“Oh f***, not another elf!”

Thus exclaimed English academic Hugo Dyson as his friend J.R.R. Tolkien prepared to read aloud the latest chapter in his then-unpublished “heroic romance” to a small audience of intimates in the pleasantly smoke-filled, gin-scented rooms of C. S. Lewis. Years earlier, during a fateful night of impassioned debate, it was Dyson and Tolkien who together convinced Lewis to forsake unbelief and embrace Christianity, doing such a good job of it that the future author of The Chronicles of Narnia would become the most influential Christian vindicator (I despise the word apologist) of the twentieth century.

Now Dyson was mocking the work of the man who would become the most influential purveyor of Christianized fiction of that same century, and many of Tolkien’s fellow Inklings were of the same mind. It was thus left to Lewis to spur the author of The Hobbit on to greater heights of imagination. “If they won’t write the kind of books we want to read, we shall have to write them ourselves,” he once told Tolkien, and that’s just what they did. Each used the medium known (fondly to some, pejoratively to most) as “fairy stories” to achieve the tang and ring and chime — and through them the thoughts and feelings and beliefs — that they were seeking in literature.

In between his increasingly unpopular Inkling readings, Tolkien wrote during snatches of time carved out of days filled with exhausting academic duties, and frequently only after penning worried, often melancholy letters to his sons off to war. “I sometimes feel appalled,” he admitted in one 1944 missive, “at the thought of the sum total of human misery all over the world at the present moment. . . If anguish were visible, almost the whole of this benighted planet would be enveloped in a dense dark vapour, shrouded from the amazed visions of the heavens! And the products of it all will be mainly evil….” In another he lamented that, “A small knowledge of history depresses one with the sense of the everlasting mass and weight of human iniquity: old, old, dreary, endless repetitive unchanging incurable wickedness. All towns, all villages, all habitations of men — sinks! . . . We do so little that is positive good, even if we negatively avoid what is actively evil. It must be terrible to be a priest!”

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Rumor has it that Sylvester Stallone’s The Expendables marks a return to the glory days of 1980s action mayhem and pro-American machismo. Its appearance on the cultural horizon has certainly stirred up memories of my mid-Eighties, Midwestern suburban adolescence.

It also brings to mind an excellent documentary I saw a few years back called Bigger, Stronger, Faster* (2008 — the asterisk leads to a footnote: “*The Side Effects of Being American”). You can check out the spectacularly funny, rousing, and nostalgic first ten minutes (and then the whole movie, if so inclined) at YouTube:

YouTube -- click here to watch full-screen

Stallone, Schwarzenegger, the Hulkster — all are members of a category of celebrity I described in a previous BH article as “silly video-game tough guys.” The walls of countless Reagan-era boys, myself among them, were papered over with posters and photos of these oversized he-men. Throughout our teen years we read their exercise books and magazine interviews, followed their advice, and strove to live up to their examples.

Examples that, as it turned out, were far too good to be true.

The director/narrator of Bigger, Stronger, Faster*, Chris Bell, kindly but thoroughly strips his beloved childhood icons of their mythic qualities, reducing them to a series of ordinary men who used tricks, illusion, and lots and lots of steroids to become larger than life to millions of youngsters. “It is kind of sad in a way,” Bell said in a Sundance interview at the time his movie was released, “how all of our heroes in America are now falling.” (more…)

John Woo is a director’s director, often causing other practitioners of the trade to gape and wonder “How on earth did he do that?” When they hear that a technically audacious movie like Hard Boiled cost only four million dollars to make, their amazement deepens. And when they learn that the film took 123 days to shoot, longer than most Hollywood extravaganzas, they begin to understand the amount of work, preparation, and creativity that goes into crafting such a picture.

David Bordwell, writing in Planet Hong Kong, describes how

Many of Woo’s visual tics, like freeze-frames and slow-motion walks and glances, were already passé in the West, but the “heroes” cycle allowed him to integrate them with MTV dissolving musical segues, an endlessly arcing camera, wistful silhouettes against saturated landscapes, and glamorous, anguished players. The result was a glossy synthesis of Italian Westerns, swordplay, film noir, and romantic melodrama new to both Hong Kong and the West.

“We are all learning from and imitating each other,” is Woo’s own way of explaining it. “Hong Kong in the old days got a lot of influence from American movies, especially technique. We got a lot of inspiration from the West. We used Western techniques to tell a Chinese story. We just combined elements to create a new cinematic language. Now it’s the West that is borrowing back. It comes full circle. We are all in the same film family. It is a good thing, I think.” (more…)

“REAL ART ENDURES” blared a printed United Artists sales pitch to theaters in 1920. “Art is not a matter of opinion. It is a matter of popular selection. D. W. Griffith’s Broken Blossoms is a more powerful attraction today than when it was first shown last Spring, because people speak of it, they see it again and again, and those who have not yet had the opportunity are looking for it. They feel it is the one film they must not miss. That is why Broken Blossoms is a more compelling box-office feature for you now than ever before. It’s name above your theater entrance means big business and prestige for your house.”

In our last installment, we read one critic from the 1920s refer to silent films as the “uncertain art of the unspoken drama.” What made it so uncertain was its newness. People then had no way of knowing how the technology was going to play out. Were “flickers” a fad, or something more? Would they be superseded by some newer, better, impossible-to-predict technology, making them as irrelevant as the horse and buggy had become by 1919? Or was this “uncertain art of the unspoken drama” fated to last for centuries, with names like Griffith and Gish remembered and admired in the year 3919 the same way ancient names like Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides still carried weight in 1919?

As it happened, silent films vanished in the face of synchronous sound only a decade after Broken Blossoms appeared. Black-and-white photography lasted a few more decades, but that, too, eventually gave way to color. The art of film continued, but the art of silent film was dead and largely forgotten. (more…)

Many of you know the story of Jerry Maguire, the agent with a conscience. Ya, I know. It’s only a movie. But sometimes movies can be great moral guideposts. Ironic that I should use one of Hollywood’s finest morality plays to illustrate how Tinseltown should operate at its most basic level.

In Jerry Maguire, the key conflict was Jerry’s realization that he was putting a pretty facade on the moral deterioration within his profession, and was in fact complicit in it. It took an injured hockey player’s young son telling him to fuck off and a bad dream for Maguire to realize the true ugliness of who and what he had become, especially when measured against the high standards of his idol and mentor, agent Dicky Fox. Those troubling events created in Maguire a perfect storm of revulsion, introspection and a commitment to reaffirm the basic principles of his profession, which he laid out in his memo “The Things We Think and Do Not Say.” In truth, he had me at hello. Tom’s a hottie! (more…)

In the beginning there was the word, and it had form.

Homer wrote his two great works, The Iliad and The Odyssey, in dactylic hexameter.  Not for arbitrary reasons was it so organized – in pre-literate Greek society, epic poetry was sung, and the fixed metrical structure allowed for ease of memorization for the poet while simultaneously lending a pleasing musicality for the listener.  This relationship between music and words, a relationship both practical and aesthetic, continued to be enshrined in poetic structural forms for millennia.

Until Whitman.

That beautiful, bearded, destructive bastard knocked poetic form hard to the ground with his free, expansive, structureless verse.  The fact that it was also thrilling and brilliant and original had the unfortunate effect of encouraging lesser poets to write in a likewise fashion, and what Whitman had floored in the 19th century was thoroughly killed in the 20th.  Music and verse became decoupled; form and structure became increasingly ridiculed as backwards, stifling, archaic, not unlike bourgeoisie society itself.

Until… (more…)

He is a man with a gun. He is a killer, a slayer. Patient and gentle as he is, he is a slayer. Self-effacing, self-forgetting, still he is a killer. . . All the other stuff, the love, the democracy, the floundering into lust, is a sort of by-play. The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted. — D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (1923)

Every once in awhile an action film comes along that revives. That proves that — no matter how strong the political correctness of an age, no matter how pale and pathetic its notions of masculinity, no matter how much Ritalin is force-fed to little boys, no matter how many toy guns, xylophone mallets, and Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots get banned from stores and playgrounds — there are certain aspects of the male soul that are inviolate, and certain primal yearnings that are evergreen. Taken (2008) is one of those films, and its release last week on DVD and Blu-ray should be heralded by lovers of all things red-blooded, hairy-chested, and morally sound.

When this movie appeared in the doldrums of Hollywood’s off-season, it was expected to die a quick death in a marketplace filled with audiences either too sophisticated or too sophomoric to respond. Modern theatergoers, the theory goes, increasingly want their “heroes” to be either brooding Abercrombie & Fitch nymphets like Leonardo DiCaprio and Matt Damon, feckless stumblebums like Ben Stiller and Paul Blart: Mall Cop’s Kevin James, quirky class cut-ups like Robert Downey Jr. and Johnny Depp, or silly video-game tough guys like Jason Statham, Vin Diesel, and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. When an actor does put some honest testosterone in his performance — Daniel Craig in Munich (2005), Clint Eastwood in Gran Torino (2008) — it’s inevitably to make a much larger point about violence breeding only more violence, all of it equally reprehensible, a product of way too many pesky males wreaking havoc in primitive bursts of knuckle-dragging temper. (more…)

The Not-Really-That-Epic Poem of Obamacles
Revised and Updated

(with Apologies to Homer)

Book the First: A question for the Muse

Speak to me, O Muse, of this resourceful man
who strides so boldly upon the golden shrine of Potomac,
Between Ionic plywood columns, to the kleig light altar.
Fair Obamacles, favored of the gods, ascends to Olympus
Amidst lusty tributes and the strumming lyres of Media;
Their mounted skyboxes echo with the singing of his name
While Olbermos and Mattheus in their greasy togas wrassle
For first honor of basking in their hero’s reflected glory.
Who is this man, so bronzed in countenance,
So skilled of TelePrompter, clean and articulate
whose ears like a stately urn’s protrude?
So now, daughter of Zeus, tell us his story.
And just the Cliff Notes if you don’t mind,
We don’t have all day.

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