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!
Just in case any of you were under the mistaken impression that I’m cooler than I actually am, here’s a little story that last blog post reminded me of:
As an undergraduate, my friends (and believe me, I use the plural of this word very, very loosely. I had one friend, and he had another friend that hated my guts. I wasn’t too fond of him, either, but I still counted him as a friend because it’s humiliating to say, when what your weekend plans are, “I don’t know. Maybe I’ll just hang with my friend.”) and I decided to form a gang. To be precise, a Grammar Gang.
We weren’t organized enough to come up with a mission statement, and we never held any meetings. The one thing we did do was decide to get tattoos.
My friend decided he would get a schwa:
His reasoning: “It’s upside down. That’s AWESOME!”
My friend’s friend… well, I forgot what he decided to get. But he was a total jackass, so it doesn’t really matter.
I had a difficult time deciding between the semicolon:
;
Or the classic expression of surprise and amusement, the exclamation point within parentheses:
(!)
I went back and forth for what seemed like weeks, until we each privately decided that getting a tattoo would be far too painful, and that being in a gang really wasn’t working out.
In the years since, I finally did make up my mind. I’d get both tattoos. As soon as I get over my fear of pain.
This has been a pretty good summer for submissions to Building 45. Which, I have to admit, is surprising. I didn’t think the submissions would be coming in until at least second week of fall term, but we’ve already got 26 of them (!).
On the one hand, I’m absolutely thrilled that you writers out there got your acts together and submitted early and often.
On the other hand, it means my extended vacation from managing editor duties is now officially over.
However! Since at this point in the summer I’m about five times as dedicated to procrastination as any student I’ve ever met, I decided to ease into things by upgrading the various WordPress installations we use behind the scenes at Building 45.
You whippersnappers out there may not realize this, but in the olden days of yore, upgrading a single WordPress installation could take upwards of an hour… and upgrading four installations, well, that was a solid day’s “work.” (And by “work,” I obviously mean “checking MySpace and eBay for four hours while occasionally clicking the “Next” button on the installer and waiting for files to download and upload. And yes, those were all billable hours.)
These days, WordPress has a fancy “Automatic Upgrade” plug-in, which means I just spent 15 whole minutes doing everything that needed to be done.
I just wasted ten more minutes blogging about the process… and now I’ve got nothing. I could check my FaceBook profile and pretend that my computer is doing something productive in the background, but I’m kind of out of practice at that sort of self-deception. So I guess it’s time to get to work.
Stupid efficiency-boosting technological advances…
Here it is, August 20. That’s about twenty days after the deadline I’d set for myself to choose a textbook for WR263: Advanced Screenwriting (which will debut spring term). If you haven’t already guessed, that deadline has come and gone without me finding something suitable.
Picking a textbook is always an arduous process. We’re asking students to shell out good money for a book, and we want to make sure that they’re actually getting their money’s worth. Ideally, a textbook for a creative writing class is something the student would want to keep, something they can continue referring back to even after they’ve left the class… or after they’ve left the college.
I couldn’t be happier with the textbooks I use in Intro Fiction (Schoen’s The Truth About Fiction) and Intro Screenwriting (Schwartz’s How to Write: A Screenplay). They’re clear, they’re direct, and most importantly, they have a healthy sense of humor about the whole thing. Sure, Schwartz’s book gets ridiculously cheesy at points, but both of those authors sincerely believe that the creative writing process is a lot of fun and worth the effort.
Now, in second-term creative writing courses (we call them “advanced” here at Chemeketa, but that word should really be reserved for upper-division university courses), I’d like to use a book that delves a little deeper and presents a more sophisticated analysis of the process. Why do we make the choices we make when we’re writing, and how can we figure out if there are paths out there we’re not following? How can we know that each component of a story is working to serve the greater purpose of the narrative?
Basically, I want a book that presents a few interesting ideas that we can mull over for ten weeks. Whether we end up agreeing or disagreeing, in thinking about those ideas we’ll be able to learn a little bit more about the way each of us writes. And that’s my primary goal in a creative writing class.
Unfortunately, the problem with most screenwriting books out there is that they present maybe one interesting idea, and then they charge you $30 for that one idea plus 200 pages of filler. Then there are those select few screenwriting books written by people who wish they weren’t hacks, filled with rambling intellectual justifications of their chosen field drawn from the past three decades of literary critical thinking. Those books are filled with ideas that might be worthwhile to discuss… if you could get past the massively pretentious egotism of the author’s writing style.
There’s only room for one pretentious egotist around here, and I’m already filling that bill. Too bad, Robert McKee.
Speaking of Robert McKee, if you want to read more about him, I’d suggest starting here. It’s the best thing I’ve ever read about him. It helps that I don’t read Spanish.
Naw, I’m giving him too hard a time. His book is actually one of the better ones I’ve read. But it’s not $35 good.
So the search continues. I just started Writing Short Films by Linda Cowgill, which looks promising and comes highly recommended… so keep your fingers crossed for me.
The Coen brothers’ new film, Burn After Reading, is due out on September 11.
You might as well go watch the trailer, because I have absolutely nothing of substance to say about the film at present. When you’re done, you can come back here and read the rest of this post.
Done? That was good, right? Brad Pitt playing his patented “half-crazy/half-dumb” character, John Malkovich playing an easily annoyed bad guy, George Clooney playing a lummox, Frances McDormand playing a desperate housewife, and even that one dude from the classic TV show Sledge Hammer. It’s nice to see he’s still getting work.
I’ve loved the Coen brothers ever since I saw Barton Fink at the one lonely run-down “art films” theater we had in Fresno, California at the time. I walked into the theater with absolutely no expectations (well, apart from expecting the seats to be uncomfortable–and that expectation was easily met) and walked out with an image of XXXX XXXXXXX bellowing XXXX the XXXXX of a XXXXXXX XXXXXXX burned forever on my brain. [See note.]
Since then, I’ve made a policy of never reading about upcoming Coen brothers projects. When I walk into the theater in September, I want to go in with as little information as possible, with an absolutely open mind. No reviews. No plot summaries. No gossip from the set. No promotional interviews. Nothing. I don’t even want to know what actors are involved (you’ll notice I’ve failed in that regard).
In the past, this has always been pretty easy to accomplish. The Coens are never very forthcoming about their projects, so the few articles written about their films were imminently avoidable.
It’s going to be a different story for this film. I’m in the middle of developing this year’s FA256: The Great Directors course, which focuses on the Coen brothers, and I’m reading every article I can find on the Internet. I’ve been lucky so far, but I don’t see that luck continuing in the next few weeks as the promotional blitz begins. Thanks to the success of No Country For Old Men, this film is going to get a lot of attention.
NOTE: Shortly after typing this, I realized that I was doing to you, reader, the very thing I’m trying to avoid. For those of you who’ve seen Barton Fink, well, maybe you can figure it out. For those of you who haven’t seen Barton Fink, please see the gratuitous product placement below.
Advertisement: The Chemeketa Film Arts course focusing on the films of the Coen brothers is due out on January 5. That’s five short months away, folks!
For those of you who missed the Books section in the Sunday, June 22 edition of the Statesman Journal (or for those of you who didn’t miss it but want to relive the magic of the experience), the Building 45 write-up featuring an interview with me, the World’s Most Famous Managing Editor of an Online Community College Literary Journal, is available online at the NW BiblioBlog.
And yes, I meant to post about this way back in June, but… I didn’t.
But then I hopped over to Laura’s Faculty Blog to see what she had to say, and noticed that her blog has the pretty theme with the fall leaves and that my blog has the Rise of The Apocalyptic Turquoise Machines theme. [NOTE: Not the actual name of the theme.]
Then I checked out Peter’s Civic Engagement blog, which has a streamlined Red, White, and Blue theme going on (and, appropriately enough for a non-partisan political blog, a header in which the red and blue merge into purple).
What were the criteria for assigning themes to these faculty blogs? I’m thinking that perhaps it was related in some way to our personalities… which means that someone out there, when he or she thinks of me, thinks of mechanical turquoise monsters working ceaselessly to blot out the sun and destroy life as we know it.
Which is precisely the image I want to project. Kudos, webmasters!