Why Armond White is My New Favorite Movie Critic (After Filthy)
'"The Bubble,' featuring the year's best original screenplay, is one of the peaks of the gay cinema breakthroughs that critics pretended to welcome with the big-budget, name-star 'Brokeback Mountain' but then ignored as a matter of habit. Israeli filmmaker Eytan Fox's symbolic situations, recognizable characters and nuanced dialog surpasses even the superb (and unfairly maligned) 'I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry' in realistic details. Fox's script isn't a satire but a political romance that dares give unprejudiced clarity to the inequities of the Israeli-Palestine conflict, global homophobia and middle-class privilege." -- Armond White [indieWIRE]
Is he brilliant or totally wack? I'm not sure, I guess I'd have to netflix ' ... Chuck and Larry' to find out, a step I can't bring myself to take; but, I like that I'm almost always surprised by his reviews.
6) The Saturdays, Elizabeth Enright - This is a reissued, nearly lost gem of a juvenile novel, first published in 1941. The four Melendy kids decide to pool their allowances so once a week one of them can have a forty cent adventure instead of each of them trying to have a ten cent adventure. As history, the book is fascinating. A six year old walking alone around New York City to get to the circus! There's something beautiful about Enright's vision of childhold here that probably makes The Saturdays more appealling to grownups than actual kids. (My seven year old read this but only once and didn't seem to like it as much as me and Mrs. BoneDaddy.) She romanticizes siblings and long afternoons with little to do, out of the way playrooms and "what I want to be" dreams. Adults probably like that stuff more than kids.
5) Gone, Baby, Gone, Dennis Lehane (1998) - I've had this book forever. Fear of spoilers surrounding the movie convinced me to finally pick it up. Lehane doesn't do anything great, but he does a lot of things well. His dialogue is good, but I didn't put this away with my Elmore Leonard or anything. The sense of place is strong, if one note - this is not a Boston novel, it's a south Boston novel. And the plot ... well, if you've seen the movie you know the plot. The resolution is sad, mostly earned and admirably unflinching. I did tear through this in a day, so it also works as a good, but not really great thriller.
4) The Abstinence Teacher, Tom Perrotta (2007) - For me it was a better year in non-fiction (with two giant exceptions coming), since I have to start talking about Perrotta's latest by saying it's not as good as either Election or Little Children. Ruth Ramsey accidentally tells the truth while teaching high school sex ed (oral sex - "some people enjoy it") and the Tabernacle of the Gospel Truth begins a crusade against the school, sex ed and Ruth. They insert in the classroom a Tracy Flick-ish co-teacher, who is the only part of The Abstinence Teacher to be truly satirical. Perrotta writes with a lot of sympathy for Tim - former addict, Tabernacle member, soccer coach for Ruth's daughter and other half of the novel's focus. I suspect this novel signals Perrotta stepping away from satire towards a contemporary Updike area. He is a master of suburban unhappiness - which is rarer than it sounds - but also great at comedy. A slightly unsatisfying finish keeps this from finishing higher on my list.
3) The Intuitionist, Colson Whitehead (2000) - Imagine if the elevator were more important than the car and the computer. If Otis were better known than Ford and Edison. Then imagine the power a corrupt union of elevator inspectors could have over a city, if that city existed in some kind of Brazil-ian (the movie, not the country) non-time, non-place. That's odd enough. But what if a new way of inspecting elevators split the union into the traditionalists and the intuitionists, who can feel what an elevator will do? If one side wanted to discredit the other side, they could frame Lila Mae, the first black female elevator inspector and an Intuitionist to boot, right? (Racism, by the way, is rampant. And it's a sign of the maturity of Whitehead's vision that Lila is the second black elevator inspector and the first one hates her because he feels he paid all the dues for her and she's stirring up the trouble that had settled down.) Odd, dense and certainly not for everyone, but I liked it.
2) Watership Down, Richard Adams (1972) - Now we get to the reccomendations without reservations. There's a long list of movies I won't see because I loved the book. The list of books I wouldn't read because I loved the movie too much was one book long. Watership Down, the movie, probably isn't nearly as good as I remember it. When I was nine, this movie had more of an impact on me than Star Wars, not that I'd have ever admitted it.
So I refused to read the book for a few decades. I'm funny that way. To my surprise - I have read other Richard Adams books - Watership Down is a masterpiece. The heft of the book always made me think it was crammed full of naturalistic garbage and meandering nature writing in British and/or rabbit slang, but the book is terrifically paced. Ultimately it's as much an adventure novel as an allegory with the nature writing complementing the story.
Watership Down is filled with chill scenes, and I don't think it's entirely because certain quotes ("There's a dog loose in the woods...""Can you run, rabbit?") are indelibly marked on my brain. Bigwig in the tunnel was utterly gripping and people, we're talking about rabbits here.
1)Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, J.K. Rowling (2007) - My No Duh choice. The publishing event of the year was also the book of the year. Some of the nitpickers make some good points about the book. I have complaints here and there about other Potter books, but I'm also upping the degree of difficulty here. Rowling had to finish an epic story, tie up a bunch of loose ends, give many characters their due and tell a self-containted story for children and adults, all under a spotlight brighter than has ever been put on an author and Deathly Hallows got it done.
For me, the hype built up the experience. Because I partially experienced it all through the eyes of a seven year old I was reminded that story-telling is often a social activity. Round the campfire, in front of the TV, whatever. Stories and masses aren't enemies. The articles, the book discussions and yes, even the balloons in the Stop-n-Shop added to the fun but only because the book delivered. (Also helped that I managed to finish the book without encountering spoilers - even from my own house.) Harry walking through the woods surrounded by ghosts (you know what I'm talking about if you've read the book) is the quintessential moment of the series and it happens at the end. You don't get that often. And you get a fantasy like this probably once in a generation.
My honorable mention for 2007 goes to Richard Matheson's I Am Legend (1954), not on the list because I'd read it before. It really holds up. I read it in preperation for the movie, then never saw the movie. Based on the reviews, I think I got a better experience. Dan Harrington's Harrington on Hold 'Embooks also almost made it onto my non-fiction list, but I figured that's kinda niche.
Why four? Because sometime soon I'll be back with my top six novels of the year and this saves me from shuffling them together into a top ten.
4) About Alice, Calvin Trillin (2006) - This expands a lengthy essay Trillin wrote for the New Yorker about his late wife Alice. He recounts a letter he received after the original essay's publication from a young woman worried that her fiance doesn't love her "the way Calvin loves Alice," which sums up the feel of the book. About Alice is an ode to love itself. A bone-deep sadness pervades this humorist's book. Although she led a long, full life, this is not a "well, at least she led a long, full life" eulogy. What happens after you lose your soulmate? About Alice will give you empathy for those old couples you see shuffling along. And it will make you, like that young letter-writer, want to eventually become one of those old couples shuffling along.
3) Friday Night Lights, H.G. Bissinger (1990) - This book is ridiculously good. In any other year, it would top my non-fiction list. The TV show, even in its superb first season, is no substitute. And forget about the movie. Written before "A Year in the Life of X, Y or Z" books became a cliche, Friday Night Lights is more about the locale than the kids and more about the kids than about football. The chapter about the use of "nigger" in Odessa should be essential reading in American high schools. With the corrupt and arrogant boom and bust oil business of west Texas as a backdrop, Friday Night Lights also marginally qualifies as the first in my string of anti-Bush books.
2) Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone, Rajiv Chandrasekaran (2007) - It's amazing this book could be so readable when it's basically the same story over and over. Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld again and again picked loyalty over experience, ideology over practicallity, and P.R. over reality when it came to choosing leaders to rebuild Iraq's health-care, business, education, industry and government. And then they stumbled supporting these Bushies who were already doomed to fail. Guess what? It didn't work. Again and again. The chapter about a handful of guys trying to privatize Iraqi factories is this close to being a living Tom Tomorrow cartoon.
"Yeah, we've got this factory for you to buy and privatize. We think it makes olive oil. Hard to tell, because of the bombing. I bet it'd be real productive too, once the electricity gets turned on. Now, you can't visit it because of the security situation and there's a good chance that whatever government eventually runs this hell-hole will just nationalize it again. You also have four times the number of workers you need but if you fire anybody, they'll blow the place up, but other than that, you're good to go! Two hundred million sound about right?"
1) The Greatest Story Ever Told: The Decline and Fall of Truth in Bush's America, Frank Rich (2007) - There are a lot of anti-Bush books out there and I've read my share. If you're looking for screeds, rants, insults, etc. they're out there and many of them are certainly justified given the tragedy that is the Bush administration. Rich's book tops my list first of all because of the scope. There are good books about the military mistakes (Fiasco), the intelligence manipulation (Hubris) or the rebuilding incompetence (see above), but The Greatest Story Ever Told covers a lot of the flim and the flam behind selling the Iraq war in succinct fashion. It's also well-written. It's easy to fall into hyperbolic rants and cheap insults when discussing Bush (again, many justified). Rich lets the facts do the damning. Even if you have scandal fatigue and wish to ride out the last 385 days with low blood pressure, you should check out this book.
Dropkick Murphys - "The Meanest of Times": I can't imagine any Battle of the Bands format the Murphys wouldn't win ... and I'm not only imagining formats where the band members have to do shots of whiskey chased with Guinness between songs, where success is measured by the vivacity of the mosh pit, where the bands play in front of a soused crowd of laborers in the sweaty basement of a union hall, etc...
Tim Armstrong - "A Poet's Life" : I don't know if Armstrong is more than thirty years old but, even if not, he might want to take Mencken's quip to heart. As much as I like this album, the title makes me cringe. Once you get past his "I'm a poet and a sex-drugs-and-rock-n-rolling party man" posing, there's no denying the wickedly danceable ska-inflected groovealiciousness.
Books (Read for the First Time Regardless of Year Published)
A more macho list of manly-men movies would be hard to imagine. I'm really not trying to exclude female filmmakers (nor authors, nor musicians) ... but, wow, take the Y chromosone out and you're not left with much here. Although, I actually thought China Mieville was a woman until I saw his picture in the back of "Perdido Street Station".
