Has John Cusack Ever Made a Bad Movie?

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Kidding. Sort of.

I mean, look, the guy’s made almost 60 movies, in a career spanning more than 25 years (per his Wikipedia filmography, at least). It’s pretty much impossible to make that many films and have nary a stinker in the bunch.

Granted, I haven’t seen all or even most of those five dozen films. (Which surprised me, actually; I’d been prepared to open this post by flashing my Cusack credentials, daring anyone to challenge me.)

But I’ve seen a lot of them. And I honestly cannot think of a single film, even the ones he hasn’t “starred” in, which he has not boosted by a sly, assured performance.

Lord knows, there’s nothing conventionally movie-star about his looks — his soulful-hangdog looks (like in the above photo) or (as at left) his crazy looks or (as below right) affable, laughing, and apparently relaxed. (I’ve never seen Rachael Ray’s talk show, but I’ve seen her manic 30-Minute Meals routine. It’s hard to imagine anyone could ever really be relaxed around that person, but I remain open to the possibilities of an infinite universe.)

And Lord knows, in one of his profession’s true injustices, he doesn’t have shelves full of acting awards.

But damn, the guy is a pleasure to see on the screen.

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The Thing That Happened, Once

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From whiskey river:

At Blackwater Pond

At Blackwater Pond the tossed waters have
settled
after a night of rain.
I dip my cupped hands. I drink
a long time. It tastes
like stone, leaves, fire. It falls cold
into my body, waking the bones. I hear them
deep inside me, whispering
oh what is that beautiful thing
that just happened?

(Mary Oliver)

And:

In the tea ceremony, the expression “once in a lifetime, this one encounter” is often used. The usual way this is interpreted is “a one-and-only encounter.” In Zen, though, we interpret this expression in the following way: In the course of our lifetime, there is one person we must meet. No matter through which grasslands we may walk or which mountains we may climb, we must meet this person. This person is in this world. Who is this person? It is the true self. You must meet the true self. As long as you don’t, it will not be possible to be truly satisfied in the depths of your heart. You will never lose the sense that something is lacking. Nor will you be able to clarify the way things are.

This is the objective of life as well as of the teaching of Buddhism — to meet yourself.

(Sekkei Harada)

And the obvious musical bit (lyrics follow), although the video is a bit… unusual:

Once in a Lifetime
(words and music by Talking Heads;
performance is emphatically not)

And you may find yourself living in a shotgun shack
And you may find yourself in another part of the world
And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile
And you may find yourself in a beautiful house,
with a beautiful wife
And you may ask yourself: Well… how did I get here?

Letting the days go by/Let the water hold me down
Letting the days go by/Water flowing underground
Into the blue again/After the money’s gone
Once in a lifetime/Water flowing underground.

And you may ask yourself
How do I work this?
And you may ask yourself
Where is that large automobile?
And you may tell yourself
This is not my beautiful house!
And you may tell yourself
This is not my beautiful wife!

Letting the days go by/Let the water hold me down
Letting the days go by/Water flowing underground
Into the blue again/After the money’s gone
Once in a lifetime/Water flowing underground.

Same as it ever was… same as it ever was …same as it ever was…
Same as it ever was… same as it ever was… same as it ever was…
Same as it ever was… same as it ever was…

(Followed by Statler and Waldorf: “Same as it ever was! Same as it ever was! Yeah—” “An hour ago!” [laughter])

Original, longer version, from the concert film Stop Making Sense, can be viewed here.

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Puzzlin’ Evidence… Done Hardened in Your Heart

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Talking Heads was one of those bands which I probably never would have picked up on — not on my own, anyhow. Predictably, in retrospect, it took a nudge from my brother.

Or rather, a couple of different nudges. One of the later ones came in 1986, with the release of the musical film True Stories. Mike pointed me to a couple of reviews and then, somehow, he managed to corral a bunch of us to accompany him to Philadelphia to see it one night.

Nominally, it’s a Talking Heads film: the group released a not-quite-soundtrack album containing its versions of the songs. But in the film — written and directed by, and “starring,” the Heads’ lead singer, David Byrne — with few exceptions, the songs are performed by other people in the cast. For instance, a voodoo priest (played by gospel/R&B star Pops Staples) sings a song called “Papa Legba” to bring love and good fortune to Louis (The Dancing Bear) Fyne (played by John Goodman).

The general idea for the film came to him, Byrne has said, from tabloid stories — how they might represent people from a single town.

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Water Falls. It Really Does.

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[First, to get this out of the way, allow me to introduce you to Miss Globe-head. That’s her over there on the right. And if you don’t know why I’m introducing the two of you, please check my previous post.]

For a number of reasons — most of them having to do with writing, by the way — I’ve been fascinated for years by the country of Wales.

(The Missus might argue with that “most of them,” by the way. She believes that I must have lived a former life there, and maybe she’s right. Not that I have any memory of it. Or evidence of it, for that matter, beyond the fascination.)

This Welsh thing of mine has taken several turns. I’ve got books about the history and culture of Wales. I’ve got a Welsh-English/English-Welsh dictionary. Somewhere along the line I even picked up a cassette-tape “teach yourself Welsh” language-instruction course.

Sometime in the early ’90s I was in a used bookstore in Charlottesville, Virginia, and came across a beautiful picture book called The Waterfalls of Wales, by one John Llewelyn Jones. (And it was beautiful, despite the fact that except for the cover, all its photographs were in black-and-white.)

Aside from the Welsh connection, I think what drew me to the book was the subject: waterfalls in general.

Now, if you’ve been following weather news during this hurricane season, you know that the topic of running water is especially fraught for people around the state of Florida right now. But the water-borne terrors of Fay, say, are of a completely different character than the sorts of running water I’m thinking of.

Consider, for example, this photograph (not from the book) of Sgwd Isaf Clun Gwyn, Afon Mellte (roughly, “White Meadow Lower Falls, [on the] River Mellte” — and if anyone can supply more polish to the translation, please speak up!):

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Writing about Reading — and Not Blogging (2)

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Once again, I’m shirking my blogging responsibilities today in order to work on a review, for the Book Book blog. (This time around, it’s Douglas Preston and Mario Spezi’s The Monster of Florence.)

As before, I offer you instead a couple of YouTube treats.

Let’s start with a trivia question. Who said this?

There is nothing quite so good as burial at sea. It is simple, tidy, and not very incriminating.

[Theme from “Jeopardy”]

Ding!

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Actions Speak Louder

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Robert Mitchum in 'Night of the Hunter'Writer’s dilemma: “Show, don’t tell.” “But how do I show somebody who’s uneasy? Isn’t that why we have the adjective ‘uneasy’ in the first place — sort of shorthand for all the… the stuff an uneasy person might do?”

Um, no.

Enter The Emotion Thesaurus, a (weekly?) Thursday feature at The Bookshelf Muse.

You start to type how your [Main Character] is cringing in terror and then stop. You glance back a page and shake your head. Somebody cringed in the last scene — can’t use that one. Hot, shuddering breaths? Nope, breathing’s already come up a million times in this book, so that beat won’t work. You need something different, something unique to show fear. His eyes widened? His face was a frozen mask? Pu-leeze. The POV police are screaming at the thought.

The joy and energy starts to leak out of you. The excitement that brought you here is fading. You can’t seem to find the right way to show the rawness of your character’s fear. Everything action you come up with seems trite or hollow or cliché.

Reality trickles in: the coffee’s even colder now, and the mailman has gone. Your flyers are probably out there on the step, about to blow away. And of course the eerie silence means your dog no longer needs to go outside. You sag in your chair, defeated by a descriptive beat.

As you leave to mop up Mr. Ruffy’s mess, you glance at the computer screen and think, if only I had a thesaurus of emotional beats.

…Now, if you draw a blank on how to show your character’s emotion through a physical action (a beat), we can help. Each Thursday we will introduce new cardinal emotions to our thesaurus, offering you an ‘idea bank’ for the times when you get stuck. You can scroll through our lists, and see if one of our ideas sparks one of your own.

For instance, here’s a selection from yesterday’s post, on “impatience”:

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Watchmen: The Movie?

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Watchmen - issue 1, September 1986I don’t read many graphic novels, but I do read some. There’s no pattern, apparently, to the ones I’ve chosen to read, except that I tend to favor ones heavy on story (and not necessarily on action).

Watchmen (written by Alan Moore, illustrated by Dave Gibbons) is in a class by itself.

Published as a regular “comic”-book series in 1986-87, from the very first issue it announced its difference. (See the cover of issue , over there on the left, for the opening evidence — surely among the most subversive uses of a smile symbol.) If you have no classic-comix-style used bookstores handy, fear not: its twelve issues were repackaged in 1995 in a single paperback volume, which you can obtain at many places (it’s still in print), including Amazon and all the usual brick-and-mortar sources.

The premise of the story, while neither unique nor original in the comic-book universe, will strike newcomers (in these days of superhero movies and other forms of media worship) as a little strange: Imagine a world in which superheroes are real, really real. They include superheroes you’ve never heard of, among them the seven who figure as Watchmen‘s protagonists: Doctor Manhattan, the Comedian, Ozymandias, Nite-Owl, Rorschach, Captain Metropolis, and Silk Spectre. (That’s them in the image below and to the right, running clockwise and starting with the freaky blue guy at the top.)

Watchmen - cast of charactersThey’re “people,” yes, of a particularly intense (and talented or perhaps even mutant) sort. But people nonetheless, with ugly or sympathetic pasts, who live in flophouses or penthouses, perhaps eat meals cooked in the equivalent of microwave ovens, have relationships with one another, get disappointed and p!ssed off.

Furthermore, as a class, they’re regulated, or rather registered with the mid-1980s government. Why? Because in the Watchmen world, there was a time when it seemed like any idiot with a stretchy-fabric uniform was running around, fighting crime (or imagining he was fighting it). They kept getting in the way of the real forces of law and order — the police et al…

I won’t spoil your pleasure in getting to know more about Watchmen on your own. (But I will note that it not only won a Hugo Award for science fiction in 1987 — the only graphic novel to have done so. In 2005, Time magazine also named it to its list of the best 100 novels in the English language published since 1923. Get that? Not graphic novels. Not comic books. Not fantasies or works of science fiction. Novels, period.)

But I will say I was delighted to learn recently that a Watchmen movie is scheduled for release sometime in 2009. (Here‘s the IMDB page on it.) Like many fans of the book — of superhero comics in general — I’m apprehensive about Hollywood’s take on it. They can never include everything, after all, and what’s left must necessarily be altered somehow to account for the subtractions.

Still, hope springs eternal and all that. Based on the trailer (below), they seem to have certainly captured the look of the comic — to the extent which any live-action film could:

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When Language, Pop Culture, and Politics Collide

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'1776' film poster

You know what driver’s-ed classes don’t teach you? They don’t teach you how complicated it is to make your way through a busy intersection of more than two streets, especially when there are no traffic signals.

I thought about this failure today, in connection with the 1972 film of the musical 1776.

Until last night, I’d never seen the movie and never (truth be told) had wanted to. No objection to musicals per se, you understand. But I’ve always had a hard time with light and frothy musical treatments of truly momentous historical subjects.

(Yet I very much like Cabaret, and agree with Pauline Kael’s assessment at the time it was released: “A great movie musical, satirical and diamond-hard.” Satire with an edge: good. But perkiness? Eh, well…)

But last night my resolve was weak. The Missus and I were both wiped out by planning, preparing, and executing a July-4th cookout for […counting…] ten people. While she escaped to her office, collapsing into a fog of online gaming, I just sat, stretched out, on the sofa, TV remote close to hand. And clicked. And clicked. And clicked…

For some reason probably having to do with the previous day’s power failure, when I first turned it on the channel was set at 2: the Home Shopping Network. (click) PBS had David McCullough on Charlie Rose, talking about John Adams. (click) Wonder what’s on Turner Classic Movies…? Hmm. William Daniels in colonial garb. Singing. Singing? Did William Daniels sing? What was this, anyhow?

By the time I realized what it must be, I’d been sucked in.

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Mr. Excitement

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So, The Missus indulged herself by going on a beach mini-weekend with a girlfriend.

Of course I pounced on the opportunity for a hedonistic erstwhile-bachelor weekend of my own.

And before you get your collective backs up (or, alternatively, let your collective imagination run riot): no, I didn’t do anything that a stereotypical bachelor does. Even an erstwhile stereotypical bachelor. Here’s how I spent the last couple days:

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Signature Samuel L.

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Last night The Missus and I watched 1408 on DVD. If you’re not familiar with the film’s plot — or that of the Stephen King story on which it’s based — and don’t want to follow that link to the corresponding IMDB page, here are the tagline and plot summary from there:

Tagline: The Dolphin Hotel invites you to stay in any of its stunning rooms. Except one.
Plot: A man who specializes in debunking paranormal occurrences checks into the fabled room 1408 in the Dolphin Hotel. Soon after settling in, he confronts genuine terror.

The man in question, one Michael Enslin, played by John Cusack, is determined to stay in the room over the objections of the hotel manager, Gerald Olin — played by Samuel L. Jackson. Olin says although he does a good job as a hotel manager, he has no training as a coroner and is tired of cleaning up the “mess” which inevitably results when people stay in 1408. So he no longer books people into that room.

Enslin doesn’t get it and requests more details. What sort of spook, spirit, ghost, long-legged beastie is supposed to be responsible for all the death and destruction?

“You misunderstand me,” says Olin, “I didn’t say there was a spirit or ghost.” It’s the room itself, he insists. And then, in classic Samuel L. Jackson form, he sums up: “It’s an evil f*cking room.”

I noted the line at the time but didn’t think much more about it until watching a couple of the “special features,” which in this case were mini-documentaries (“webisodes,” for cripe’s sake) on the making of the movie. The scene is excerpted in both of these featurettes…

…but in both, what Jackson says is, “It’s an evil room.” No F-word at all.

It does make one wonder if the scene was re-shot in neutered form for release in the mini-docs. That wasn’t my first thought, though. I actually prefer to think that the re-shooting took place for the scene as it appeared in the final version. I picture a handful of screenwriters sitting around in a bar, congratulating one another on the great job they did with the script. (They didn’t do a great job, but in the post-production afterglow, it’s easy to imagine, they may have.) Suddenly one of them stops in mid-sentence and slaps himself in the forehead.

“What?” they all ask him.

“I just realized,” he says, “we’ve got Samuel L. Jackson in a key role… and he never once says ‘f*ck’! We can’t do that!”

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