Reviews

Title: Cult Movies 3

By: Danny Peary

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“Cult films are born in controversy, in arguments over quality, themes, talent and other matters,” writes Danny Peary in the Foreword to Cult Movies 3, “Cultists believe they are among the blessed few who have discovered something in particular films that the average moviegoer and critic have missed.” If you’ve ever felt protective towards a film that no one else seems to care for, Peary’s warm, perceptive, very personal essays are a must-read. He has the most important quality of a genuine movie-lover – open-mindedness about what he’s willing to watch – and backs it up with friendly but informed writing.

The 50 films Peary discusses here span every possible genre, including horror (the Lugosi-Karloff The Black Cat, George Romero’s under-watched Martin), melodrama (Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life), film noir (the latter-day Bogart starrer In a Lonely Place), slapstick comedy (The Gods Must be Crazy), underground-experimental (Slava Tsukerman’s Liquid Sky) and even pornography (Café Flesh), as well as camp classics by directors such as Russ Meyer (Faster, Pussycat! Kill, Kill!) and Ed Wood (Glen or Glenda?). He has intelligent, insightful things to say about all of them, and this book is a great example of unselfconscious writing about movies.

Title: Wodehouse: A Life

By: Robert McCrum

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Flaubert once observed that a writer’s existence ought to be boring, to allow his or her work to be exciting. Well, the life of Pelham Grenville Wodehouse contained few exciting moments, permitting his prose to attain polished perfection. (The exception was, of course, his infamous radio broadcasts from Nazi Germany and the accusations that dogged him thereafter.)

Robert McCrum’s highly readable biography charts the defining moments: Wodehouse’s reserved relationship with his parents; his stint at Hongkong and Shanghai Bank; his early writing and breakthroughs; his devoted though less-than-passionate relationship with his wife; his collaborations on Broadway; his stint in Hollywood; and last years in Long Island. In dwelling on Wodehouse’s time with the Germans during World War II, the biographer reiterates posterity’s verdict: the good-natured Wodehouse was duped and misguided, but in no way a Nazi collaborator or apologist.

McCrum also teases out the inspirations for and origins of some of the writer’s most endearing characters. What comes though at every turn is the hard work Wodehouse put into his writing, his doggedness to get plots and prose just right.

When Wodehouse received the news of his stepdaughter’s death he said, “I thought she was immortal”. Fortunately for the rest of us, Psmith, Wooster, Jeeves, Emsworth and the rest will always endure.

Title: Back to Black

By: Amy Winehouse

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YouTube may have changed the way people see video, but for me, it has changed how I choose new music to download. As Lily Allen, the new Norah Jones album, and Lady Sovereign made headlines, I went on YouTube for a private concert.

That’s where I first heard British soul singer Amy Winehouse, a self described “violent drunk,” as she tottered her way through Michael Jackson’s “Beat It.” Winehouse has been on my radar from gossip websites where photographs of her with cocaine dribbling from her nostrils and giving her first US performance stoned, are staple. But what distinguishes this young musician from others with similarly unfortunate interests is her outstanding singing talent.

You see before you a ratty haired, ghostly-pale, stick figure about to fall over. You hear a throaty, sensuous, tortured diva whose magical voice conjures an image of Billie Holiday crooning in a smoky bar in New York. Winehouse’s second album Back to Black, which includes the singles “Rehab” and “You Know I’m No Good,” is stunning. While her first album, Frank, released at age 19, is the classic no one has ever heard, her sophomore effort has long swept past British shores. She has been compared to Holiday—whose personal life was no picnic either—and to Nina Simone. But it’s clear from Winehouse’s music that sometime in the future there will be young soul singers who will be compared to her.

Title: Transmetropolitan

By: Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson

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Spider Jerusalem makes Hunter Thompson seem like a benign old grandma. Spider, the star of Transmetropolitan by Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson, is a gonzo journalist in a future dystopia that is strikingly familiar. He emerges reluctantly out of retirement at the start of the series and plunges into a campaign against ‘The Beast’, the incumbent president of the USA, a dead ringer for Nixon.

That is just the start of a frenetic journey in which Spider, with a fearless lunacy that is oddly suited to the times, battles all that is twisted in the world around him. Wrapped in a steamroller narrative, Transmet contains potent reflections on power, aging, city life, identity and loneliness that have the power to both move and disturb. While the pace of Ellis’s story makes you want to turn the pages as fast as they will go, the beauty of Robertson’s art, especially some of his cityscapes towards the end of the series, make you want to stop and stare.

Ellis once said that one of his aims in writing Transmet was to portray the “moments of pure, heart stopping beauty [that exist] in the most tragic and broken environments.” He succeeds magnificently.

Title: Behaviour

By: Pet Shop Boys

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Notwithstanding the deliberately in-your-face “How Can You Expect to Be Taken Seriously”, written as a dig at Rock ‘n Roll’s prima donnas, the 1990 Behaviour is among the Pet Shop Boys’ most understated albums. The lyrics are introspective and the music grows on you; none of the songs have the instant-chartbuster appeal of previous PSB hits like “West End Girls” or “It’s a Sin”, but the album as a whole is lush and timeless, a classic of British pop.

It kicks off with the elegiac “Being Boring”, which touches on nostalgia, misspent youth, AIDS, and the passing of old friends (having heard this gentle song over 15 years, I think it comes to mean more as the listener gets older), and ends with the stirringly operatic “Jealousy”. In between are such treasures as the delicate ballad “Nervously” (whose lyrics meant a lot to me as a painfully shy adolescent), the atmospheric “This Must be the Place I Waited Years to Leave” and the piano-dominated “My October Symphony”. The last, believe it or not, was an inspiration for the Guns ‘n Roses hit “November Rain”, which itself is a tribute to the power of great music to transcend genres and styles (has there ever been a bigger contrast between two bands?).

Title: The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

By: Lawrence Sterne

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There are many, many reasons to love Tristram Shandy – only half of them involving the term ‘postmodern’. Sterne’s rollicking opus is at once a satirical masterpiece of the order of Rabelais and Swift, and a novel so restlessly ingenious it makes Foer and Calvino seem old-fashioned. The tale of a man who starts to tell you his life story, but nine volumes later has barely managed to get born, Tristram Shandy is a hilarious tribute to the idea that every story leads to an infinite labyrinth of other stories, and how sometimes, NOT sticking to the point can be the more entertaining path.

At another level, of course, Tristram Shandy is a deeply serious book. Critics will tell you that it’s a rebellion against the tyranny of narrative, against the clockwork of birth and death; a sustained and breathless evasion of the fact of growing old. With his asides, his circumlocutions, his constant side-tracking, Sterne’s narrator is not just trying to kill time, he is trying to kill Time.

Mostly though, Sterne is just plain old fun. What other novelist would draw a squiggly line across the page to graph the progress of his plot? What other writer would stop in the middle of a sentence to scold the reader for not paying attention and make her go back to the last chapter to read it again? This isn’t just a book ahead of its time, it’s a book still waiting for its time to come.

Oh, and for those of you who find the idea of a 720 page novel daunting, there’s always Martin Rowson’s superb comic book rendition.

Nora Ephron, the famous writer of films like, “When Harry met Sally” and the writer-director of films such as “You’ve got mail” and “Sleepless in Seattle” writes about turning sixty. It is often said that there exists a very symbiotic relationship between the music of Gershwin and the New York of Woody Allen. Ephron, on the other hand, navigates around the Big Apple with the ease of Tony Bennett and Billy Joel, what with her joyous takes on what women carry in their purses, dealing with hair dye, bad skin, and nails, to ruminative outpourings on the difficulties of buying an apartment in an area that will eventually become fashionable.

One wishes that there were more than fleeting anecdotes on her troubled relationship with her second ex-husband, the Washington Post reporter Carl Bernstein, whose name is never mentioned in the book.  She claims that he was in love with the British ambassador’s wife and that the ambassador and Ms Ephron met to weep in each other’s arms, during which time the former dryly remarked; “What is happening to this country?”

While there are no notable quotes or terribly witty statements to take home, this is certainly a cheery book to read on a short flight.

Title: In Cold Blood

By: Truman Capote

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In Cold Blood, Truman Capote’s masterpiece of literary non-fiction, recounts the impact and investigation into one of contemporary America’s most gruesome crimes, the shooting of four members of the Clutter family in 1959 rural Kansas.

What convinced the notorious gadfly, and celebrated writer of Breakfast at Tiffany to leave New York for the village of Holcomb, with its two “apartment houses,” two filling stations, one café, and no passenger trains? It was a small newspaper report, and instinct, and with these, and the company of his research assistant Harper Lee, he spent eight years writing and researching what is acknowledged as the “best documentary of an American crime ever written.” There have too many since—both crimes and writings on them—but Capote’s work is memorable not for its subject matter, which has long lost its ability to shock, but for the spectacular language, at once richly descriptive, stark, surefooted; every sentence conjuring a Technicolor image.

In Cold Blood allowed Capote to realise his every wish—more fame, over $2 million in advance royalties, and acknowledgment as a pioneer of a genre. One of the indirect consequences of this success however, wasn’t as sweet. Attempting to extend this format to a series of vignettes about the rich New York social circle in which he moved, Capote accepted a significant advance for, and began writing Answered Prayers. Publication of a few chapters in Esquire in 1975 created such a backlash from his acquaintances, that he fell into depression, and a downward spiral of substance abuse, leaving the book unfinished at his time of his death.

Title: Reading Jazz: A Gathering of Autobiography, Reportage and Criticism from 1919 to Now

By: Robert Gottlieb (editor)

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You don’t have to be a jazz aficionado to enjoy this book, only a lover of good writing. Like boxing writing, jazz writing is one of the rich subcultures of American nonfiction, and the best of it is collected here by Gottlieb, the legendary New Yorker editor. All the great names of jazz are here, writing, talking, remembering, arguing. Whether it is Jelly Roll Morton talking about being around at the birth of jazz and recalling the “outstanding hot” pianists of his time, Nat Hentoff writing about “the ferociously wheeling, diving, climbing” art of John Coltrane, Jean-Paul Sartre asserting that “Jazz is like bananas – it must be consumed on the spot”, or Dizzy Gillespie saying “You only have so many notes, and what makes a style is how you get from one note to the other”, this book skips from one good thing to another. Vast, and vastly pleasurable.

Title: The Napkin Fiction Project

By: Esquire

You’re forever being told that the short-story is the contemporary form. We no longer have the time to read a novel. Well, who has the time to read a short-story? That is why I like the idea of “Napkin Fiction.”

Advantages: 1. You don’t have to read fifty, or even five, pages to find out whether you’re going to like this or not. 2. It’s a challenging form. 3. A review can be longer than its subject. Disadvantages: 1. The form risks giving respectability to a premature ejaculation. 2. Gimmicky last lines make O Henrys of otherwise fine writers. 3. A review can be longer than its subject.

But this is a rave-out and that is why I absolutely recommend Jonathan Ames to you. Check out his contribution to the project. No great shakes but I think I could read him again. Understand, there is no love, but I haven’t loved anyone in a long time.