Beloved Movies That I Hate

Come on, you’ve probably got them too—those big movies that everybody around you loves, but that make you reach for the remote as soon as they come on. Maybe the jokes don’t work for you, you don’t like the hero’s forelock curl, or…well, you just can’t stand it and that’s that. Here are a few popular films that, for one reason or another, make me want to stick a fork in my eye.

The Wizard of Oz

I don’t know how many times I’ve sat down to watch this movie, thinking I might like it this time. But it just never works. I like the little hard guys in the Lollipop Guild and the Cowardly Lion’s song (“What makes the Hottentot so hot? What puts the ‘ape’ in apricot?”). But a half-hour in, right after Billie Burke floats away in her big bubble and inexplicably strands Dorothy, I find myself squirming, stuck in this movie’s spiral of frustration. It’s like one of those dreams where you’re trying to catch a plane or drive to work, but everything keeps going wrong and you never get there. Too many of the songs have the same melody (bad dream again), the talking trees scare the crap out of me, and I get antsy for Dorothy—I keep thinking she should sit down and have a meal, or maybe take a shower. And when the scene with the poppies comes up, I find myself wishing I were watching Traffik instead. Now there were some poppies.

Forrest Gump

Fingernails on a blackboard, people, from beginning to end. For my money, Tom Hanks hams it up too much when he’s playing “extraordinary” characters, like that morose cryptologist in The Da Vinci Code or the stressed-out survivor in Cast Away. I love him when he’s playing more of an everyman, like the poor schlub in Catch Me If You Can or level-headed James Lovell in Apollo 13. Forrest Gump is further hampered by one of my pet peeves: actors playing people with learning disabilities. It just seems like something we’ll look back on in 50 years with shame, the modern equivalent of white actors playing in blackface. And despite this movie’s having Gary Sinise—who can pretty much do no wrong—it doesn’t convince me of its magic realism and whimsical sweet nature because I’m too busy thinking about how Hanks is putting on an act and Sinise’s legs were erased with special effects. And if you buy the right box of chocolates, you do know what you’ll get. There’s a chart and everything.

Sleepless in Seattle

I like Hanks fine here, but this movie has the version of Meg Ryan that grates on my nerves*—the one where the director seems to have said, “Look how cute she is! Let’s exploit that in every possible way!” But the elaborate stalker story is creepy, and I can’t believe any man would be attracted to a woman who stands in the middle of a busy road, gaping at him like she’s had about 16 margaritas. At the end, when they’re peering soulfully at each other and walking away with the kid, I always think, “Won’t last six months.” They don’t know each other at all! And she’s crazy! The movie does have a lot of funny lines and some great supporting actors—David Hyde Pierce, Rosie O’Donnell, and the always wonderful Victor Garber. They’re just not enough to overcome the cringeworthy premise.

Braveheart

The trouble with this Scottish historical saga is that whenever I see it, I find myself comparing it to the other Scottish historical saga that came out the same year, the fantastic Rob Roy. That movie had Liam Neeson (always perfect in my book) and a much wider emotional range than Braveheart: good guys who make mistakes, an almost-too-intimate air of tragedy, and a couple of the best swordfights ever filmed. Braveheart also doesn’t bear up well against Gladiator, which came out five years later and basically tells the same story—a chaste hero’s family is killed by a bad guy, driving the hero to exact revenge on said bad guy—and Gladiator, of course, had Russell Crowe**. So when Braveheart comes on, I just find myself sitting there thinking about other movies I’d rather be watching. Some of them are even Mel Gibson movies; although he made a few that I didn’t like (all the Lethal Weapons and What Women Want), he’s been in three that I absolutely love: The Year of Living Dangerously, The Bounty, and Signs.

Pretty Woman

This is another one with a creepy premise that I can’t get past: Richard Gere buys Julia Roberts, and then the “happy ending” is that he buys her again (to snuggle up against for a few more weeks before he throws her back on the street, I cynically figure). Of course, it’s based on Pygmalion, so Roberts’ lady of the night has to be as chipper and undamaged as Eliza Doolittle (“Oy’m a good girl, oy am!”), which is beyond implausible. Her street-smart roomie—the formidable Laura San Giacomo—is much more convincing, and I always wish the movie were about her instead. There is one fun thing about Pretty Woman, though: It bears a strange resemblance to The Princess Diaries.*** Maybe it’s because Héctor Elizondo is in both of them, playing more or less the same guy, but Anne Hathaway starts to look like Julia Roberts if you squint your eyes and think “hooker” instead of “princess.”

* I am not a Meg Ryan basher, though I hope never, ever to have to watch When Harry Met Sally again. I like her fine in You’ve Got Mail, but her character is smarter and more cynical in that one than in Sleepless. And I like her a lot in Proof of Life. But that has Russell Crowe in it, and—well, that man is hot sex on toast.

** See * above. Sub-footnote: Other actors considered for the starring role in Gladiator were Hugh Jackman, Antonio Banderas, and…Mel Gibson.

*** My other favorite thing about Pretty Woman is that it’s used as a joke in a much better movie, Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion. (Lisa Kudrow, tearfully: “I just get really happy when they finally let her shop.”)

Moby-Dick Days

My love affair with Moby-Dick began in kindergarten. That sounds like the start of an awkward joke, but it’s true.

        My mother was a fan of “accelerated learning.” She felt that kids should start reading much earlier than the school system recommended in the 1960s, and I was her guinea pig. When I was three, she stuck flashcards all over the house, labeling every object—sofa, lamp, wall—and drilled me on them constantly. The next year, she hired a local woman to tutor me in reading the usual first books, Dick and Jane–type stuff. (I vaguely remember one called Nose Is Not Toes.) So by the time I started kindergarten, I could read pretty well. That put me way ahead of the other kids, since at our school they didn’t teach reading until the first grade.

The trophy book

Frankly, having an academic jump on everybody else made me into a little monster. I lorded my reading abilities over the other kindergartners, reading signs out loud and haughtily carrying books around. At recess, I’d sit reading whatever I could get my hands on—ham radio magazines, dinosaur books, lists of the kings of England; didn’t matter. In the school library, I walked past all the kids’ books and went right for the grown-up novels, checking out whatever was big and intimidating-looking. And the biggest, fattest book, weighing in at more than 500 pages, was Moby-Dick. All through kindergarten that book was my constant companion. I checked it out over and over, just to have the satisfaction of walking around with it under my arm.

        Trouble was, I never read it. I couldn’t read it, even with my accelerated-learning super powers, because that book was hard. I kept looking at the first page and could never make heads or tails of it. “Call me Ishmael”? Like, he won’t even tell us his real name? And what was up with the long sentences and turned-around, foreign-sounding language? It wasn’t like any other book I’d seen. I skimmed forward a few chapters, and they didn’t even go to sea for, like, 100 pages.

Call me bored

Fast-forward—gulp—almost 50 years, to a couple of months ago. I was sitting in a theater one night during a dress rehearsal. This is part of my job; I have to go to a lot of these rehearsals, and this one was taking forever, with very long intermissions and pauses to fix things. I’d brought my Kindle, loaded with literary journals and a few classic novels for just such emergencies. During an especially long wait, I turned it on and saw I had Moby-Dick on there. I had to laugh—I’d forgotten that I’d downloaded it months earlier as a joke with myself. I thought, what the hell, I’ve got all this time on my hands. Let’s see if I can get past that first page. Here we go again: “Call me Ishmael...”

        And you know, not only was I able to get past that first page, but I loved that book. I went home and read some more, and stayed up reading it every single night at bedtime for the next 50 nights.*

        I will say now, having finished that big book, that I’m glad I didn’t try to read it at a younger age. Even more glad that I wasn’t forced to slog through it for some class, though I often wished I had a fellow reader to talk things over with. Years ago, I think I would have been impatient with all the poetic language and the crazy-quilt mix of tones and styles. But now I was loving it so much that I started tweeting a line from it every day (@writersisland), a fun project that made me comb through it looking for snippets under 140 characters (a real challenge with Melville, who did go on).

        More than anything, I was surprised at how readable and entertaining it is. Like…well…a whale, it’s this big living, breathing creature, turning and glinting and diving for hours and breaching up, marvelous, where you least expect it. I can genuinely say I’ve never read anything else like it.

        Here are other things that surprised me:

Illustration for 1902 edition:
"Moby-Dick swam swiftly round
and round the wrecked crew." 

• It’s a ripping yarn.

As in, a page-turner, a potboiler, an action-adventure that actually left me gasping sometimes. Okay, not every page—it starts off slow—but once you’re on the ship and the hunt begins, it unfolds and unfolds with the dangerously obsessed captain and the very nice first mate who tries to talk some sense into him, and an extremely motley crew caught between them. Plus, sharks and squids and cruelty and peg legs and near drowning and actual drowning and wrecked boats.

• It’s an encyclopedic tour of the whaling industry, circa 1850.

Seriously, if you want to know how whales have been portrayed in classical literature, how blubber is boiled and what it’s used for afterward—even how the boilers themselves are made—or what the inside of a whale’s mouth looks like, what’s lurking in its gut, or how the sinews of its tail are constructed, it’s all in this book. In vivid, sometimes stomach-churning detail, told by an extremely entertaining tour guide.

• It’s like a zig-zagging conversation with your crazy uncle.

You know, the one who served in France in the army and tells you minutiae about the experience every time you see him. But every little thought leads him off on some digression—like, he’s telling you about this chef he met in Lyons, which gets him talking about escargot, which takes him to how snails are raised, which leads to the Fibonacci sequence, found in natural objects ranging from nautilus shells to pine cones to pineapples, but the nautilus part is disputed, which leads him to that trip he took to Vanuatu in 1964, where he went snorkeling and met that woman he left his wife for. And what was he talking about? Oh, France. That uncle.

• Style-wise, Melville threw in everything but the kitchen sink.

I sometimes found myself sitting there, reading this thing and thinking, “Did he even have an editor? Who would have agreed to all this?” We’ve got a chapter told entirely in internal monologue from the point of view of one of the mates, then another, and then we never hear from them again. And one chapter is all Ahab muttering to himself. Then your chatty tour guide is back for 20 chapters or so. This thing would get boiled alive in a college creative writing workshop.

• We never get to know Ishmael.

I love this device. Ishmael, who tells this story, is a fly on the wall the whole way. Somehow he’s privy to conversations he shouldn’t hear and other people’s thoughts that he couldn’t possibly know. We never figure out how much he’s making up, or where exactly on the ship he is, or what exactly his job is. It reminded me of another wonderful mysterious narrator, the one in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. In Midnight, the narrator is the author, John Berendt, telling this crazy true story of his friends and neighbors in Savannah. But he moves so deftly through the events that we barely see him. He’s there, but the book is not about him. Ishmael, similarly, always seems to be listening at the door. By the end you’ve heard this great tale, and then you’re like, Wait, come back—who are you?

• It made me laugh out loud.

Actual, explosive guffaws. Many of them. Melville would have made a great dinner guest; he’s wry and arch at the most unexpected times. He manages to lampoon the wealthy, the ignorant, and the gasbags that seem to come with every profession, all while making you slightly seasick with all the details about sails and cargo and blood and boilers. That is a fine line, and he walks it.

• It reads like freakin’ music.

Time and again, I had to stop and reread a sentence because it was so beautiful. I read entire chapters out loud, acting out all the parts as if I were making an audio book. The language is so theatrical that you can’t help rolling it around in your mouth. Again, this probably works better now that I’m older, since my head is now filled with a lot of Shakespeare, whose influence on Melville is unmistakable. But Melville infused the language with his own idiosyncrasies, which ended up sounding alternately like the Bard without line breaks and then like the Bible through some sort of warped looking glass. Dude could write.

"Boats Attacking Whales," 1839

• It’s sad in unintended ways.

For all this book’s beauty, you can’t read it from a 21st-century perspective and not feel queasy. Melville was a product of his time, and his descriptions of people of color are not kind—they’re savages, they’re ridiculous, they’re inscrutable. Even the harpooner Queequeg and Pip, the cabin boy—both crucial to the story—are childlike characters who never really develop into three-dimensional people. And to those who say Melville was some sort of early environmentalist, I don’t think so; he touches lyrically on the havoc man was wreaking on the natural world, but in the next turn he brushes it off. Even in his most soul-crushing scenes of man’s cruelty to whales, to dolphins, to anything that moved or might be regarded as food or fuel—there is endless stabbing and cutting and bleeding in this book—the men doing it are often painted in a heroic light. At one point Melville says there were too many whales to ever fish them out; they had places to hide (under the ice sheets, he said), and there would always be plenty of them. And true, the harpoon-and-rope whaling of Melville’s time, deadly as it was, had its limitations; he probably couldn’t have foreseen the destruction brought by 20th-century mechanized whaling, which nearly wiped out whales everywhere. I kept thinking that Melville’s bravado-tinged-with-melancholy felt like just the kind of thinking that’s hurtling us toward the end of the world. Whales had products that we wanted for convenience and industry; they were big business, so we killed them for it. Much like how wolves got in our way, so we killed them for it. Above the storytelling, above the feverish genius of Melville’s writing, there hangs this grand tragedy that humans were bringing down on themselves and everything around them—and which continues today.

Sperm whale. (Photo: Tim Cole, NOAA)

* I know this because the Kindle keeps track of what percentage of the book you’ve read, not page numbers, and I found that 2% was about all I could handle in one night. That’s only about 10 pages of the printed version, but if you’ve read it, well, you know—it’s dense. Like dog years.

Book Review: American Neolithic

American Neolithic

by Terence Hawkins

200 pages

C&R Press, 2014

I love a literary mashup, whether it’s Ben Winters’ end-of-days murder mysteries or Kirsten Bakis’ feverish mix of Frankenstein science and pop culture. So when I received a review copy* of Terence Hawkins’ new sci-fi legal thriller, American Neolithic, I tore into it with relish.

        Hawkins, a longtime attorney, puts a fresh spin on a classic genre, the hardboiled crime novel, by framing it in an alternate reality: In a United States governed by a fanatic religious regime, a small community of Neanderthals lives hidden in the shadowy margins of New York City. Aside from the Neanderthals—who, in our reality, died out 30,000 years ago—the idea isn’t that far-fetched. In Hawkins’ dystopian America, Homeland Security oversees law enforcement with brutal efficiency, government propaganda constantly stirs public panic and xenophobia, and—most germane to this story—the religious political machine has officially “debunked” evolution, dismantled scientific facilities, and made it illegal to espouse any theory but creationism. This sets up a complication larger than a few genetic misfits trying to quietly survive in the back alleys of humanity. In this world, living Neanderthals present a scientific conundrum that doesn’t fit the theological story the government is trying to tell, and this government has ways of erasing what it doesn’t like.

        Woven into this backdrop is a quirky crime story about a soft-spoken Neanderthal who becomes a sort of mascot to a hip-hop group, then gets entangled in a murder. There are legal machinations, A Guantanamo-style detention center, court dates and behind-the-scene wrangling among lawyers and judges, with rapid-fire dialog and just enough details for authenticity. The book’s pacing is brisk, and the cynical narration of the main protagonist, a hard-bitten defense attorney, alternates with chapters narrated by the more poetic Neanderthal, who traces the secret history of his people with a wry tenderness. The contrasting voices keep the tone lively, but each has its pitfalls—the lawyer is so disillusioned that his salty narration sometimes overpowers the story, and the Neanderthal’s passages turn syrupy at times.

        The lawyer’s bleak world view presents another thorny issue: In his eyes, the few women in the story are described mostly in terms of their bodies, and the African-American characters all seem to be drug-addled music moguls or bouncers. This character flaw in the main narrator could have made for some welcome nuance if it had been further developed; as it stands, the reader is left wondering what to make of these misogynistic and bigoted remarks tossed off without apology. But, that said, Terence Hawkins can write—he keeps a headlong high-wire act going all through the book, with pacing that never flags and a nightmarish world that’s frighteningly believable. And his inside knowledge of the legal system brings the lawyers’ behind-the-scenes wrangling and one-upmanship vividly to life. I look forward to seeing more books from Hawkins.

      

* The hardcopy of the book got lost in the mail so I ended up reading it on Kindle, which is fine—I like Kindle books. And then—funny story—a day or two after I wrote this review, the hardcopy arrived, the packaging mangled but the book unharmed. I only mention this because I then got to compare the physical copy with the Kindle one, and they are very different animals. The hardcopy is beautifully designed, printed on good-quality paper and elegantly formatted for effortless reading. But the Kindle version has a lot of formatting errors: no white space signaling section changes within a chapter, ambiguous chapter heads that make it hard to tell where one chapter ends and another begins, and lengthy newspaper excerpts in shoutycaps. To make matters worse, when I tried it on an iPad (via the Kindle app), the whole book was in boldface. (Amazon’s “Look Inside” feature for this book has the same problem.) I’m going to take the book’s publisher to task a little bit here because bad e-book formatting is so prevalent and has become such a pet peeve. I’ve converted books to e-book and Kindle, and I can tell you that the only difference between a sloppy one and a tidy one is a few hours of (admittedly tedious) work. The real time-sucker is testing it out on all the different devices (part of the proofing process when you enroll your book in the Kindle program) because each device uses a different fonts, spacing, chapter head styles, etc. It takes a lot of trial and error to figure out a format that looks good (or at least not bad) on all of them. There are lots of good resources online to learn how to do this, and you don’t need any special skills; it’s just work. I wish more publishers would put in the time to do it. Of course in a few years this technology will have changed again, and this will be one those quaint little topics that nobody talks about anymore.

House Hunters vs. Home-Buying Reality

The other day I woke up thinking about my mortgage, drowsily dreaming up ways to pay it off early (freelance jobs, MacArthur Genius Grant, selling my organs). Suddenly I had a woozy, out-of-body feeling: Whoa, I thought, I own a house. It’s been more than three years since I got the keys to my cozy little townhome, but some days it still hits me like that. I’ve never gotten used to the fact that I actually marched out into the world and bought a house.
        But the truth is, I didn’t just march out and do it. It took me years to screw up the courage—years and a lot of homework, including watching many, many episodes of House Hunters, the HGTV show where they track a homebuyer through the process of buying a house. Before I even started looking at houses, I watched that show every night for months, studying every phrase and nuance in each homebuyer’s quest. And even though some savvier part of my brain understood that it was just a TV show, for chrissake, I still felt that it would give me a better understanding of how things would go when I was out looking at houses for real.
        Of course it didn’t turn out that way. House Hunters did provide me with some inspiration and confidence, but most of the big, iconic scenes you see all the time on that show—those watershed moments of house-hunting mythology—never happened when I was shopping for a house.


1) The “tell me your dream” chat with your agent
On House Hunters: Before your house-hunt begins, you’ll sit down with your real estate agent over a cup of coffee and talk about everything you want in a house—stainless steel appliances, the extra bedroom, the man cave, the commute. Your agent will take notes on his laptop. You will both be well dressed.
In real life: Not only did I never have this conversation with my real estate agent, I never even met him in person until the day we started touring houses. Our first encounter was over the phone, a hurried and hushed conversation that we were both cramming into our busy days. (I had to sneak into a conference room at work to call him; he was on his cell phone in a noisy car.) He just asked what my budget was and what towns I wanted to look at, and within an hour he’d e-mailed me every listing in my range. It was up to me to pick the ones I wanted to tour. This was much more self-serve than I’d pictured, but he turned out to be one of the kindest, most easygoing people I’ve ever known—which was lucky since, little did we know, we would end up spending more than a year looking at houses together.


2) The three finalists
On House Hunters: After looking at a handful of houses, you will narrow the field down to three. You’ll weigh their strengths and weaknesses and eliminate your least favorite. Then you’ll use some emotional, alchemical formula (“it just feels like home” or “I love the pool and didn’t even know I wanted a pool”) to decide between the remaining two.
In real life: This one’s obviously cooked up for TV drama*. For me, there was no “narrowing down”; I had no timetable, no crazy gotta-move deadline, so I just looked at house after house after house for months on end, which proved to be both a blessing and a curse. I learned a ton about houses as I wandered through dozens of them, going “Nope,” “Not quite,” or “Eww**.” But saying no to so many houses—more than 40 of them—made me wonder, after a while, whether I was actually ready to be a homeowner. But just when I had that thought, I saw a house that was the right size, had a good yard, and had a price that didn’t scare me. The market was slow and no one else seemed interested in it, so I took my time and mulled it over (probably maddening for my agent). After a few days the idea still didn’t creep me out, so I put in an offer. So rather than “It just feels like home,” my alchemical formula seemed to be “It doesn’t make me puke with fear.”


3) The back-and-forth, the dickering, the stress
On House Hunters: You and the seller will battle through some fierce negotiations. You’ll ask them to cover the closing costs; they’ll be insulted by your offer. You’ll find dry rot; they’ll leave a dirty hibachi on the balcony. You’ll end up paying more than you wanted to, but the thrill of buying your dream house will make up for the stroke you almost had.
In real life: I paid list price because it was reasonable. I asked the seller to fix the dryer vent, and he did. The bank found our deal so boring that they let us close a week early.


4) The happy dance
On House Hunters: When the seller accepts your offer, the realtor will meet you at a restaurant, where he will give you the big news over a tall glass of iced tea. You’ll jump up and give him a high-five and say, “I bought a house!” Later, at the title company, you’ll sit at a shiny table and sign approximately 1,600 trillion papers. Then a well-dressed person will hand you the keys and you’ll blush with pride. You did it!
In real life: This was the part that really didn’t go as seen on TV. And I also had this vision in my mind, which didn’t happen either: I thought I’d sign all those papers, get the keys, and think, “I am now a homeowner! I can buy paint and a nail gun and do anything I want to that place!” I figured it would put me on a higher plane, that, somehow, it would make me a different person—bold, in control, grown up.
        But the reality went like this: During our many months of searching, my real estate agent and I had done so much business via e-mail that he’d lost my phone number. So when the seller accepted my offer, my agent e-mailed me with the good news (and an apology for not calling with it). I happened to be home from work that day, sitting alone at my computer. And I’ve got to say, when I saw that e-mail—that moment in House Hunters where they say, “The house was hers!”—I didn’t feel excited. Or anxious. Or anything, really. My brain could not process the information; I literally didn’t know what to think. And then, moments later, I got sucked into the riptide of all the tasks that had to be done—inspection, insurance, title company (which did have a shiny table, and where I did sign 1,600 trillion papers), flooring company, plumbers. It was a jam-packed three weeks of escrow, with little time for me to stop and think about whether I felt changed. By the end, I was exhausted, physically and emotionally. Completely drained. All I wanted to do was take a nap.
        The business with the keys proved to be one of the silliest moments of the adventure, and one of my favorites. I went to my real estate agent’s office for that ritual—the keys! The moment when the place is really mine! He and I sat down at his desk, and he pulled out a small manila envelope that the selling agent had dropped off for me. He opened the flap, upended the envelope, and a single key dropped out—dink—onto the desk. Surprised, he puffed the envelope open and shook it to see if there was anything else inside. There wasn’t. We burst out laughing. He shrugged and handed me the single, modest key, and we were done.
        That bold, in-control, grown-up feeling never came either. Instead, on those surreal mornings when I wake up and realize I bought a house, the feeling I have is more a sense of stewardship, of having a responsibility and privilege to take care of a house and piece of ground that require careful tending. There’s also a feeling that I made a sound financial decision, that I’m no longer bleeding out rent money to pay someone else’s mortgage. The thought of retirement still frightens me (that, folks, is another topic) but the housing situation now makes pretty good sense. And I guess I’m just the sort of person for whom “pretty good sense” is as close to the happy dance as I’m likely to get. And with any luck, it will last longer.




* Oh, the exposés of this show! According to some reports floating around the internet, House Hunters is “somewhat real” but back-engineered: The producers find a person who’s just made an offer on a home, and then recreate the house-hunting process using, if possible, some of the houses the buyer actually looked at. (That part is tricky, since the owners of the rejected houses don’t always want their bad remodels and plumbing problems aired in public.) And there’s talk that some of the episodes are less “real” than others.

** While looking at houses, I constantly thought of that Star Trek episode “Return to Tomorrow,” where Kirk and Spock and Diana Muldaur let aliens inhabit their bodies so they can build android bodies for the formless aliens to live in. Spock (as the alien Henoch) shows Diana Muldaur (as the alien Thalassa) the female body he’s building for her—this unclothed, clammy-looking dummy that probably smells like rubber, that she will be stuck inside for eternity.*** She’s horrified; she visibly shudders. That’s exactly how I felt, looking at all those damp ’80s carpets and crooked doors and kids’ bedrooms with a thin coat of paint that didn’t quite cover up the polka dots underneath. Diana Muldaur’s voice kept coming back to me: “I cannot live in that…thing!”

*** At which point he utters one of the creepiest Star Trek lines ever: “Once it’s occupied, I'll add female features and some texturing.”