shoop and salinger

There's a moment in "Zooey" where the title character is in the bathtub re-reading a four-year-old letter from his older brother. The letter and the letter writer give Zooey no end of annoyance, but something keeps pulling him back, even to the point of taking the darn thing in the full tub with him--not the best place to read something composed of aging, fragile paper to begin with. I've yet to bring Franny and Zooey--or Nine Stories, or Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction, or Catcher in the Rye into a tub with me, but I do go back to them for...well, something, even though I often think to myself as I read and re-read, wow, these are incredibly annoying people.

As Salinger played more and more with self-reflexiveness, meta-fiction, Zen, and just plain not giving a damn whether his stories had any shape or purpose, the how-hard-this-stuff-is-to-get-to-the-end-of quotient ratcheted up exponentially. With "Zooey," at least, the patient reader is rewarded with a knockout wrap-up that actors (or at least a lot of actors I know) just love--that if you're an actor, you're pretty much acting for God (I think most actors believe that already, but it's nice to have it confirmed). And "Raise High the Roofbeam" is probably the most accessible Buddy-driven story, if you can get past Seymour's diary entries. But the end of "Seymour--An Introduction"? There's an ending that just makes you want to toss your book across the room or out an open window. And yet...yeah, I keep going back to it. (Although I've never quite made it through "Hapworth 16, 1924"--that one's a real ball-buster.)

And it's not just because I'm starting to "get" what Salinger left behind--the kinds of entertainment for which you can give him credit. Characters who probably don't realize how obnoxious they are? I tend to think of the "meta" Larry David on "Curb Your Enthusiasm" as an aging Zooey (Zooey, in fact, would be 80 this year, while Franny would be 75)--and again, we can think of the "meta" persona Salinger left behind in the ever-loquacious Buddy. And the way Salinger playfully capitalizes some words? Now read some David Mamet and watch what he does with his dialogue. A quick google search, especially over the next couple of days, will give you many more examples, both "high" and "low," I'm sure.

What keeps me coming back, I think, points back to how I referred to Salinger's characters at the beginning--they're people. What Salinger mastered in his dialogue is a remarkable combination of "who the hell says things like that" (i.e., "This is Kaliyuga, buddy, the Iron Age" from "Zooey") plus a composer's ear for sound and rhythm that really did capture people actually talking. At its best, that combination convinced you that, okay, these people said things like that. You could easily run hot and cold with all of Salinger's characters--for me, Holden Caulfield was, depending on when you asked me between, say, high school and now, a super-cool guy who "got" what being a teenager meant, a spoiled prep-school tool, and a sad, mixed-up kid. Of course, he's all of those things and more--because he's a person, and people are that complicated and contradictory, engaging and maddening.

At any rate, I like to imagine Salinger now, chatting with the Fat Lady on her porch. It's a "Zooey" reference--if you haven't already, pay him a visit.

shoop and up in the air

I think Jason Reitman is making the best Michael Ritchie movies of the 21st century. You probably know who Reitman is by now--he directed Thank You For Smoking, Juno, and now one of the probable Oscar-contenders, Up In the Air. As for Ritchie? He spent a lot of his career as a gun for hire, piloting some successful vehicles for star personalities (Fletch, for example, which is pretty funny, but it's mostly Chevy Chase doing his best Chevy Chase, shot from competent angles) and some not so successful (The Golden Child with Eddie Murphy, back when everybody went to see Eddie Murphy movies, and the regrettable A Simple Wish with Martin Short, when Ritchie had even given up on story continuity). But once, in the 1970s, Ritchie was actually considered a major director--Time Magazine, for example, devoted several pages to a review of Semi-Tough, a movie the reviewer didn't even like very much. Where Ritchie excelled was small-scale satire with often petty, unadmirable characters who either change very slightly, or consider changing briefly and then think better of it. So his best movies were usually devoid of big moments, or potentially big moments that are quickly deflated. Check out Robert Redford in Ritchie's The Candidate, for example, asking after what should have been his character's huge moment, "What do we do now?" Or my personal favorite Ritchie film, Smile, where following a beauty contest gone spectacularly and often hilariously wrong, things pretty much continue in the community as normal, or perhaps a little bit worse. Ritchie tuned his worldview toward the sunny side in the climax of The Bad News Bears, but what lingers is how miserable Walter Matthau's character is, and what a bleak future is in store for those unfortunate kids he coaches. Ritchie couldn't sustain that kind of creativity into the 80s and 90s, partly, I think, because his style was so deceptively passive--observing real, random behavior and letting audiences pick up, or not, on the telling details he included. That kind of style needed equally creative artists joining Ritchie, which was too seldom the case.

Reitman seems to be on a roll currently, making those kinds of movies I didn't think we'd see anymore. After seeing Up In the Air, I realize now how much credit he deserves for Juno--Reitman trusted the story and the characters would hold up despite the occasionally too-clever flourishes of Diablo Cody's much-honored screenplay that nearly kill the movie before it gets started. (Note: if you haven't seen Juno, I'd say rent it and skip the first 10 minutes.) Here Reitman makes expert use of George Clooney's double-edged effortless charm--effortless as in, he makes it look easy, as well as effortless as in, he's not really trying--Ritchie would have had a field day with Clooney, I'm sure. Clooney's Ryan Bingham is a fascinating and frustrating catalog of starts and stops, flourishes without follow-through. When he launches into a catalogue of how to go through airport security and who to ideally get behind (Asians, preferably), Clooney gives the lines a great amoral snap--but that's the only time; it's not really his character. Similarly, we see flashes of humanity and caring when it comes to his family, but again, they're just flashes. So it seems appropriate when his one, big, movie-ready romantic gesture lands with the thud that it does. And what are we left with? Has Clooney's character learned anything or changed? Maybe a little, but we're just not sure. The movie's title is smashingly appropriate.

Reitman also has a gift for detail similar to Ritchie's--he likes the reactions of his actors, who all come through splendidly for him--Reitman seems to be catching them unguarded as if waiting for his direction. Also, pay attention to Natalie's boyfriend saying goodbye to her as she sets off to travel with Bingham. The boyfriend has no lines, but notice how he's dressed compared to Natalie's power travel outfit. And we know everything about this relationship.

I'd like to see what Jason Reitman directs next, and I hope his path is clear of potential Golden Children.

shoop and avatar

There's an episode arc from the Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle where the intrepid moose and squirrel are chasing after an elusive element called "upsidaisium"--something that can instantly turn things upside down. I think that's a good way into "Avatar" for a few reasons. For one, it speaks to the characters' straight-faced references to "unobtainium"--in the real world, a science/engineering joke referring to the impossible element that could make something work, but in Avatar's case, it's the element that the development company wants badly enough to chase the indigenous blue folks away from their magic tree. The term is just as silly as the one in Bullwinkle, and it also matters as little as far as the movie itself goes. There's also an area on that planet that is, indeed, upside down--it makes about as much sense as the big, goofy animals and the blue people. What we've got here, in other words, is a doofus movie with a plot cribbed from any number of old westerns (not just Dances With Wolves), no characters to speak of, and some really clunky dialogue...and it's all terrific.

You probably know this already, even if you haven't seen it yet, as some billion dollars worth of worldwide filmgoers have. And you probably know the terrific part--it's the "you're in this world" feeling that James Cameron and a lot of other smart, talented people have engineered for us. That's pretty much my point--it takes some genuinely smart people, and maybe even a genius or two, to make such a successful doofus movie. Or, to put it another way, it's worth noting what Avatar didn't need--for example, performances. Oh, Sigourney Weaver's there, all right, looking hale and hearty, but she's just lending her presence, much the way Sean Connery used to do in the 80s and 90s. (Here's my idea for a remake--Medicine Man, except with Weaver in the Connery role, calling some younger guy "Dr. Bronx" and having a fairly chaste cougar-romance in the jungle.) It's not Weaver's fault that she's not acting; there's really nothing else for her to do. The rest of the cast, whatever their skill and talent levels happen to be, are all in the same boat.

Then there's Cameron's dialogue, and it's absolutely uncanny. I mean, it's bad, but not just inept--there's a certain on-the-nose heavy-handedness to it that actually works in the world of his films--Billy Zane's villain in Titanic comes to mind, speaking in a way that you can practically read the speech balloons over his head. In a way, my ramblings here tie in nicely with my last post--James Cameron might well be the best comic book movie director ever who never really made a comic book movie. And his dialogue is an important element--I don't think you can learn to write dialogue like that, and I'm not sure it's possible to do it on purpose. For example, in the hero's voice-over (which Cameron freely--I would almost say gleefully--uses in place of character development, literally telling us, at one point, that somebody's character has developed), he explains that his brother was killed because someone "wanted the paper in his wallet." Wow! I mean, is that any way for any sentient being to say that his brother got killed in a robbery? But in a comic book--yeah, of course that's what he'd say. Same with the evil colonel, played in appropriate one-note fashion by Stephen Lang, who's actually another good actor--as he addresses the troops, he helpfully tells them that they're "not in Kansas anymore." Note to screenwriters and playwrights everywhere--that was a good line in The Wizard of Oz, and it will never be a good line again. Except in the comic book world that Cameron has created, yes, it works just fine, thanks.

I'll take this one step further before signing off--Cameron and the movie have been getting some flack for some of the reasons I've talked about--dumb story, no characters, silly dialogue. I suspect, however, that the damn thing wouldn't have worked as well, or maybe at all, unless that all-around level of doofusness (doofosity?) was part of the package. Thinking, logic, encouragement to look inside and question ourselves--none of that goes with the joyride Cameron has dreamed up. It's the coolest ride ever, cool enough that many people will want to go on again--and with all the substance that that description implies, i.e., none. It is a hoot, though.