Guys, I am judging a short short fiction contest for Passages North. The deadline is March 15. Maybe enter?
Speaking of Passages North, they were kind enough to publish a story (novel excerpt, really) of mine, The Nature of Living Things, in Issue 33. I also wrote for The Rumpus about books I am looking forward to in 2012, and other things, but mostly books I am looking forward to in 2012. In, shall we say, unexpected but OMG news, I was invited to respond to Teddy Wayne’s lament for the male novelist over at a little website called Salon. I was grateful for the opportunity. I also did a Book Notes for Ayiti at Largehearted Boy. Lastly, I have a little story in Heavy Feather Review 1.1.
Now, let’s talk about interesting things.
I woke up one morning recently and thought, “I would like to make a tapenade.” My friend T’s husband made one a few months ago, and it was my first experience with such ambrosia and I thought about his tapenade that morning and one thing lead to another. I went to the grocery store, after consulting Dr. Google, to acquire some olives and being that this is, well, where it is, the olives I purchased came in cans and jars. The olive bar at Whole Foods weeped, nay, sobbed, at the quality of olives I purchased. I was undeterred!
I bought this shitty food processor a while back and took months to take it out of the box and then I did and took a while longer to use it because I had no food requiring processing.
It is the cutest fucking appliance.
Also, the word appliance. Let’s enjoy that word a little.
I wisely discarded the user manual when I got rid of the box so I had no idea how to use my cute fucking appliance. Whatevs. I put the black olives, from a can, baby, in the processor. I attached the cover. I started pressing the buttons, of which there are only two, but nothing was happening. I lifted the processor and studied the body for an “On” switch. There was none. I looked at the cover and thought maybe it needed to be aligned a certain way but no matter how I configured the cover, the processor wouldn’t work.
We live in the future so I consulted Dr. Google. The Oster website has the manuals for absolutely every food processor BUT MINE. Awesome. I went to Amazon. People talk all kinds of shit in the Reviews. What a feature, man. I FOUND MY ANSWER! Turns out that I bought a really terrible appliance. There was some serious rage in the reviews so I definitely amused myself for a while reading and enjoying all that consumer anger. It also turns out that I was right. The machine won’t work unless the cover is properly aligned. I returned to my kitchen and basically beat that lid into submission and then it started working. Oh modernity, how wonderful you are. Soon, I had a lot of olive bits.
Then I added some green olives and garlic. I processed the shit out of those.
I added some olive oil, lemon juice, and freshly ground black pepper.
That is a tapenade! It tastes delicious. It really does. I know this story seems like it is going somewhere but it isn’t.
I saw this intriguing little book at the grocery store: This book exists! What is it about? I didn’t want to ruin the deliciousness of guessing so I didn’t read the back cover.
I made a tomato soup substituting mushrooms for pancetta and vegetable stock for chicken stock.
I’ve not blogged because I’ve been busy with this Lions In Winter reading series we have at my school. I ended up doing way more work for it than I planned but that’s okay because I got to bring two amazing writers to EIU and if you get a chance to invite these writers to your city, you should–Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz and Megan Stielstra. Both ladies were wonderful and stayed with me during their visits. Oh we talked and laughed and shared meals and it was like I wasn’t living in exile.
They also killed their performances, and I mean KILLED, and were generous to visit classes and talk to our students. I love being able to introduce students to working writers so they can learn about how different people work and try to make a living at their art. My guests also brought gifts. Cristin brought a calendar from the Mutter Museum. Medical Oddities! Yes! Megan brought me Fage Cherry yogurt (genuflect), wine, and vegetable stock which has been oddly challenging to find here in the heart of Fried Food Country. She was the magi bearing goodness and light. We had only been Internet friends but now I’m comfortable saying Megan and I are special flesh sangria true lyf friends. We went to this restaurant up in Chambana and the sangria had layers so it was really an interactive drink because the fun part was mixing the layers. What what?
Cristin’s reading electrified me. Megan’s reading moved me deeply. She’s a consummate storyteller. Her reading was just so moving and charming and perfect.
This “No Weapons Allowed” sign has been recently added to the doors at the movie theatre. It’s weird because I live in the deep sticks. The theatre is sometimes called the Corn Palace because it was literally carved out of a cornfield. Was there a killer corn threat I don’t know about?
Anyway.
I saw The Darkest Hour, a movie so random and obscure it did not have one headlining star. The cast was a hodgepodge of people who typically play district attorneys, best friends, and otherwise litter the background of movies. It goes without saying that The Darkest Hour was terrible but it was different from your typical movie terrible in that this movie should have been released straight to cable. That’s right. This movie should have bypassed DVD entirely.
First, let me briefly detail everything this movie lacks–charismatic actors, production values, plot, coherence, logic, or charm. The most lacking part of this movie was the third dimension. For reasons that truly elude me, The Darkest Hour was a 3D movie but never was there any third dimension. The producers were basically non-consensually peeing in your mouth with the 3D bullshit.
The principal actors were Emile Hirsch, who has had an odd little career and has a disproportionately sized head on screen, the annoying guy from Social Network who wanted damages and injunctive relief or whatever but wasn’t one of the Winkelvii, the girl who was Juno’s BFF in Juno and always had something sassy to say, and the blonde computer hacker from the first Transformers movie–the one who is SUPER Australian and “hot” with a pointy face. She is exceptionally unbearable in this movie, like, as if being annoying was her job and she had a good work ethic.
I had a whole spiel about this movie planned but look, it was a waste of time. I don’t even remember half of it. The special effects were very summer camp, second grade. It was, I repeat, a waste of time.
I saw Contraband, which was wonderful. I had totally forgotten that Marky Mark is great with caper movies. I had a blast and was entertained and though there were two separate movies going on–violent heist movie with a psychopathic villain and quirky caper movie featuring a smuggler with a heart of gold, the duality worked for me.
The movie I’m really going to talk about is Haywire, with that MMA fighter lady, Gina Carano. This movie is rather baffling. I laughed from the beginning of the movie straight through to the end because so much of the movie was ludicrous and unintentionally hilarious.
Half the movie is a silent film. The entire movie uses the score of Oceans 11-13. The score is so overbearing throughout the movie it becomes painful to hear the playful “something potentially mysterious is about to happen,” chords.
At the beginning of the movie, we see the Helvetica Light Italic typeface which Soderbergh, who directed the movie, is clearly in love with. Yes, I can eyeball that typeface from a mile away. The place: upstate New York. A woman is in the woods. It is winter. She appears to be act shivering in that you can see her trying to make it look like she’s trembling and that’s really the first shot across the bow of terribleness. It’s the canary in the mine letting you know how deeply this movie is going to suck. The woman trots across a parking lot and sits in a diner and waits, her dark hair hanging in her face. Her hair shifts and we see faint bruises. Aha! Something’s wrong. After a while, Channing Tatum strolls in and in a scene where he comes across as the better actor, you can only imagine how much face acting is taking place. He and Gina engage in some random conversation that’s trying to approximate the witty staccato of Aaron Sorkin dialogue but there’s no context (which is supposed to inspire a sense of intrigue but instead inspires frustration). This attempt is further hampered by the people delivering the dialoge who are incapable of vocal inflection. Tatum is also feigning a hangover. Or he’s really hung over. Who knows?
He orders coffee, black, the waitress delivers it, he throws it in Gina’s face and then it is ON. Ding Ding Ding. The first of several impromptu MMA cage fights breaks out in an unexpected locale. The fight scenes were painful to watch because the choreography was visibly evident. You could literally see the actors still blocking their moves only, the director was actually shooting. I watch MMA with man friends or my brothers from time to time so it was great to recognize submission moves (whose names I know not) and also, an arm bar. The fight ends, which is a mercy for the audience, and Gina grabs Michael Angarano, who plays Michael Angarano–a dweebish nineteen year old whose voice is still, perhaps, changing. She commandeers his car as he protests weakly. As they drive away, she has him “take care” of her arm because in the scrum, she was also shot.
As this dynamic duo drives to parts unknown, Gina begins to tell young Michael about the strange sequence of events that have brought them together without everinflectinghervoicenotevenonce. It was then I realized that the script was going to be even weaker than I feared–it’s such a terrible device, forcing two strangers together, and providing the backstory for the rest of the movie to make sense by having them share a little chat. As Gina tells her story, which begins in Barcelona, we get to see flashback scenes.
Ewan McGregor, or Kenneth, meets with Michael Douglas and Antonio Banderasssssssssssss who is sporting a mighty beard. They have a conversation that, again, without context, makes no sense but is clearly trying to approximate Sorkin. Only Sorkin can do Sorkin. I do not know why the screenwriter even tried to go there. Hubris!
Cut to Barcelona and Gina is sitting in the same apartment where spies who don’t know each other assemble to do some kind of mission no matter what European city they might be in. You’ve seen this apartment in the Bourne movies, on Alias, Mission Impossible, etc. When you see this movie and see this apartment, you’ll totally recognize it. Gina dons a bandana, why we don’t know, but she makes a big show of putting it on and trust me, it goes nowhere (see: tapenade), and then does spy things like staring at a hard plastic case or something. Channing Tatum enters and they resume their battle to see who can face act more and speak without inflecting their voices. It ends in a tie. What was supposed to happen in this scene is that we were supposed to see the initial sparks of antagonism that would eventually blossom into lust. We’ve all seen enough movies to see where this is going. Because Carano and Tatum have less chemistry than a pair of 80-year old nuns, they just look like two muscular people in a room, bless their hearts.
There’s a mission, where the muscleheads and a couple other guys use a bunch of slick gadgets and retrieve a Chinese hostage from another European city spy apartment. There’s a chase when one of the bad guys sees the team about to escape and then Gina and the bad guy break into another cage fight. Arm bar! Awesome! The only thing missing was that amazing black UFC referee who is my favorite. The best (worst) part of this fight is that they were in a narrow hallway and Gina kept doing parkour before kicking the bad guy as if doing that was going to give her any sort of momentum. Why do fight directors these days insist on incorporating parkour, no matter how inane the parkour looks? Parkour was only interesting, because it was funny, in that one episode of the Office. Foisting parkour on us time and again is still not going to make parkour happen.
Back in the generic European city spy apartment, Gina is sporting her bandeau again and cleaning her gun while enjoying a nice glass of wine–a Spanish red, I’m guessing. Channing tries to engage in sexy banter: “This is how you relax? Wine and gun cleaning?” and Gina, in an admittedly slick move, says, “There’s another glass in the kitchen,” which is basically her way of saying, “I am waiting for you to nail me.” Sure enough, she stands up, he asks about Kenneth who she broke up with 6 months earlier and then she;s roughly unbuckling his belt and they’re kissing and it’s a bit odd to watch because they both are a bit square, as in the shape, and there is negative chemistry between them. The young couple is undeterred—it’s a movie with a woman so obviously she has to have sex with someone. It might as well be with a beefcake like Channing Tatum. Throughout the movie, we will continue to be reminded of Gina as a sexual being as if the fact that she gets nailed on the regular will make her more feminine. They tried real hard to establish that Ginas character wasn’t a big ole lesbian. I wish she had been and I wish she could have had sexy times with hot Spanish ladies. That movie would have been great.
As an aside, Channing’s career is developing in a fascinating way isn’t it–from stripper to teen dance movie and now he’s doing Nicholas Sparks-like romantic dramas and action movies. I would suggest he has range but that would be deeply inaccurate. I am guessing his agent just has a real sense of humor.
We go back to the car, Gina insists Michael repeat all the names she has mentioned back to her, we cut to San Diego, Helvetica Light Italic! Gina is walking around, her hair wrapped in a towel, her robe cinched around her waist as she drinks a glass of wine, this time white, and does some unpacking. There’s the scraping of keys at the door. Oh no! Who could it be?! It’s Kenneth of course, and his keys no longer work because he and Gina are no longer together. But if she’s unpacking and they’ve been broken up for six month, why would he have a key to her new apartment? SAT question. He begs her to take a job in Dublin as arm candy, she grudgingly agrees, he promises her a trip to Majorca after and she’s all, “OH HELL NO.”
In Dublin, Carano meets Michael Fassbender (looking GOOD), and they have some dull conversations and there’s another montage of spy gear, which Soderbergh clearly has a hard on for. She takes a peek in the minibar and there are bags of…human plasma? Some other biological substance? This is never referenced again for the duration. It is as inexplicable as the rest of this terrible, terrible, action cum silent cum overbearingly scored movie. Fassbender says he needs to take a shower which is just a lazy way to write him out of the room so she can snoop through his belongings which she does as soon as he exeunts stage left. With her ancient Blackberry, she does some spy-related computer nonsense including setting up a tracker on his laptop. Remember this.
She gets ready and off they go to the house of some guy for some party and he’s the bad guy they’re watching but nothing is ever articulated in a way that makes sense so they drink and exchange about two lines of conversation about their families and then separate in the most incoherent set of scenes I have seen in a long while, at the end of which Gina stumbles into a barn or garage of some sort and finds the Chinese hostage dead, and holding her brooch. Hark! A clue! Before that, though, Gina is doing some reconaissance and she whips out her phone to track Fassbender’s laptop, which is still in the hotel, so she can spy on him with the bad guy. I will let that sink in for a moment.
Her phone, which is tracking the laptop still in the hotel, shows that Fassbender is in a courtyard and from her perch, she watches him stroll about the grounds with the bad guy. They hire people to handle script continuity. In a movie like Haywire that was, in theory, designed to be an intricate puzzle, all the pieces have to eventually fit. This is a puzzle where the pieces bear no relation to each other but you are forced to keep trying to make them fit.
Fassbender and Gina reconnect, leave the party, and as they’re about to enter the hotel room, she removes her heels (foreshadowing). Once inside the room, he tries to bumrush her and Ding Ding Ding, another cage fight! Arm bar! Jujitsu moves I don’t know! Terrible, terrible choreography! This fight, dear God, will never end! Arm bar again! Pillow on Fassbender’s face to silence the gun shot! Gun shot!
Suddenly, Gina’s on the run. She calls her dad, everyone’s favorite polygamist Bill Henrickson or that guy from Twister, and they have a brief, potentially coded conversation about coming home. She dons a sassy chapeau and an amazing pair of jeans (like, these jeans were the highlight of the film), and begins an interminable evasion maneuver throughout Dublin. There’s no point telling you about it because it is yet another terrible sequence. I could create a more compelling chase by walking to the dumpster outside my apartment.
Suddenly she’s back in the car with Anganaro, and in another piece of terrible writing, she essentially says, “And that brings us to the present.” Well, now that we’re all caught up! Things happen, plot elements are revealed, Gina ends up in New Mexico with her dad, tumbleweed blows, she paints her face and cornrows her hair because that’s how you show you mean business. Kenneth and Channing Tatum and some other goons show up to “question” the dad. There are a couple more cage matches. Tatum is shot and they have a supposedly touching moment. She flashes back to their kissing after he slumps into a cold, lonely death. Her dad touches her arm. She “acts” startled and turns to face him as if she’s going to attack only she doesn’t do this convincingly. You can literally see each acting decision she makes in the ten or so seconds, and she also does a lot of face acting through the greasepaint.
There’s an ending but I don’t want to spoil it and also it’s just that incoherent that there’s no point in trying to relate it to you. The “twists” are more like a rusted old 1974 Grand Prix lumbering through a tight corner. You can see them coming from a mile away but you’re still not quite sure what you’re looking at. Twists, lies, betrayal, money, spies, what? It’s just, the plot is fucking stupid. The puzzle is broken.
To recap: what little “writing ” there was in this movie was lazy and uninspired. The only people who acted well were the older guys–Douglas and Banderassssssss and they were on screen for about thirty-seven seconds. Michael Anganaro is falling into the Michael Cera trap of playing the same “sensitive” white guy in every movie so he’s no longer interesting to watch. Carano wasn’t offensive. She’s no worse than a lot of the people who call themselves actors these days. However, she also wasn’t memorable. She lacked charisma. Carano is trying to crossover, and this movie, theoretically, should have been the right vehicle. To crossover, though she needs a whole lot of help to get where she wants to go and no one involved in this movie did a damn thing to help the woman out. I truly don’t understand how this movie flailed in such a dull, almost depressing way. This movie’s saving grace is that it has a running time of 92 minutes instead of stretching past two hours the way so many movies do these days. I kept thinking, “I only have to hold on a little longer.”
I am trying to console myself with the knowledge that I also get to see Underworld this weekend. It will be terrible but it will be fun terrible and also I love Kate Beckinsale. I just do and I am not sorry about that.
