Work Week

This week I really must get that book proposal written - but I've got to see students about essays. Heigho. My repeated insistence that if they want to make an appointment they will have to sign the sheet of paper on my door seems beyond them.

Meanwhile I've completed a long and bloody Chapter 11, and am a third of the way through Chapter 12 and the half way point marker. In the next draft I'm going to have to do something about the who-do-you-meet-this-chapter structure of the even numbered ones, but I can't see the way round it with a character stuck in one place.

60,745 / 100,000 (60.7%)

Of course, there are still fragments of chapters 13-24 in the word count so, seasonally adjusted:

49,407 / 100,000 (49.4%)

553 words a day to finish by the end of the year - but I am still writing long.

Edit: 2000 words seems to have been attached to chapters 1-12 or 13-24 (can't work out which). Let's steal the words from 13-24 as part of the total until the 3/4 mark of Chapter 18 (7000 words written, 18000 words to go, so mid-November), when I'll point out the discrepency again.

Alejandro González Iñárritu, Babel

Continuing the exploration of hyperlink cinema after 21 Grams (and years ago, Amores Perros, and debatably Go and Pulp Fiction). Here we have four strands, one with Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett as the Ugly Americans on a bus tour in Morocco, when one of them is shot by accident. Meanwhile, their nanny/maid Amelia (Adriana Barraza) is left to look after their children as the day of her son’s wedding dawns. Unable to find a sitter, she takes them to Mexico with her, and has a nightmare journey home. Meanwhile in Morocco, two goat herders Yussef and Ahmed (Boubker Ait El Caid and Said Tarchini) have been playing with a new rifle. Meanwhile in Japan, Chieko Wataya (Rinko Kikuchi) is discovery on sexuality and dealing with the death of her mother.

It’s less tangled than 21 Grams, although the intercut narratives are not told sequentially, and hence there is less of a sense of wondering what the point was. Intriguingly there is a sense of a thriller in here trying to get out – the trailer is very much can the Americans abroad in a hostile north Africa reach safety? in its tone and cutting. At the same time the Japanese thread (it’s not right to call it a subplot even if it tens towards being one) feels welded on to the other three.

Again, an artistic decision has been taken – or Iñárritu is doing his schtick again – and the question is whether it was the right one. Yes, there are moments of real tension, and I wasn’t sure whether the characters would survive. But it almost becomes Brechtian – I think I cared less about the Japanese narrative because it was intercut.

Babel derives from the Tower – but is it the universal language that is being alluded to or the confusion after the fall of the tower? (This is post 9/11 of course.) Amelia I feel is punished too much for one bad decision. Not as disappointing as I expected.

Small Murphies XXI

Being trusted.

Don Roos, Happy Endings

Another example of hyperlink cinema which has the ensemble cast but lacks the international locations (even the Mexican setting is knowingly and openly faked). It’s also a point when you think, hyperlink cinema is Robert Altman without the mastery of the material and using subtitles. We are here closer to intertitles than subtitles.

Twenty years ago Mamie (Lisa Kudrow, but then played by Hallee Hirsh) seduces her gay stepbrother Charley (Steve Coogan, then played by Eric Jungmann) and becomes pregnant. She secretly puts the child up for adoption – and in the present she is then blackmailed by aspiring film maker Nicky (Jesse Bradford) into making a documentary. She thinks that she can manipulate him by offering to make a film about her lover Javier (Bobby Cannavale) as masseur and supposed sex worker. Meanwhile Charley, running a restaurant (into the ground) is convinced that his lesbian best friends have secret user his partners sperm to conceive their child and wants to expose them. Charley has a secret admirer, the closeted Otis McKee (John Ritter), who is seduced by the new singer in his band, Jude (Maggie Gyllenhaal), who then goes on to seduce Otis’s widowed father, Frank (Tom Arnold).

Again, the threads are tied together, and not just through Charley and Otis, although the chronology will fall apart if looked at too closely. But there is a deftness of touch here, in the subtle mirroring of one pregnancy with another, one seduction with another, one attempt at parenthood with another. Great play is made of mirrors and the video footage of the documentary the characters make – which is also called Happy Endings.

Tom Arnold is better than I’d expect from previous outings, and quietly steals his scenes. Lisa Kudrow is a smarter actor than her Friends persona would suggest – whereas I’d made it a rule to avoid romcoms with Friends alumni, Kudrow is the exception as I realised with Roos’s The Opposite of Sex. The film is (almost) all about her and her lack of self-awareness and her failure to get other people. Gyllenhaal – as her thematic twin, again unaware of consequences to actions – continues to impress, and should be winning Oscars one day: her character remains likeable despite her manipulation, she’s always constantly on the move, thinking, eating, emoting. The one weak link is the lazy depiction of the lesbian couple, which is right out of (either version of) Queer as Folk.

Finally, the intertitles. Used sparingly but with apt affect, these offer information on the characters, a commentary on the action or a notification of what is going to happen. It’s a novelistic technique, but brings a refreshing sense of irony to a tight rope walk over the abyss of soapdom. I think it’s this that fits it in the camp of hyperlink cinema.

Oh, and a smattering of stand out, quotable, lines.

Mamie: I'm not pro-life, though.
Jude: Who is, once you start to pay attention?



But maybe I want linear again.