Review: The Big Bounce

Elmore Leonard is a hard writer to adapt. There was for a while the idea in Hollywood and elsewhere that all filmmakers had to do to make a successful film out of an Elmore Leonard book was just copy the book, dialogue and all, and you’re gold. The truth is a lot more complicated, though. One reason why Hollywood thought that was because some filmmakers made it look easy in a series of films in the nineties (Get Shorty, Jackie Brown, Out of Sight - which to be fair, are as much the sensibility of the directors as they are Leonard’s). Leonard does write good dialogue, but the trick of turning his work into films is complicated because he didn’t care about a three act structure, and had his own ideas about pacing. That’s not a criticism at all, by the way, just an observation.

I thought of this watching The Big Bounce, which was released in 2004. On the surface it has everything going for it. The director was George Armitage, who’s made a number of good noirish and crime films over the years including Grosse Point Blank and Miami Blues that really try to blend genres and tones in interesting ways. Movies that even when they don’t completely succeed, are interesting. And I’m one of those people who would often rather watch an interesting mess than a perfectly made bland film. (I’ve also always liked Armitage cause he was originally from Hartford and always nice to see Connecticut folk do good). It stars Owen Wilson and Sara Foster, with a supporting cast of Morgan Freeman, Gary Sinise, Charlie Sheen, Bebe Neuwirth, Willie Nelson, Harry Dean Stanton. It’s set in Hawaii, where it was shot, so at the very least the scenery is great.

I kept thinking about the film. Not because it was good. It wasn’t even horrible. It was simply…bland. The movie feels like the edited for TV version of a movie. Where all the sex and violence and profanity and a lot of the subtext and character of the film has been edited out. Because a lot of the charm of Elmore Leonard books is his dialogue and though there are good scenes in the film, for the most part it never feels like Elmore Leonard. It doesn’t feel like much of anything.

The film involves a drifter and small time thief (Wilson) who after getting out of jail on an assault charge, gets hired by a local judge to manage his small beachfront resort. Meanwhile he becomes interested in Foster, who’s the mistress of a local developer, who has a plan to rob her boyfriend. And of course as the plan gets developed, there’s a lot more to it.

Apparently during editing Armitage left the film or got fired, so I hold out hope that there is a good version of this film that exists and that someday we may get to see. Because it’s possible to see bits and pieces of it in the film. Wilson and Foster work well together and there are a lot of scenes where the two play off each other in interesting ways. Those small moments, likely a combination of scripted nuance and improvisation, showing how they’re falling for each other even while they’re deeply wary of each other, being able to read each other all too well, and can’t trust each other. Wilson especially leans into the dialogue, which for both is this mix of laidback lightheartedness with this intensity and hostility. The film needed more of those scenes with the two of them.

Similarly think about the scene where Wilson and Charlie Sheen get into a brief fight and after punching him in the nose, Wilson is telling him not to tilt his head back, and how to wash his shirt to get the blood out while sitting in the grass next to him. Sheen saying his wife will know how to get blood out of the shirt. Again, these little funny moments between characters.

The biggest waste of the film is that they had Willie Nelson and Harry Dean Stanton and did almost nothing with them! Seriously what were people thinking?

There is a scene which is Morgan Freeman, Willie Nelson, and Harry Dean Stanton playing dominos. I would watch two hours of the three of them playing dominos. I truly hope that there’s hours of raw footage of the three just improvising in front of the camera. No hyperbole. I think it would be enthralling and hilarious and entertaining as anything. And yet the scene in the film is a blink and you’ll miss it moment.

Maybe that’s the film’s biggest problem. Leonard is good at taking his time. At letting his characters talk long enough to reveal themselves. At following a meandering plot that’s never less than enthralling. The film is uninterested in such moments. Because a movie like this isn’t about the plot, it’s about the characters, the tone, the dialogue, the humor. It’s about the how of the story more than the story itself. The result is a film that’s fine to watch on TV in the middle of the night, where half awake you can enjoy the scenery and follow the plot with casual interest but not have engage with the material deeply. It’s too bad that the filmmakers felt similarly, and didn’t want to spend time with the material and characters and enjoy the experience.

Apples in February

December 21 is the darkest day of the year, and yet the days that follow are darker than the ones that preceded it. Which never makes sense, and yet we all know that January through March are winter, the dark brutal days we endure. Autumn in New England being what it is, one of the nature’s great joys, the bitter cold that follows is always hard. February is the longest month, gray and overcast, cold and windy. It is a period we endure. Maybe it’s because as we approach the end of December, there are lights everywhere to keep the darkness at bay. Afterwards, even as the darkness lifts, the lights are removed, leaving us with gray. Fall is behind us and spring is ahead of us, and in the meantime, we soldier on like the good puritans we are.

And in these long days, we eat the remaining apples. The good apples. The perfect apples have been picked and eaten months ago. The local orchards have made their calculations, setting aside fruit to make baked goods and sent to the cidery to be pressed. Those perfect apples that we hold in our minds – admittedly influenced by supermarket crap and artwork of all stripes – are long gone. Eaten months ago. Sure, there are apples in the market shipped in cold storage from half a world away which are, well, bland. But the supermarkets don’t stick them because they taste good. Such apples (and other fruits and vegetables) are grown and shipped from one end of the earth to the other because they don’t bruise easily and ship well. No, real apples come from nearby. Like the foliage it’s easy to take this for granted in New England but we have apples a plenty nearby. And great apples.

At this point in the calendar, though, the stock of apples is running thin. Now we’ve moved onto the fruit where the color isn’t uniform or perfect. The skin is bruised. Cut it open, and they still have flavor. Not what a fresh off the tree one did in October of course, but it tastes like an apple.

My personal preference is for tart, sweet apples. The easiest to find and most common is Granny Smith (which also happens to be a nice baking apple), but there are others like Stayman, Winesap, Braeburn, Cortland. I tend to bake more apple-related items after New Years because the quality drops. Not that I have many apple-related recipes, but a cake here and some scones or muffins there. Honestly until March and it warms up more, I tend not to work out as much or spend as much time outdoors. That plus the cold weather in general means I tend to stop and slow down and use the oven more.

Apples don’t have terroir the way that wine does, but regardless of the varietal, there’s something about local produce. It’s not just hippie-liberal nonsense, as has been suggested by some over the years. It means something. It’s spiritual and physical to eat food that is grown or that lived nearby. We are a part of this place and being nourished by it is not simply metaphor. It tethers us to the land.

A winter apple is something green (or rather, green-ish), something alive. Something to sustain us in the winter months when the ground is covered with snow. At a time when the cold air forces us to huddle in our homes, our dens, in the earth, under the ice, hibernating (or close to) it reminds us of what happened before, what will happen again.

Fruit as flawed as we are. Reminding us that this won’t last forever. And, pricking our finger as the knife slices into the flesh of one, a reminder that neither will we.

Review: Bonding

The Netflix show created by Rightor Doyle was first released in 2019 and the second season took a while to arrive before coming out last month. The first season had been in the queue, but after the new one dropped, I spent a weekend watching both. It’s striking because the first season was perfectly fine. It was interesting. It was a character piece but it also leaned into the shock of being about a dominatrix.

That’s not to say it was bad, because it was a striking portrait of being closeted and the fear of being oneself. About how one can be close and then push those people away in self-destructive ways. About how we become broken and try to put ourselves back together. That last point is, I know, something problematic as people in the BDSM Community are wary of the idea that trauma leads people to BDSM. It doesn’t. We all have damage and some of those people are into bondage, but of course that’s not how it usually plays out in pop culture.

Having said that, after watching the first season, the second season was better. In every way. It was smarter, funnier, deeper. It introduced new characters and gave existing characters more to do. It brought the central themes of consent and intimacy into sharper focus. And while becoming a bigger show in every sense, it still kept the focus on these two central characters.

The show got heat for not being accurate in the first season and the show took that criticism and found a way to use that. To consider why the character would have behaved that way. How would it have made sense for those characters. And the result is a show that is more accurate but also more thoughtful. Not every show can take the legitimate and important criticism they receive and find a way to see it as valuable, to rethink what they got wrong, to consider how the criticism could make the show better.

Bonding, which in the second season was written by Doyle, Olivia Troy and Nana Mensah, managed to make a second season that was better than the first and they did so by listening to criticism. I don’t know whether there will be a third season, but it ended in a thoughtful and moving place with a lot of potential to become something even more exciting. Here’s hoping they get the chance.

Review: Silent Movie

Sometimes it’s hard to think about how great Mel Brooks was. And how productive he was in a short period of time. In the span of a decade, he co-wrote and directed six movies, created a short lived TV show (When Things Were Rotten). That’s in addition to a new 2000 Year Old Man recording and TV special – the fifth album that he and Carl Reiner had made together. Of those six films, it’s hard not to argue that three of them are among the very best film comedies ever made.

After Mel Brooks made two of the best films of 1974 – Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein – Brooks made Silent Movie, which was released in 1976. There were two risks in this film. One, it was a feature length silent movie. Which is a crazy concept, but if one can do whatever they want, well, swing for the fences. And Brooks did. He also took another risk. Brooks starred in the film himself.

He had acted before. The 200 Year Old Man bits were (and are) hysterical, but today we know Brooks in part as an award-winning actor. Besides his own films he’s acted in films like The Muppet Movie to To Be Or Not To Be to countless animated films to shows like Mad About You and Curb Your Enthusiasm. But before all that, he starred with Dom DeLuise and Marty Feldman, Bernadette Peters and Sid Caesar, and a number of very big celebrity cameos.

What’s striking is how Brooks is, well, the Brooks we all know. Perhaps more impressively because he doesn’t have any spoken dialogue. But when people think of Mel Brooks, he’s right there. Of course by this time he was 50 years old and had been writing and performing for decades, so perhaps not a big shock, but it was startling.

Brooks stars as a washed up recovering alcoholic filmmaker who is trying to put together a new film - A silent film! Which will help to save the studio, which is being targeted by Wall Street vultures. (Who entertainingly pray to a dollar sign, among other amusing gags). That is a funny gag, but it’s also not a complex one. And that is part of the appeal of the film. It’s not complicated and it’s not deep, but it’s entertaining.

The movie lags at points but overall, it worked better than I thought it would. It worked much better than the award winning 2011 film The Artist. There are inter titles with lines of dialogue scattered throughout the movie, but for the most part, the film is made so that it’s easy to follow what’s happening, what the characters are doing. It’s often over the top, but never in a cheesy manner that pulled me out of the film.

There were only two moments that pulled me out of the film. In each scene, Brooks and his two colleagues (DeLuise and Feldman) are celebrating and over the top jumping up and down and hugging each other, and as they do, two old ladies walk by and shout something at the men. The title comes up: “Fags!”

I think it would be worth a new edition of the film which cuts those two titles. In part because, it’s obvious (and I say this as someone who cannot read lips) what they’re saying without the titles. We know. The audience back then knew. We don’t need the word cause it’s not funny. And it was especially disappointing because Brooks in Blazing Saddles was very smart about how language was used. Not so much here.

Silent Movie is funny. I recommend it to people. But we’re talking about Mel Brooks and saying that it’s funny feels like damning him with faint praise. Because it’s not a great film. It’s a good film. I think it’s something people will enjoy.

And while I wrote that the movie isn’t smart about language, it was in some ways. There’s only one word of spoken dialogue in the film. And it’s spoken by the legendary Marcel Marceau.

If Mel Brooks is thinking about a new project, my suggestion: make a musical of Silent Movie. I bet that would be something else. And no one else could do it.

Review: Blade

When Blade was released in 1998, it was an oddity for a lot of reasons. An action film starring Wesley Snipes based on the Marvel Comics character, the action/horror film stood out back then. Today of course a comic book movie is just another Friday.

Director Steve Norrington is known for two films, this and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, which was, well, bad. So rewatching Blade for the first time since it came out, I was expecting the film to be unimpressive. I mean, Wesley Snipes can be good, but definitely not always, and he is in a lot of mediocre films. So I was surprised to find that Blade was good. The script, the direction, the fight choreography. More than two decades (and lots of superhero movies) later, I’ll put Blade on a list of the best comic book movies.

Admittedly, that’s not a long list.

It’s a Wesley Snipes movie, but it’s also a pretty one note performance - Blade is a very one note kind of character - so a lot of the weight falls on the supporting cast, who manage to balance the film in different ways. The great Kris Kristofferson plays Abraham Whistler, Blade’s grizzled old mentor, who might have been as cold as Blade once upon a time, but now it’s softened by age and his concern for his adopted son. N’Bushe Wright as the doctor who gets caught up in this, and would be the love interest except that, well, Blade isn’t into love or human emotions. Meanwhile Donal Logue offers comic relief as a vampire who can handle a lot of damage and is entertaining as all hell.

Whatever happened to N’Bushe Wright?

The main villain though is played by Stephen Dorff, who is Deacon Frost, a young punk of a vampire who is waging his own war against other vamps. A ruling council composed of the well-dressed accented, monsters we know in films has their own way of doing things, but Frost has his own ideas, from the wild parties, to decoding ancient texts searching for the answers in what others have dismissed as myth. It’s a fascinating character and Dorff enjoys chewing scenery as he kills other vampires and grabs a young child to have a conversation with Blade in the middle off the day. He has his own ideas of how vampires should act and not simply sit in the shadows.

Admittedly I keep thinking the script could have used another draft but those dynamics are there and they work. It’s not a deep movie, but it knows what it’s trying to do. And has a cast that can pull it off.

It is very much a film of the 1990’s. From the rave opening (which is a fabulous scene) to the lighting and the dark shadows. It definitely leans into that goth tone and sensibility of The Crow and other films of that era. It also builds from the vampire and horror stories being written at this time. I found myself enjoying it. Blade is a dark, brutal film and it was enjoyable in a way that a good genre film can be. Managing to both satisfy my expectations and also do something new. But director Norrington and the cinematographer Theo van de Sande manage to do an impressive job.

That’s not to say that the film doesn’t have issues. The ending of the film falls flat. I remember thinking that when I first saw the film. Much of it takes place in Los Angeles, in these dark corners of the city at night. Then we go to the desert nearby where there’s an ancient temple underground. Then the final fight between Blade and Frost is just okay, but it’s not one of the better fights in the film. After the earlier fights as Blade takes on various henchmen, which were much more impressive, this is very much a fight where a guy had other people fight because he couldn’t. Then to conclude a mediocre fight, Frost gets injected with - well, let’s not get into all that - but the result is a CGI explosion, which looked fake when the film came out and looks possibly worse now. But I’m more forgiving of bad CGI today because I know fo the technical limitations. So I don’t take as many points off as I might have once upon a time.

But in this, it’s like most superhero films where they have some interesting ideas and fight scenes and design work and cinematography in the first two acts of the film, but the third act is, well, boring. Because beyond have the hero fight the villain, the filmmakers don’t know have other ideas. Though at least here the plan is straight forward: Stop Deacon Frost and kill everyone. There’s a brutal simplicity to it.

I know that Blade is coming back, this time with Mahershala Ali as Blade. And Ali is a great actor and I hope that they build a good film around him (and that the film is better than Green Book, which isn’t a particularly high hurdle). But I’ve read some of the old comics from Mark Wolfman and Gene Colan, which were similarly genre work that aspired to be more than just another comic. In Tomb of Dracula, the series where Blade and others fought the titular villain, they struggled to kill Dracula time and again. And there’s a way where this could feel like another comic book device where the villain always escapes and never dies, but in that comic they made it feel ominous. That the characters managed to avoid the worst, foil the plot, but the villain and the evil seemed as though they were impossible to defeat. The film manages to capture some of that feeling.

Again, it’s a very nineties movie. But it was fun. And it fairly sure it’s not because I’m feeling slightly nostalgic for the nineties.

Review: Call Your Mother by Barry Sonnenfeld

I feel like everyone reading Barry Sonnenfeld’s memoir will be disappointed.

That’s not the same as saying the book is bad. It’s not. But for people expecting a book filled with behind the scenes stories from Sonnenfeld’s Hollywood career, they’ll likely be a little disappointed. Even as someone who was fine with the book not being a lot of anecdotes, found myself disappointed. After all I am a big fan of his pair of Addams Family movies and would have loved to read more about the making of them, and some of the choices he made (especially considering that David Krumholtz’s character in Addams Family Values seems to have been a younger version of Sonnenfeld). Why he thought Wild Wild West was a good idea (I mean, why anyone thought that was a good idea is beyond me….). More about Men in Black and his friendship with Will Smith. The making of the sadly short-lived The Tick series. Pushing Daisies, the pilot which Sonnenfeld directed, I will argue, is one of the most beautiful episodes of television ever made.

He does have stories about how he got his start, about how he became friends with the Coen Brothers and how they worked together. About how he and Penny Marshall did NOT get along making Big.

The book is ultimately about Sonnenfeld’s life. Which I should note he tells in a very entertaining way. It’s far funnier to read than it was to live. This is a man who argued with Larry David over which one of them is more neurotic. Which should give people a rough idea of the kind of person Sonnenfeld is. I mean, many of us who think we’re neurotic would go, I can’t hold a candle to Larry David. But in reading about Sonnenfeld’s parents and his uncle and his childhood and plane crashes, well, can’t really blame the man.

I said earlier that I wanted more stories of the making of different projects, and I do, but I can also see Sonnenfeld’s interests and fingerprints in his work after reading the book. Some of which may simply be in my own mind. But I suppose it might be too much to ask Sonnenfeld to dissect his own work at length after just dissecting his own life in such depth. Besides, he wrote an entertaining book.

If I ever have a drink with Sonnenfeld, I’ll concede that he’s more neurotic. (And I’m not just saying that so he’ll tell me about The Tick.)

Review: Scream 2

Ah, Scream 2. The first was successful, so of course there has to be a sequel – I mock, but I can relate, having written about the first film HERE – and it arrived roughly a year after the first, bringing the band back together (well, the band that hadn’t been killed off in the first film, at least). Which is to say, only a few people.

The first Scream film was a comment on the genre, saying, yes, we are in a horror movie, but we know the rules of horror movies. But it was also a very 90s movie because it was about The End of History.

In 1989, after the Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama wrote an article by that title, and while its premise is very questionable, it has been interpreted in a number of ways he likely never meant. But at its heart was this idea that all the great challenges in human society were over. Communism had failed. Free market capitalism and Democracy had “won” and there were no more ideological battles to be fought. After the 20th Century which was defined by fascism and communism and great wars over ideas, all that was over.

This idea – that everything is new, the rules have changed, the old order has collapsed – ran through 1990s pop culture in explicit and implicit ways. There are obvious examples were this was part of the plot and discussed (Pierce Brosnan Bond movies, I’m looking at you!) but it can be seen in everything from Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven, a revisionist take on a classic western story made by one of the people synonymous with classic westerns, to Pretty Woman, a darker take on the traditional romantic comedy. Some of that change is expressed in different ways. Because of course some of the “this is all new and all different” films which are remaking/recycling are simply the result of generational and technological change (Jurassic Park and T2 making differently looking films, or each generation making a new Robin Hood/Peter Pan/whatever film).

But this is one of the impulses behind Scream. This is a horror movie but it’s not. It’s self-aware and reflective and it’s new! Of course, it wasn’t. It was a horror movie. And watched without the sound, it functions like most horror movies.

The problem with making a sequel to such a movie is that it’s a lose-lose situation. It isn’t new. It can’t be new. People are buying tickets to watch the same thing done a little differently. And how does one make a sequel to the idea that everything is new and different? Well, there’s a reason few good movies get sequels. Because by their nature, they are revisions of the first. So, same basic idea, it will keep you guessing who the killer is, lots of people will die.

The first Scream was about high school kids and this film is set in college. One of the appeals of the first film was that it did a pretty good job of capturing some of the feel of adolescence. This film did a less good job. It’s a much more surface take with some fun moments of dialogue but never as interesting. Much of the geeky self aware dialogue is about sequels.

I suppose what was most annoying was how every time the film made a point of diverging from expectations based on the first one, they almost felt this need to underline it. As if to say, we know what you expected. It’s annoying, but it also points to how the second film is looser than the first film. This seems common in sequels, where the first film has been written and rewritten with a very tightly plotted structure, where the second film is a lot looser, shaggier and more relaxed in different ways (see Ocean’s Twelve, Lethal Weapon II, Aliens, Temple of Doom….and almost all sequels, let’s be honest).

Having just ripped into the script, it must be said that the opening scene is chilling and precise and so well done. After introducing and reintroducing characters, and taking its time, there’s a lengthy scene in a sorority house as one characters is killed that is as well crafted as anything Wes Craven has made.

One of the film’s saving graces is the cast. Which is more impressive than the first film. From the opening scene featuring Omar Epps, Jada Pinckett Smith and Heather Graham, to Sarah Michelle Gellar, Elise Neal, Jerry O’Connell, Timothy Olyphant, Laurie Metcalf, and Portia de Rossi joining the returning actors from the first film. Plus Liev Schreiber’s cameo in the first film is expanded into a bigger role in this film. And David Warner has a small role as a theater professor/director, which I enjoyed.

Courtney Cox’s local newswoman Gale Weathers may have been almost a cliche in the first film, but in the second film, she is part of a much more conscious approach the film takes to the media and how it works and how we relate to it in really interesting ways. This is one of the major thematic concerns of the rest of the films, Fame and the media and what that means. And it’s interesting because of course today there are these serial killers losers who write manifestos and want to be famous, but this came out in 1997 and clearly the filmmakers had a feeling and understanding of this which was far beyond most of us. Because I see that and watching the film today and how Liev Schreiber’s character wants to be famous, how Cox’s character wants to be more important and more famous, and I think there’s something wrong with them.

I suppose that in that respect, I am like Neve Campbell’s Sydney, who simply wants to fade into the background and live an ordinary life and has no desire to be famous. For all the film’s flaws, I can’t help but see that final scene as this almost primal scream into the void that is the future. A future filled with social media influencers and YouTube stars and reality television. And saying, in the midst of death and insanity and all that is happening, I just want to live a quiet life. Of course the nature of this genre is that such a thing is never possible. But I suppose, it’s not really possible in life, either.

R.I.P. Jan Morris

I am one of those people who wanted to be Jan Morris.

Admittedly some of that was simply the job description which involved traveling the world, spending long periods of time in a place, trying to get beneath the surface of things in different ways. That was how Morris wrote about Venice and Trieste and Hong Kong and elsewhere. Morris hated being called a “travel writer” - though I feel like everyone who’s been described as such hates the term. But I understand the annoyance because of course Morris didn’t want to write about travels or traveling, but rather about places and the people there.

Most people’s experience of travel writing is short bullshit articles (pardon my French) in newspapers and bad magazines about traveling to places, naming a few restaurants and sights. But what Morris did is in a long tradition of Robert Byron and Freya Stark, Patrick Leigh Fermor and Rebecca West, Bruce Chatwin and Peter Matthiessen.

Morris understood the conventions of travel writing and used them to good effect in her two novels, which were recently collected into a single volume as Hav. The Book Prize nominated work isn’t a great novel but for lovers of Morris’ work and travel writing, it’s a strange work of speculative fiction and just a delight on many levels.

But I always come back to her memoir Conundrum. Because Morris wasn’t born Jan, but James. In 1974 Morris published a memoir about the experience and what it meant and years ago, when I first read it, at a time when trans wasn’t something people talked about or acknowledged, and it was eye-opening.

Many people cite Morris’ books about Venice as a career highlight and others point to the Pax Britannica trilogy. My favorite book of Morris’ would have to be Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere. And explaining my love of the book is relatively easy - a lot easier than explaining to people who have not read the book why I have so long been obsessed with and fascinated by Trieste. Maybe some of that is imply because I had been obsessed with and fascinated by Venice - it’s hard not to be - but to become obsessed with Trieste, that requires time and effort and the skills of a writer and observer. It was a lesson about being a writer and about life.

For all her travels, though Morris loved Wales, and always identified as Welsh. She wrote a lot about the region in different ways and I always think about what her tied to the land. Despite traveling to every corner of the globe, she always wanted to come home. One reason was her marriage. Married in her twenties, they had five children together, but were forced to divorce when Jan transitioned. But they continued to live together, raised their children, and when civil unions between same sex couples were allowed in Britain, they made their partnership official, again. It’s the kind of love story between two friends that most of us can only envy.

Morris’ best work remains insightful and fascinating. And points to what good travel writing can be. Because it’s not about an up to date guide of what’s on this street now, and the best place for a falafel. But about something deeper and truer, about a sense of place and of what it means. Of history and what it means. This complex web that is life. And making a foreign place something understandable in different ways. Morris did that to places and with her own life and we all owe her a debt.

R.I.P. John Le Carré

David Cornwall, aka John Le Carré, died on December 12, 2020, and in a long year of so much death, it’s hard to process the passing of people we didn’t know, and yet, his death has been so affecting to so many people and not just the bookish sorts like myself who often feel a loss when great writers and artists die. The way so many people and publications wrote about Le Carré’s death felt empty, though. Admittedly I often feel this as significant artistic talents get less coverage than celebrities or nonsense, but Le Carré has long been under appreciated, and that has continued sadly.

There’s the way that everyone felt the need to call him a “spy novelist” and of course that’s true. But it also minimizes how he was a novelist who wrote primarily about spies and espionage. Most writers have a relatively limited range of topics, ideas, places and concerns they write about. Some of deeply specific, some are much more universal. I think what so many people writing about Le Carré miss is that he was our generation’s Graham Greene.

I am not the biggest fan of Greene, admittedly, but one reason he was so beloved by so many people is that he was the first serious adult novelist they read and related to and that shaped so much of how they thought about literature. Part of the reason for Graham was that he had absorbed a lot of crime stories, adventure stories and so he was able to craft work that played with many of those tropes and ideas in different ways. And sometimes it was simply a matter of writing a philosophical version of a thriller with actual characters and political issues. Le Carré was able to do similar things. Both were writers who knew about spies, but they were interested primarily in other issues. They didn’t want to write thrillers or pulp novels, but they had been influenced by them far more than they were more ostensively literary work.

Another similarity is that Le Carré, like Greene, was a moralist. Greene of course was a Roman Catholic and religious themes and concerns run through his work in different ways, perhaps most notably in The Power and the Glory, The Heart of the Matter, and The End of the Affair, but agree with him or disagree (and I know plenty of people who love him who don’t share his politics), Le Carré was as much of a moralist as Greene in his own way.

“Ideologies have no heart of their own. They're the whores and angels of our striving selves.” It should stand as one of Le Carré’s great quotations, but it also gets at the heart of so much of what he believed and how he saw the world.

There is enough written about his own background, his father, his childhood that I don’t need to get into, but I think it was clear in many ways from the start that Le Carré was something of an outsider. That was one of the ways he was able to see the world so clearly, or at least avoid the sharp lines and idea that defined so many people. There are many who loathed how Le Carré wrote about the Cold War, but there is a reason why he’s not a “spy novelist” but a novelist. And that’s in what happened after the collapse fo the Soviet Union. Le Carré didn’t spend years writing period pieces or find other countries to be the replacement villain, but he wrote novels that were in some ways torn from the headlines.

Le Carré wrote about money laundering and arms dealers, medical experimentation, covert operations, governmental corruption, the War on Terror. In many ways he was one of the first adult authors many of us were introduced to. And often introduced to by adults. We didn’t read Le Carré in school, but were given his books by relatives or teachers. Le Carré was an entertaining writer. He could craft these incredibly tense thrilling scenes, but those moments were never the heart of the novels. The heart of the novels were these characters and the insight he had into them. Even if not spelled out, the ways that Le Carré built characters often through actions was so exciting.

I’ve often joked that for all my obsession with great prose and great writing, I love a good story. I love writers who can tell an entertaining plot driven story. But what separates Le Carré, like Greene before him, from writers who can only write thrilling plots is the characters. That he can craft believable and real characters. That he can manage to do conduct such research and impart it to the reader so thoughtfully and digestible. All these vital but often invisible aspects of crafting a story, the building of a fictional world, of being able to convey complicated ideas and structures.

Of course not every book was a winner, they never are, but Le Carré was more productive than a lot of writers – well, far less productive than your run of the mill thriller writer, but far more productive than other literary writers. But through it all he sought to try something different, to explore a new place, to play with structure. He could have simply retired after the end of the Cold War. A Perfect Spy, which was published in 1986, was probably his finest work. But he kept writing. It was by the end, simply how we able to process the world and his own feelings. Plus if he had stopped, we never would have had The Tailor of Panama or The Constant Gardener, and what a loss that would have been.

He wrote a lot about orphans – his complicated relationship with his father meant he likely found that easier – and he was so good at capturing how childhood was important. So many of the books touch on characters’ childhoods in different but important ways, which Le Carré could write about movingly, but he did so to show how our character and our values are formed early. We were playacting at that age in so many ways of course, trying to act older than we were, trying to fit in some way, which helped us find a way into these stories about people pretending to be someone or something they’re not, avoid having our secrets discovered. I think that’s one reason adults suggested these books to us when we were young. To tell us that those years, those struggles, which seemed both so big and so small, mattered. That our lives wasn’t something ahead of us, but that it had started.

Le Carré understood this. He wrote about individuals and systems and being trapped and finding escape. He didn’t make espionage romantic and exciting, like Fleming and others have done. Instead he was realistic about the world and what happened in it. He wrote about childhood and the world and didn’t tell us lies. The world was big and strange and full of possibility. Full of tragedy, yes, but also full of so many things bigger than us, which would both save us and destroy us, and give it meaning.

And in writing two of his best books - The Constant Gardener and Absolute Friends - in his seventies, it serves as a vital reminder for those of us who are now adults. That our best work, our best days, are not necessarily behind us.

Rest In Peace, David John Moore Cornwell.

Review: Scream

I was exhausted by everything happening in the world, so around Halloween I watched a few “scary” movies because, well, considering I was working on the election, the horror on screen was pretty relaxing compared to what was happening in real life. And so beyond watching a film from 1996 that I haven’t seen since it came out, watching Scream was a chance to re-experience pop culture from my youth, and take a new look at it.

Beyond of course the obvious reaction, which is to throughout the film repeatedly go, I forgot this actor was in this! (And, wow, they look so young)

This is the first time I’ve watched Scream since it came out and I found myself ignoring dialogue for the most part. Or rather, on rewatching, it’s the least interesting aspect of the film. At the time it came out, the self-referential dialogue with its shades of Tarantino-esque postmodernism was one of the appeals. This is what made it more than just another horror movie. The characters were aware of how horror movies worked. (which doesn’t stop most of them from getting killed, of course). The film had that dialogue, but in other aspects, it was another horror movie. Scream helped to establish Kevin Williamson as, well, Kevin Williamson. And I could mock his career, which I admittedly don’t hold in especially high esteem, but at the same time, the man’s created multiple TV shows and written a few movies. Most of his work just isn’t for me (and The Following was bad on many levels), but The Faculty is something of a classic, and I actually liked Glory Days and Wasteland when they came out. (I’m one of the few, it seems)

The film may have been marketed with Williamson, but the movie belongs to director Wes Craven and composer Marco Beltrami. By the time Scream came out, Craven was an old hand and practically synonymous with the horror genre for The Last House on the Left, The Hills Have Eyes, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and other films. But he was coming off on two of his more ambitious films (Wes Craven’s New Nightmare and Vampire in Brooklyn) both of which are much more highly regarded now than they were upon release. His career was on the decline and Scream revitalized his career. What he showed in Scream was how talented he was. Craven was masterful at establishing the geography of spaces in small ways and then utilizing that to help craft drama and tension. He wasn’t a great director of comedy, but he knew how to communicate with actors and give them space for comedy – just as he gave them space to emote – and it’s incredible to watch. Why didn’t Hollywood realize he was so good at this and throw money at him to direct thrillers? Because he was so much better at it than most directors. Plus he was good working with younger and inexperienced actors and coaxing good performances out of them. He directed Red Eye in 2005, but imagine if he was doing that annually? Or if he had the chance to make a few more odd films like the short he wrote and directed for Paris je t’aime? Careers go up and down, obviously, and often for reasons out of individual’s control, but I’m not sure I appreciated how good he was until I rewatched the film. He was really talented and not in the very explicit stylistic ways (think of John Carpenter) that draw a viewer’s attention to the camera. Craven was more invisible than that

By contrast to the mid-career Craven, Beltrami was at the very beginning of his career. He’s currently one of the best film composers currently alive, but his talent was obvious right at the start here, because his score for the film is gorgeous. Seriously, one of the best parts of the film and I say that having just talked about what a skilled craftsman Craven is, but Beltrami brings the film to another level entirely.

And having dismissed Williamson and his script, I will say that what he does well is to capture some of the feeling of being a teenager. And not just the idea of being a teen, or the symbolic idea of it, which is why so many films about kids and teens feel…off, let’s say. The struggle is to capture what it felt like at that age, and at its best, Scream gets that. The anger, the irreverence, the attitude to authority. Being a complete wiseass, which is at the heart of a lot of the dialogue about horror movies and the rules and what it means. That added level of geekiness. The film’s success – and the script’s – is its ability to do many things well. To be a teen movie, to be a geeky self-referential movie, to be a horror movie. It’s not funny (or at least, not as funny as it thinks it is) but that’s not a major problem.

The film was huge and it was huge for the horror genre. In some ways the film can be blamed for a generation of horror movies that featured young casts – I’m thinking about everything from I Know What You Did Last Summer to Final Destination to the remake of Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and the list goes on. This was…not great, let’s say. But the film launched dozens, if not hundreds of films in its wake. And if in the end, the film wasn’t as influential, didn’t change as much as it was trumpeted to, well, every genre needs to be rebooted and refurbished every now and then. To remind people why it worked, why its great, what it’s capable of being. Scream did that.

Admittedly I was not the biggest fan of much of the cast – then or now. As I said, I was reminded throughout about how I didn’t remember most of the cast was in the film. I did not remember how Drew Barrymore had a small role and was essentially the movie’s big name.

I was never a big David Arquette fan, though he’s fine in the films. In truth I’ve never enjoyed his work as a comedian, but I do wish he’d done some more dramatic roles, some more crime movies and thrillers, because he’s not bad. Courtney Cox was on one of the biggest shows on TV at the time she made Scream, and I was never a big fan of Friends, but she’s good here. The character is annoying for the most part, but Cox plays the character perfectly.

I was reminded how much I like Neve Campbell and how she should have (and is capable of) a much better career than she’s had. But back in the nineties (for all you young ‘uns reading) she was on Party of Five every week and then besides Scream, she was in The Craft and Wild Things. And she had a mixed bag of films after but there was The Company that she co-wrote and produced and starred in, directed by the late great Robert Altman, and films like Investigating Sex, Panic, Last Call, Reefer Madness, Closing the Ring, I Really Hate My Job. She’s worked with good directors and actors. She’s often interesting even if the film isn’t. But I’m guessing most people never saw most of those films.

Also, and this may be showing my age but I can’t help but think about how the film was released in 1996, which is to say, pre-Columbine. And watching the film today it feels completely different than it did to me back then for that reason. I don’t know that it could be made today. And yes, obviously sequels to the film have happened since, but this initial film, and two teenagers going on this kind of killing spree in the film, I really can’t see it being made. And I don’t say that as someone who has a strong opinion one way or the other about that fact. I can’t imagine writing a movie about teenagers on a killing spree through their town. Back when I was in high school, I could have imagined such a film. But Columbine changed that. How does one make a film about that, knowing about the rash of school shootings in the United States? I don’t think making a movie today on that subject would change anything. I just don’t think I could sit through it, let alone make it.

I do think it says something about the talent and the artistry of the film that after that thought popped into my head (it’s been years, I forgot the identity of the killer) I didn’t shut it off and move on with my life.. If it was a bad movie, I wouldn’t have bothered.

There’s a way in which the film manages to deconstruct the genre, at least in its dialogue, but also is essentially a horror/slasher film, and is unabashedly so. Which if I’m honest, I enjoy. It’s a movie that loves the genre, and wants to celebrate it. Not elevate. Just enjoy it. I’m someone who enjoys genre, and I love work that leans into genre, and I think one way that genres grow and change is finding new ideas and avenues. Scream did that. I’m not sure it has a lot of appeal for people not interested in horror, though I think the dialogue brought people in back when it first came out. But Scream stands up. Even after all these years.

Some Suggestions for the Criterion Collection #BlackCriterion

After the article in the New York Times about the shortcomings in the Criterion Collection, many people have taken it upon themselves to draw up lists of what should be included, great work that needs more recognition, films and filmmakers who deserve to be considered part of the canon. I’m a film nerd and so many of the lists have given me films that I haven’t seen, and I wanted to add my own suggestions. I have also most likely forgotten as many filmmakers as I listed. I will just say that all of these filmmakers deserve to be in the Criterion collection, to be discussed and considered and studied more than they are.

Madeline Anderson

Her documentaries like Integration Report One and I Am Somebody are a very big deal.

Maya Angelou

The sole film she directed was Down in the Delta, a small gem featuring Alfre Woodard, Mary Alice, Al Freeman, Jr., Loretta Divine, Wesley Snipes in a film whose strength lies in a naturalistic performers (especially Woodard and Freeman) who masterfully illuminate these characters lives.

Charles Burnett

Burnett is simply one of the world’s greatest living filmmakers. Criterion released To Sleep with Anger, arguably his best film. There’s a great two disk set of Killer of Sheep, which includes his second film My Brother’s Wedding. It would be nice to see some of his later work receive such treatment. Like Namibia: The Struggle for Liberation? Maybe a set of his documentaries? Burnett also directed a few television films, and I haven’t seen them all, but Nightjohn is excellent, and Selma, Lord, Selma and The Wedding are both good.

Rafael Casal and David Diggs

Blindspotting is a great film first film by two longtime friends and first time writer-directors and what they pull off is something truly personal, something that speaks to the Bay Area and to this moment.

Chinonye Chukwu

Clemency was one of the most deeply moving and deeply political films that came out last year, thanks to a flawless cast and a central performance by the great Alfre Woodard.

Kathleen Collins

Losing Ground was so under appreciated when it came out in 1982 but watch it today and it is a great work. Plus her prose work has been reissued in recent years to great acclaim and attention.

Ryan Coogler

I would love a nice edition of his debut feature Fruitvale Station along with his short films.

Julie Dash

Daughters of the Dust is a masterpiece. The Rosa Parks Story (starring Angela Bassett) is good. She also made a number of short films, which I’ll be honest, I’ve never had the chance to see, but I know I’m not alone in wanting to see them.

Ossie Davis

There’s his adaptation of Chester Himes’ novel Cotton Comes to Harlem. Black Girl is a drama featuring some great actors (Claudia McNeil, Peggy Pettit, Leslie Uggams, Ruby Dee, Brock Peters). There’s also the action drama Countdown at Kusini about African revolutionaries and the drama Crown Dick.

One of his films that seems made for Criterion is Kongi’s Harvest, which was written by and stars the Nobel Prize winning writer and playwright Wole Soyinka. I could be wrong but I believe that’s the only time that Soyinka has written a script or acted in a film, which given that he is a Nobel Prize winner feels…notable?

Mati Diop

I really want a Criterion release of her film Atlantics.

Bill Duke

You might know him mostly as an actor, but he’s the director of some very good films including The Killing Floor, about labor activism in the early 20th century, A Rage in Harlem, based on the novel by the great American novelist Chester Himes, Deep Cover, a great noir film starring Laurence Fishburne, and Hoodlum, which took some liberties with the historical record but is still a good gangster film about 20s/30s Harlem. He also directed an A Raisin in the Sun with Danny Glover and Esther Rolle for television.

Cheryl Dunye

The Watermelon Woman. Stranger Inside. The Owls. All her short films.

Anne-Laure Folly

This filmmaker from Togo has directed a great collection of documentaries over the years including Femmes aux yeux ouverts and Les Oubliées.

Carl Franklin

Devil in a Blue Dress is a masterpiece, with two of the best performances by Denzel Washington and Don Cheadle ever. I also quite like One False Move.

Lisa Gay Hamilton

Her film Beah: A Black Woman Speaks, about the late actor and activist, is a great, award-winning documentary.

Tanya Hamilton

Night Catches Us is that rare film that manages to be a great interpersonal drama while also showing us characters caught up in larger historical events. A masterpiece in miniature.

Thomas Allen Harris

The director and producer made the films Twelve Disciples of Nelson Mandela and Through a Lens Darkly: Black Photographers and the Emergence of a People, both of which should be on a list of great 21st Century documentaries.

Barry Jenkins

Obviously his Best Picture Oscar winner Moonlight is an obvious choice, as is his adaptation of If Beale Street Could Talk. His first film, Medicine for Melancholy, is definitely deserving and stands among some of the other debuts of notable American voices Criterion has released.

Clark Johnson

After getting his start in TV, Johnson directed the great tv film Boycott starring Jeffrey Wright as Dr. King. He also directed last year’s, Juanita, a lovely character based indie film starring the great Alfre Woodard.

Spike Lee

Where is the deluxe remastered edition of Malcolm X? There are lots of Spike films to pick from, but if I had to go with one, that’s the one. Though of course She’s Gotta Have It and Clockers and a few others would make very fine additions to the collection. Maybe his documentary 4 Little Girls? What about a multi-disk set of his documentaries When the Levees Broke and his followup If God is Willing and da Creek Don’t Rise?

Kasi Lemmons

Her debut Eve’s Bayou was brilliant, and since then she’s made a number of others including last year’s Harriet.

Tina Mabry

Mississippi Damned is brilliant and amazing.

Sarah Maldoror

When she died earlier this year of complications from Covid, Maldoror was hailed as a pioneer of pan-African cinema and almost everyone cited her 1972 film Sambizanga about the Angolan war for independence as a masterpiece of global cinema.

Djibril Diop Mambéty

The late filmmaker only made two feature films in his lifetime, along with a number of short films, but Touki Bouki and Hyenes are both excellent. And those plus all his shorts would be a great addition to our understanding of global cinema

Steve McQueen

Hunger. Shame. 12 Years a Slave. Widows. I’d be good with a Criterion edition of any of them. I would also love a nice collection of his short films.

Gordon Parks

He’s most famous for directing Shaft (well, and for his photography) but he also directed The Learning Tree, Leadbelly (about the great blues musician), and Solomon Northrup’s Odyssey, which adapted 12 Years a Slave and starred Avery Brooks.

Raoul Peck

His film Lumumba was incredible. I Am Not Your Negro was a brilliant film about James Baldwin. There’s The Man by the Shore, Sometimes in April, Moloch Tropical, Murder in Pacot. Plus all his shorts and early work.

Sidney Poitier

The Oscar winning actor directed a few films over the years including Buck and the Preacher, a western starring Poitier, Harry Belafonte and Ruby Dee, and the romance film Warm December starring him and Esther Anderson. He also directed the popular “trilogy” of films featuring Poitier and Bill Cosby (Uptown Saturday Night, Let’s Do It Again, and A Piece of the Action) but the presence of Cosby kind of ruins them.

Dawn Porter

The great filmmaker behind Gideon’s Army, Spies of Mississippi, and John Lewis: Good Trouble has made some of the best and important American documentaries of recent decades.

Dee Rees

Pariah was a great first film. Bessie was a fabulous TV movie anchored by a tour de force performance by Queen Latifah (possibly her very best). Mudbound was a masterpiece.

Tim Reid

Once Upon a Time…When We Were Colored, a portrait of life in the rural South over nearly two decades, stands out for its portrait of a community in a time of change. Not a film about plot so much as a collection of characters and scenes and moments that cumulatively becomes this deeply affecting portrait of life and humanity.

Marlon Riggs

I would love a nice box set of his work like Ethnic Notions, Tongues Untied, Color Adjustment, Black Is…Black Ain’t.

Boots Riley

Sorry to Bother You is one of the great debut films of the 21st Century.

Michael Schultz

Truly one of the great underrated filmmakers in recent American history. He directed Lorraine Hansberry’s To Be Young, Gifted and Black first on Broadway and then for television which starred the great Ruby Dee. Schultz went onto make a series of films that combined comedy and drama with social content in different ways like Cooley High and the ensemble film Car Wash.

Osmane Sembene

Criterion released Black Girl, the debut feature from the late filmmaker, which I hope will be the first of many, as I think both the quality of his work and the influence that he had certainly warrant it. I will admit that I would call Faat Kine, my favorite of his, but it was the first film of his I ever saw, when it debuted in New York in 2001, I believe. Camp de Thiaroye is not just an important historical work, but received the Grand Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival and Guelwaar is a stunning masterpiece.

Melvin Van Peebles

The Story of as Three Day Pass, Watermelon Man, Sweet Sweetback’s Baasassss Song!, and Don’t Play Us Cheap would make for an interesting box set.

Also, there’s a film called Unstoppable: A Conversation with Melvin Van Peebles, Gordon Parks, and Ossie Davis. I’ve never seen it, but if you’re looking for extras, well, who wouldn’t want to be a fly on the wall of that conversation?

Denzel Washington

His adaptation of August Wilson’s Fences.

George C. Wolfe

One of the great theatrical directors, his film work hasn’t been on the same level, but Lackawanna Blues, an adaptation of the play by Ruben Santiago-Hudson is a great character ensemble that stars S. Epatha Merkerson.

Phillip Youmans

Burning Cane was a stunning debut film, and it’s easy to hate him for being so young and so talented, but to watch the world he crafted unroll, is to sit in awe.

Happy Birthday, Robert Plant

Robert Anthony Plant was born on August 20, 1948. He is of course the lead singer and lyricist of Led Zeppelin, and quite simply, one of the great figures in the history of rock and roll. In his lyrics, one sees a wide range of influences from Norse and Welsh mythology to Tolkien to the blues. After the death of drummer John Bonham, Led Zeppelin broke up, and since then they’ve each found their own musical path, and Plant has constantly sought new influences and ideas. Raising Sand, the album he made with Allison Krauss and producer T-Bone Burnett shows that. He’s explored synth rock and roots music, Appalachian music and North Africans rhythms. He has nothing to prove but is constantly curiosity, always amazed by and interested in music. One has to remember the Kennedy Center Honors in 2012 where Led Zeppelin was honored and Plant had tears in his eyes at the performance of Stairway to Heaven, a song he’s heard probably more than anyone ever, and yet, it can bring him to tears. Plant is a musical genius, but more than that, a model for anyone, to never stop creating, never stop working, never stop finding wonder and ideas everywhere.

Happy Birthday, Gene Roddenberry

August 19, 1921 is the birth date of Eugene Wesley Roddenberry, the screenwriter and producer best known as the creator of Star Trek. Trained as a pilot during the Second World War, and after the war worked for Pan Am. In 1947, he was piloting a plane that crashed in the Syrian desert, and afterwards left flying to pursue his dream of being a writer. He moved to Los Angeles and got a job on the LAPD. He became a speechwriter for the Chief of Police, which led to him advising television productions, which led to him writing scripts for different shows. Roddenberry went onto create The Lieutenant, about Marines at Camp Pendleton, which lasted one season, running into problems because of a script involving racial prejudice. His next project was Star Trek, of which I was one of the millions of people obsessed by the show. Roddenberry tended to rewrite scripts, which led to problems with writers. Afterwards Roddenberry wrote a film for Roger Vadim (Pretty Maids All in a Row), wrote a number of pilots that didn’t go to series (Genesis II, Planet Earth, The Questor Tapes, Spectre) and worked on Star Trek: The Animated Series, attempted to revive Star Trek before launching the feature films and then The Next Generation. Admittedly Roddenberry managed to anger almost everyone working on TNG, and the show became significantly better once he stopped having much to do with the show. It’s hard to underestimate the influence of his optimistic humanist vision of the future and what was possible.

Happy Birthday, Joe Frank

August 19, 1938 was the birthday of the late writer and radio performer Joe Frank. Born Joseph Langermann in Strasbourg, France and grew up in New York City after his family emigrated. In the course of his career he published fiction and wrote plays, did voiceovers, but ultimately he remains best known for extensive work in radio. He began working in New York City where he hosted a show that was a mixture of monologues, sketches and live music. He worked at NPR’s All Things Considered for years and wrote for NPR Playhouse. In 1986 he moved to Los Angeles and began a weekly show for KCRW. To listen to his work is to discover a new form of radio. In his very best work he has this dry ironic sensibility, work that’s full of irony, and takes strange odd turns. From the episode where he kept promising a great story but he was going to a commercial break so he could drink his tea, and when he comes back…. Later in life he contributed work to KCRW"‘s Unfictional program, these beautifully shaped pieces like Dreamers, A Hollywood True Story, The Poor Are Always With Us, and Isolation. He had one of those voices, but more than that he had this mind that was able to craft so many incredible stories and find new ways to present them. A true visionary.

Happy Birthday, Steve Martin

August 14, 1945 is the birth date of Steve Martin. A writer, comedian, actor, musician, he’s one of those figures who is hard to pin down, and how a person defines him probably depends on how old they are, and what Martin was doing at the time. He began as a comedian and writer while in college, became a writer on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, winning an Emmy Award at the age of 23. His comedy albums in the 1970s were massively successful, and Martin was a guest and host on Saturday Night Live many times, was a guest star on The Muppet Show, and in 1981, retired from comedy and began focusing on acting and writing. He has tended to move between comedy films like The Jerk, Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid, The Man with Two Brains, Three Amigos, with more serious work like Pennies From Heaven and The Spanish Prisoner.

Martin wrote a number of films that he also starred in including Roxanne, L.A. Story, Shopgirl, and the great comedy Bowfinger. Martin has written plays including Picasso at the Lapin Agile, books including The Pleasure of My Company, and a memoir, Born Standing Up, in addition to making multiple albums as a banjo player.

Strangely enough I think my introduction to Martin was The Muppet Movie where he plays an insolent waiter whose entire cameo is one great line after another. It’s very much a role that the wild and crazy Martin would have had in the 1970s when the film was made, and so very unlike the kinds of roles he’s known for today.

Happy Birthday, Wim Wenders

The filmmaker and photographer Wim Wenders was born August 14, 1945 in Dusseldorf, Germany. Part of the New German Cinema that arose in the 1970s, so much of his work is defined by road trips, journeys, about people transformed by travel. While he first achieved acclaim for his co-called “Road Movies trilogy” of films he made in Germany in the 1970s and An American Friend, his adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley’s Game, Wenders is that rare filmmaker who is perhaps as well known for his documentaries as for his fictional films. He went onto make movies like Paris, Texas and Wings of Desire, which are quite simply, two of the greatest films ever made. Last year Criterion released the 287 minute cut of his 1991 film Until the End of the World, which deserves to be mentioned with his very best work. Among his many documentaries are Buena Vista Social Club, about Cuban musicians, Pina, about the choreographer Pina Bausch, The Salt of the Earth, about the photographer Sebastiao Salgado, and Pope Francis: A Man of His Word, which began when the Vatican wrote Wenders a letter asking if he would interested in making a film about the Pope.

Happy birthday, Gary Larson

August 14, 1950 is the birth date of Gary Larson, the cartoonist behind The Far Side. The single panel comic strip ran from 1979 to 1995 and at least among people my age, is considered done of the great comics of all time. Since retiring, Larson made a picture book for children, produced two animated specials, and recently began posting new comics on his website thefarside.com. His unique point of view and strange sense of humor has been influenced many people, led to more than one new species being named after him, and he coined the term “thagomizer” and for people who don’t know what that is, I encourage you to look it up because quite frankly the story behind it is so strange and funny that you wouldn’t believe me if I told you.

Happy Birthday, Bert Lahr

August 13, 1895 is the birth date of the acclaimed actor Bert Lahr. Born Irving Lahrheim in New York City, Lahr dropped out of school and went to work in vaudeville. Eventually Lahr found his way to Hollywood where he famously played the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz. He had small roles in other film and TV productions, including The Night They Raided Minsky’s, a film about burlesque, a world he knew well, which Lahr was filming when he died. Lahr remained best known as a stage actor. He starred as Estragon in the first American production of Waiting for Godot. It was a failure, but Lahr went onto star in the Broadway production of the play, which was a success.

Shortly after his death, Lahr’s son John Lahr wrote the biography Notes on a Cowardly Lion, about his father, which was both a fascinating book for people interested in vaudeville and burlesque and theater life in the early 20th Century, but also traced how Lahr’s origins in comedy were not foreign to Beckett and that Lahr understood the play on multiple levels, even if he couldn’t talk about it the way that others could. It’s an unflinching look at how his father could be, his brilliance and his flaws, and displayed the kind of nuance and thoughtfulness that John Lahr has approached writing about the theater and about people his entire career. But he makes his father known to us. Those who only know him as the lion who says “Heavens to Murgatroyd!” but shows how much more there was to that performance and to that life. The highs and lows of it all, the struggle, and how those decades of struggle defined him. There’s a lot of stories of Hollywood and the theater which are fun and fascinating to read about it, but ultimately it is the story of a son trying to understand and appreciate his father.

Happy Birthday, Alfred Hitchcock

August 13, 1899 is the birthday of the late Alfred Hitchcock. In his lifetime, he was one of the most popular filmmakers in the world, and one of the most recognizable, but since his death in 1980, his stature has grown, and is widely regarded as one of the greatest filmmakers of all time.

He was known as “the master of suspense” for the many thrillers he made, but like many writers who specialize in a genre, that meant that his technical skill as a director and storyteller often went unnoticed by many. One of those who didn’t was filmmaker Francois Truffaut who spent more than 50 hours interviewing Hitchcock, producing the great 1967 book Hitchock/Truffaut, which is considered an essential book for filmmakers, scholars and storytellers.

The 39 Steps, The Lady Vanishes, Rebecca, Foreign Correspondent, Suspicion, Spellbound, Notorious, Strangers on a Train, Rear Window, To Catch a Thief, Vertigo, North by Northwest, Psycho, The Birds and so many more aren’t simply thrillers, aren’t simply entertainment, they’re great films. Rear Window holds up as brilliant. Filmmakers have been trying to make something like To Catch a Thief ever since it came out because it’s light and entertaining and fun and suspenseful featuring beautiful actors in a beautiful setting - only to find that it’s much harder than it looks. Psycho and The Birds freak people out to this day.

And Vertigo is simply one of the greatest movies ever made. I saw it for the first time when it was rereleased and restored in the late 1990s and it was as strange and intense as I imagine it must have been to viewers in 1958. And remains strange and dazzling and unsettling and moving for all the same reasons today.

Happy Birthday, Edith Hamilton

August 12, 1867 is the birthday of Edith Hamilton. Today she is known and beloved for her books The Greek Way and Mythology. One of the great classicists of her generation for the generations who grew up after World War II, she spent much of her life as a teacher and headmistress at the Bryn Mawr School, an all girls prep school in Baltimore. She began writing after she retired, and her first book The Greek Way, was published when she was in her sixties. Mythiology was the book that kids my age who loved the myths were given after we graduated from the D’Aulaires beautiful illustrated texts. I liked Mythology well enough, but when I was a little older and read The Greek Way, it was one of the books that helped me to understand and appreciate Greek literature and culture. She never claimed to be a scholar, but for generations since, she has been one of the voices and minds who opened our eyes to the classics and the Mediterranean world.