The Kindlings Muse: Gone Baby Gone, Michael Clayton, Amazing Grace, No Country for Old Men, and More
Author and radio star Dick Staub hosted another engaging, spirited discussion of movies over at Seattle's Hales Brewery last week.
I joined Staub, Greg Wright, and Jennie Spohr to discuss Gone Baby Gone, Michael Clayton, Dan in Real Life, Amazing Grace, The Wind that Shakes the Barley, The Devil Came on Horseback, Vanaja, Longford, and No Country for Old Men.
You can download and listen to our conversation here.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn on Art
I just spotted this fantastic quote about art on a friend's Facebook page, and thought I'd post it here.
It's from Alexander Solzhenitsyn's 1978 Nobel lecture on literature:
The task of the artist is to sense more keenly than others the harmony of the world, the beauty and the outrage of what man has done to it, and poignantly, to let people know. Art warms even an icy and depressed heart, opening it to lofty, personal experience. By means of art we are sometimes sent dimly, briefly, revelations unattainable by reason, like that little mirror in the fairy tales. Look into it and you will see not yourself but for a moment, that which passes understanding, a realm to which no man can ride or fly and for which the soul begins to ache.
Mark Steyn on "3:10 to Yuma"
Thanks to Peter Chattaway for finding this spot-on analysis of 3:10 to Yuma.
Mr. Scott trembles, albeit accidentally, on the brink of a great insight here. Hollywood assumes that if you have enough beautiful stars making out and getting shot at and running up stairwells and diving through windows and outrunning the fireball, that that is sufficiently "American" (as Mr. Scott puts it) that the absence of a heroic narrative won't matter. The movies have divorced the form from the content, or, if you prefer, the telling from the story. You see it most obviously in almost any remake. Take the old 3.10 to Yuma, which chugged in last month, remodelled for the 21st century. The 1957 western was nobody's idea of a masterpiece but it had a moral seriousness: Van Heflin's broke and he'll lose his farm so he agrees to escort a violent felon to meet the train that will take him to prison. He's doing it for the 200 bucks -- or so he thinks. But along the way he comes to understand that he's doing it for rather more. When a disaffected sibling of one of Glenn Ford's victims tries to kill him, Heflin prevents him -- because, in a civilization as fragile as the young West, he thinks it important that it be the law that dispatches the prisoner.
All that's gone in the new version, with Christian Bale in the Heflin role and Russell Crowe as Ford. For Bale, it's just about the money. Now the guy who tries to intercept the prisoner en route is not a vigilante who wishes to shortcut the law but the law itself -- a rogue cop as brutal as the man he pursues. Oh, and the 2007 3.10 also gives us a Pinkerton agent who enjoys killing Injuns just for kicks, which even Russell Crowe primly draws the line at. There's no moral universe, just a rotten state in which wickedness and violence are tempered only by degrees of politically correct squeamishness.
The Golden Compass (2007): Looking Closer at Christians, Controversy, and Phillip Pullman
 
And so it begins.
The first review of New Line Cinema's The Golden Compass, which is based on the first book in Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, has been published in The Daily Telegraph.
Telegraph reviewer John Hiscock says:
... an early screening of The Golden Compass in Los Angeles reveals that the investors who put up the $90 million cost of the film can rest easy - though it lacks the impact or charm of The Chronicles of Narnia, the special effects are extraordinary and the film is sure to be a success with young audiences.
Weitz, whose biggest success to date has been American Pie, a comedy featuring a teenage boy having sex with a pastry, proves he is up to the task of handling the massive CGI demands of Pullman's fantastical tale, though the book's devotees may quibble at some of the cuts he has been forced to make.
He has changed the story's rejection of organised religion, in particular the Roman Catholic Church, in favour of a more general attack on an unspecified dogmatic authority that seeks to rid the world of "free thinkers and heresy".
As I've been on a tour of radio talk shows introducing people to my new novel Auralia's Colors, I've been asked a long list of questions about The Golden Compass. As you probably know, the author has admitted that he wrote these stories because he wanted to give children a vision of a world without God, as an alternate fantasy to C.S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia. His story about a little girl named Lyra ends up with her on the side of people who are trying to kill God... not just any God, but Yahweh himself, and Christianity as a religion... and they succeed.
Since folks have been asking where on my website they can find the things I've been saying on the radio, I decided to write some of them down.
Ready?
(This post will probably be revised in the coming days, as I'm writing in a bit of a hurry here.)
Specials: No Country for Old Men, The Golden Compass, and Tim Burton
The Coens and The Golden Compass
You can now download my conversation with radio show host Paul Edwards as we discuss the Coen Brothers' No Country for Old Men... and then the controversy surrounding The Golden Compass.
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The Coens... They're Not Nihilists
Among people who write about movies, few writers capture my attention as consistently as the insightful Matt Zoller Seitz.
And now he's eloquently making an argument for what I've always believed about the Coen Brothers: That, for all of their antics, their stories reflect a strong moral sense... and an inclination for theological inquiry. I know that I'm inclined to be hyperbolic, but I don't care: This is by far the best examination of this film I've yet encountered -- and maybe the most thoughtful, revealing piece on the Coens yet written.
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The Harrelson Coincidence (?)
And speaking of the Coens, Peter Chattaway just pointed me to a blog that raises a fascinating question about No Country for Old Men.
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Through the Burton Glass
It was only a matter of time.
Tim Burton is going to direct Alice in Wonderland for Disney. But here's the surprise. It'll be in 3D. (And he'll do another project with Disney too. How do I put this? Man, there's just no safe way to talk about Burton's famous short Frankenwenie becoming a full-length, 3D Frankenweenie.)
David Lynch Lecture in Germany Goes Bananas
There's nothing unusual about David Lynch lecturing about transcendental meditation. He does that all the time.
But watch what happens during his lecture in Germany.
This is very unusual, and a rather shocking development in Lynch's career... and in the history of filmmaker lectures.Read more
A Portrait of My Favorite Actor
Daniel Day-Lewis rarely ever acts in a film. But when he does, it's not something you easily forget.
I first encountered him when I saw A Room with a View, which remains one of my favorite films. It's just perfect. And Day-Lewis is astonishing in his ability to take a character that could so easily have been a scapegoat and turn him into a three-dimensional character. In fact, he owns the movie's most moving scene.
Since then, again and again, he has been nothing short of extraordinary. And Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood may well be his most impressive performance yet, if the early reviews are to be believed.
Here's The New York Times Magazine with a rare, in-depth portrait of the artist.
Thanks to Charlotte Maney for the link.
And Sometimes My Email Cheers Me Up
And sometimes, I get email that makes my day. And from total strangers!
Hello, my name is Michael Kane.
I just finished reading Auralia's Colors and I must say I'm impressed.
For the last year I've worked at a christian bookstore, and must admit I get tired of the mediocre stories and writing that so proliferates the market today.
As someone who whet my teeth on Lewis, Tolkien, and MacDonald, it can be hard to swallow a lot of what is publishers claim is fiction.
I saw one brief ad for your book, I beieve in a free sample book put out by Waterbrook, and made a note of the release date in the back of my mind. Release date came and passed. No Auralia's Colors. The particular store I work in is a small regional chain, so I understand perfectly well that the owners must carry what will sell. Fantasy is never an easy sell and so I usually only see a few copies of a particular fantasy book hit out shelves.
Last week I was dusting the fiction section when I found a single copy of Auralia's Colors. It was the only one we had received and it had eluded my notice apparently for a week. I bought the book on the spot. However due to an impending eight page paper due in a certain history class, I was unable to start it until this last weekend. I was very impressed from the start.
But come the chapter on the Rites I was thoroughly sucked in. That was Monday evening. Come Tuesday morning around 3:00 A.M I was done.
I can truthfully say that I consider Auralia's Colors one of the best modern fantasies I have read. Particular haunting to me were the Northchildren and the Keeper. The way you handled them were nothing short of masterful. You had done such an excellent job in hinting and them both both and building the myth and mystery surrounding them, that when they were finally reavealed, the effect was piercingly beautiful.
And as such, I had difficulty sleeping after reading the chapter "Laughter in Chains."
Thank you so much for writing this novel. As one who one day dreams of doing the same, I would rather not imagine the toil required to produce it such a work of art. For now I must scrounge some patience while awaiting the stories that follow Auralia.
And I must also figure out how to convice my manager to pull in some more copies of Auralia into the store. ... It's the least I can do for you after you caused me to lose half a night of sleep at the end of the semester, a time when I have so many other supposedly more important but so much less interesting things to do.
Thank you again!
Michael Kane
Michael, I'm not sure how to respond except to say... THANK YOU!!
Linford Detweiler Tells Over the Rhine's "Made in America" Story
At Paste, Linford Detweiler slips into that storytelling voice that fans of Over the Rhine know and love, and he vividly illustrates the events leading up to his career as a songwriter, to the recording of The Trumpet Child, and to the arrival of a song about Tom Waits.