'Cribs' for the Literati

As part of a really cool visual project, professional photographer Kyle Cassidy has been compiling images of famous science fiction and fantasy writers in their personal creative spaces.  The website for the project is WhereIWrite.org.  It's a fascinating collection of snapshots that give us a glimpse into these artists' surroundings where they spill their imaginations onto the page, and from there we get a glimpse into the artists themselves.

Featured writers include Joe Haldeman, Margaret Weis, and even famed fantasist Neil Gaiman.  The private domains, sometimes disheveled and in varying states of traditional organization, seem to pulse with creative energy as captured through Cassidy's lens.  They contain artifacts such as creepy half mannequins, big black cats, and giant eyeballs atop bookcases.

I've got my own plans to build a formidable writer's fortress one day.  A site like this is a great source of inspiration.      

Link: WhereIWrite.org

Top 10 Cinematic Villains

Here's a list I've been putting together for a while as I've reflected over the tons of villains I've watched scare up the screen.  Nothing makes a movie classic quite like a badass bad guy, and these are the best of the bunch.  Evil, insane, brilliant, calculating, sociopathic, or just plain blood-thirsty.  Many different ingredients go toward making a great villain, and here are my choices for the greatest baddies to ever hit theaters.  

10. Maleficent - 'Sleeping Beauty'

In one of the greatest, oddest, and most uniquely crafted Disney films of all time, we're given this exquisitely cruel sorceress so consumed with envy and spite that she'll unleash a deadly curse on a newborn baby!  She's cold, relentless, and wrapped in a classic Disney evil the likes of which hasn't been seen since.  

9. Amon Goethe - 'Schindler's List'

Aside from the political figureheads of Nazi Germany, it's hard to put an actual face on the up-close and nonsensical brutality of the Holocaust.  Ralph Feinnes did just that in 'Schindler's List', embodying the hellacious mix of aristocratic Western austerity and animalistic hatred and rage.  The character was also a real person.

8. Nurse Ratched - 'One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest'

It takes a hell of a villain to make you want to personally strangle her to death throughout the entire film.  Emotionless and unfeeling in some of the most monstrous ways, she makes the plight of the hospital's inmates all the more universal.  

7. Hans Beckert - 'M'

He's the very first cinematic serial killer, a disturbingly everyday monster roaming the streets and whistling as he approaches the children he preys upon.  His bug eyes and frantic pleas of understanding make him one of the most chilling characters ever on film.  "That's a nice balloon you have there, little girl," he says.  All the more frightening because creature like him really are out there.  

6. Anton Chigurh - 'No Country For Old Men'

The fatalistic 'flip-a-coin' motif has been employed by numerous villains, but none with more menace and psychotic gusto than this pauper-haired rogue killer.  His pneumatic cattle gun is one the best weapons ever used in a movie.  Cold-blooded.

5. Reverend Harry Powell - 'Night of the Hunter'

With 'love' and 'hate' tattooed on his hands, this evil and obsessed perversion of a clergymen will stop at nothing to kill two small children and take the cash they're hiding.  In a surrealist hell of a film, he's the devil himself luring the innocent to their doom.  Robert Mitchum's performance has influenced countless villains since. 

4. Lil' Ze - 'City of God'

In a Brazilian gangland loaded with rampant violence and teenage gunmen, one killer reigns supreme.  He grows from a laughing pint-sized murderer to an evil walking holocaust, a sociopathic nightmare let loose on everyone around him in a destitute land where there is no law but the gun.  Temperamental, unpredictable, and ultra-violent, he's a being so awful he almost defies belief.  But the kicker is this guy actually existed.  

3. Hannibal Lecter - 'Silence of the Lambs'

A cannibalistic villain so genuinely terrifying that he was almost as scary behind prison walls as he was once on the loose.  He combined polished intellectual charm with grisly viciousness in a way that made him both revolting and oddly appealing, especially considering the unique ethics he used when choosing who to feast on.  No can use 'fava beans' in a sentence anymore without bringing him to mind.  

2. The Joker - 'The Dark Knight'

It's impossible to Heath Ledger's untimely death from the brilliant character he created, and the Joker's every move has a sense of finality and impending doom that blankets the entire film, even when he's not in the scene.  Finally doing Bob Kane's bravura creation justice on the big screen, he's a deadly and wildly unpredictable wildcard whose actions are much easily condemned than his anarchist observations, and that makes him all the more disturbing.  A walking nightmare in caked on makeup.

1. Darth Vader - 'Star Wars'

The ultimate movie bad guy.  He's got the cape, the voice, the swagger, and the icy heart, not to mention to ability to choke you to death through a video screen.  George Lucas recreated the prototype mythological antagonist to do battle with his set of charismatic heroes, and that galaxy far far away wouldn't be near as exciting without his fearsome visage lording over it.  He's the ultimate cinematic icon, the perfect personification of evil, and he's this list's #1 movie villain of all time.  

A Little Tale Of 'Sextortion' In Rural Wisconsin

In the recent issue of GQ, there's the sordid story of a middle-American high school plagued by an teenaged internet predator the likes of which hasn't really been encountered before, at least not famously (linked below).  It's a disturbing piece of culture journalism as well as an expertly crafted crime article, and it's implications will have your mind racing through the dangers of technology's conquest of youth, along with its ability to produce brand new types of monsters in our midst.  But is he merely a monster preying on innocent peers?  Is it really that simple?  Or is this a symptom of larger factors at work as the Information Age continues to break down the dam and magnify our culture's faults as well as our virtues?

I'll let you read for yourselves, but it's a thoroughly absorbing and compelling read.  Chilling, intriguing, and horrifically not so shocking, it's sure to get your brain gears churning.

Here's the article: 'Sextortion at Eisenhower High'

Hat-tip to fellow Hurricane film alum Brody Logan out in sunny Los Angeles.

Recommended Reading: 'Never Let Me Go' by Kazuo Ishiguro

Though the revelation at the heart of this incredible novel comes very early in the story, I'll warn you that after this paragraph there will 'spoilers' of sorts.  So as a general review I'll just say that it's a chilling, methodical, and beautifully anguished work that charts the short lives of a group of friends who attend a special school in an alternate-reality England.  What makes this school and these friends so 'special' is said below, along with why their teachers and those outside the campus are so afraid of them.  But know that this is a science fiction work in the most literary sense, with complex technological and emotional themes intertwined in order to explore some disturbing aspects of a potential future.  Hopefully that's enough to get you to a book store of Amazon or wherever you need to go.

Like I said, the 'big reveal' comes early and the surprise isn't necessary to the overall reading experience, so here it is.  The kids at this school are clones.  And they've been cloned in order to their harvest their organs, and in all likelihood the process will kill them before they're thirty.  The three friends at the center of the novel, including the wonderfully voiced female narrator, are aware of this future very early.  The nature of their particular existence and the reason they've been put up in such a fancy school are details best left unsaid here, but the powerful strength of the novel lies in its ability to communicate buried anguish, to paint a portrait of doomed souls whose acceptance of their fate requires a quiet and shattering emotional strength all its own.  

Ishiguro's style is very 'English', as anyone who has read his Booker-winning 'Remains of the Day' surely knows.  His prose can be at once lyrical and droll, and he's never in a hurry to push his narratives along at a brisk pace.  But for the kind of stories he tells, especially this one, it's perfect.  He carefully unwraps the layers of this tale, and every layer is more distressing and charged, both emotionally and intellectually.  He leaves the greater quandaries of the cloning debate and all its ramifications to the reader.  His interests lie with these people; their relationships, their fears, and their search for meaning in their relatively short lives that jives with our own distraught searches.  It's a jarring, affecting, and devastating work from one of the best writers out there.  Whether you like science fiction or not, give this one a look.

Note: A film adaptation is currently in the works and it's slated for release in 2010.  It features Kiera Knightly as one of the three friends and it's being directed by Mark Romanek.  It's a major leap for the director and it remains to be seen if he can pull it off.  Romanek's only major previous film is 'One Hour Photo',  a solid film that flashed some skill at gradual pacing and understated horror, but he's never tackled anything as complex and thematically risky as this.  However, the screenplay is supposedly a slam dunk and was listed as one of England's 10 best unproduced scripts by Vanity Fair.

A Bit Of Good Ol' Fashioned Nazi Philosophy on 'Fox and Friends'

I didn't pick up on this until I found it on the Internet yesterday because, well, 'Fox and Friends' is quite possibly the dumbest show on television.  Dumber than The Kardashians, dumber than Flavor of Love, dumber than perhaps any 'news' show in American history, and watching it for more than five minutes puts your cognitive abilities, motor functions, and possibly even your respiratory system at severe peril.  

But anyway, here's one of their resident geniuses, Brian Kilmeade, discussing why we don't live in a 'pure society' like Sweden or Finland because we intermarry among different ethnic groups and nationalities, or as he eloquently puts it, "we keep marrying other species and other ethnics."

This cutting commentary came as they were discussing a Swedish study suggesting that people who stay married are less likely to suffer from Alzheimer's.  Nothing to do with race or ethnicity.  Those connections came right out of Kilmeade's own brilliant mind.  

The look on cohost Gretchen Carlson's Botoxed face says it all.  Even she's aware of the mini train wreck that just crashed onto their set.  

Hat-tip to Salon.com

Ryan Reynolds will be the Green Lantern

I've been waiting a long time for Reynolds to become a big superstar.  The guy has everything you'd want in a leading actor and he's done a decent job in picking a variety of roles, from the altruistic egotism of 'Van Wilder' to nuanced and self-destructive narcissism in 'Adventureland'.  He was also the best thing in the unfortunate lame-fest that was "Wolverine: Origins'.  But for some reason, the stars haven't really clicked for him.  He did help make 'The Proposal' the #1 film a few weeks ago, but as we all know, romantic comedies suck, in all but the rarest of cases.  

Well, it looks like he may finally have his chance to shine in a big-budget tent-pole film as the Green Lantern, the superhero from DC's underrates comic series of the same name.  Actually it's numerous characters of the same name, but that likely won't show up in the film.  

It seems like the perfect chance for Reynolds to show off his onscreen charisma and finally vault into the cinematic elite.  Of course, the movie could bomb and take his career with it, but I doubt it.  The project is in the very capable hands of director Martin Campbell, who made 'Casino Royale' and 'Goldeneye', the two best James Bond films of the last 25 years.

'The Green Lantern' will probably hit theaters sometime in 2011.  Count me as excited.

Commercials as Art: A Brief Case Study

Yes, television commercials are an ever more frequent annoyance and at their core serve only to promote some unnecessary byproduct of our material-obsessed culture.  But they can also be pretty nifty little pieces of art, and the new Bacardi Mojito ad is an excellent example of a company taking the time to do something special with their slice of corporate airtime.  

Making inspired use of a previously obscure song that employs musical elements from just about every era dating back to the Wild West saloons, the ad smoothly treks back in time through the lounges and dance clubs that have served as vital escapes throughout this nation's history.  It's an elegant and innocently joyful visual journey accomplished in only a minute, and if you took the specific product's name out and made it about a generic spirit, the artistic impact would be much the same.

Kudos to Bacardi for providing at least one little gem in the endless procession of irrelevant garbage that passes for advertising.  We've got to live with these things on television, so the least the companies can do is make them good.  And you know what?  I want a mojito now, so mission accomplished.

Note:  The song in the ad is 'Daylight' from the duo Matt and Kim.  Get on iTunes and reward them for some very solid work with the track.

Review and Discussion: 'Public Enemies'

Rating: 5 stars out of 5

"My name is John Dillinger.  I rob banks."

Michael Mann is a singular entity among modern commercial filmmakers.  His special brand of stylized realism and existentialist narrative credo are probably ill-suited to attract a large audience, but the big stars keep flocking to work him because they know, as I do, that he is one of the preeminent American storytellers working today.  He dares to treat his viewers like adults, and such a sin against the programming of the studio assembly line tends to leave his work flagging in the wind amidst the noise and infantile splendor of the 'Revenge of the Fallen's of the world.  But it's not a shame, really, and I seriously doubt Michael Mann cares.  He just works.

His latest work is 'Public Enemies', a brilliant, cutting piece of American history painted with tommy guns and slick suits and featuring a group of men solely of their own time.  Some thematic similarities to Mann's classic 'Heat' and certainly there, but anyone claiming that this film simply transports the other's story to another time is missing the essence of both.  And anyone complaining that 'Public Enemies' lacks traditional character development and moral focus are, well, mostly right.  But they've also either not followed Mann's career or they simply aren't attuned to his narrative values.  Traditional character development and moral focus are not what Michael Mann does.  In 'Public Enemies', as in his other superior works, he doesn't ignore the line between right and wrong, but he makes it just that...a line.  A thin, fuzzy line that doesn't fully encapsulate the men standing on each side.  And as for developing Depp's John Dillinger and Christian Bale's Melvin Purvis, they are handled much the same way as Mann's other protagonists.  They are richly detailed characters who rise from the fabric of their time and place.  They carry out their business and depart in the most logically sound fashion.  We are not spoon-fed data about their childhoods or told why the carry the issues and compulsions they have.  In a Michael Mann universe, it's what men do that defines them.  And as viewers, our job is to evaluate them based on what the director captures them doing.

As played by Depp, John Dillinger is a perfect subject for this approach.  He's a man living solely for the moment, ignoring past and future because he believes they don't truly exist as relevant realities.  He enjoys the life he has, and expresses no regrets.  He's a bank robber.  That's just what he does.  He falls in love with a woman (a splendid Marion Cotillard) who values the rush of freedom and the ecstasy of the moment as much as he does, though they both seem to know the end is near.  

Christian Bale does a fine job in the limited role of Agent Purvis.  He pulsates with the ferocious professional intensity that defines Mann's lawmen even more than his criminals, and despite the southern charm and G-Man veneer, he's as ruthless a killer as anyone in the film.  Do his unit's coarse methods and sketchy ethics compromise their moral superiority in this 'war on crime'?  True to form, Mann lets us decide for ourselves, and his work is all the better for it.   This story is presented as a Midwestern war, without easily identifiable good sides and with firefights characterized by manic bursts and random victims.  Virtue and reason are notions that float away once the bullets fly, and you haven't seen bullets fly like this is a movie before.

The film looks gorgeous, thanks to the revolutionary use of HD cameras that give every scene a sense of realist intensity and immediacy.  Every locale is detailed and focused to the point that they become sharply drawn characters, taking bullets with the same visual and aural punch as the people onscreen.  It really is a completely new look for a feature film, one Mann has been striving toward for years, and it's perfect for the director's style.  Finally he can take his hyper-realist, truth-of-the-moment flourishes and produce a visual product befitting his artistic ideas.  

Like I said, this isn't a film that will babysit you.  It's not a 'popcorn movie' and it's not going to roil your usual theatrical impulses by rooting for one side or the other.  But it is brilliant, and I feel confident predicting that as years pass it will be regarded as a masterpiece.  If nothing else, it's a great way to get the nasty taste of 'Transformers 2' out of your mouth.

This Week In Tragic Stupidity

In another disheartening example of adult idiocy taking the life of a young person not given a chance to break free from the binds of her infantile guardians, a two-year-old Florida toddler was strangled to death in her bed by an 8-foot python.  News story here.

When the owner of the snake, also the boyfriend of the child's mother, called 911, he reported the incident by saying, "our stupid snake got out in the middle of the night and strangled the baby."  That quote is despicably absurd on numerous levels.  First of all, yes, the snake is the stupid one for escaping your cage and seizing on the chance to make a meal out of a defenseless, sleeping infant.  It's a fucking snake.  That's what it does.  Secondly, the snake is "ours" and the innocent child killed by your illegally obtained animal (It was his snake.  He brought it with him when he moved in.) is merely 'the baby'.

Thankfully, charges are being brought against the man.  When you have a small child in your home, there are certain sacrifices you have to make.  You can't go out partying every night.  You can't leave switch blades and pills on the floor.  And you can't have 8-foot snakes.   Sorry, that's just part of the deal.