actor Daniel Brühl, as another example. And all of these people co-existing with a Brad Pitt, a Mike Myers, an Eli Roth. And then there's a French actress Julie Dreyfuss from the Kill Bill movies. There's a term "europudding" that Variety uses, often in a negative sense, that take an actor from country A and a director from country B, film in country C in the language of country D, in order to cover all bases and maximize the sales. That could definitely apply to Inglorious Basterds, except the term is intended as a negative oftentimes, and this movie makes you wish for more of them.

The entire musical soundtrack is borrowed. If it sounds like it's something Ennio Morricone might have done for a spaghetti western or Italian gangster movie, it's because it is something he composed for a spaghetti western or Italian gangster movie. These tracks are joined by cuts from Cat People or White Lightning or a composer Jacques Loussier whom I've never heard of before. There's not an original note to be found, and it's pitch perfect.

Contemporary cinema is not known to linger. Michael Bay is at the extreme end of the quick cut, but it's safe to say his style of short shots and fast cuts is closer to the norm. A lot of times now if we're looking at a movie that's leisurely in its editing, it's probably way in the opposite direction, the kind of over-stuffed art film that I felt was pretty much self-parodied in Police, Adjective. What a change of pace this is. The lion's share of the movie is taken up with just a few very long scenes. There's one at the beginning, where we meet the Christoph Waltz character as he interrogates a farmer about Jews that might be hiding in the area, and it's a good 20 minutes, and all of it pretty much in the main room of the farmhouse. There's another later on in a basement night club that goes on for around a half hour. Each of these long scenes is a miniature masterpiece. As long as the scenes are, they never seem slow or dull. The words being spoken are interesting and suspenseful. The music is heightening the atmosphere. The camera movements aren't flamboyantly suspenseful like Brian de Palma might be but are gently nerve-wracking. These gentle scenes build real suspense and come to great climaxes in ways we're simply not used to seeing. This is a quality that's shared on this year's best picture nominees with Hurt Locker, which manages to find a serenity in the chaos of war. It definitely ain't shared with Avatar.

A very nice piece of work.

all the gin joints...

I like the soundtrack to Chariots of Fire very very much. I can still see the feet of the runners pounding along the surf while this wonderful Vangelis music swells up, still remember the day I saw it, driving down with my younger brother to the RKO Stanley Warner Rt. 4 in Paramus, NJ in the upstairs auditorium, and driving back very happily in a light snow.

Hearing said music on a TV ad for the forthcoming movie The Bounty Hunter?

That is very very strange.

indie-d indeed

I was in the Posman Books location in Grand Central Terminal last night, and if you wonder why I often don't shed tears for the demise of the beloved independent bookstore...

They have two copies of books by Scott Mackay on the shelf, including his book Phytosphere, which is out of print for long enough that we have a reversion of rights.

They don't have and never have had a copy of a Lost Fleet book by Jack Campbell. These books are not only in print, but have made the NY Times bestseller list.

And there's no sign that they will be getting any copies of the Warbreaker mass market by Brandon Sanderson, or the Warded Man mass market by Peter Brett, as two examples of March releases that I would expect will enjoy strong sales.

So they clearly don't have anyone buying the sf and fantasy who knows anything about sf and fantasy. They don't have very good inventory management, because their relatively small sf/f section has plenty of books that just aren't very likely to sell.Based on the concentration of odd books they have from the DAW/Roc list, it's clear they look at the monthly NAL mass market catalog more closely than some others which may imply that the Penguin sales rep is better than some of the others that call on this account.

Now, I love all my book children equally, and I was certainly happy when the Scott Mackay books came out that Posman was carrying them. At the same time, I do get that weekly Bookscan report card and I get royalty statements, and I know which books are selling and which are not. Independent bookstores are just much more likely, especially away from the categories like lit fic or children's they really care about and which motivate the owners, to have sections like this that ooze inattentiveness.

the e-book Revolution 2

I keep seeing more and more and more people with e-book readers. Sunday night on the Acela back from DC, last night on the #5 train from Grand Central to Union Square, it's gone from being a special sighting to being a regular occurence.

Barnes & Noble spends so much time touting their wondrous results and the immense huge hitted-ness of their Nook on their earnings conference call this week that it wouldn't surprise me if the executives on the call shit in their pants from the excitement of what they were saying. As is the case when Amazon shits in its pants in excitement talking about the Kindle, there are all kinds of buzz words and not a lot of specifics. When they sales sales "exploded" beyond expectations does that mean they were expecting to sell 4 and actually sold 6, or they were shooting for 82,900 and sold 126,800? Their market share on e-books on some books is now above their 18% market share of physical bookstore sales. Which e-books? Bestsellers? Ones that sell 2 copies and B&N sold one? All of this stuff needs to be taken with a grain of salt, the Nook wasn't that well reviewed, and in the call they're very happy with the reviews, but there you have it.

We just got royalty statements for a book that came out around 14 months ago. Thru a November royalty report, it sold 475 non-Kindle e-books, with the biggest formats there accounting for 194 for the Sony Reader and 183 copies for another format which it's hard to tell exactly which it is. Then there's an e-book format that sold 2,271, which we guess to be the Kindle edition, for total e-book sales approx 2250 copies. The print version trade paperback sold 31,832, which number could go up or down based on other copies shipped and returned.

This doesn't really include any Nook sales, because that was just shipping about the time this royalty statement was closing.