BOOK - Good People and Bad People: "Gilead" and "No Country for Old Men"

Gilead, a remarkably restrained novel by Marilynne Robinson, doesn’t care much for narrative thrust. Neither do I: life isn’t really filled with huge and cataclysmic events, nor does coincidence often resolve itself into moralistic episodes that are succinctly capped with feel-good (or feel-bad) conclusions. Where Robinson goes right: eloquent anecdotes and memories, bits and pieces of a larger, unseen thread of her protagonist’s life. Where she goes wrong: deviating from those simple and honest reflections—rambling memoir, really—to fill her novel with too-impeccably and polished dialogue (for what is supposed to be a memoir) and a likewise-polished obfuscation on the nature of good. Good as those comments may be, the story should stick with the Reverend John Ames's attempt to record his final days so that his oh-so-young son will someday remember and understand him. The attempt, instead, to absolve himself of an imaginary sin pertaining to his namesake, John Ames Boughton, his best friend’s ne’er-do-well son, doesn't seem to fit.

This lengthly deviation also wastes much of Robinson's brilliant world-building; what happens to his righteously kleptomaniac grandfather or his gentle father? I would rather be lost in contemplation of this rich past than dragged forward through a meandering (and repulsively saccharine) attempt to convey a mediocre present. At one point, Rev. Ames, remembering baseball as a youth, compares the game to a solar system. It's so simple and joyous, so suddenly obvious, and it's brilliant conveyed by Robinson's neat straightforward prose. “This is obvious,” acknowledges Ames, “but the realization pleased me.” It pleased me, too.

When I read this—“I can’t tell you what that day in the rain has meant to me”—and found no explanation, I was convinced that Robinson would stick to with the first half of her perfectly meaningless epic and continue to withhold plot. After all, her narrative structure was the perfect device for justifying an endless retreat into memory, into soul, and into character. But no, even great authors are convinced they have to plod forward, and plod forward Gilead does.


While Gilead is a story where not much happens and everybody acts morally decent, Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men is a fast-paced read where everything happens, almost at once, and nobody is a good man, except maybe the sheriff, and he, being a good guy, bored me. He writes in lots of tight, short bursts of sentences; clean, crisp, freshly-laundered paintings of southern country...oh, and blood. It’s as if McCarthy wrote a travel guide and then allowed his inner Pollock to splatter crime fiction atop it. It’s quite impressive: the writing legitimizes the over-the-top action scenes and the over-the-top action legitimizes what otherwise would be pretty dry scenery. Throw in some delightfully (though perhaps stereotypically) droll dialogue and McCarthy’s world is a pretty, fun place to read about.

The plot, standard summer blockbuster nonsense, has to do with the typical anti-hero hunting in the middle of the desert when he chances upon some abandoned cars from a drug trade gone bad. Being an expert tracker (or at least far better than me), he hunts down the sole survivor and his bag full of blood millions, takes it, and runs off. Predictably, people with guns come looking for him, all of them anti-heroes, except for the standout character, Chigurh, who may be the first fully-realized anti-villain. This man kills so often, and without any explanation, that you can’t call him a villain, so much as someone for whom killing is normal. And because McCarthy doesn’t give two shits about justifying the violence, we never find out anything about him or any other character. Instead, everything is exposed in the most visceral way: from the gut, gushing out all at once or never at all. As a wise man once said, "What's not to love?"

So far as entertaining goes, No Country for Old Men squeezes page after compelling page, and there’s plenty of subtle philosophizing being done, hidden by the coarse language or the constant sound of buckshot. But it’s Gilead, or at least the first half of Gilead, that’s more rewarding, with page after re-readable page.

THEATER - "Safety"

Isn’t it funny how guns and cameras both shoot people? Well, no, not really; but it can be a stark and darkly comedic nuance to quibble about. And British playwright Chris Thorpe is really good at it: he’s got a keen ability to go straight to the heart by completely circumventing it. In his brilliant play Safety (part of a trilogy, though it more than stands alone), loose, fragmented, emotionally-wrought chunks of text carry more bite in one little mouthful than any slack-jawed proselytizing. Rather than speak to the ineffable “horrors of war,” Thorpe makes an awkward dinner party into “enemy lines” and treats words as bullets. And while that’s been done before, these characters have not: a war photographer, haunted by his 1/125th of a second stills; his wife, haunted by the realization she neither loves nor knows her husband anymore; and a blissfully ignorant stranger, who just happened to save their daughter from drowning.

[Read on] at New Theater Corps

FILM - "Cowboy del Amor"

Cute, quaint and quite often funny in that homegrown way, Cowboy del Amor is a charming documentary that looks at desperate, lonely men and their unlikely savior, Ivan Thompson, the "Cowboy Cupid." But what starts out—and could've just floundered­—as a film chronicling the odd business of hitching American men with Mexican women (Ivan suggests they're easier to handle) quickly strikes gold in exploring the burgeoning relationship of one of his clients, Rick, and his Mexican dream girl, Francis. And though Ivan says it's the prospecting that's more thrilling than finding what you're after, Michèle Ohayon's film is saved by the rich and poignant moments she's caught on camera of love, that rarest of flowers, blossoming.

[Read on] at Film Monthly

THEATER - "Anton"

A doctor suddenly switches careers and finds a passion not just for theater, but for classic and highly-stylized Chekhovian Theater. No, that’s not the plot of Anton (would that it were); that’s the story of actor-writer-director Pierre van der Spuy, who is clearly in love with the extremely influential world of Chekhov, but who has only managed at best to flatter the playwright’s original intentions and at worst to be so pale an imitation that Chekhov burns all the brighter.

[Read on] at New Theater Corps

THEATER - "In the Continuum"

There are two women in the powerful must-see-play In the Continuum and yet it’s almost a one-person show. Save for a few directorially clever juxtapositions where the two talk at each other (but never to each other), the two stories, the two characters, the two worlds (USA and Africa), never meet. They alternate in rapid succession, one world bleeding into the next, but always apart. They are linked only by their parallels: two bright young women, suddenly diagnosed with AIDS, suddenly in that continuum. The singular use of monologue (though each actor plays multiple characters in their story) only emphasizes that while the two actors share a stage, they remain­—like too many good people—abandoned and alone. The stage, large and bare, heightens their helplessness; the brick walls look on like the world, mortared and remorseless.

[Read on] at New Theater Corps

THEATER - "RFK"

“Ruthless Bobby,” they said. "Guts but no brains,” they said. Or “little brother,” they said. These were all just words, phrases, and nicknames for Robert F. Kennedy, a man I knew little about. He was an American leader, a hero, who got shot, like JFK and MLK before him. He was just a name, a character really, to be learned somewhere in the drudgery of endless, bland History classes. Now that Jack Holmes has once more given this potent figure a face, some depth, and real life, he should bring his one-man show, RFK, to schools. “Tragedy is a tool for living,” is the play's message; I’d offer another maxim to our apathetic youth: “Those who do not learn from the past are doomed to repeat its mistakes.” And if learning can be this entertaining, this powerful, this emphatic, even to someone a generation removed, what excuse do you have not to see RFK?

[Read on] at New Theater Corps

FILM - "Cache"

In Michael Haneke’s gripping and genuinely disturbing new film "Caché," a family finds themselves pulled from their quiet, simple suburban life when they find a mysterious tape left by a stalker. The contents of the tape are oh-so simple: a car driving by the house, the family’s house from a distance, a pedestrian strolling by. Just like that, Georges and Anne, played by Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche, are suddenly being watched, hunted. The deliberate use of inaction is what makes "Caché" a masterful film: not superficial or full of cheap shocks, but frightful and maddening.

[Read on] at Show Business Weekly

MUSIC - The Crimea, "Tragedy Rocks"

Tragedy Rocks. It does. Slowly, finessing each note and milking each masterful chord, The Crimea rocks inexorably forward. Davey MacManus whispers with a wounded crack and growls in a high baritone tinged with feeling. The Crimea rocks passionately onward. Andrew Stafford doesn’t so much play the keyboard as massage it, squeezing the tension through each note in that light and ephemeral key. The Crimea absolutely rocks. Andy Norton and Joseph Udwin collide off each other on guitar and bass, playing complex and dissonant chords with acrobatic and dexterous ease. The Crimea completely rocks. And finally, beneath an already impressive tour-de-force of sound, Owen Hopkin just lays down an intricate web of beats, subdued yet commanding. The Crimea, once again, totally rocks.

[Read on] at Silent Uproar

FILM - "Shadowboxer"

A man, spread-eagled on a pool table, the eight-ball gagging his squeals, struggles with his bonds. Stephen Dorff, the effortless villain, juggles a pool-cue and sneers. Cinematography, camera angles, lighting, and color: they are all exquisitely vivid. We know something bloody is about to happen - there's no surprise in Shadowboxer - but we're entertained enough to watch how. In this case, Dorff will pull down the man's pants, snap the stick in half, and, as one end flops away in slow-motion, use it "naughtily." As much as there's violence for the sake of violence, director Lee Daniels has also managed to find beauty for the sake of beauty.

[Read on] at Film Monthly

MUSIC - The Forecast, "Late Night Conversations"

Late Night Conversations, the new CD from The Forecast, proves that it doesn’t matter if you can sing well or not, so long as you can sing loudly with a bunch of people. Rock should be a bit belligerent; The Forecast works only when amidst violent bedlam. Slow croons like “Soft Hands” don’t work—one voice isn’t compelling enough to inspire a following. Nor is their light guitar complex enough to be thrilling or simple enough to be catchy. It’s just there, like that thing in the corner that we don’t talk about.

[Read on] at Silent Uproar