The Mother and the Whore
Spider, the latest film from David Cronenberg, is Psycho on Prozac: a strange, slow, moody drama about a deranged man with a mother fixation, and it may not begin to work on you until after it's over. It takes a long time getting started, and that does work against it a bit; about 20 minutes in, a guy in back of me muttered "So far I'm enthralled" to his wife, who I suspect dragged him to see it. "Shut up," I muttered, but I could kind of see his point, as I was doing a little seat-shifting as well. Cronenberg wants to put us in the drab, hazy, suffocating world of his lead character, Dennis -- played by Ralph Fiennes, doing his studied level best to create another kind of English patient -- and he sacrifices little to audience comfort.
Dennis has just been released from an asylum into some kind of a group home for the aged or mentally ill, run with an iron hand by a stiff-backed Nurse Ratched type with a menacing perm (Lynn Redgrave). We don't know much about Dennis except that he has some sort of deranged obsessive-compulsive disorder: he mumbles incoherently, writes unreadable scribbles in a notebook which no one could possibly read but which he carefully hides anyway, wears four or five shirts at the same time, uses twine to weave a web in his room, and is clearly tortured by something in his past we can't quite fathom.
The past kicks in. The adult Dennis begins recalling scenes from his childhood, and rather literally wanders about in them: a deranged, unshaven, ill-kempt sod watching his well-groomed and proper eight or nine year old self from 30 years earlier. His home life growing up is one of those dull, sad, working-class English ones, where his long-suffering, slightly dumpy mother (Miranda Richardson) sends him the grimy local pub to fetch his grumpy, put-upon dad (Gabriel Byrne); while he's there, a low-life tramp viciously bares her tit at him. As scenes of home are played out, Dennis -- nicknamed "Spider" by his mother -- watches the up and down cycle of his parent's marriage: squabbling and making up; fighting and then later having a night on the town. A patchy story emerges, of a loving mother who is trying to hold her family together despite the wandering eye of a blustery, bitter dad. Suddenly the past, in Dennis's reconstruction of it, takes a hairpin turn: his dad kills his mother, and brings home a tramp who looks a good deal like the one Dennis saw in the bar, only this time she is played by Miranda Richardson.
The story, of course, now looks shaky, as the dad simply buries the mother's corpse with the help of his new girlfriend; there's nothing rational about this memory, no report of a missing person or police involvement. As Dennis remembers it, his dear mom was merely killed by his bastard father and replaced by an ill-bred cockney slut with bad teeth.
Of course, there is more to it than this, and the challenge of watching it is figuring out just what the "real" story is, of separating Dennis' real memories from his false one, the one which he has constructed, like a spider's stratagem, as a psychological self-defense. I'll confess I didn't really, really get the whole story until I had coffee this morning and was replaying it in my head, at which point I recalled a key scene. I'm thinking of going back tomorrow evening before it leaves town to see if I had it right. It's the kind of torpid film which probably improves on a second viewing.
All this is, of course, right up Cronenberg's alley, who does a typically good job at putting you in a dislocated world, this time focusing constantly on feet, as if even the adult Dennis is still seeing things from a child's-eye view. Miranda Richardson, in the dual role, does her usual excellent job. I was less impressed with Fiennes. You know how mental patient roles go: there are two kinds, ones where you forget the guy is acting, and ones -- like Fiennes' -- where you couldn't forget if you tried. He has the wild eyes and the involuntary breathing down, but the story moved me more than he did. The real points here go to Patrick McGrath's script (from his novel) and the slow build of Cronenburg's pacing, which does, indeed, enthrall. It just takes its sweet time getting there.
Sunday, May 25, 2003
Friday, May 23, 2003
The new "In-Laws" movie sucks, says the Times reviewer, which is as I suspected. But the 1979 original -- which the underrated Andrew Bergman directed from his own script, and which stars Peter Falk and Alan Arkin -- is a lot funnier than Scott allows. Hell, I think it's one of the funniest movies ever made, with near-perfect chemistry between the leads. Arkin plays a very anal, very uptight dentist whose daughter is marrying the son of Falk, a former CIA agent who appears to be completely nuts. In a hilariously awkward dinner scene near the beginning, when the two families meet for the first time, Falk fondly recalls his episodes in the African "bush," namely the heartbreaking sight of giant tsetse flies carrying away native children, despite the desperate effort of parents to chase them away with brooms. Not only that, he points out, these flies are protected by the government, under something called the Guacamole Act of 1917. The "red tape in the bush," he explains, is awful.
Ok, it's a lot funnier to watch than to read about, but do watch it.
Ok, it's a lot funnier to watch than to read about, but do watch it.
Wednesday, May 21, 2003
Self-serving defensive bullshit is what you expect in cases like that of disgraced former Times reporter Jayson Blair, which is more or less what he serves up in today's interview in
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Tuesday, May 20, 2003
If you haven't heard JuneCarter Cash's solo album, Press On, by all means try getting it or at least dialing up some songs off the Internet. As soon as I got the news of her death, I thought of that great anthem she sings with Johnny on that record, "The Far Side Banks of Jordan." It was touching enough the first time I heard it, because all you could think is of Johnny's illness, and how she'd probably be left behind sometime not far off. Turns out the opposite happened and a song that used to be a promise has, I prefer to believe, become a fact.
And I'll be waiting on the far side banks of Jordan.
I'll be waiting drawing pictures in the sand.
And when I see you coming, I will rise up with a shout
And come running through the shallow waters reaching for your hand.
And I'll be waiting on the far side banks of Jordan.
I'll be waiting drawing pictures in the sand.
And when I see you coming, I will rise up with a shout
And come running through the shallow waters reaching for your hand.
Saturday, May 17, 2003
The Rodney Canon
I started this list with the best of intentions -- to come up with my own Top 50 novels. As you will see, I only got to 43. Does this mean I haven’t read 50 great books? No, not exactly. It just means that as I was coming up with names I kept asking myself the same questions: Did it make a striking impression? And, more importantly, Did it make a lasting impression? It’s no trick to come up with fifty titles, but I wanted to come up with fifty I really believed in, really loved or adored, and what kept coming back to me is the fact that in the end maybe I’m not as ardent or generous a lover as I thought. I’d jot down a title and then scratch it out, muttering “Nah, it was overrated.” Or “Would you even dream of sitting through that again? So I finally had to settle on 43. I didn’t want to pad the list with books I either kinda liked or whose virtues -- which in many cases I am certain are there, and need only be rekindled -- had been forgotten.
I also told myself, despite a lot of going back and forth, that my only rule would be to strictly stick to novels: fictional prose of some length. This raises the obvious problem of not being able to include any short stories, dramatic literature or poetry, so I wound up making seperate catch-all lists. Then I decided to list a second string of also-rans: books I liked but which didn’t quite become a permanent part of my mental furniture. As is also naturally the case in making lists such as this, you also think of the books you really don’t want to include, and those you wish you could, but which for whatever reason you’ve never read.
The Best
1.) In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust
2.) Ulysses, James Joyce
3.) Moby-Dick, Herman Melville
4.) Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
5.) The House of Seven Gables, Nathanael Hawthorne
6.) Pale Fire, Vladimir Nabokov
7.) Absalom, Absalom! William Faulkner
8.) David Copperfield, Charles Dickens
9.) The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner
10.) Persuasion, Jane Austen
11.) The Scarlet Letter, Nathanael Hawthorne
12.) The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
13.) Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
14.) Howards End, E.M. Forster
15.) Where Angels Fear to Tread, E.M. Forster
16.) Little Dorrit, Charles Dickens
17.) Dead Souls, Nikolai Gogol
18.) War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
19.)The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde
20.)Rabbit Tetralogy, John Updike
21.)The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera
22.) The Day of the Locust, Nathanael West
23.) Bleak House, Charles Dickens
24.) The Violent Bear It Away, Flannery O’Connor
25.) Demons, Feodor Dostoevsky
26.) Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon
27.) Burr, Gore Vidal
28.) Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, Anne Tyler
29.) Franny and Zooey, J.D. Salinger
30.) Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie
31.) Money: A Suicide Note, Martin Amis
32.) A Handful of Dust, Evelyn Waugh
33.) Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
34.) Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte
35.)The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
36.) Angels, Denis Johnson
37.) Angels on Toast, Dawn Powell
38.) Nothing Like the Sun, Anthony Burgess
39.) Mason & Dixon, Thomas Pynchon
40.)The Verificationist, Donald Antrim
41.) The Unconsoled, Kazuo Ishiguro
42.) A Suitable Boy, Vikram Seth
43.) The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
Top Short Story Collections
Cathedral by Raymond Carver
A Visit From the Footbinder and Other Stories by Emily Prager
Collected Stories, Franz Kafka
Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural
Collected Stories, William Trevor
Collected Stories, Flannery O’Connor
Collected Stories, John Cheever
Collected Stories, Vladimir Nabokov
Dubliners by James Joyce
Nine Stories by J.D. Salinger
The Piazza Tales by Herman Melville
Stranger Than Truth (Stunning Works of Art I Wish Were Novels, So I Could Include Them)
Hamlet, William Shakespeare
The Winter’s Tale, William Shakespeare
King Lear, William Shakespeare
The Tempest, William Shakespeare
As You Like It, William Shakespeare
Henry IV, Part One, William Shakespeare
Uncle Vanya, Anton Chekhov
The Cherry Orchard, Anton Chekhov
Hedda Gabler, Henrik Ibsen
Ghosts, Henrik Ibsen
Inferno, Dante
Faust, Goethe
Mont Saint Michel and Chartres, Henry Adams
The Education of Henry Adams, Henry Adams
The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Path to Power, Robert A. Caro
The Journals of Eugene Delacroix, Eugene Delacroix
The Executioner’s Song, Norman Mailer
Armies of the Night, Norman Mailer
In Cold Blood, Truman Capote
The Second String List: Kinda There, But Not Quite
Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
Emma by Jane Austen
The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass
Return of the Native, Thomas Hardy
A Room With a View, E.M. Forster
Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami
A Passage to India, E.M. Forster
Ragtime, E.L. Doctorow
Loon Lake, E.L. Doctorow
The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie
The Quick and the Dead, Joy Williams
Neighbors, Thomas Berger
The Houseguest, Thomas Berger
Being Invisible, Thomas Berger
Animal Farm by George Orwell
The Pilgrim Hawk by Glenway Westcott
The Field of Vision by Wright Morris
Deliverance, James Dickey
The Passion, Jeanette Wintersen
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
The Winter of Our Discontent by John Steinbeck
Cannery Row by John Steinbeck
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
The Accidental Tourist by Anne Tyler
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
The Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe
Libra by Don DeLillo
Mao II by Don DeLillo
You ARE the Weakest Link (Famous or Critically Acclaimed Books That Just Don’t Impress Me as Much As They Do Everyone Else in Town)
The Brothers Karamazov, Feodor Dostoevsky
Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe
To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien
Omensetter’s Luck and The Tunnel, William Gass
Underworld, Don DeLillo
Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller
The Adventures of Augie March, Saul Bellow
Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf
Look Homeward, Angel, Thomas Wolfe
The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway
The Confidence-Man, Herman Melville
One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Will This Be On the Test? (Classic Novels That Might Have Made the Cut, If Only I Had Read Them)
Tom Jones, Henry Fielding
Middlemarch, George Eliot
Don Quixote, Don Miguel Cervantes
Vanity Fair, William Makepeace Thackeray
Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer
Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
Pere Goriot, Honore de Balzac
The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann
The Red and Black, Stendahl
And You Call Yourself a Book Reviewer (Well-Received Contemporary Novels I Certainly Should Have Read By Now )
Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace
The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Michael Chabon
The Blind Assassin, Margaret Atwood
Atonement, Ian MacEwan
White Teeth, Zadie Smith
A Staggering Worlk of Heartbreaking Genius, David Eggers
I started this list with the best of intentions -- to come up with my own Top 50 novels. As you will see, I only got to 43. Does this mean I haven’t read 50 great books? No, not exactly. It just means that as I was coming up with names I kept asking myself the same questions: Did it make a striking impression? And, more importantly, Did it make a lasting impression? It’s no trick to come up with fifty titles, but I wanted to come up with fifty I really believed in, really loved or adored, and what kept coming back to me is the fact that in the end maybe I’m not as ardent or generous a lover as I thought. I’d jot down a title and then scratch it out, muttering “Nah, it was overrated.” Or “Would you even dream of sitting through that again? So I finally had to settle on 43. I didn’t want to pad the list with books I either kinda liked or whose virtues -- which in many cases I am certain are there, and need only be rekindled -- had been forgotten.
I also told myself, despite a lot of going back and forth, that my only rule would be to strictly stick to novels: fictional prose of some length. This raises the obvious problem of not being able to include any short stories, dramatic literature or poetry, so I wound up making seperate catch-all lists. Then I decided to list a second string of also-rans: books I liked but which didn’t quite become a permanent part of my mental furniture. As is also naturally the case in making lists such as this, you also think of the books you really don’t want to include, and those you wish you could, but which for whatever reason you’ve never read.
The Best
1.) In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust
2.) Ulysses, James Joyce
3.) Moby-Dick, Herman Melville
4.) Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
5.) The House of Seven Gables, Nathanael Hawthorne
6.) Pale Fire, Vladimir Nabokov
7.) Absalom, Absalom! William Faulkner
8.) David Copperfield, Charles Dickens
9.) The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner
10.) Persuasion, Jane Austen
11.) The Scarlet Letter, Nathanael Hawthorne
12.) The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
13.) Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
14.) Howards End, E.M. Forster
15.) Where Angels Fear to Tread, E.M. Forster
16.) Little Dorrit, Charles Dickens
17.) Dead Souls, Nikolai Gogol
18.) War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
19.)The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde
20.)Rabbit Tetralogy, John Updike
21.)The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera
22.) The Day of the Locust, Nathanael West
23.) Bleak House, Charles Dickens
24.) The Violent Bear It Away, Flannery O’Connor
25.) Demons, Feodor Dostoevsky
26.) Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon
27.) Burr, Gore Vidal
28.) Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, Anne Tyler
29.) Franny and Zooey, J.D. Salinger
30.) Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie
31.) Money: A Suicide Note, Martin Amis
32.) A Handful of Dust, Evelyn Waugh
33.) Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
34.) Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte
35.)The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
36.) Angels, Denis Johnson
37.) Angels on Toast, Dawn Powell
38.) Nothing Like the Sun, Anthony Burgess
39.) Mason & Dixon, Thomas Pynchon
40.)The Verificationist, Donald Antrim
41.) The Unconsoled, Kazuo Ishiguro
42.) A Suitable Boy, Vikram Seth
43.) The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
Top Short Story Collections
Cathedral by Raymond Carver
A Visit From the Footbinder and Other Stories by Emily Prager
Collected Stories, Franz Kafka
Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural
Collected Stories, William Trevor
Collected Stories, Flannery O’Connor
Collected Stories, John Cheever
Collected Stories, Vladimir Nabokov
Dubliners by James Joyce
Nine Stories by J.D. Salinger
The Piazza Tales by Herman Melville
Stranger Than Truth (Stunning Works of Art I Wish Were Novels, So I Could Include Them)
Hamlet, William Shakespeare
The Winter’s Tale, William Shakespeare
King Lear, William Shakespeare
The Tempest, William Shakespeare
As You Like It, William Shakespeare
Henry IV, Part One, William Shakespeare
Uncle Vanya, Anton Chekhov
The Cherry Orchard, Anton Chekhov
Hedda Gabler, Henrik Ibsen
Ghosts, Henrik Ibsen
Inferno, Dante
Faust, Goethe
Mont Saint Michel and Chartres, Henry Adams
The Education of Henry Adams, Henry Adams
The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Path to Power, Robert A. Caro
The Journals of Eugene Delacroix, Eugene Delacroix
The Executioner’s Song, Norman Mailer
Armies of the Night, Norman Mailer
In Cold Blood, Truman Capote
The Second String List: Kinda There, But Not Quite
Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
Emma by Jane Austen
The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass
Return of the Native, Thomas Hardy
A Room With a View, E.M. Forster
Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami
A Passage to India, E.M. Forster
Ragtime, E.L. Doctorow
Loon Lake, E.L. Doctorow
The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie
The Quick and the Dead, Joy Williams
Neighbors, Thomas Berger
The Houseguest, Thomas Berger
Being Invisible, Thomas Berger
Animal Farm by George Orwell
The Pilgrim Hawk by Glenway Westcott
The Field of Vision by Wright Morris
Deliverance, James Dickey
The Passion, Jeanette Wintersen
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
The Winter of Our Discontent by John Steinbeck
Cannery Row by John Steinbeck
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
The Accidental Tourist by Anne Tyler
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
The Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe
Libra by Don DeLillo
Mao II by Don DeLillo
You ARE the Weakest Link (Famous or Critically Acclaimed Books That Just Don’t Impress Me as Much As They Do Everyone Else in Town)
The Brothers Karamazov, Feodor Dostoevsky
Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe
To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien
Omensetter’s Luck and The Tunnel, William Gass
Underworld, Don DeLillo
Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller
The Adventures of Augie March, Saul Bellow
Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf
Look Homeward, Angel, Thomas Wolfe
The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway
The Confidence-Man, Herman Melville
One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Will This Be On the Test? (Classic Novels That Might Have Made the Cut, If Only I Had Read Them)
Tom Jones, Henry Fielding
Middlemarch, George Eliot
Don Quixote, Don Miguel Cervantes
Vanity Fair, William Makepeace Thackeray
Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer
Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
Pere Goriot, Honore de Balzac
The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann
The Red and Black, Stendahl
And You Call Yourself a Book Reviewer (Well-Received Contemporary Novels I Certainly Should Have Read By Now )
Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace
The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Michael Chabon
The Blind Assassin, Margaret Atwood
Atonement, Ian MacEwan
White Teeth, Zadie Smith
A Staggering Worlk of Heartbreaking Genius, David Eggers
Maximum R&B: A Top 25 List
“Son Of A Preacher Man,” Dusty Springfield
“Sweet Soul Music,” Arthur Conley
“The Pick Up,” Etta James
“Tired of Being Alone,” Al Green
“Tramp,” Otis Redding and Carla Thomas
“Cry to Me,” Solomon Burke
“The Hawg, Part One ,“ Eddie Kirk
“Do You Love Me?” Contours
“You're No Good,” Betty Everett
“Hey There Lonely Girl,” Eddie Holman
“Shoop Shoop Song,” Betty Everett
“We Got More Soul,” Dyke & The Blazers
“Didn't I Blow Your Mind This Time?” Del-Fonics
“I'm Your Puppet” James and Bobby Purify
“Shake a Tail Feather” Five Du-Tones
“Night Train” James Brown
“Seven Rooms of Gloom,” Four Tops
“The Oogum Boogum Song,” Brenton Wood
“Private Number,” William Bell & Judy Clay
“Have You Seen Her?” Chi-Lites
“Black Man,” Stevie Wonder
“Mama Told Me Not to Come,” Wilson Pickett
“I’m Stone in Love With You,” The Stylistics
“Hitchhike,” Marvin Gaye
“Shake a Tail Feather,” The Five Du-Tones
“Son Of A Preacher Man,” Dusty Springfield
“Sweet Soul Music,” Arthur Conley
“The Pick Up,” Etta James
“Tired of Being Alone,” Al Green
“Tramp,” Otis Redding and Carla Thomas
“Cry to Me,” Solomon Burke
“The Hawg, Part One ,“ Eddie Kirk
“Do You Love Me?” Contours
“You're No Good,” Betty Everett
“Hey There Lonely Girl,” Eddie Holman
“Shoop Shoop Song,” Betty Everett
“We Got More Soul,” Dyke & The Blazers
“Didn't I Blow Your Mind This Time?” Del-Fonics
“I'm Your Puppet” James and Bobby Purify
“Shake a Tail Feather” Five Du-Tones
“Night Train” James Brown
“Seven Rooms of Gloom,” Four Tops
“The Oogum Boogum Song,” Brenton Wood
“Private Number,” William Bell & Judy Clay
“Have You Seen Her?” Chi-Lites
“Black Man,” Stevie Wonder
“Mama Told Me Not to Come,” Wilson Pickett
“I’m Stone in Love With You,” The Stylistics
“Hitchhike,” Marvin Gaye
“Shake a Tail Feather,” The Five Du-Tones
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