by Greg Proops
THELMA & LOUISE
Ridley Scott, director, 1991
Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon are magically and sadly cast for their only time together as two Women on the run from the aftermath of shooting a rapist. The assault is quite unnerving, but the rapist deserves it. Even the waitress at the bar says so. It’s a great running look at how unfair and complex the act of defending yourself is for Women. They decide to have a holiday and leave Louise’s sexist d-bag of a husband with just a note and dinner in the microwave. The great Harvey Keitel works as a beagle of a tough, sensitive Arkansas detective who knows the horrible truth about Louise’s past. The one who drives her to run when someone else might stay and try to explain. Ridley Scott stretches the screen to include the whole damn road, and the characters change into different people before your eyes. A moonlit scene in the 1966 Thunderbird rag top, gazing into Susan Sarandon’s wonder-filled blue eyes while Marianne Faithfull sings the poignant “The Ballad of Lucy Jordan” is close to poetry. The Women start out honest, but circumstance forces them to evolve quickly into the lawless wild chicks the feds seem to believe they are. After a robbery comes this exhilarating exchange: Louise: “Why are you driving so fast?” Thelma: “I want to put some distance between us and the scene of our last goddamn crime.”
The revenge they wreak on bad husbands, pig truck drivers, sexist police, deadbeat boyfriends, and an uncaring world make this one especially rewarding. Geena Davis has a romp with a young and very fresh-out-of-jail Brad Pitt. It proves Brad is funny and better as a character actor than leading man, when he always seems so droopy. It is one of the best crime movies because our heroes are the victims and the perpetrators, and at no point are we not rooting for them. You will consider changing your life and taking to the road in a bitchin’ convertible. Butch and Sundance in a Thunderbird. Special bonus pot-smoking rasta gag late in the movie.
THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING
John Huston, director, 1975
The Man Who Would Be King, starring the devastatingly rugged Sean Connery and the very clever Michael Caine, plays like an old-time movie as John Huston wanted to make it in the ’40s with Gable and Bogart, but only got around to it in the ’70s. The film is based on the short novel by Rudyard Kipling about the true-life maniac Josiah Harlan, an American who went to Afghanistan and waged his own war, and is all the more charming for it. Chemistry is the key; Caine and Connery fight the elements, ravines, avalanches, the natives, fate, and their own greed and egos. Sean Connery is the sexiest and most charismatic of actors. His greatest ability as a performer is his unlimited capacity for adoration. Good, old-fashioned movie racism and high adventure. Don’t call in; it’s just for fun. This adventure buddy movie is about love, the boys’ for each other, the love of glory, and our love for them even though we know good and well they are shady and nefarious scoundrels. Connery sets just the right tone as the kingish Danny, and Caine is guile itself as the canny and crafty Cockney Peachy trying to work a sticky situation into a fortune. Movie Helper Saeed Jaffrey from all the old Merchant Ivory movies is Billy Fish, the last survivor of a previous expedition, who becomes their translator and guide through the strange, superstitious, magical, cruel mountain country at the roof of the world, Kafiristan. They face the very wrath of the gods, all to bring back the treasure hidden by Alexander the Great. Butch Cassidy in the Hindu Kush. Thelma and Louise on a mule with Martini rifles. You need the high adventure. You will cry at their dreams coming all undone.
POINT BREAK
Kathryn Bigelow, director, 1991
Kathryn Bigelow is the only Woman director as of this writing to win an Oscar, so we may safely assume that the Academy Awards are amazingly open-minded and even-handed. She directed the intense war story The Hurt Locker and the acclaimed torture-licious Zero Dark Thirty. But her magnum opus is the ’90s bromance that will never die, Point Break. Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze at their hunkiest surf, play overaggressive touch football, fight, dive from planes, drink Mexican beers, rob banks, battle a gang of evil surfers, call each other compadre, and generally fall in love. They aren’t gay because it’s a Hollywood movie, so they don’t have sex. They do what straight men do when they are in need: they tumble, fight, and do extreme sports. Patrick Swayze is Bodhi (it’s short for Bodhisattva), the spiritual, vaguely Buddhist leader of a gang of bank-robbing surfers called the Ex-Presidents. They wear awesome rubber masks of Carter, Reagan, LBJ, and Nixon to add to the real. Keanu is Johnny Utah—of course he is—a young hot-shot former Heisman Trophy–winning quarterback turned FBI agent (aren’t they all?), who is assigned to the case and partnered with live-wire foul-up Gary Busey (Pappas). You still aren’t on board? It gets gooder. Johnny infiltrates the gang by dating Bodhi’s ex-girlfriend, Tyler (Lori Petty), who works at a hamburger stand at the beach where they surf. Johnny hides that he is an FBI agent from Tyler and grows ever closer to Bodhi, going night-surfing, sky diving, and chasing his gang around during a series of astounding action set pieces. Gas stations are burned and pit bulls are thrown. Bodhi tries one last heist that goes horribly wrong, and he makes Johnny join his gang for it. This is their prom. Much shooting and dead gang members later, Johnny runs Bodhi down and finds out he has kidnapped Tyler—whom we have largely forgotten about at this juncture—and Johnny must save her. Keanu jumps from a plane without a parachute to get his man, Pat Swayze. It happened. The love story here is between the morally upright Johnny and the dark rebel Bodhi. In the end they marry briefly by sharing handcuffs, and one walks on while the other seeks enlightenment. When someone has to throw a backward scissor kick in tai chi pants, Pat Swayze is your man. The best action movie for stoners ever. The best stoner movie for action fans ever. Vaya con Dios, brah.
A HARD DAY’S NIGHT
Richard Lester, director, 1964
Total, tasty teen excitement with the cutest, funniest band ever. They wear super-bitchin’ boots and ties and cute hats. They run, jump, gambol, leap, goof, and invent the music video. The Beatles mock television, trends, and commercialism while being in on the joke of being the most popular thingy in the world. They’re always cynical and funny, which is what distinguished them from all other bands. That, and they evolved socially and musically with every album. John is the disbelieving snarky one, Paul is the lovable mophead, George is the knowing cute one, and Ringo is the best actor. For real. If you have not seen this, it may explain the Beatles to you better than any one thing they did. They made the Cold War world laugh hysterically when the world needed it. They made rock fun again when we were getting snowed in by boy singers named Bobby. Most of all, they will make you smile. Name another band that evokes that particular reaction. The Stones make you feel cool and like hitting someone, the Velvet Underground makes you want to smoke and be hateful, the Beach Boys make you want to get them a new wardrobe, but the Beatles are shaggable and the songs are tremendous. Unbeatable. Beatleable.
THE SMARTEST LITTLE BOOK OF BOOK REVIEWS
After the disappointment of this “book,” I can offer you the small solace of some books that I can vouch are actually illuminating and you won’t have to work very hard to understand why. You like reading or you wouldn’t be here. But we live in a world where our attention spans last less than the length of an Internet ad. So I am here to help by boiling down some of what I think of as classics to a paltry but amazingly descriptive few lines. It is literally the least I can do. Without further ado, the squint-and-you-miss-it Little Book of Littler Book Reviews.
Blood Meridian, or The Evening Redness in the West
War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner.
—Cormac McCarthy (1933–)
* * *
A violent tween joins a horrific band of doomed scalp hunters and the fun starts there. Moby-Dick in the Old West with beheadings.
* * *
Cormac McCarthy makes himself hard to read. Women in general are not huge fans. He believes that punctuation
is “tyranny,” and he would never use a semicolon. Quotation marks are out of the question, so when you read him, you must do a lot of heavy attributive lifting. That and the fact that lots of it is in Spanish, which he learned to write for this book. Cormac has been poor and struggling as well as granted with genius money. It doesn’t seem to change his outlook. And he makes no bones that he does not care for authors who do not deal with death. He is also reclusive in the sense that he cares not at all about doing interviews to promote his work. In our post-Kardashian world, that makes him a hermit. He did go on Oprah, where he looked furtive, and she actually posed the probing question of how did he get his ideas. Contentious late-in-life genius or overreaching genre-ist with a violence fixation? This is your call, baby. You must deal with lots of death in this one, so saddle up and amigo, buena suerte.
The Rock of Tanios
All pleasures must be paid for, do not despise those that state their price.
—Amin Maalouf (1949–)
* * *
A tragic story of mistaken identity and revenge set in colonial Lebanon full of sheikhs and beauties. A strangely uplifting work scented with pine and coffee.
* * *
Amin Maalouf is a Christian author from Lebanon. He was a journalist who covered the fall of Saigon and interviewed Indira Gandhi. He left Lebanon for good during the 1975 civil war and moved to Paris and now writes in French. He has been wildly celebrated and definitely brings a unique, colorful, intellectual perspective to religion, race, and identity. As he puts it: “The fact of simultaneously being Christian and having as my mother tongue Arabic, the holy language of Islam, is one of the basic paradoxes that have shaped my identity.” Paradox is his chocolate box.
The Great Gatsby
In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)
* * *
Shallow, brittle rich people drink, dance, and have unrepentant sex with the underclass in the Roaring ’20s. Just desserts are served.
* * *
F. Scott Fitzgerald was a drunk married to a crazy person. He was from a notable family but was always after money. He hobnobbed with all the heavyweights of the ’20s and sold his soul to Hollywood. He made it to the semi–rock star age of forty-four. He wrote Gatsby in the ’20s, but it was not a commercial success till the ’40s, when soldiers overseas were given copies. Somewhere around 150,000 books were handed to GIs during WWII. Then it became part of high school curriculums in the ’50s and voilà, the Great American Novel was reborn. Fitzgerald knew all about his subject matter, the new rich: he lived on Long Island where he soiréed; when in Europe, he and his wife, Zelda, sponged off many rich friends. He was a mordant observer of the rich while at the same time something of an admirer and sycophant. He certainly comes closer than any other novelist in capturing hedonism, which he practiced, and as well as despair, which he became an expert on. As he says in “The Rich Boy”: “Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft, where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand.”
Bruges-la-Morte
Bruges was his dead wife. And his dead wife was Bruges. The two were untied in a like destiny. It was Bruges-la-Morte, the dead town entombed in its stone quais, with the arteries of its canals cold once the great pulse of the sea had ceased beating in them.
—Georges Rodenbach (1855–1898)
* * *
Depressed neurotic weirdo seeks replacement for dead wife, then freaks out when she is an uncontrollable bummer.
* * *
Georges Rodenbach is considered a symbolist, which is to say not a realist. Feeling, art, and aesthetics come first before authenticity. His tomb in the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris with his green corpse spirit flying out of the ground is the most over-the-top spookarama this side of the Haunted Mansion in Disneyland. The symbolist movement included writers (Gabriele D’Annunzio), playwrights (Nobel Prize winner Maurice Maeterlinck), painters (Gustave Moreau), poets (Arthur Rimbaud), philosophers (Arthur Schopenhauer), and composers (Claude Debussy). This is the first novel to be printed with photos; that, mon ami, is très moderne.
1984
If you want to keep a secret you must also hide it from yourself.
—George Orwell (1903–1950)
* * *
Trouble and torture in the future for truthseeker Winston Smith when the past is denied and the news is written by the government.
* * *
Orwell lived it. He was a poor rich person who was sent to a hideous boarding school that he hated, was a police superintendent in Burma, lived among the wretched poverty and squalor of London and Paris, was shot in the throat in the Spanish Civil War, wrote literary criticism, was married while in the hospital, smoked like a chimney, and suffered and died of TB at the age of forty-six. He also wrote loads of articles, pieces, essays, columns, and diatribes, including how to make a perfect cup of tea and the immortal classic Animal Farm: “Some animals are more equal than others.” Plus the Big Boy, 1984. He was famous and well off when he passed but had no idea how huge 1984 would become as the novel of dystopia. He would have been thrilled. Maybe not so thrilled that there is an inane reality show with people under constant surveillance called Big Brother. Neither are we, for that matter.
I, Claudius
I was thinking, “So, I’m Emperor, am I? What nonsense! But at least I’ll be able to make people read my books now.”
—Robert Graves (1895–1985)
* * *
Stuttering Roman noble is forced to take over the Empire after his nephew, the over-the-top pervert emperor Caligula, is rubbed out.
* * *
Graves was severely wounded at the Battle of the Somme in WWI. He came home shell-shocked and exhausted from the Spanish flu, the virus that wiped out somewhere in the neighborhood of two and a half percent of the world’s population. He was pals at Oxford with T. E. Lawrence—yes, Lawrence of Arabia—with whom he chatted about poetry and apparently played pranks. That had to be a good time. Graves wrote a popular bio of Lawrence and then his own memoir of the war, Goodbye to All That. He went through a couple of wives, moved to Majorca, and used his extensive knowledge of classical literature and history to write I, Claudius. It was a hit, so of course he said he wrote it for money so no one could enjoy themselves. Despite his snipe for it, it is well witty.
Dancing Bear
I had done either too much coke or too little, a constant problem in my life.
—James Crumley (1939–2008)
* * *
Chandler with snow tires. And a giant duffel bag full of drugs and guns in the trunk.
* * *
Crumley was never a bestseller. He put it more starkly: “I’m not middlebrow and middle class. Sure, I’d like it if more people read the books. My children would like it. My ex-wives would like it. But that’s just not what I’m about.” The heir to Chandler and all that is hard-boiled, he had five wives and an enthusiasm for alcohol. He served in the army in the Philippines and wrote his only non-detective novel, One to Count Cadence. His detectives are hard drinking and very druggy, in reflection of his own tastes, we presume. Spent forever writing screenplays that never got made. He had to be satisfied with being a brilliant stylist.
“The Sneetches” The Sneetches and Other Stories
Now, the Star-Belly Sneetches had bellies with stars. The Plain-Belly Sneetches had none upon thars.
—Dr. Seuss (1904–1991)
* * *
Fury on the beach when race and identity are explored in this hilarious Holocaust allegory for kids.
* * *
The greatest of all children’s writers—sorry, J. K. Rowling. Theodor Geisel’s middle name was Seuss, his family was from Germany, and they pronounced it Zoice. He was an
indifferent scholar at Dartmouth, but he loved to draw. He was a struggling artist living in a walkup on the Lower West Side when he did a cartoon of a knight with a can of bug spray saying, “Darn it all, another dragon. And just after I’d sprayed the whole castle with Flit!” The wife of an ad exec saw the cartoon, and he started a cartoon ad campaign. The slogan was “Quick, Henry, the Flit!” The campaign was super popular; it was the “Got milk?” of the way back. He was an ad man for thirty years while writing various children’s books. Then in 1957, The Cat in the Hat sold a million copies, and he was now a brand as well as an author. He felt strongly that kids should read, think for themselves, and not be patronized. Generations have grown up on his humanist poetry. Dr. Seuss wrote children’s books about the power structure (Yertle the Turtle), nuclear war (Horton Hears a Who and The Butter Battle Book), and the environment (The Lorax). His wordplay and fantastical names are part of the culture now. He gave us nerd. Most of all, he encouraged everyone to try independent critical thought, “Think left and think right/and think low and think high/Oh, the THINKS you can think up if only you try!”