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Reviews
Tom Wolfe's Los Angeles (1977)
Tom Wolf - where r u?
Whatever happened to Tom Wolfe? He's the famous author of "Bonfire of The Vanities."
In 1984 and 1985 Wolfe wrote his first novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities, in serial form against a deadline of every two weeks for Rolling Stone magazine. It came out in book form in 1987. A story of the money-feverish 1980s in New York, "The Bonfire of the Vanities" was number one of the New York Times bestseller list for two months and remained on the list for more than a year, selling over 800,000 copies in hardcover. It also became the number-one bestselling paperback, with sales above two million.
In 1989 Wolfe outraged the literacy community with an essay in Harper's called "Stalking the Billion-footed Beast." In it he argued that the only hope for the future of the American novel was a Zolaesque naturalism in which the novelist becomes the reporteras he had done in writing "The Bonfire of the Vanities," which was recognized as the essential novel of America in the 1980s.
In 1996 Wolfe wrote the novella "Ambush at Fort Bragg" as a two-part series for Rolling Stone. In 1997 it was published as a book in France and Spain and as an audiotape in the United States. An account of a network television magazine show's attempt to trap three soldiers at Fort Bragg into confessing to the murder of one of their comrades, it grew out of what had been intended as one theme in a novel Wolfe was working on at that time. The novel, "A Man in Full," was published in November 1998. The book's protagonists are a sixty-year-old Atlanta real estate developer whose empire has begun a grim slide toward bankruptcy and a twenty-three-year-old manual laborer who works in the freezer unit of a wholesale food warehouse in Alameda County, California, owned by the developer. Before the story ends, both have had to face the question of what is it that makes a man "a man in full" now, at the beginning of a new century and a new millennium.
"A Man in Full" headed the New York Times bestseller list for ten weeks and has sold nearly 1.4 million copies in hardcover. The book's tremendous commercial success, its enthusiastic welcome by reviewers, and Wolfe's appearance on the cover of Time magazine in his trademark white suit plus a white homburg and white kid glovesalong with his claim that his sort of detailed realism was the future of the American novel, if it was going to have oneprovoked a furious reaction among other American novelists, notably John Updike, Norman Mailer, and John Irving.
In October 2000 Wolfe published "Hooking Up," a collection of fiction and non fiction concerning the turn of the new century, entitled "Hooking Up." It included "Ambush at Fort Bragg" and, for the first time since their original publication in the Herald-Tribune, his famous essays on William Shawn and The New Yorker, "Tiny Mummies!" and "Lost in the Whichy Thickets." His new novel "I Am Charlotte Simmons," is now available in paperback from Picador.
A Mighty Heart (2007)
A Mighty Heart
Spiritual knowledge is an awareness of the two great truths taught by all great religions and great teachers through the ages -- Karma (cause and effect of every act and thought) and Reincarnation (a wheel of rebirths put in motion by previous actions in past lives). So in light of these truths, murder is no solution to anyone's political agenda because whatever difficulties or suffering one is trying to correct, those same difficulties will reappear again, I believe, in another life.
After seeing the tragedy unfold in "A Mighty Heart," I sank deep into melancholy. Is there anything outside ourselves? Do we not hold within our own hearts the beloved, and life and death? And do we not hold within our own souls the Divine Self? So at last we are forced to return to some simple thing we once loved -- perhaps only the delight of a streak of sunlight across the floor or a child's laughter. But in this small comfort -- to know that things are together and held forever tightly, and some things are never to be more than dreamed. We are on fire -- I believe --burning with ideas and with a passion to create goodness out of chaos and tragedy and a daring to achieve. Migdia Chinea June 30, 2007, New York Times Review --
Tom Wolfe's Los Angeles (1977)
Tom Wolf - where r u?
Whatever happened to Tom Wolfe? He's the famous author of "Bonfire of The Vanities."
In 1984 and 1985 Wolfe wrote his first novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities, in serial form against a deadline of every two weeks for Rolling Stone magazine. It came out in book form in 1987. A story of the money-feverish 1980s in New York, "The Bonfire of the Vanities" was number one of the New York Times bestseller list for two months and remained on the list for more than a year, selling over 800,000 copies in hardcover. It also became the number-one bestselling paperback, with sales above two million.
In 1989 Wolfe outraged the literacy community with an essay in Harper's called "Stalking the Billion-footed Beast." In it he argued that the only hope for the future of the American novel was a Zolaesque naturalism in which the novelist becomes the reporteras he had done in writing "The Bonfire of the Vanities," which was recognized as the essential novel of America in the 1980s.
In 1996 Wolfe wrote the novella "Ambush at Fort Bragg" as a two-part series for Rolling Stone. In 1997 it was published as a book in France and Spain and as an audiotape in the United States. An account of a network television magazine show's attempt to trap three soldiers at Fort Bragg into confessing to the murder of one of their comrades, it grew out of what had been intended as one theme in a novel Wolfe was working on at that time. The novel, "A Man in Full," was published in November 1998. The book's protagonists are a sixty-year-old Atlanta real estate developer whose empire has begun a grim slide toward bankruptcy and a twenty-three-year-old manual laborer who works in the freezer unit of a wholesale food warehouse in Alameda County, California, owned by the developer. Before the story ends, both have had to face the question of what is it that makes a man "a man in full" now, at the beginning of a new century and a new millennium.
"A Man in Full" headed the New York Times bestseller list for ten weeks and has sold nearly 1.4 million copies in hardcover. The book's tremendous commercial success, its enthusiastic welcome by reviewers, and Wolfe's appearance on the cover of Time magazine in his trademark white suit plus a white homburg and white kid glovesalong with his claim that his sort of detailed realism was the future of the American novel, if it was going to have oneprovoked a furious reaction among other American novelists, notably John Updike, Norman Mailer, and John Irving.
In October 2000 Wolfe published "Hooking Up," a collection of fiction and non fiction concerning the turn of the new century, entitled "Hooking Up." It included "Ambush at Fort Bragg" and, for the first time since their original publication in the Herald-Tribune, his famous essays on William Shawn and The New Yorker, "Tiny Mummies!" and "Lost in the Whichy Thickets." His new novel "I Am Charlotte Simmons," is now available in paperback from Picador.
Apocalypto (2006)
A Blood Bath
Miami University:
No one really expects historical dramas to be accurate, so I was not so much concerned with whether or not the film would accurately represent what we know of Classic period Maya history as I was concerned about the message Mel Gibson wanted to convey through the film. After Jared Diamond's Collapse, it has become fashionable to use the so called Maya "collapse" as a metaphor for Western society's environmental and political excesses. Setting aside the fact that the Maya lived for over 1000 years in a fragile tropical environment before their cities were abandoned, while here in the U.S, we have polluted our urban environments in less than 200-I anticipated a heavy handed cautionary tale wrapped up in Native American costume. What I saw was much worse than this.
The thrill of hearing melodic Yucatec Maya spoken by familiar faces (although the five lead actors are NOT Yucatec Maya but other well known and fantastic Native American actors) during the first ten minutes of the movie is swiftly and brutally replaced with stomach churning panic at the graphic Maya on Maya violence depicted in a village raid scene of nearly 15 minutes. From then on the entire movie never ceases to utilize every possible excuse to depict more violence-it is unrelenting. Our hero, Jaguar Paw, the charismatic Cree actor Rudy Youngblood has one hellavuh bad couple of days. Captured for sacrifice, forced to march to the putrid city nearby, he endures every tropical jungle attack conceivable and that is AFTER he escapes the relentless brutality of the elites. I am told this part of the movie is completely derivative of the 1966 film The Naked Prey. Pure action flick, with one ridiculous encounter after another, filmed beautifully in the way that only Hollywood blockbusters can afford, this is the part of the movie that will draw in audiences and demonstrates Gibson's skill as a cinematic storyteller.
But I find the visual appeal of the film one of the most disturbing aspects of Apocalypto. The jungles of Veracruz and Costa Rica have never looked better, the masked priests on the temple jump right off a Classic Maya vase, the people are gorgeous. The fact that this film was made in Mexico and filmed in the Yucatec Maya language coupled with its visual appeal makes it all the more dangerous-it looks authentic, viewers will be captivated by the crazy exotic mess of the urban city and the howler monkeys in the jungle. And who really cares that the Maya were not living in cities when the Spanish arrived? Yes, Gibson includes the arrival of clearly Christian missionaries (these guys are too clean to be conquistadors) in the last 5 minutes of the story (in the real world the Spanish arrived 300 years after the last Maya city was abandoned). It is one of the few calm moments in an otherwise aggressively paced film. The message-the end is near and the savior has come.
Gibson's efforts at authenticity of location and language might for some viewers, mask his blatantly Colonial message that the Maya needed saving because they were rotten at the core. Using the decline of Classic urbanism as his backdrop, Gibson communicates that there was absolutely nothing redeemable about Maya culture, especially elite culture which is depicted as a disgusting feast of blood and excess. No mention is made of the achievements in science and art, the profound spirituality and connection to agricultural cycles, or the engineering feats of Maya cities.
Instead, Gibson replays, in glorious big budget technicolor, an offensive and racist notion that Maya people were brutal to one another long before the arrival of Europeans and thus they deserve, in fact they needed, rescue. This same idea was used for 500 years to justify the subjugation of Maya people and it has been thoroughly deconstructed and rejected by Maya intellectuals and community leaders throughout the Maya area today. Pan-Maya intellectuals have demonstrated convincingly that such ideas were manipulated by the Guatemalan army to justify the genocidal civil war of the 1970-90's. To see this same trope, this clearly Western fantasy about who indigenous people were (and are today?) used as the basis for entertainment (and I use the term loosely) is truly embarrassing. I am embarrassed for my race that we continue to produce such one sided and clearly exploitative messages about the indigenous people of the New World.
Before anyone thinks I have forgotten my Metamusel this morning, I am not a compulsively politically correct type who sees our little brown brothers as the epitome of goodness and light. I know the Maya practiced brutal violence upon one another-I have studied child sacrifice during the Classic period, etc. And I loved Braveheart, I really did. But there is something very different about portraying a group of people who are recovering from 500 years of colonization as violent and brutal. These are not Romans killing Celts. These are people who are living with the very real effects of persistent racism which at its heart sees them as less than human. To think that a movie about the 1000 ways a Maya can kill a Maya when only 10 years ago Maya people were systematically being exterminated in Guatemala just for being Maya-- is in any way okay or entertaining or gods forbid, helpful-is the epitome of a Western fantasy of white supremacy that I find sad and ultimately pornographic. Ultimately it is best to conclude (and this is surely no surprise to most of us) that Apolcalypto has very little to do with Maya culture and instead is Gibson's comment on the excesses he perceives in modern Western society. I just wish he had been honest enough to say this. Instead he has created a beautiful and disturbing portrait that satisfies his need for comment but does violence to one of the most impressive of Native American cultures.
Alexander (2004)
"Alexander" bad
I can't express how much I disliked and was bored by "Alexander." At the private screening to which I was invited, purses were checked for possible video cameras, etc. I reached inside my purse for my chapstick and someone hovered over me like a Soviet Union inquisitor. Well, they shouldn't have bothered. In my opinion, "Alexander" is an Oliver Stone vanity project with actors in costumes making didactic speeches and exerting accents--"acting, acting, acting." I have an honors UCLA degree in Classical Civ and learned that back in Alexander's time men preferred each other's sexual company and considered women for procreation. Nevertheless, I was offended by the unnecessarily affected performances and all that silly posturing. I had a secret crush on Colin and I was crushed. Angelina is in danger of becoming a cliché. Anthony Hopkins was a bizarre touch. Geez! I give it a zero.