Putting the Rant in Tarantino

I’ve been trying to organize my notes about Django Unchained for about two weeks now, and I’m not satisfied with anything I’ve been able to turn them into.  So, as a homage to David Shields--who is considered a writer because he publishes a bunch of unsourced quotes whose real authors are only noted in an appendix (and whose new book was originally titled How Literature Saved My Life Because It Gave Me People To Steal From)--here are those notes, in no particular order at all. 

Opening sentence:  Django Unchained is the kind of movie Tarantino fans can point to as a perfect example of what he does best and why they love it

It’s really two movies:  the first half is For A Few Deutschmarks More; the second half is Inglourious Niggaz.  So it’s a mash-up of a Sergio Leone Western and a revenge fantasy where the Jews Blacks kill Hitler Whitey.  As well as a twisted version of Paleface.

In-jokes abound.  The bar Minnesota Clay is the title of a Sergio Corbucci Western.  There’s a wanted poster for Edwin Porter, who directed the silent movie The Great Train Robbery.  Franco Nero, who played the original Django, is the guy next to Jamie Foxx when he spells out his name.  Samuel L Jackson’s last words (“You son of a b--“) echo Eli Wallach’s in The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.  The trick horse dance at the end is a direct steal from the Trinity films (including the Trinity theme music under).

Like Brecht, Tarantino steals with impunity.  (I eagerly await his heist movie, where the main character’s sidekick will be named M. Punity.)  And he displays his stolen goods so openly that they appear to be his possessions by right.  But the truth is, he is owned by them.

I don’t get the Australian accent thing at all.

Slavery is to this movie what torture is to Zero Dark Thirty.  Not just the Big Moral Issue, but The Elephant In The Room. The difference between Bigelow and Tarantino is that Bigelow shows you the elephant right up front, and then escorts you through a couple of other rooms that have a bunch of different animals in them.  Tarantino keeps showing you the elephant no matter what room you’re in, because it’s big enough to hide the lack of furniture.

QUESTION:  So if you take that elephant out of this movie, does it still work as a movie?

ANSWER:  On paper?  Sure.  A bounty hunter frees a prisoner because the prisoner can identify someone the bounty hunter is after.  Because the prisoner has a personal vendetta against, say, the evil rancher who framed him for murder, he agrees to a trade: I’ll help you if you help me.  The bounty hunter agrees, teaching the prisoner the tricks of his trade while they accomplish the first mission (The Job Plot), and then either dying or getting wounded heroically while helping the prisoner with his vendetta (The Revenge Plot). 

QUESTION:  You said “on paper.”  What about on film?

ANSWER:  Ah; well now.  There’s a teacher/student story here too.  In The Job Plot, the student learns the value of Doing The Job Without Caring; while in The Revenge Plot, the teacher learns that There Are Some Things Worth Caring About.  And thematically, whether or not he learns that lesson determines whether or not the teacher dies at the end.

I really hated the way Schultz dies at the end.  It was such a giant FU.  The one guy you figure is going to keep his cool turns into the one guy who loses it, like Steve McQueen suddenly turning into Robert Vaughn halfway through The Magnificent Seven. 

Schultz's plot role requires him to grow as a character--to move from the job view of life to the caring view of life.  But in the second half of the film, he’s the audience surrogate.  He views the casual violence of slavery the way we are supposed to: as something sickening, something to be despised.  Is this character evolution?  Or is this just the most likeable character in the movie continuing to be likeable? Is Tarantino even capable of character evolution?  He’s really good at scenes of competing self-interest, but character evolution? 

And how does Django evolve?  In the words of Stuart Klawans from The Nation: "He changes clothes."   And winds up dressed like a black version of Little Joe in Bonanza.

In story terms, you can do the final revenge movement one of two ways: with Teacher and Student fighting (and possibly dying) together, or with the Teacher off the board and the Student fighting alone.  Tarantino chose the second approach.  Not because the Student grows as a character, but because, since he’s alone, the Student is all we have left to identify with, so we’re the ones who make him bigger.  In a sense, by killing off Schultz the way he does, Tarantino is making us do his work for him.

Sidebar: the whole thing feels schematic.  Like Tarantino wrote it backwards and had to figure out a way to get rid of Schultz that would make sense.

Each main character has a double.  Schultz, who could be the grandfather of Hans Landa in Inglourious Basterds, is an amoral cosmopolitan who speaks at least three languages fluently.  He’s paired off with Calvin Candie, the fake cosmopolitan who affects to be French but God forbid you speak real French to him because he doesn't know the language.  (He’s sort of like Jay Gatsby with slaves.)  Meanwhile Django,  who starts out not knowing basic words in English and who, thanks to the miracle of montage, winds up as fluent with the language as he is fast with a gun, is paired off with Samuel L Jackson’s nasty-ass Stephen, who looks like the love child of Uncle Remus and Uncle Ben, and who (unless I misinterpreted a brief but telling moment in his final confrontation with Django) has spent most of his adult life faking a leg injury to get over with the white folks.  And he is a nasty piece of work, let me tell you.

It makes sense that the members of each pair will face off with each other, but Tarantino (characteristically) undercuts both moments.  Neither one is satisfying.  The Schultz/Candie showdown is so WTF it either gets nervous laughter or cries of anger or both.  And the Django/Stephen showdown, well, all along I figured we’d end up with a Mandingo fight between these two guys, which would have been all kinds of thematically satisfying.  But instead, you got a guy with a gun and a guy with a cane, and the outcome ain’t in question once the guy with the gun begins shooting.

Tarantino quotes Mandingo as an influence, but that movie is an uncle compared to the three Fred Williamson movies from the Seventies that can claim a piece of DU’s parentage: The Song of Nigger Charley, The Soul of Nigger Charley, and Boss Nigger--which is currently available under the single word title Boss, and plays out like a dead serious version of Blazing Saddles. 

Speaking of which: the KKK scene is in this movie?  Straight out of Blazing Saddles.  A bunch of lynch-happy peckerheads arguing about eyeholes in their pillowcases?  You can just hear Cleavon Little saying , “White people are so DUMB, baby.”  It’s a safe laugh, and when they get blown to hell, who cares?  They’re nothing but a bunch of stupid rednecks who deserve to die at the hands of our cultured, politically-correct heroes.  And in the background, you can hear Tarantino saying, “That’s right, modern audience--you laugh.  You laugh away.  Because in about 20 minutes, I'm gonna have an old black guy torn apart by dogs.  Who's your bitch now?”

If Tarantino was a fighter, he would only have two punches: a left jab so pussy it makes you laugh, and then a right to the jaw that makes you see stars.  He makes you laugh, and then he knocks you on your ass.  He makes you care, and then he knocks you on your ass.  He makes you sick to your stomach, and then he reminds you that it’s only a movie; and then he knocks you on your ass again.  And boy, is he a sucker for that “it’s only a movie” move.  Remember the end of Death Proof?  Where Kurt Russell is getting the crap kicked out of him, and suddenly it turns into a Foghorn Leghorn cartoon, complete with sound effects?  There’s something like that in all Tarantino’s films, and it’s beginning to feel more like a character flaw than a character trait.

Every time Tanrantino gets close to a real emotion, he points to the camera.  He’s the kind of guy who can’t have sex with you without picking the absolutely worst moment to point out that he’s doing to you what Mickey Rourke did to Kim Basinger in  9 ½  Weeks.

MICKEY ROURKE:  In his dreams.

KIM BASINGER:  Not mine.

I keep coming back to Schultz’s death, because it’s totally arbitrary, and yet, because of the way the film is structured, totally necessary.  There are so many ways a plot necessity can be accomplished, but in the end, the way it’s done says something vital about the artist.  When a man faces death, really faces it, you see exactly how much he values life. When a creator kills off one of his characters, especially someone the audience likes and identifies with, you see the same thing.   He can give him dignity, he can give him disgrace; he can have him come onstage cradling the dead body of his daughter, or he can have her willingly commit suicide because the odds is gone and there is nothing left remarkable beneath the visiting moon.  Or, as in this movie, he can have a character shoot another character and then turn around and say “I’m sorry; I couldn’t resist,” before he gets blown away.  A moment which, the more I think about it, seems to me to be nothing more than Quentin Tarantino talking directly to the audience.   I could have done this so many ways, he’s saying to us.  I could have given Schultz a noble death, or a clever death, or a death that was totally in character for him.  I know that.  But I decided to make it meaningless.  I decided to make it the preface to a ridiculously-over-the-top bloodbath.  I decided to go for the cheap laugh.  I’m sorry--I couldn’t resist.

Opening sentence:  Django Unchained is the kind of movie Tarantino detractors can point to as a perfect example of what he always ends up doing and why they despise it.

Cold Dead Hands

The good news is: the first act is done.

The bad news is: I have no glocking idea what happens next.

Law & Order: CIA

Zero Dark Thirty is actually three different movies.  The first, titled “See What You Made Us Do To You?” is concerned with gaining information through, shall we say, enhanced interrogation techniques.  The second movie is "Where's Osama?" in which Jessica Chastain’s Maya, who is blessed and/or cursed with the cleanest hair you will ever see in a desert country, plays the lone wolf intel jockey who has to convince everyone from her co-workers to her superiors that her interpretation of the facts is the correct one.  And the third movie is “Call of Duty: Pakistan,” where a bunch of hard-ass no-nonsense gun jockeys don their night goggles for a first-person shooter black op.  As evidence of this filmic schizophrenia, I point to the fact that there are currently two completely different trailers for ZD30, one which centers almost completely on Maya and one which is all Seal Team Six.  As for the third trailer, the one just showing the torture scenes, I think it’s currently only playing in three malls outside Langley, Virginia.

If you looked at this woman’s hair in night vision, 
it would sear your retinas.

What’s also interesting about this movie is all the movies that it isn’t.  Starting with the obvious--it isn’t a documentary.  But it’s a movie that wants it both ways, a movie that will play the demands of storytelling against the veracity of non-fiction, and vice versa, so that every attack you make on one area gets defended by pointing to the other.  This is more than disingenuous on the part of the filmmakers, since a movie is always and only what you see on the screen--not the book it was based on, not the historical events it was based on--and can only be judged on its own terms. 

And what are those terms?  Whether intentional or not, the film says that torture or the threat of torture gets quantifiable intelligence results. It says that the upper echelon of the intelligence community demands swift and decisive action even as it’s crippled by politics.  It says that politicians get in the way of everything, and that it’s not just us against them--it’s us against us.  It says that a determined, single-minded field agent is an outsider and a nuisance who can actually make things happen in this particular world as long as she’s wiling to make that single-minded purpose her entire life.  It also says that one well-placed use of the word “motherfucker” is a hundred times more powerful than all the times it’s anachronistically repeated throughout Django Unchained. 

And as I said, it’s also a lot of non-existent movies.  For instance, all the tradecraft makes you think this is going to spin out like a John le Carré thriller, but instead of a quiet patient British civil servant, we have a loud impatient monomaniac who is never wrong, which (given this character’s current incarnation in Homeland) is fast becoming a cliché. Our heroine also butts heads with the only other woman in her working group when she gets to her station, and in that initial scene there's a spark of antagonism between the two of them that makes you think, okay, I know where this is going--they’re going to be in each other’s faces from now on.  Only it doesn't happen; and not only doesn’t it happen, they become friends. All of which happens offscreen, because their relationship isn’t the focus of the movie.  We’re given Fact A, and then Fact B, and it’s up to us to either wonder how that happened, or draw a line between them so that they make sense.  In other words, we have to treat the information the movie gives us in the same way that Maya treats the information she gets: by making a story out of it. 

This happens all over the place.  There’s a moment in the beginning of the movie where Maya asks Dan, the chief interrogator, if a suspect they’re questioning is ever going to be freed, because she wants to go in talk to him without a mask.  When Dan says no, he’ll never get out, in Maya goes.  Now I don’t know about you, but that’s the kind of tell I’m used to filing away for future reference, as in: “They’re setting up somebody who can’t escape and identify her; wanna bet he escapes at some point and all hell breaks loose?”  Never happens.  We see Maya’s initial reaction to torture, and we think, okay, the fact that she has to deal with this is going to be a big thing, right?  Wrong.  We see Maya threatening her superiors, and we think, okay, this is heading to a showdown, but it doesn't go there.  We see her sit down with the head of the CIA and think, okay, this is obviously where we’ve been heading, and nope, not where we’ve been heading at all.  Because where we’re heading is a woman standing over a dead body, and that ending has been not just foreshadowed, but demanded, by the beginning of this movie, which is a dark-screen audio montage of emergency and personal calls from 9/11 World Trade Center victims. 

The identification of dead bodies.  Based on that ending, which to me at least is troubling and unsatisfying, Zero Dark Thirty is the story which one woman has created around certain pieces of information in her possession, a story which gets a bunch of people killed in the end, including the one person she’s really after.  A story where, once again--and this is the troubling, unsatisfying part--we’re set up to desire a specific knock-down that we never get.  What’s the knock-down?  The staple of all action movies: the moment where we get the satisfaction of seeing the bad guy die.   

No such satisfaction here.  When UBL gets shot, we see what the shooter sees, a fleeting glimpse of someone and then gunfire that hits him.  When the identifying snapshots of the dead body are taken, we see the blurred body and the flash of light and then the image on the pocket camera, but not a single one of those images is in focus or clear enough to give us a satisfying look at the features.  It's maddening, and I will argue that it's deliberately maddening, because that very lack of satisfaction is at the heart of what the movie is about. It's about knowledge in a world of intelligence. We are given that knowledge by people whom we can either trust or mistrust.  And because that act of trust or mistrust is vital to our belief or disbelief, we can only have an opinion about certain events.  We can't know for sure what really happened, because all we ever get is the story of what happened.  In the world of intelligence, “knowing” means “trusting the storyteller.”

And Maya, our storyteller--the one person who can know for sure?  When she identifies the dead body, we're looking up at her from behind the back of its head, like she's identifying us.  We don't get to see the face. We only get to see her looking down at the face, and giving her opinion.  If she says it's UBL, then we have to believe her.  We're in the same position as everyone else in the film: we either believe her or we don't. So do we believe her? Do we trust her? She could be lying.  She could be deluded.  She could be seeing what she wants to see.

Another director would have given us the money shot.  Spielberg would probably have swooped the camera up from behind Chastain so we could look over her shoulder and that halo of golden orange hair to view UBL's face head-on, all to some soaring John Williams music, because Spielberg wants to do your thinking for you.  Which is yet another movie this movie isn’t.

And yeah--to get totally esoteric on your ass--I think it’s more than coincidence that the main character’s name is the Sanskrit word for illusion.  The film sets up a world we think we know, and never follows through, leaving us to fill in the blanks with missing information.  In essence, it turns us into Maya. 

“This world of names and forms is maya,” as they say; and so is this film.

Some thoughts on Les Miz

There are rules that govern stage performances which do not apply to film.  One of them is what I call the three minute rule.  If a scene or a song goes on for three minutes or more during a play or a musical, an attentive audience will get caught up in the moment and its short-term memory will re-set, so that time takes second place to cause-and-effect.  Instead of asking chronological questions (where does this next scene happen in time?) the audience asks consequential questions (how does this next scene follow from what I’ve just seen?).  This is why, when you lay out the plot of Othello in a spreadsheet, it makes no sense, but when you see it in the theatre, it hums like clockwork.

I bring this up because, as I mentioned, film works differently.  In film, time takes first place; so when you’re watching a filmed stage musical with mostly songs and multiple locations that takes place over, say, 17 years of real time, simply presenting the scenes and songs one right after the other without layering in some temporal breathing space (wide shots; montage) makes everything look like, well, that Othello spreadsheet.  This is why the movie version of Les Miz takes place in a city of almost 2 million inhabitants where the same five people keep bumping into each other once every ten minutes.  

It’s also why this film is not what usually passes in movies for real life.  Hell, it’s not even what usually passes for larger than life.  It's a movie where everything is an emotional moment that starts out at 8 and goes back and forth between there and 10 for the next two hours.  Which makes “larger than life” look like a skyscraper in Lilliput.  And if you can't take all those 10’s without some 1’s along the way, then you're going to sit there with your arms crossed, wondering why everybody FEELS so much. 

As my friend Stacy says, “You either get it or you don’t.”  Me, I got it.  You?  You may hate it.  A lot of critics evidently did.  But there’s a snobbish snort to a lot of those bad reviews, like all those critics were a bunch of opera buffs who had to sit through Tommy, and were required by law to write 1000 words on how popular culture is not culture, or how Top Hat or The Band Wagon with their overdubbed vocals (and overdubbed tap-dancing taps, for that matter) are what people who want to see a good musical should be watching instead of Guess What.  (I’m not joking; go here for the article.)  Speaking as someone who absolutely adores The Band Wagon, this is like Mayor Bloomberg telling me how to live my life for my own good.  That’s not a review of a film; it’s a nanny lecture married to a therapy session.

If I was reviewing the film?  The first half hour is brilliant.  I really liked Anne Hathaway.  The “Master of the House” number has more cross-cutting and multiple angles than all the other musical numbers combined, which makes it not only stick out, but stick out like somebody dropped it in from the extras disc of Oliver.  The last half hour is like the last half-mile in a 5K race: it’s a lot of work to cross that finish line.  And (because it’s a film) I realized four things I didn’t notice before about the story (yes, there's a story here):

1. Every main character has someone else as the motivating factor in his or her life.  Javert and Valjean live for each other; Fantine lives for Cosette; Eponine lives for Marius; Marius is torn between the revolution and Cosette; Cosette is torn between Marius and Valjean. The only ones who live for themselves are the Thénardiers, and they wear out their filmic welcome pretty quickly, in my opinion.

2.  Calling Ivanhoe--here we are again with the mythic battle between the dark lady and the fair lady for the male romantic lead.  As usual in this battle, the fair lady is bland and the dark lady is interesting, which is why she gets the ballad that everybody still sings in auditions.  Hell, she even changes her sex (symbolically) to hang out at the barricades, like some Hugoistic version of Rosalinde.  And of course she has to sacrifice herself like Dietrich in Destry so the blonde-besotted sap she loves can marry Cosette without ever actually having to choose between the two of them.

3.  Russell Crowe can act, and Russell Crowe can carry a tune, but he can’t do both at the same time.

4.  The ending is deeply ironic.  Every dead person in the film, every single one with no tomorrow, is standing on a massive barricade and singing about when tomorrow comes.  Not because kings or jailers or the law is a tyrant.  Because Life is the tyrant.  And death is the only true freedom.  Top that, Top Hat.

2012 Report Card

Passions

Movies Watched in Theatres: 81

DVD’s Watched: 77

Plays: 32

Operas: 0

Dance Performances: 7

Readings: 8

Music Performances: 24

Museum Visits: 7

Books Read: 28

Plays Read: 37
Poetry Magazines Read: 29

Comic Books Read: 411

Staged Readings Given: 0

Produced Plays: 0

Poetry Readings Given: 0

Stories Written: 1

Ten-Minute One-Acts Written: 4

One-Acts Written: 2

Full-Length Plays Begun: 2

Full-Length Plays Finished: 0

Full-Length Plays Rewritten: 1

Screenplays Written: 1

Novels Begun: 2

Novels Finished: 1 (and boy does it need a rewrite)

Poems Written: 46

Blog Posts: 83

Submissions:  15

Acceptance Letters: 0

Rejection Letters: 8 from 2011, 4 from 2012

Awaiting Reply: 11

Addictions: Alcoholic

Abita             6

Allagash White 1

Bass Ale    3

Beck's        1

Blackened Voodoo     4

Blue Moon   11

Blue Point Ale   3

Boddington's     4

Brooklyn Lager 17

Budweiser    2

Corona      14

Bombardier   2

Dos Equis 13

Flying Dog In Heat Wheat 5*

Guinness  164

IPA   3

Killian's     1

Lion Stout 3

Long Island Pilsner     6

Magic Hat   10

Old English Hen             2

Pacifico     1

Presdidente       2

Sam Adams        86

Sierra Nevada   10

Stella         3

Yngling      2

Cabernet Sauvignon  4

Champagne        1

Chardonnay       1

Cote du Rhone 2

Malbec (bottles)        7

Malbec (glasses)       28

Merlot        6

Pinot Grigio       1

Pinot Noir   11

Riesling    15

Rose   3

Shiraz        4

Jameson    16

Powers  1

Macallan 4

Oban  5*

Petron (shots)   5

Don Julio  (shots)   3

Margaritas   10

Stolichnaya (shots) 6

Sangria   1

Rob Roy   2

Amazon heat    4*

Hurricane  4*

Sake   15 large

Checking The Tires   8

*all on the same night

Addictions: Romantic

Exorcisms: 1

Actual Attractions: 0

Neurotic Attractions: 3

Neurotic Attractions Acted Upon: 0

Miscellaneous

Weeks Spent in a Foreign Country: 0

Weeks Spent in the Nineteenth Century: 1 (Thanks, Hurricane Sandy!)

Total Spent on Comic Books: $1661.85

Price of Round Trip Ticket to Australia on Qantas: $1598

Weddings: 0

Memorial Services: 2

Eulogies: 1

Bowling: 4

All-Nighters: 3

Working Days of Drinking (8 hours or longer): 4

Nights On The Town With A Fetish Model: 2

Resolutions made on 1/1/12: 4

Resolutions kept as of 12/31/12: 2

Zombie Christmas - The 2012 Christmas Compilation

And here we are again, at the end of another year, where the operative word seems to have been lost--as in friends, loves, youth (hello, 60), elections (nyah nyah) and houses ("Thanks for nothing, Sandy. No Love Ever, Maddy."). Loss and endings. Like for instance the fact that the days are ending sooner is really killing me this year. I can't tell you how many times since we turned the clocks back that my body has said it's midnight and the clock has said 7:30. (Actually I can tell you exactly how many times, because I've been keeping track of it: 37.)

Yeah--a big year for endings: lives, friendships, more lives, maybe even tax cuts for the rich--and we even have the end of the world to look forward to in a week and a half. According to a long-extinct race that was so notoriously smart they could track the movements of Venus for centuries in advance, and so notoriously dumb they never invented the wheel. Which is, like many notorious things, not quite true--little Mayan children played with wheeled toys, if I remember right; it’s just that, when your cities and towns are all connected by cliff-based pathways, a wheel is more of a danger than a convenience.  People who live on a perpetual incline invent cleats, not the wheel.

And the way my, uh, (Maya?) year has inclined to go? Well, it's no surprise that my year-end version of those cleats is a playlist of holiday songs.  This year’s compilation was born even more quickly than last year’s, over a rain-soaked spring-like weekend where I flogged my dying Microsoft laptop for hours trying to get it to load up an internet connection, and trolled through four years worth of discards and downloads for tunes that struck my fancy--or, given that I’m more withdrawn than Bob Cratchit's bank account these days, struck me at all.

The result is below, split up into two downloadable zip files.  As with previous years, please let me know offline if you want these in CD format, or if you want any individual songs rather than the whole kit and kaboodle.  (Note to self: add “Kit and Kaboodle” to your list of Imaginary Rock Bands.)   

Merry Happy, everybody.

Zombie Christmas

The 2012 Christmas Compilation

1.      Zombie Christmas - Emmy The Great & Tim Wheeler

2.      Monsters Holiday - Bobby Boris Pickett and the Crypt Kickers

3.      It’s Christmastime (and I am still alive) - Deep Sea Diver

4.      It’s Christmas, Baby - Ms. Jody

5.      I Ate Too Much Over The Holidays - Lee “Shot” Williams

6.      Santa Bring My Baby Back - O.B. Buchana

7.      I Need A Lover For Christmas - Sheba Potts-Wright

8.      I Need A Man Down My Chimney - Barbara Carr

9.      Ain’t No Chimneys In The Projects - Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings

10. New Year’s Resolution - Otis Redding & Carla Thomas

11. Our New Year - Tori Amos

12. All I Ever Get For Christmas Is Blue - Over The Rhine

13. Home For The Holiday - Sugar & The Hi Lows

14. Snowfall Kind Of Love - Ingrid Michaelson

15. Deeper Than You Know - Marc Scibilia & Leigh Nash

16. Christmas In Paradise - Mary Gauthier

17. It’s A Wonderful Life - Henry Travers

18. Wonderful Life (Live) - Kylie Minogue

19. Christmas For Cowboys - Jars of Clay

20. Christmas Time In The City - Mary Chapin Carpenter

21. Santa Looked A Lot Like Daddy - Brad Paisley

22. Don’t the Girls All Get Prettier Around Christmastime - Mickey Gilley

23. The Little Hooters Girl - Bob Rivers

24. Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town (Q-burns Abstract Message Remix) - Johnny Mercer with the Pied Pipers

25. Christmas Alphabet - The McGuire Sisters

26. Django Bells - Gypsy Hombres

27. Linus And Lucy - Bela Fleck & The Flecktones

28. Santa’s Midnight Run - The Untamed Youth

29. Santa Is Coming (Ho, Ho, Ho) - The Woggles

30. Santa’s Too Drunk To Drive - The Hot Rods

31. Driving Home For Christmas (Extended Remix) - Benny Royal vs. Chris Rea

32. All Alone On Christmas - Parker Lewis & Matilda Berggren

33. Christmas Day (I Wish I Was Surfing) - Emmy The Great & Tim Wheeler

34. Christmas In the Sand - Colbe Caillat

35. Oh Holiday - Jules Larson

36. Bonus Track - Hers

37. Bonus Track - His

Zombie Christmas - Part 1

Zombie Christmas - Part 2

Bonus Download: Bah! Humbug! The 2003 Christmas Compilation

Movies in brief

Skyfall.  Good; very good.  But still not as good as Casino Royale, which is probably what we’re going to be saying about the next ten Bond movies.  Especially since Daniel Craig is only signed for the next two.  The film does five things at once: it sends Bond through a three-hour action plot that feels like two hours tops, winks at past movies (hello and goodbye, Aston Martin), gives Bond a past (hello, Scotland), sets up the Bondian supporting cast (hello Q and Moneypenny), and creates a modern version of the Bond Villain (hello, Javier Bardem in a bad wig) who can destabilize governments with a single computer and yet still persists in shooting a lot of bullets from big-ass guns that never once hit our hero (hello, Stallone Rules).  As an added bonus, Judi Dench reminds us why she won on Oscar for five minutes of screen-time in Shakespeare In Love, and Albert Finney plays the obvious Sean Connery cameo (supposedly they offered it to Connery and he declined) by performing his own version of an in-joke and channeling Wilfred Lawson’s Black George from Tom Jones. 

Anna Karenina.  You’re either going to love or hate the directorial conceit that embraces this Tom Stoppard script: all the country scenes (and this version actually has the country scenes) take place in the country; but all the Moscow scenes take place on a huge period proscenium stage, including the railroad scenes and (brilliantly, IMO) the horse race.  Me, I loved it, and not just because for once we get to see all the Levin and Kitty scenes.  I loved it for Jude Law’s Karenin.  The way he makes the man sympathetic is astounding when you think that ten years ago he would have been typecast as Vronsky.  It makes me want to see him play Torvald in Doll’s House opposite Lily Rabe. 

Killing Them Softly.  By boring them to death and making them walk out of the movie theatre thinking they just wasted 15 bucks.  The perfect George Higgins movie, because it’s just as annoying as the book.

Argo.   It’s such a rare pleasure these days to see a movie where you’re on the edge of your seat even though you know the ending.  That’s what this movie is: a pleasure to watch, and in retrospect all too rare.

Lincoln.  Speaking of movies where you know the ending.  Where Argo goes for the excitement of a thriller, Lincoln goes for the excitement of getting caught up in a good novel, which is unsurprising given the Tony Kushner script.  What is pleasantly surprising is that it’s the most bookish thing Spielberg has directed, which may be why his usual bag of tricks is not in evidence.  All for the better, say I.  Other pleasant surprises include Sally Field’s Mary Lincoln, Tommy Lee Jones’ scene-stealing Thaddeus Stevens, and James Spader’s unrecognizable “I’m just having a great old time” WN Bilbo.  And while it seems redundant to say that Daniel Day Lewis is probably the greatest film actor we will ever see in our lifetime, it’s only redundant in the same way that saying Michael Jordan was the greatest basketball player we will ever see in our lifetime.  In both cases, the level of the game is raised to stratospheric levels even as they make it look easy.  Best movie of the year so far.  And don’t forget to stay through the credits and see Joseph-Gordon Levitt get the keys to the Beard Cave from his father’s manservant.

MZ Ribalow Memorial Celebration Speech

This past Saturday night at The Players Club, there was a memorial for my friend Meir Ribalow, who died in August. I had the honor to be the final speaker of the evening. Here's the speech I gave. 

Hi, I’m Matthew Wells.

In a few minutes, I’m going to read you a sonnet I wrote the morning after Meir died. But before I do, I want to tell you a couple of stories. Well, actually, Meir wanted me to tell you a couple of stories.

The first story starts in the wild and empty desert. To the tune of whistled notes as liquid as a flute, a lone rider appears--a man whose calm and steady self-possession only needs a spark of fire to blaze up into irresistible action--a man whose two companions are a wolf called Black Bart, and a horse named Satan that no other man can tame.

The name of this cowboy is Whistling Dan Barry, and he’s the hero of three Max Brand novels which Meir read as a kid, and returned to when he was an adult.  As he put it, “I wanted to see if they were as good as I remembered them being.”  And because, for him, they were still that good, those books were one of the first things he told me about when we started to get to know each other.  I think he told everybody about them; and if he didn’t tell you, please don’t feel slighted--it just means he didn’t get around to it yet.

Why did Meir love the Dan Barry books?  Because they are literate, adventurous, courtly, earthy, entertaining and instructive.  Y’know--like Meir.  That’s answer number one.  Answer number two is a lot simpler: because they are good westerns.  Meir loved westerns.  We are, after all, celebrating a man who would have fought tooth and nail to wear that Stetson of his to a nudist colony.

A man who loved not just Dan Barry, but Ethan Edwards, Tom Doniphon, Cole Thornton, JP Harrah; Randolph Scott and Joel McCrea in RIDE THE HIGH COUNTRY, Gregory Peck in THE GUNFIGHTER; and Gary Cooper in just about anything. 

Meir told a lot of Gary Cooper stories.  Here’s one you haven’t heard yet. 

On the last Sunday in July, there was an article in the Arts section of the New York Times about LONELY ARE THE BRAVE (1962, directed by David Miller, starring Kirk Douglas and Walter Matthau).  According to the article, Miller’s only direction to Douglas was, “Try and play this the way Gary Cooper would.”  Which prompted Douglas to write Cooper a letter admitting that he was in essence playing the quintessential Gary Cooper part, and confessing his fear of failure by saying: “I know now that at best I will come remotely close.  But more important--I do know also that just trying to be you will make a better me.”  A statement made even more poignant by the fact that Cooper died nine days after Douglas wrote that letter.

When I visited Meir on that Monday, the day after this article appeared, the first thing he did was swing his computer screen around to display the online version.  “Did you see this?” he said.  And when I told him, “Yes, and I thought of you when I read it,” Meir said: “And I thought of Maria Janis. (Gary Cooper's daughter, with whom Meir was good friends.) I don’t know if she knows this.” And he reached for the phone across his day bed, and he looked at me over his glasses and he said: “She has to know this.  Don’t you agree?”

Now, I knew Meir well enough to know that the phrase “Don’t you agree” was not a question. It was his way of saying, “If you don’t agree, meet me on Main Street at high noon; bring a gun.”  And those first five words?  “She has to know this?”  In various forms, those five words echo through the lives of everyone he ever met.  “You have to read this,” he would say.  “You have to see this.”  “You have to write this.”  “You have to hear this.”  “You have to know this.” Seriously--raise your hand if the only reason you know about a movie or a book is because Meir told you about it. [BEAT] The rest of you have forgotten.

How do you explain someone like that?  By saying that sharing was a reflex with him?  By saying that it was the teacher in him?  Maybe by saying it was the eager and eternal student in him, which is why he was such a great teacher?  Each one is true, in its own way; but in the end, explanations are like labels, and people are more than labels.  Meir did what he did because he was Meir.  Because his friends echoed in him.  And if you were Meir’s friend, and he understood you, then you were all right. 

Which happens to be a quote from another one of Meir’s favorite westerns, a movie called RAMROD.  1947.  Directed by Andre DeToth.  Joel McCrea; Veronica Lake.  RAMROD puts a film noir femme fatale in the middle of a cattle ranch war--a woman who gets away with murder because the men around her all treat her with respect--a woman who can slap the bad guy and know that he won’t hit her back, because that’s just not done; he’ll only smile and say, “You know, Connie--that’s the first time you’ve ever touched me.”

Which is my favorite line from the movie--not Meir’s.  His favorite line gets said later, when Connie, played by Veronica Lake, has endangered Joel McCrea’s life--because that’s what the femme fatale does--and McCrea’s best friend Bill is going to sacrifice himself to buy McCrea time to escape. “And he’ll need that time,” Bill says to Connie.  “Thanks to you.” 

Now a normal human being would probably feel remorse at this point, but Connie is not a normal human being, it’s all about her, which is why she says: “You haven’t much use for me, have you, Bill.” And Bill takes a moment to size her up and then he tells her exactly how small she is by saying:  “You’re like a horse or a dog or a man or any other woman.  Once I understand you, you’re all right.”  And he turns and rides off, to what he knows will be his death. 

His certain death.

At the end of THE UNTAMED, the first Dan Barry book, winter is coming, and Whistling Dan sees the wild geese flying south; and because he is a wild child himself, a force of nature in buckskins, he feels the urge to ride off after them.  But following them would mean leaving Kate Cumberland, the woman he loves, the woman who knows him well enough to understand exactly who he is, which is why she tells him that he has to go; he has to follow the wild geese south; he has to leave her.  She says this in the hopeful knowledge that, when the wild geese fly north in the spring, Dan Barry will follow them back to her.

That’s the kind of close that feels right at the end of a good western--a close that remains open.  Our hero riding off into the sunset, and with him rides the possibility of a sunrise when he may someday ride back. 

One of the most famous instances of this is at the end of SHANE.  Meir’s favorite western; his mother’s favorite movie.  1952.  Directed by George Stevens.  Jean Arthur; Alan Ladd; and Brandon deWilde.  If you haven’t seen it, you should. And I don’t think I’m spoiling anything by saying that, in the end, the wounded hero who has just killed the bad guy rides off into the mountains, because he is what he is--he’s a gunfighter--and all good gunfighters are like Moses--they can get you through the desert, but they are not permitted to cross that river into the Promised Land.  Like a good teacher, their job is to get you to where they are not needed anymore.  Because it’s the gunfighter’s job to make sure that there are no more guns in the valley. 

So Shane rides away, wounded.  That ride is open-ended--we’re never told what happens to him--so what we think happens next is not just a window into his story, but ours.  In other words, if you choose to look at the end of this movie as a touchstone--and I know Meir did--then there are only two kinds of people in the world.  The ones who think Shane dies at the end, and the ones who are dead certain that he lives. 

Meir was unapologetically part of that second group.  He had no use for despair, no time for cynicism, and no patience for people who thought that moaning was a form of music.  I keep thinking of the line that gets repeated over and over again in John Ford’s RIO GRANDE: “Get it done.”  “Get it done, Johnny Reb.”  “Get it done.”  That’s what Meir did.  He got it done.  He was a man for whom the work was its own reward.  The care and pride he took in casting the absolutely perfect actor for a play or a story reading was like a jeweler’s pride in matching a diamond with the perfect setting.

No surprise there.  As Meir once said about his father, he loved writers and he loved talent, and he lived for what he loved.  As Meir once said about his father, he did not want to be emulated; he wanted to inspire.  And as Meir once said about his father: now, we must live in a world where his absence is a constantly illuminating presence.  Where what happens next is not just a window into his story, but ours.

Life is a coincidence of travelers.  A bond can be created from a glance.  Chance meetings can turn into lifelong friendships.  Far too often, you go through your day, and in the back of your mind is a voice which asks, “Am I really the only one who thinks this?  Am I really the only one who feels this?  Am I really the only one who likes this?”

And then somebody rides into your life like Meir--a man who gives you permission to be yourself--a man who answers all those inner questions not by saying you aren’t alone anymore, but by saying you never were.   Which is why, for me, meeting Meir Ribalow was the equivalent of Robinson Crusoe finding Friday’s footprint in the sand.  It was the day my desert island became a community.  Of which he was the one and only mayor.   

He was an amazing friend to me.  When my brother died two years ago, Meir called me constantly; and if he didn’t hear from me for more than three days, I’d get out of work and there’d be a message from him on my phone.  “Just calling to see how you’re doing,” he’d say, or, “Give me a call when you get a chance; I want to run something by you.”  And then we’d talk for the next thirty hours.  Quite a gift, when you remember that this is a man who had more than a few issues of his own to deal with on a daily basis. 

That’s the Meir I’ll never forget.  The man who was the western hero of his own life--especially at the close. I hope he thought I was as good a friend.  He was--he was and is--my non-blood brother.  I loved the man this side idolatry.  I still do.  And in that, too, I am not alone.  Because like Shane, Meir didn’t just ride off into the sunset.  He rode off into us.

So all that, and more, is why, on the morning after Meir followed the wild geese south, I sat down with my notebook in the Dunkin’ Donuts at the corner of 20^th Street and 3^rd Avenue, and I wrote the following sonnet.  I changed a couple of words on the ride over to the burial service, and when the time came to say my farewells, I read it over his grave.

It’s time to say farewell again, so here it is.  It’s called Ride Away.   

Ride Away

I saw his Stetson first, as he rode up.

   He grinned at me as if he’d found the Grail.

When we made camp, he offered me a cup,

   And, for a while, we shared a common trail.

He had a hunger only hard work fed.

   He’d ramrod someone’s ranch, get it to thrive,

Then quit and move on--like he always said,

   “It’s not about the cattle--it’s the drive.”

A river to his people, he would fight

   For others with a passion uncontrolled.

And when he rode west, hunched against the night

   Like Shane before the final credits rolled,

      He called out, as he crossed that river wide:

      “I’ll see you, Pilgrim, on the other side.”

Copyright 2012 Matthew J Wells