When he shambled, bleary-eyed, to pick up the morning paper, there was a crowd outside his front door. Some cheered, some threw eggs.
"What the hell?" He knuckled his eyes, but the crowd remained.
"Your photo was posted online," said a reporter. "Guess it hit a nerve or something, who even knows these days. You've gone viral. How’s that feel?"
He stood there, blinking in his boxer shorts and faded Hawaiian holiday T-shirt, yellow yolk slipping gently down the front. Overhead: news helicopters.
"But why the eggs?"
A shrug. "Should've watched what you said in high school. By the way, what're your plans now you've been fired?"
The mother changed her face, the son changed the land. The father tilled the earth, the son cultivated men. The king gave him a cup, the cup-bearer took the throne. The rivers washed the babe, his armies washed their swords in the sea.
* * *
Inspired by the Legend of Sargon inscription, the beginning of which runs like this:
Sargon, the mighty king, king of Agade, am I.
My mother was a changeling, my father I knew not.
The brother(s) of my father loved the hills.
My city is Azupiranu, which is situated on the banks of the Euphrates.
My changeling mother conceived me, in secret she bore me.
She set me in a basket of rushes, with bitumen she sealed my lid.
She cast me into the river which rose not (over) me,
The river bore me up and carried me to Akki, the drawer of water.
Akki, the drawer of water lifted me out as he dipped his e[w]er.
Akki, the drawer of water, [took me] as his son (and) reared me.
Akki, the drawer of water, appointed me as his gardener ...
The
team found the casket beneath the mound that had once been the ziggurat. A
sarcophagus, carved from a single block of stone.
The
lid felt smooth and cool as hematite, black as obsidian and forever, heavy as
granite and despair. A dozen bodies, long reduced to bone and faded
memory, lay on the ground before it in silent, screaming procession.
“On
three,” they said, and did not notice the lid move on ‘Two.’
A
bomb dropped from the decision tree and devastated Baghdad, with 65% degree of
certainty. The operators were pleased with this newer, cleaner, more refined
type of regression.
There came the pauper prince, to prize loose a treasure.
Full-handed, fool-hearted, in his fear never seeing:
That ruby is an eye, that ivory a claw. That damascene, the dragon.
A stab at writing something in alliterative verse. I haven't been as strict about scheme and meter as the original Norse/Germanic (especially the last two lines), but I like the sound of it. So there.
A
thousand lives dripped from the edge of Lancelot’s blade, a thousand more from
the point of his lance. The dead tide lapped his thighs with a thousand shadowed
hands.
He stepped,
smiling, from the Lake, doffed his helm and bowed to the Queen: the greatest knight that ever
lived.
The Elegiac Empress reigns for a year following the death of her Unmade Prince, during which time four new princes are quickened.
The Rite of Return is held at the end of the year, during which the four are led to the grotto of the Water Singer. The survivor becomes the new Prince.
* * *
One of my favorite lines by Iain M Banks was the first line of Consider Phlebas, supposedly the beginning to a character's favorite story:
The Jinmoti of Bozlen Two kill the hereditary ritual assassins of the new Yearking's immediate family by drowning them in the tears of the Continental Empathaur in its Sadness Season.
Loved that suggestion of untold worlds, and sprawling strange stories, and this is my attempt to recreate the same feeling.
I've decided to try writing nanofiction, 50-world-long micro stories, as a way of trying to stay creative and write something new in the timeframes that life makes available to me. The length is arbitrary--fits about one tweet I find--and I might try longer or shorter, see how they feel. Here's the first:
Prometheus clambered down the mountain, the stolen ember in
his hand. Revenge served not cold, but hot enough to scald his skin. He heard
the harpy cries of the Furies behind him, and smiled, though the wind clutched at
him with eagle claws.
Will be using the label 'Nanofiction' to track these.
Title: Dunkirk Directed by: Christopher Nolan Screenplay by: Christopher Nolan
Finally watched this on my phone’s Netflix app, an experience which would have been improved if the screen didn’t keep going black every 30 seconds. Rewinding for 10 seconds seemed to fix the problem—for the next 30 seconds. Rewind. Repeat. So I can say I saw this movie the way Christopher Nolan intended: On a tiny screen, in 30 second installments.
Obviously, this made. Made the whole. Whole experience a. A little bit. Bit choppy to. To watch.
But you know, it was good, I liked it, and this is why I don’t write much about things I like: It’s easier for me to criticize than to praise, for what makes entertainment enjoyable to me seems to be essentially the same in every case, while there are half a million ways things can go wrong. Or else maybe it’s human nature never to be satisfied with the same thing twice, that we grow quickly bored of the good but clutch the memory of the bad to our breast like a talisman.
It may be that the concept of ‘Quality’ is inherently undefinable, that we first experience something subconsciously or instinctively as good or bad and only later rationalize why we felt so, in the way that people who know nothing about iambic pentameter can recognize something powerful in Shakespeare, or who know nothing of storytelling conventions or cinematography (Hello!) can feel the power of a Nolan movie.
Well, you’re not going to fool me this time, grey matter.
Might be this all lives in some pre-linguistic corner of our lizard brains. But let’s try to break it down, even if this amounts to nothing more than rationalization after the fact.
First thing that hits you, even squinting against my glowing five-incher (eyebrow waggle), is how ludicrously good-looking the movie is. Every line and detail is as crisp as Kenneth Branagh’s accent, perhaps thanks to the decision to shoot the movie in larger-than-usual 65mm film. The balletic aerial dogfights in particular amaze as steel angels dart among the cirrus skyscape. Bowler-hat shaped helmets off to cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema. Meanwhile, composer Hans Zimmer chips in by keeping both hands firmly down on the keys in the suspense synth soundtrack.
Plucky desperation has never looked or sounded so good.
That sense of being there is reinforced by the attention to detail. The whole thing just exudes authenticity from every square centimeter of celluloid. The movie was filmed on the beach of Dunkirk at around the same time as the real evacuation, using the actual boats that actually took part in the actual evacuation, actually. It’s that groundedness, I think, that urges you to trust that the movie knows what it’s doing, and opens you up to its message on the real qualities of heroism.
(No doubt some details were missed—the one thing I noticed was the Spitfires in the movie never seem to run out of bullets: Tom Hardy’s pilot shoots down about four or five planes, despite the Spitfire only having ammunition for 10-20 seconds of firing).
All of this in service of a war story that is not about a victory but an evacuation, the point being I think that for the average Tommy, GI, grunt or doughboy, ‘victory’ is not something you, personally, can aim to achieve. Rather, your goal is, first and foremost, not dying. Taking the hill or capturing the bunker or whatever comes second: can’t do any of that if you’re dead. So we get that truth distilled to its essence, with a group of soldiers whose only aim is to escape and survive, who fight against the specter of death rather than the enemy. Symbolically, we never see a German soldier at all until the last few seconds of the movie, and even they are blurry and out of focus.
It’s a Nolan movie so of course the plot isn’t as simple as the premise sounds, as we cut back and forth across three stories operating across three different timeframes: three soldiers (Fionn Whitehead, Aneurin Barnard and One Direction’s Harry Styles) wait for rescue and have a series of boats blow up from under them (this gets almost comical by the third time it happens), a father and his son (Mark Rylance and Tom Glynn-Carney) take their pleasure yacht across the channel to help rescue the soldiers, and three RAF pilots (Tom Hardy, Jack Lowden and the voice of Michael Caine) take part in a sortie to provide air cover for the evacuation. Kenneth Branagh and James D’Arcy as the British commanders provide a kind of play-by-play commentary through the whole thing.
I love this take on the traditional war movie, as a kind of embodiment of one of my favorite Word War 2 quotes, by American correspondent George Biddle: "I wish the people at home, instead of thinking of their boys in terms of football stars, would think of them in terms of miners trapped underground or suffocating to death in a tenth-story fire." It’s the answer to the mad, Rambo-fantasy of glorious war, our childish wish to be the hero.
There are heroes in Dunkirk, such as Mark Rylance’s yacht owner coming to the rescue, or Tom Hardy’s ace fighter pilot, but they’re grim men, doing a dirty job, and their only reward is the knowledge that they gave it their best.
I mentioned storytelling conventions earlier, and one interesting thing for me, unlearned amateur that I am, that I felt this movie doesn’t really follow the traditional three-act structure. There’s very little setup and zero backstory for any of our characters, acts one and two sort of slosh into one another without any clear twist as the trapped soldiers repeat the cycle of find ship-board ship-lose ship, and while the score treats the appearance of the civilian rescue boats off the beach as the climax, it’s a kind of diffuse one, spread across the three stories and happening at three different times.
But—again, for me at least—that kind of single, sustained note of suspense without letup works in the movie’s favor and supports the theme that the only thing that matters for these characters is returning to England.
Like I say, maybe our sense of Quality is something submerged beneath our intellect, just kind of bobbing to the surface from time to time. That sounds like a capitulation on the part of a writer and reviewer, doesn’t it, an admission that subjective experience is never going to be entirely explainable or applicable. Well, I write mainly for my own solipsistic, onanistic amusement, and if someone out there on the Internet enjoys it too, then so much the better.
Watch Dunkirk. It’s good, says my lizard brain. Sometimes, just making it, making it to the, the end is, is victory enough.
Directed by: Ron Howard Written by: Lawrence Kasdan and Johnathan Kasdan I was cautiously optimistic going into this movie, and still found it a touch underwhelming. It was harmless. Well. Mostly harmless. THE SHITSHOW THAT WAS PROMISED Perhaps that counts as something of a minor triumph for the makers of “Solo: A Star Wars Story”, given how relentlessly negative most of the pre- and even post-release narrative has been. Pre-release, the original directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller were famously fired halfway through the production and the stalwart, staid Ron Howard brought in to reportedly reshoot 70% of the movie. Han Solo actor Alden Ehrenreich was apparently so unimpressive that a coach was hired to put some smug in his smuggler. I’ve only just seen this because it was only released here June 29. Frankly, Japan’s decision to delay the release of the movie a full month after the rest of the civilized world (previous Disney movies have come out within a week of the US premier) should have been seen for what it was: a massive vote of no-confidence in the success of this movie. That lack of confidence seems to have been well-founded. Post-release, the box office results have been less than stellar, as the franchise has been brought firmly down to earth. As I write this, boxofficemojo.com reports that worldwide, the movie has made just shy of $370m, which doesn’t sound bad until you realize it’s about one-third what the next lowest-grossing of the Disney movies, Rogue One, made during its run. Reshoots are reckoned to have blasted the movie’s production budget up to $250m, so when you add in marketing and subtract the theater chains’ take, means the movie will likely lose money on its theatrical run. Pundits (well, okay, Internet idiots like me, really) have been quick to suggest reasons for the lack of interest—its release came too hard on the heels of Avengers: Infinity War and Deadpool 2, it came too soon after The Last Jedi (TLJ), it didn’t feel ‘necessary’, audiences are rebelling against the controversy of TLJ and boycotting the movie. Let me offer another possible reason: It isn’t that good. It isn’t that bad either, but the best I can offer is that it isn’t the utter shitshow that was promised. OH, STUFF THE LORE We open on Corellia, a world of Victorian steel mills and Dickensian child labor, where a young Han (Ehrenreich) dreams of escape with his squeeze, Qi’ra (Emilia Clarke of Game of Thrones fame). The two make a break in a spectacularly dull car chase, and reach the spaceport where they find every memorable moment from the previous Star Wars movies, cut up, stuck in a blender and regurgitated onto the script page at every possible opportunity: Stormtroopers tell people to “Move along,” a recruiting video plays the Imperial March theme, and so on. Indeed, this movie half feels like an answer to all the obsessives who cried about TLJ’s being unfaithful to the ‘lore’ of Star Wars, designed to stimulate that pathetic need to feel you’re the smartest person in the movie theater. So, so many eye-rolling shout-outs: Tracking devices on the Falcon, the holo-chess table, Teras Kasi from a two decades-old Playstation game, a suit of Mandalorian armor in the background in one scene. Because for too many out there, this seems to now be a substitute for things like engaging characters or an interesting plot. Ah yes, the plot. Right. Han escapes Corellia although Qi’ra doesn’t. Han joins the Imperial army, then deserts, joins up with a smuggler and con-man named Tobias Beckett (Woody Harrelson) in a series of escalating heists designed to buy off Crimson Dawn crime syndicate boss Dryden Vos (Paul Bettany). Here, he is reunited with Qi’ra, who has become either Vos’s sex-slave (Vos is creepily and physically controlling of her, and her face falls as soon as he enters the room) and/or lieutenant (she’s a deadly martial artist and Vos sends her with Han to ensure he honors his end of the deal), I’m not really clear which—and I suspect the movie isn’t either. It all culminates in the Kessel Run, made famous in the original Star Wars thanks to an offhand remark Harrison Ford’s Han Solo makes to Luke and Obi-wan. I was struck how this feels like a movie in search of a purpose or goal, kind of flitting from one scene to the next, dutifully ticking off boxes on the back story that we already know about Han Solo—gets a nickname, tick, meets Chewbacca, tick, gets his blaster, tick, does the Kessel Run, tick, wins the Millennium Falcon in a card game, tick. Shoots first, tick. Any time the movie appears in danger of going in a new or interesting direction and showing you something you’ve never seen in a Star Wars movie before, it’s immediately reigned in and we skip ahead to the next scene. There is a very, very brief sequence, for example, where Han is thrust in the middle of a sort of World War I-style battle, filled with terrifyingly confusing explosions and smoke, and you think, ah now we’ll see how he grows to hate the Empire through this senseless war. But nope. Next scene he’s plotting mutiny and escaping with Chewie. I think it was always going to be hard to make an interesting Han Solo prequel (or the Boba Fett and Obi-wan prequels which may or may not be in planning), but seeing the Empire from the inside might have been an interesting twist, focusing less on what we already know about Han and more on what we don’t know, or more on the mechanism of evil, and how the free soul rebels against tyranny.
Sorry fellas. This movie has boxes to tick. As a result, each scene and plot point feels thin and stretched out, like an idea spread over too much running time: “We must escape,” says Han. A minute later, they do. “I should join the Imperial army,” thinks Han. A minute and a brain-hurtlingly stupid nickname later, he does. I think it’s symptomatic of this kind of approach of stitching plot points mechanically together that two scenes end with characters walking off in some random direction, despite being in the middle of icy/sandy wastes. It’s very meta, as if the characters just decided to literally walk across the pages of the script to the next scene. You ain’t got no spaceship buddy, where the hell you think you’re walking to? A SMALL MOVIE The locations, both interior and ex, feel oddly cramped and soundstage-y. The spice mines of Kessel, for example, look like they could comfortably fit into a suburban back yard. The cinematography is very dimly-lit for about the first third, punctuated by Pokemon-seizure inducing blast of brilliant light. There’s little of the visual flair that made TLJ enjoyable despite its potty plotting, save for perhaps the aforementioned battle scene and one more where we follow Han up the ramp and into the Falcon in the middle of a firefight. Should-be-crowd-pleasing sequences like the initial car chase or the flight through the Kessel Run are instead just kind of leaden and lifeless. The music keeps swelling and telling me something dramatic is going on, but I’m not buying it: Chewbacca sitting in the Falcon’s co-pilot seat, for example, is not in and of itself dramatic. It’s a totally unearned moment, that acquires significance only with knowledge of the Star Wars series. Otherwise, it’s just this big furry ape sitting in a chair. As Han, Ehrenreich is fine, I guess, aside from one scene where he takes the Falcon’s controls and does the I’m-obviously-not-driving-this waggling the steering wheel from side to side bit. There’s one or two scenes where he shows the thin veneer of bravado over someone unsure of themselves, but there’s too little of this. I don’t especially buy him as the future Han Solo we met in the original trilogy, since he seems to lack any hint of selfishness or cynicism. Clarke similarly lacks the hint of depth and menace her role seems to call for, as someone who has had to be ruthless in order to survive inside a criminal organization run by an unstable, paranoid narcissist. Indeed, the movie seems uninterested in Qi’ra as anything other than a motivator for Han, which makes her climactic betrayal at the end of the movie far less impactful that it might have been otherwise—despite the fact that her arc seems much more interesting than Han’s. Phoebe Waller-Bridge has one enjoyable scene as L3, a navigation droid infatuated with Han’s frenemy Lando (Donald Glover), but her ‘droids’ rights’ shtick humor falls flat, coming off as ill-timed mockery of equal rights movements. Even the stunt casting of Donald Glover as Lando didn’t do much for me—though I know other reviewers loved him—I can’t help but suspect his accolades have more to do with the goodwill he’s already garnered from his music and previous acting than with his performance here. DIRECTIONLESS I think the common thread between the sketchy plot and sketchy characters is the lack of a clear goal or direction for the characters. You could do a movie about plot, but here there are three or four, raised and discarded in quick succession. In the good Star Wars movies, the heroes had something they want to accomplish, a goal, an objective. Steal the plans and blow up the Death Star. Become a Jedi knight. There’s none of that here. Han wants to earn enough money to buy his own ship and return to rescue Qi’ra from Cor—oh no wait, there she is. He wants to do a heist to pay off a gang lord—ah, no, he’s decided not to. There’s nothing left to connect you to the main character, a vague sense he wants a ship and independence, but there’s nothing really established onscreen in the movie. Alternatively, you could do a movie about character, but the titular loner ends the movie much the same as he began it, and we grow no closer to understanding what makes him tick. He says he’s a selfish guy, others say he’s basically good, but there’s no evidence either way. Han is just kind of blown by the plot, exercising little agency at any stage of the story. His friendship with Chewie is paint-by-numbers and established in a single scene, in keeping with this movie’s impatience to cover all the required ground. Qi’ra is another potentially interesting character, but relegated to the background—this movie could have taken a lesson from Mad Max: Fury Road and realized the viewpoint character doesn’t always have to be the center of the action. So instead we’re left with a kind of rote retelling of what we already know about Han Solo, with no alarms and no surprises, while the hero himself becomes a kind of muddled blur, his only motivation being to hit the required plot points and move the story forward. If the plot points themselves were more fun, we might not notice the boring characters and haphazard execution. It’s not actively, malevolently bad, it’s just a bit dull, lifeless and predictable, content with doing what is safe and expected rather than challenging the imagination of the audience in any way.
