Month: February 2005

Truth be told (and that’s really kind of the point, isn’t it?), Hunter S. Thompson stopped writing well sometime in the 70s. It doesn’t matter. Even if you discount The Great Shark Hunt, which I personally wouldn’t, you’ve got a legacy the likes of which we don’t see often. Hell. It says enough about him to say that he was so dominant, so powerful, that (despite Tom Wolfe and George Plimpton) he birthed and killed gonzo. If you write like he wrote, you’re an imitator, and who thinks of gonzo journalism as anything else but writing in his style?

So there’s that. Still, I don’t feel deprived of great works yet to come. I read his last column, written for ESPN, just to be sentimental. It’s mostly crap. “The death of professional hockey in AMERICA is a nasty omen for people with heavy investments in NHL teams”? What the fuck is that supposed to be? “It’s a nasty omen when your business shuts down, did you know that?” Well, yes; we did. The line about the very excited message is good, though.

I’m depressed anyway. Of course I am. Like he didn’t influence me tremendously? So I wrote this and I put a black border around the page. Not terribly meaningful but what can you do?

Well. Let’s stop ripping him off, for a start. I think that’d be a good tribute: let’s stop using fuck as a prefix, and let’s stop with the strange and terrible (unless you’re really quoting Tolstoy, but no cheating, OK?), and let’s just find our own voices. I’m not looking forward to reading a bunch of puerile tributes written in faux-Thompson style. Which, I hasten to note, I’ve seen none of so far. But I’m a pessimist at heart.

“So much for Objective Journalism. Don’t bother to look for it here—not under any byline of mine; or anyone else I can think of. With the possible exception of things like box scores, race results, and stock market tabulations, there is no such thing as Objective Journalism. The phrase itself is a pompous contradiction in terms.”

If I finish up with half the integrity he had, I think I’ll have done a decent job of living.

Speaking of Wong Kar Wai, turns out the Brattle is running a Wong Kar Wai retrospective in April. They’re showing everything but 2046. Note that Ashes of Time, the only Wong Kar Wai movie unavailable on DVD in the US (OK, yes, but Sony seems to have the rights to 2046 and it’ll be out by the end of this year, I bet) is playing on Sunday, April 10th.

I’m currently in La Guardia Airport. In the ideal world, I’m in Boston, but that world was shattered sometime this afternoon. No biggie. Most of the annoyance I might otherwise feel is dispelled by the fact that the Fort Lauderdale airport has free wireless Internet. Cool beans for Fort Lauderdale, which has suddenly become my preferred transfer point for any air travel involving Florida but not involving Orlando. (Once in the past seventeen years, counting this trip, but still.)

I am also exceedingly happy to note that Mr. David Cronenberg has achieved funding for Painkillers, which is not his next movie or the movie after that, but rather the movie immediately following that one. The words “plastic surgery as performance art” make me quite cheerful. Remember “gynecological tools for mutant women”?

Oh, OK. A History of Violence (with Viggo Mortensen and Maria Bello) is next, and London Fields is the one after that. While researching that, I discovered this interview with Maria Bello, which has my new favorite Cronenberg quote: “David Cronenberg was an incredible leader/father figure.” Right up there with “Cronenberg is to Toronto as John Hughes is to Chicago,” which I should really verify somehow someday. I remember getting it from a valid source but I’ll be damned if I can remember what it was.

Hey! If you’re in Boston, I’m providing you with plenty of warning and I will brook no objections that do not involve the need to babysit. The Saturday after next, February 26th, Days of Being Wild is playing at the MFA. It’s at 4 PM. I cannot even begin to explain how great this movie is, although I took a crack at it once. When I listed the top twenty movies of all time? Most of them were hard to choose and maybe Last Life in the Universe could creep on there and so on. But the top three, those were easy, and Days of Being Wild was among them.

So it’s pretty strongly recommended. There are shows all week long if you can’t make Saturday at 4. It’s one of the best movies ever.

I say “Well, I think I’m going to see Constantine after all.” And you say, “What? That’s stupid. Keanu, and Los Angeles instead of London, and dude.” And I say, “Well.”

Then the New York Times says, “How difficult is it to play a mythic figure like Gabriel as opposed to, say, a soccer mom?” And Tilda Swinton says “They’re exactly the same, because no one you play is ‘real.’ Every character is a construct, even if you’re playing a suburban mother. You’re looking for a construct in the way you look and talk, and you have either the mythic information about Gabriel, or what we know about suburban mothers, and then you just try to make it real. It’s exactly the same. So, you start with what we know about Gabriel as God’s messenger.”

The picture looks something like this:

It goes a long way to unconvince me from taking a pass.

(You could also read Kip on the matter, who says basically the same thing, which is not surprising since I stole it all from him anyhow.)