Syntax of Things

One Person's Crap...

I think I would lose my blog tagline if I didn't point out that the History Channel will give us 120 minutes of premium television with the debut of All About Dung tonight at 9ET:

Join host Monty Halls* as he investigates the historical, medical, scientific and evolutionary importance of poop on an excremental safari guaranteed to fascinate even the most squeamish of viewers. You'll be surprised by the amazing manner in which the world puts dung to use. Discover that through a 14,000-year-old human dung deposit it has been determined that humans inhabited North America 1300 years earlier than previously thought. Climb a 100-foot mountain of bat guano in Borneo that is teeming with insect life. Travel to India and view housewarming rituals using sacred cow dung as good luck. Finally Halls drinks coffee made from poop and investigates, through their large droppings, why mammoths might have disappeared.

*In case you're wondering, it's not the Let's Make a Deal guy.  That would be Monty Hall.  Though it would probably be damn good television if they could get Monty Hall talking to Monty Halls about dung.

Warm Family Moment

The NY Times has more on the upcoming Hunter S. documentary, Gonzo:

As the documentary demonstrates, the bottom for the pair came when Mr. Thompson was assigned to cover the Rumble in the Jungle, the fight between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman in Zaire in 1974. Mr. Steadman explains in the film that in an act of enormous cocaine-assisted hubris (or perhaps fear that Mr. Ali, one of his heroes, was about to take a huge beating), Thompson gave away his tickets to the fight and went for a swim in the hotel pool. In doing so, he missed one of the greatest upsets in boxing history and, more important for a journalist, did not get the story.

By the accounts of many Thompson never recovered from that episode, gradually morphing into the character of Uncle Duke that Garry Trudeau introduced in “Doonesbury,” a cartoon figure who fired automatic weapons from his sun deck at apparitions and enemies that only he could see. He became the sum of his trademarks — the sunglasses, cigarette holder and inchoate rage — and ended up imprisoned by them.

“He was the master persona maker,” said Douglas Brinkley, the historian and friend of Thompson’s who serves as executor of the estate. “If Ernest Hemingway was going to go big-game hunting in Africa, Hunter wanted to use a submachine gun to hunt wild boar in Big Sur, Calif. He was dangerous, like handling nitroglycerin, and he liked to keep it that way.”

In the end everyone wanted to be around Thompson except Thompson. And on a bright winter day in Woody Creek, with his son in the house — Juan Thompson sardonically terms it a “warm family moment” in the film — he called his own bluff and blew his brains out.

He was infirm at the time, spending time in a wheelchair. Given his fundamental allergy to institutions like hospitals, his decision to set the terms of his exit is unsurprising.

“Hunter was very much one to share the pain when things went wrong, but he would share the glory as well,” said Anita Thompson, who married him in 2003. “He was a generous person, but he ended up surrounded by leeches and hanger-on-ers. It is the curse of fame.”

Hunter

Here's the trailer for the new Hunter S. Thompson documentary, Gonzo, coming to a theater near you in July.

BMW's On the Road

Seriously, is nothing sacred?  BMW is using On the Road in a Spanish TV ad.  And using one of the most overused quotes from the book at that:

 

Find more videos like this on AdGabber

But isn't it interesting that only the title of the book appears? Where's Kerouac's name?  Could it be that the words appeal but the person who penned the words might turn off the Beemer drivers they are trying to attract?  Who knows.  Maybe I'm just being sensative.  Judge for yourself.

Yawn. {via}

Filming The Road

Still hot.  Still busy.  But I saw this post over at Cinematical about the transformation of Cormac McCarthy's The Road from page to screen and thought I would share:

The movie represents, to me, an opportunity to magnify the novel's triumphs and diminish its failures. Director John Hillcoat (The Proposition) and his crew have reportedly been putting in painstaking effort to bring the bleakness and emptiness of McCarthy's universe to the screen. Looking at the still on top of this page sends a chill down my spine: the desperation in Viggo Mortensen's eyes, the utter shell-shock on Kodi Smit-McPhee's face, the grime and dust and ash that cover them, all make it apparent that the movie isn't going to spare us any of the novel's emotional wallop, at least not intentionally. The book has been hailed as a masterpiece of raw, devastating simplicity, but stripping it of some of McCarthy's stylistic flourishes could make it stronger still.

Cassady

A new biopic, Neal Cassady, premiered last week on IFC.  Unfortunately I forgot to set the DVR and now can only hope that they run it again in the near future.  Or I guess I can wait for the DVD.  Here's the trailer:

And here's more on the film from IFC:

IFC Festival Direct presents a film that poses the question: What happens to someone's life when they become famous through a fictionalized account? Noah Buschel's intelligent and unusual new biopic focuses on the life of Neal Cassady, one of the central figures of the Beat Generation. Chronicled by greats like Allen Ginsberg and Hunter S. Thompson, Cassady became an antihero for a new age. But, it was as Dean Moriarity, the lead character in Jack Keroucac's historic On the Road, that he was immortalized. Later in life Cassady hopes to settle into an ordinary family life, but the pressure from Beat fans to act like Moriarty haunts him. Shot gorgeously with a searing dreamy tone that mirrors the writing of the generation, "Neal Cassady" is the story of a man trying to live down his own legend. Before it kills him.

Knitter

I love this photo of Pedro Almodóvar helping his mom knit. {via}

Song of Himself

PBS's American Experience will air an hour-long documentary on Walt Whitman tonight.  Check your local listings for time and channel.  If you can't watch or record it tonight, you can always check the show's site to see it in its entirety:

On a hot summer day in 1855, a 36-year-old writer emerged from an undistinguished printer's shop in Brooklyn, New York, carrying a slim volume of his work. To family, friends and neighbors, Walter Whitman, Jr., may have been just a too-old bachelor who lived in his parents' attic, but as he walked the city streets that day, he knew something of himself they could not imagine. With his book of a dozen poems, Leaves of Grass, he was about to introduce America to a savior.

Ominous events were on the horizon in America, and Walt Whitman offered up his poetry and his persona as a perfect reflection of the America he saw; it was daring, noble, naive, brutish, sexual, frightening and flawed. He hoped his work could heal a fracturing America. But in his own time, his poetry was as contested as the idea of America itself.

This American Experience tells Whitman's life story, from his working class childhood in Long Island, to his years as a newspaper reporter in Brooklyn when he struggled to support his impoverished family, then to his reckless pursuit of the attention and affection he craved for his work, to his death in 1892.

Portman's Books

I've been sitting on this link for a while so please pardon if you seen it at every other site out there, but last night I had a dream and I think Natalie Portman was in it, only briefly but enough so that when I woke up I was reminded of reading this.  And if you needed a reason to like Ms. Portman (I mean, please, how can you not like her?), then knowing that she can say the following about David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas should convince you that she ain't your usual movie star and she's much more than the stunning (and I mean stunning)good looks:

This was the present I gave everyone I knew for three years. It's six different stories told in different time periods and genres: One is historical fiction, another is a '70s thriller mystery, the sixth is a post­apocalyptic story. It's one of the most beautiful, entertaining, challenging books—something that takes all your attention. I think the stories are meditations on violence, specifically the necessity of violence. The book ends with a beautiful exchange: "…only as you gasp your dying breath shall you understand, your life amounted to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean! Yet what is an ocean but a multitude of drops."

Krasinski's Brief Interview

Over at the NYT's Paper Cuts blog, Dave Itzkoff reprints the portion of his recent interview with The Office's John Krasinski that dealt with Krasinski's adaptation of David Foster Wallace's Brief Interviews with Hideous Men.  Here's a snippet:

Did you and Wallace ever speak directly as you began work on the film?

We did. I spoke to him on the phone. I think that he misunderstood where we were in the process. We were just about to cast the movie, and I think he was still thinking we were just trying to get the rights. So he was just giving me his blessing. Then we talked about what my understanding of the book was, and he said, I don’t really want to talk about the book, but maybe you could give me a little insight as to where you’re going with this. It was a great stamp of approval to hear I was at least on the right trail.

Were you afraid you might have one of those “Annie Hall” moments where your literary hero tells you that you’ve completely misunderstood his life’s work?

Exactly. “Why don’t you go read Dr. Seuss again?” I know there are way bigger David Foster Wallace fans. I found “Brief Interviews” at a time where I was expanding my brain in any way I could, reading anything I could and seeing anything I could. He was just one of the authors that really rocked things for me. I’m still reading all his stuff and still trying to understand him better and better, because it takes a long time. It’s a sort of a vintage thing.

Return

I'm still trying to figure out how four days could go by so fast.  More to the point, I'm wondering what happened to the months of June, August, September and October.  I'll be slowly trying to get back to a normal schedule over the next few days, including opening Bloglines for the first time since last Tuesday, so bear with me.  To start it off, here a few thrown together items mostly of a personal note, just to get the typing tips warmed up and ready to go:

• I know I said that I would be reading nothing but short story collections at least until the end of the year, but I forgot that a few reads would be out of my control--the nominated Litblog Co-op titles.  Yes, we are still active.  Just took some time off to reorganize.  I think there will be an announcement in the next few days so I won't spoil anything here, but let's just say that the books chosen this time around are all quality and made me happy to be reading novels again, even if I had to cram them in under deadline.
• I got around to seeing No Country for Old Men this weekend.  I'm going to try to put together something more detailed later on, but I will say that this was one of those rare cases that I liked the movie better than the book.  Also, did anyone else feel like this was a strange, Coen-CorMacish 21st Century-revision of The Andy Griffith Show? 
• Sick of Christmas?  We're still a week away from December 1st, over four weeks away from the day itself, and you can't get away from it.  Can't we all just digest our turkey and enjoy a break between the holidays before we let the yule overtake us? 
• More later.

Movie Day

Don't get me wrong, I love Autumn.  Unfortunately, my sinuses don't.  I'm taking a day to see if I can keep the front of my head from detonating.   But I'll leave you with the full version of Henry Fonda's movie adaptation of The Grapes of Wrath, a film that's been on my mind a lot this summer what with the lack of rainfall and the possibility that major cities in the Southeast might run out of water soon.  Enjoy.

{via}

Font Talk

If you let the title dissuade you from checking out the post, you'll be missing one of those rare moments when absurd TV becomes meta-absurd and threatens the existence of the very foundation of all we hold sacred.  Actually, it's just Vanna White and Pat Sajak talking about what font they prefer, but still...

Unearthing

Let's see, on August 29th of this here year I posted this little nugget which shows you not only the "green band" trailer to the new Coen brothers' adapatation of Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men but if you were lucky enough to be one of the fifteen folks to view it before it was yanked, you saw the "red band" version of said trailer.  Well, according to a certain highly influential blogger who seems to be reading only other "highly influential bloggers" these days, Papercuts, that NYT litblog that is pretty good at borrowing ideas from bloggers, "unearthed" the trailer just today, September 20th.  So if one unearths a trailer that was previously unearthed nearly a month before but by a much smaller blog--or one not attached to the NYT--can it still be considered unearthing or is it just being a little fart in a Cat 5 hurricane?

It's okay.  Just proves the futility of what I'm doing here.  In addition to working sixty hours a week I have to spend several hours a week earthing the NYT.

By the way, if you can stomach the blood (minor) and the ad (crappy), here's the "red band."  Or you can wait about a month for its unearthing.

 

No Country For Old Men - Trailer - Red Band

Let's All Go to the Lobby

It's nice to dream of a future, a future somewhat like my past, one when I will scan the fall movie preview lists and begin anticipating the movies that I'll be gleefully attending in the coming weeks.  Unfortunately, one of the many casualties (not that I'm complaining) of becoming a dad has been my moviegoingness.  Now it's become more of a privilege, something I have to save up for by doing untold numbers of honeydos or allowing the wife a day to get her nails or hair or eyebrows or kneecaps done.  For the most part, movies for me are paid-per-view and often not even that, especially if there's a good cop chase show on Court TV.  Anyway, I ramble on just to show you two trailers for movies which will have me doing plenty of honeydos in the next few weeks.  The first, No Country for Old Men, the adaptation of a Cormac McCarthy novel I didn't care too much for but which is directed by the Coen brothers, which means that I'll be in the theater on or close to opening night, exhausted from hanging new pictures on the wall or putting a new toy box together, but happy at the results of my effort and pleased with the movie, I hope.  Here's the trailer:

Or if you need more gore to get you excited about a movie, perhaps the "red band" version will do the trick.

There's always a chance that I'll get to see two movies this fall.  If so, I'm probably going to opt for There Will Be Blood, an adaptation of Upton Sinclair's Oil directed by Paul Thomas Anderson and starring Daniel Day-Lewis:

Is there anything else I should try to see?  I'll save you a little time by telling you that I have little or no interest in seeing the new Dylan biopic, especially if I have to put extra work in.  I'd rather save up that time to go catch a hockey or college football game or something. 

Oh and by the way, can anyone guess what the two movies above have in common?  Possibly more than one thing but if you can guess what I'm thinking I have a copy of Richard Powers' The Echo Maker that I'll send your way.

Ginsberg Cross

I'm sure some of you have been wondering how Cate Blanchett would pull off Dylan in the Dylan biopic, I'm Not There.  Myself, I've been trying to picture David Cross as Allen Ginsberg.  Well, here's a little clip to help all of us out.

Here Comes Harry

In the  LA Times, curmudgeon Richard Schickel discusses movie adaptations of popular books:

It's a very lucky novelist who creates a sacred text, something the movie folks dare not screw around with. Leo Tolstoy was not at first fortunate in this regard; the first screen version of "Anna Karenina" permitted her a happy ending. Neither was Herman Melville; there's an adaptation of "Moby-Dick" in which Ahab finds romantic fulfillment instead of a tragic fate in the final reel. Joseph Campbell, the great student of myth, once defined movies as "the genial imaging of enormous ideas," and these adaptations proved too genial — better make that too risible — for the literati of their day. Even Dashiell Hammett had to endure two ludicrous adaptations of "The Maltese Falcon" before John Huston finally got it right in 1941.

This suggests that when it comes to adaptation, neither literature's high end nor its low end is likely to gather about it an impassioned crowd whose demand for faithfulness weighs heavily with the studios. There are exceptions, of course. Back in the '30s, there were delightful movie versions of such beloved classics as "Little Women" and "David Copperfield," not complete in every detail but engagingly true to the spirit of those novels. And from the low end of the literary spectrum there was, in 1944, Billy Wilder's unimprovable take on "Double Indemnity," which its author, James M. Cain, thought (correctly) was better than his hastily written novel.

Friday Fix #1

If, like me, you're missing your weekly new episode of The Office, here's a little video clip that might help. Most of you are probably aware that John Krasinski (Jim Halpert) is directing a film adaptation of David Foster Wallace's Brief Interviews with Hideous Men.  No, this isn't a first look at the film; it is him reading from one of the "brief interviews," #14 if you're wanting to read along (p. 17 in the paperback edition).

Tuileries

I do like a little Steve Buscemi with my Coen brothers. And I renew my call to have Mr. Buscemi play Don Knotts in any role save a movie version of The Andy Griffith Show. Just thinking of Hollywood tinkering with TAGS makes me retch.{via}

Don't Stop Believin'

Let the debate begin:  Best use of a Journey song in a television episode. 

Drink the Kool Aid

According to Variety, Gus Van Sant is set to direct the long overdue bigscreen version of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test:

Shortly after the Wolfe book was published in 1967, its film rights were purchased by entrepreneur Alfred Roven. Not a film producer, Roven had some meetings over the years with filmmakers but was very protective. When he died, Roven left the rights to his children, Daryn and Alison Roven. FilmColony's Gladstein was introduced to them by attorney Peter Grossman, and for the first time, the rights were entrusted to a producer.

Van Sant, whose latest film, "Paranoid Park," was honored at Cannes, signed on quickly. The filmmaker cast Kesey in his 1993 film "Even Cowgirls Get the Blues" and dedicated his 2002 film "Gerry" to the author, who died in 2001. Van Sant enlisted Black, with whom he's collaborating on a biopic of slain San Francisco pol Harvey Milk.

It's likely Wolfe will not be a major character in the film, which will focus on Kesey and include events that occurred after the road trip.

Cut to Silent Black

{Turn away quickly if you still haven't watched it.}

I'll get this out of the way.  We'll never know what happened to Tony Soprano in the end.  We're left with silence, the echos of one of the most annoying songs ever recorded (ironic on a show that used so many quality songs on its soundtrack), and a black screen followed by the final, final credits.  Did anyone else wait around to a) see if the joke was on us and the last scene was going to be shown after the final credits or b) see if they were going to preview the next episode, the real finale.  Nope, that's all we get, all we're ever going to get.  We're left to speculate, that perhaps the place was about to blow up or Tony was about to catch a bullet from the guy whom we see disappear into the bathroom, or there's going to be an armed robbery gone bad, or the Feds will bust in and arrest Tony.

My theory is that he chokes on an onion ring, but that's just a contrarian view and one I haven't heard yet.

But what's most important is that we'll never know.  And if David Chase et al. do the right thing, that will be the case.  Forever.  We don't have to know and for godsake we don't need a movie.

And at least it didn't end Six Feet Under style, which I still maintain to be one of the biggest cop out endings ever.

How I Spent My Lunch Hour (or Great Moments of Percocet-Dosed Television Watching)

I refuse to even type the name of the celebrity who apparently is or isn't going back to jail in a few minutes, but thanks to her, I think I just witnessed one of the best moments in cable network news history.  For some reason--one supposes it's because he spent some time in the slammer--MSNBC decided to ask Tommy Chong, of Cheech and Chong fame, to make an appearance as an expert of sorts to discuss this whole [City in France Hotel] debacle.  Chong became confrontational immediately, thought it was a travesty, and not just the fact that [City in France Hotel] had even served three days for such a minor thing as drunk driving.  He basically alleged that this entire event, the blanket coverage, the OJish freeway footage, all of it was actually a media creation to take away attention from the plethora of problems in our country caused by Republicans. 

While that may or may or not be true, the best part of the whole thing came courtesy of MSNBC's talking head Contessa Brewer, who after a few minutes of trying to make sense of anything Chong was saying and actually get an interview out of the man, but who actually seemed to be a little pissed at having to cover this event in any way, finally quipped, “Have you smoked anything today?”

In Your Neighborhood

Yet another reason why I have to finally visit the great city of Pittsburgh:

{via}

No Country Clip

I mentioned last week that the Coen brothers' adaptation of McCarthy's No Country for Old Men was getting rave reviews following its showing at Cannes.  Well, here's a clip from the film.  Watch it while you can.

Several more clips can be found here.