I realized that after all the hype over the past couple months, I haven’t said a thing about the latest Coen brothers film since I saw it. I hate disappointing the three people who read this blog, but there’s no time for a full review… so you’ll have to settle for one in haiku:
Burn After Reading
Refers back to Blood Simple
Malkovich is great
I know, I know: people die every day. And there’s something that seems a bit callous, as though we had misplaced priorities, when we choose to publicly grieve the deaths of artists and celebrities while keeping the grief we feel about the deaths of those close to us private.
But for all of the annoyance we might feel at the pettiness and irrelevance of contemporary celebrity culture, sharing our thoughts about the lives and deaths of people whose work we admire is one of the most effective ways we non-celebrities can connect with each other. If someone in my family dies, and someone in your family dies, we can perhaps get together and talk and share the experience–but only to a certain extent. Our experiences are similar, but they are separate. However, when Heath Ledger or David Foster Wallace or Paul Newman dies, and if you happen to also be an admirer of those people’s work, there is a shared experience of loss that makes it much easier to communicate with each other.
With that said…
I have a long list of favorite all-time films, and Newman starred in two of them: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and Cool Hand Luke. I’ve never taught them in a film class, in part because I’ve never offered a class called “Films Justus Ballard Thinks Everyone Should Watch,” but they do make appearances in my WR262 screenwriting class. Newman had a good eye for solid scripts, and was rarely involved in a film with a lousy story.
The bicycle scene from Butch & Sundance
This is the first Newman film I consciously chose to watch, and it was all thanks to my grandpa. Every once in a while, in response to seemingly nothing at all, my grandpa would say, “Who are those guys?” and laugh to himself. Eventually, I would also laugh, but I had no idea why it was funny, other than my grandpa was apparently being comically perplexed by an invisible group of mysterious men. Finally, I had to ask him: “What guys?” At which point he looked at me sternly and said, “You don’t know Butch and Sundance?” And then, finding out I didn’t, he sat me down and made me watch the movie. And it was beautiful and charming and funny, and I developed a serious crush on Katherine Ross, and discovered Burt Bacharach, and it immediately became my new favorite film (displacing, if I recall correctly, Caddyshack). As a teenager in the early nineties, I found something magically nostalgic about a film made in the sixties about a couple of good-hearted outlaws from the old west. I don’t know if the filmmakers intended this to happen, but every time I see it (or hear “Raindrops Keep Falling on my Head”), I get this weird feeling of love for America…
And here’s a TV spot for Cool Hand Luke. You should take the time to check it out. Even if you’ve seen the film, and if only to marvel at how much film advertising has changed over the years.
I finally saw this film about five years ago, and I regret not having seen it sooner. Actually, it’s probably a good thing I didn’t see this film in high school. I had enough problems with authority as it was; I can only imagine the hours of detention I would’ve earned for saying “What we have here is failure to communicate.”
This post is already far too long, but I’ll leave you with the final quote from the NY Times obituary:
“We are such spendthrifts with our lives,” Mr. Newman once told a reporter. “The trick of living is to slip on and off the planet with the least fuss you can muster. I’m not running for sainthood. I just happen to think that in life we need to be a little like the farmer, who puts back into the soil what he takes out.”
I am a glutton for punishment. A few months ago, my good friend and colleague Jeff McAlpine (who teaches at Clackamas Community College) asked if I wanted to help him introduce a couple of performances of Waiting For Godot at Clackamas Repertory Theatre.
I said, “Why not? It’s not like I’ll be busy prepping my themed WR121s or FA255 courses.”
Cue the rueful laughter on the soundtrack.
Anyway. We’re scheduled to introduce the Saturday performances on September 27 and October 4. Our introductions are scheduled for 6:45, and curtain for the play itself is 7:30.
The title of our introduction is “Top Ten Things You Don’t Need to Know About Samuel Beckett.” And yes, I will be playing a keyboard and pretending to be Paul Shaffer. I need to brush up on my Canadian, but otherwise I think I’m going to nail this role.
I’m in the middle of putting together all the materials I’ll be using for this term’s courses, and while blogging about the process would be an excellent way to procrastinate, I can’t imagine that anyone would want to read about it. Actually, let’s test that hypothesis: I’m polishing up the third essay assignment for my WR121 courses, and I just spent five minutes researching the early years of American television broadcasting.
OK, maybe that was a little bit interesting. Nonetheless, I’d rather write about comics.
First, let me introduce you to my current favorite comic strip. No, it’s not Garfield Minus Garfield, although that was a good guess.
It’s Achewood. Achewood is about a couple of bears, a tiger, and an otter. It’s occasionally vulgar and almost always funny. I know, I know, vulgar bears and tigers aren’t for everyone (the otter is never vulgar). It might not be your cup of tea. If it’s not, forget I mentioned it.
However, if you like your cup of tea sweetened with an occasional fart or sex joke, you might want to check it out. Thanks to the magic of free online comics from Portland-based Dark Horse Comics, we get several full-color pages about the greatest trip to Taco Bell of all time.
In other news, there’s a new Ambush Bug series out from DC Comics.
I was never a big comic book reader as a kid. I liked the comic strips (Bloom County, Calvin & Hobbes–you know, the classics), but I didn’t really have the disposable income or proximity to a comic book store to really get into the monthly books. There was only one series that really grabbed my interest, and that was Ambush Bug. I was ten years old, and that comic book blew my mind. It was about a humanoid bug who… had problems with his socks and kept getting beat up. None of it made sense. When I got older, I learned that the reason it didn’t make sense was because I didn’t read many comic books, and the entire premise of the Ambush Bug series was to present a bunch of inside jokes that only hardcore devotees of the DC Universe would truly appreciate.
I didn’t “get” any of the jokes, but I laughed anyway, because it was the most absurd thing I’d ever stumbled across. (This was still a couple years before I discovered Monty Python, but around the same time I saw the Beatles in Hard Day’s Night.)
Now, a couple of decades later, Ambush Bug is back. I’m still not a regular reader of any DC Comic, which means I’m probably still not “getting” the jokes. But this afternoon, when I’ve finished reading up on Milton Berle and Hopalong Cassiday, I’m heading down to my friendly neighborhood comic book store to pick up issue two of the new series. Sometimes things are just funnier when they don’t make any sense.
SPECIAL BONUS WINTER TERM FILM ARTS COURSE PLUG: Remember, kids! The Coen brothers’ Burn After Reading opens at a theater near you tomorrow!