Dan Mancini

 This weekend, I grabbed a budget paperback of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird and began reading. I’m righting a wrong, filling an omission. Despite the fact that I have a post-graduate degree in English literature, I’ve never read Lee’s novel. It’s the sort of classic that one usually reads in high school (though it’s truly better appreciated as an adult), but somehow it never showed up on any of my class syllibi. And for a couple decades it simply fell through the cracks. I’ve seen the movie more times than I can count (it would hold an unshakeable place on my list of Top 10 Movies of All Time, if I had such a list, which I do not). But seeing the movie is no replacement for reading the book, and so now, finally, I am reading the book.

Atticus Finch: The Baddest Man in the Whole Damn Town

This exercise (which is really less an exercise than an act of pleasure) got me thinking about other gaps in my adventures as a reader. So I’ve decided to declare 2010 the Year of Filling the Gaps (20th Century American Edition). For the remainder of the year, I plan to plow through American literary classics of the 20th century (mostly novels) that I’ve somehow, inexplicably, never gotten around to before.
 
The list, in no particular order:

On the Road by Jack Kerouac
I have to admit I’m not much of a fan of the Beat Generation. Generally speaking, they come across like the whiny, snot-nosed younger siblings of the far more interesting Lost Generation. Still, I’ve read Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, so I really have no excuse for not finishing out the trifecta of Beat classics with Kerouac’s seminal work. I should’ve read it when I was a teen, when it would have seemed more vibrant and relevant, but it’s too late now.

It tolls for thee, punk!

For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
This is the only of Hemingway’s major works that I’ve never read. Don’t ask me why. I couldn’t tell you. It may have something to do with the fact that I enjoy Hemingway’s short stories more than his novels (though The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms are brilliant long-form works). I have a tattered copy of The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway that I’ve read through multiple times, but I’ve never tackled For Whom the Bell Tolls. I mean to rectify that.

East of Eden by John Steinbeck
This novel is to Steinbeck what For Whom the Bell Tolls is to Hemingway: the one major entry in the author’s oeuvre that I’ve neglected. I’ve read The Grapes of Wrath, Of Mice and Men, Cannery Row, Travels with Charley, and The Pearl. Heck, I’ve even read The Red Pony, Tortilla Flat, The Winter of Our Discontent, and many of Steinbeck’s other minor works. But I’ve never worked my way through East of Eden.

The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett
I’ve seen the movie countless times and have heard great things about the novel, but I’ve never been huge on detective fiction. That said, I can’t imagine that a couple hundred pages with Sam Spade could be anything but a blast.

The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer
I’ve read a ton of American literature. I’ve read a ton of World War II history. Somehow, though, I’ve never gotten around to Mailer’s classic war novel. Shame on me.

Nice lid, Slappy.

Tobacco Road by Erskine Caldwell
I love pre-war writers from the American South (you’ll notice there isn’t any Faulkner on this list; that’s because there isn’t a single of his major works I haven’t read). Their prose tends to be lush, their view of the world complex, and their stories melancholy, haunting, and sometimes gothic. What’s not to love?

A Good Man Is Hard to Find by Flannery O’Connor
My interaction with O’Connor’s work is woefully spotty considering my professed appreciation for Southern writers. Her ruminations on the nature of religious faith in a messed up world place her squarely in my literary wheelhouse as well. This collection of stories (a few of which I have actually read) should begin to set things right.

Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
My knowledge of African-American literature doesn’t extend much beyond Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, and The Autobiography of Malcolm X. I may have read a short story or two by Baldwin, but that’s it.

In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
Like Mailer’s, Capote’s talent was swamped and capsized by his love of fame and all of its trappings. In Cold Blood is a book that I’ve been meaning to read for years, but always found something else to sit down with instead. Not this year.

800% better than that crappy Rush tune

The U.S.A Trilogy by John Dos Passos
I’ve plowed through most of the great sprawling, experimental novels of the 20th century — Joyce’s Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake, Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, Wallace’s Infinite Jest, Delillo’s Underworld, and even Dow Mossman’s lost treasure, The Stones of Summer — but I’ve never read Dos Passos’ rich and complex trilogy, which consists of The 42nd Parallel, 1919, and The Big Money (not “Dixie,” “All My Trials,” and “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” which make up Elvis Presley’s ”An American Trilogy”…in case you were confused).

Anyway, that list is just the tip of the iceberg. I’m sure I’ll think of more stuff as the year progresses, which will result in this little experiment extending into 2011 and possible beyond. Fun awaits.

What great books have you neglected?

Easter is my favorite holiday, the only one that really matters. Christmas is a pleasant distraction from everyday life, a time to enjoy family and friends, and, yes, celebrate Christ’s birth. But it’s non-essential. Easter, on the other hand, is the real deal. The three days spanning Good Friday to Easter Sunday are the most important in the Christian calendar — the only truly important days, in fact. As author John Irving puts it in his novel, A Prayer for Owen Meany:

“Anyone can be sentimental about the Nativity; any fool can feel like a Christian at Christmas. But Easter is the main event; if you don’t believe in the resurrection, you’re not a believer. “

Which is just a pithy and mildly sarcastic way of reiterating what the apostle Paul wrote in his first letter to the Corinthians:

But if there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain. (1 Cor 15:13-14)

Christianity isn’t a religion built on ideas or practical self-help style information designed to improve your finances, or marriage, or relationship with your kids. It’s not a mechanism whereby God becomes a cosmic ATM, doling out material and spiritual rewards based on your proper application of religious knowledge. Christianity’s foundation is an event: the resurrection of Christ. Either it happened or it didn’t. The earliest founders of the church were quick to admit that, if the resurrection didn’t happen, Christianity itself is a waste of time.

There’s something refreshingly simple, straight-forward, and honest about that. Which is why Easter is so awesome: It’s the day on which all of the noxious trappings of organized religion — denominational infighting, prosperity gospel reductionism, right- or left-wing political hoo-ha, rigid orthodoxy — are silenced in the presence of Christianity’s true message: God’s radical, grace-filled love for humanity as expressed through the death and resurrection of Jesus.

Simple. Powerful. Essential.

And so, for me, Easter is a time for prayer, fasting, and contemplation. It’s the real deal.

That’s it.

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Today is the 100th anniversary of the birth of the great Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa. If the fraternity of top-tier directors can be subdivided, then Kurosawa would occupy the top tier of the top tier. In a career spanning four decades and 30 films, he made at least three unqualified masterpieces (Ikiru, Seven Samurai, and Ran), as well as a string of 10 to 12 movies that would be career-defining if made by a lesser talent. His 1950 film, Rashomon, not only won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, it almost single-handedly introduced Japanese film to the rest of the world, and inspired the sociological term “The Rashomon effect,” which describes subjectivity’s effect on perception and memory.

Kurosawa was part of a unique generation of Japanese artists who became adults before the outset of World War II, but didn’t reach their artistic prime until after the war was over. Having lived through major political and socio-economic upheaval, this generation lost its identity and had to forge a new one out of two diametrically opposed forces: the shattered remnants of Imperial Japan, and the cultural and economic values of the American GIs who occupied Japan after its surrender. Kurosawa settled on a brand of humanism that lived in the tension between individual autonomy and collectivist unity. His characters — be they 16th century samurai or 20th century bureaucrats — struggle to define themselves both as unique individuals and as members of larger groups (whether family, clan, corporation, government agency, or nation).

The beauty of Kurosawa’s films is that they explore universal human experience through the lens of mid-20th century Japanese psychology. Though culturally specific, they offer easy appeal to non-Japanese. In fact, Kurosawa is arguably the most thoroughly entertaining of the major auteurs. He had no qualms about making genre pieces that fulfilled the dictates of their genres’ conventions. Though period pieces, his samurai movies have insightful things to say about the postwar Japanese experience, but they also offer the sort of well-staged action, breezy comedy, and intense drama that make the genre so entertaining. Movies like Yojimbo and Sanjuro are every bit as fun and energizing as Steven Spielberg’s genre work throughout the 1980s.

Kurosawa’s directorial career unfolded in three phases. The first began in 1943 with his promotion by Toho Studios from the position of assistant director, where he had carefully studied every technical and artistic aspect of filmmaking from writing screenplays, to editing film and sound, to building sets. His early films are mostly contemporary, often have a literary bent (his favorite writers were Shakespeare and Dostoevsky), and give little hint of the action-packed period pieces to come. His output was hit-or-miss during this period, but its highlights include Drunken Angel (1948) and Stray Dog (1949), two movies set in the Japanese demimonde of the American occupation.

Kurosawa’s most productive and artistically vibrant period began with the domestic and international success of Rashomon in 1950, and ended with the 1965 release of Red Beard, a 19th century medical drama that is one of his most beloved films in Japan — it is perhaps even more popular than Seven Samurai. It is during this middle, mature phase of his career that Kurosawa delivered one great film after another, alternating between contemporary dramas like Ikiru and period pieces like Seven Samurai. He produced loose but powerful adaptations of William Shakespeare (Throne of Blood and The Bad Sleep Well) and Maxim Gorky (The Lower Depths). He improved upon Ed McBain’s pulp crime novel King’s Ransom with a structurally inventive and philosophically probing policier called High and Low. He reinvented the Japanese action movie with The Hidden Fortress, Yojimbo, and Sanjuro. He changed the face of cinema both in Japan and around the world.

Toshiro Mifune

Part of his success during this period can be attributed to his creatively intense partnership with Toshiro Mifune (1920-1997). Still Japan’s most iconic actor, Mifune was like a cross between John Wayne and Marlon Brando — a dynamic screen presence with great range and an efficient, idiosyncratic style. He brought energy, personality, and life to Kurosawa’s screenplays. He was a dominating force in nearly every scene he occupied. The late phase of Kurosawa’s career was initiated by his falling out with Mifune. No one knows exactly what transpired to split the duo apart (neither would talk about it), but their final film together, 1965’s Red Beard, sent them both into career doldrums. Mifune, on the far side of middle age, began taking any role, good or bad, that would pay for his mortgages and alimony, while Kurosawa struggled to get the cash-strapped Japanese studios to give him the budgets he needed for the projects he wanted to pursue. The financial pressures and his either quitting or being fired from (depending on whose story you believe) the director’s chair of the Japanese half of the Pearl Harbor epic Tora! Tora! Tora! led to a suicide attempt in the early ’70s.

When Kurosawa emerged from this existential funk, his movies were more somber and pessimistic, yet also frequently mawkish and sentimental. Dodesukaden (1970), Dersu Uzala (1975), Dreams (1990), and Madadayo (1993) are all lesser films in the director’s oeuvre. But in the 1980s, he also made two samurai epics that are startlingly good, staging his bleak outlook on life on vast battlefields. Kagemusha (1980) is a mixed success, a comedy trying (mostly unsuccessfully) to escape Kurosawa’s pessimism. Still, it probes at fascinating questions about identity and cultural entropy. His late period masterpiece is Ran (1985). A loose and violent adaptation of Shakespeare’s King Lear, its tale of an old, fallen warlord is one that only an old man could tell. Yet very few men of Kurosawa’s age (he was 75 at the time) would be physically capable of managing such a massive production. Like Seven Samurai before it, Ran is both epic and deeply personal. It’s nearly perfect.

The Hidden Fortress (the dopes on the right inspired R2D2 and C3P0; the guy in the center is a prototype for Obi-Wan Kenobi)

From an American point of view, Kurosawa stands out among great international filmmakers because of how often we retell his tales — The Magnificent Seven, A Fistful of Dollars, Last Man Standing and even A Bug’s Life are remakes of his work. But it is his influence over filmmakers of the New Hollywood movement — directors like Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, Martin Scorsese, and Steven Spielberg — that has had a lasting affect on American movies. George Lucas was so gobsmacked by Kurosawa’s work that he borrowed liberally from the director’s light actioner The Hidden Fortress when outling Star Wars. Coppola is fond of calling Kurosawa the “father of screen violence.” That may sound like a dubious title, but Coppola means it in the best possible sense. Kurosawa was one of the first directors who presented violence bluntly but with no hint of sensationalism. In his stories, combat has real emotional weight and consequences. Death is no small matter in Kurosawa’s oeuvre — even the death of an antagonist. It always has a cost — often paid by the psyche of the character doing the killing. The influence of Kurosawa’s humanism and technically precise use of violence on movies like Coppola’s The Godfather and Scorsese’s Goodfellas is incalculable.

The Climax of Sanjuro: Bloody Powerful

Modern American cinema wouldn’t be modern America cinema without Kurosawa — at least when it comes to the good stuff. For that, we owe him. On the occasion of the 100th anniversary of his birth, let’s raise a glass to Akira Kurosawa, the best damn filmmaker the world has ever known.

If you want to know more about Kurosawa, my reviews of some of his films are available at DVD Verdict:

• Stray Dog
• Ikiru
• Seven Samurai
• The Lower Depths (co-written with Bill Gibron)
• The Bad Sleep Well
• Yojimbo & Sanjuro
• Kagemusha (co-written with Adam Arseneau, Erick Harper, and Joel Pearce)
• Ran

Maddie’s fond of Luke. Just a bit. The pictures speak for themselves:

(Shot with the iPhone 3GS.)

The other day, I received this letter from the Census Bureau:

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It’s not the fact that the letter is written at about a second grade reading level that I find mildly insulting. That’s understandable. If you’re going to write a letter to the entire country, you sort of have to keep it simple.

What’s insulting is that the powers that be think they can only motivate me to do my civic duty by appealing to my base self-interest in the form of lame promises of my “fair share” of Federal largesse.

Thanks for the vote of confidence, guys!

Also, the letter would be far cooler if the salutation read “Dear Citizen.” It would lend the entire 2010 census an evil, dystopian air. Laurence Fishburne might show up unannounced at my door, tell me that all of reality is a computer program, and offer me the choice between a red pill and a blue pill. In which case, this would actually be the coolest census letter ever — at least until the moment when I realize that the last refuge of humanity is an underground rave attended by 10,000 insufferable hipsters, most of them with rancid dreadlocks. Then it would go back to being what it is right now: the lamest census letter ever.

Oh, well. I’ve got some paperwork to fill out. Gotta get my fair share.

It’s time once again for Hollywood’s annual night of masturbatory exhibitionism, The Academy Awards. I never watch the ceremony. Ever. I don’t care who wears what (I’m a dude), how good or bad the host was, or whether Bruce Vilanch managed to write even a single funny one-liner (the ceremony is a few hours away and I can confidently assert that he didn’t).

It’s difficult to take seriously any awards handed out by an Academy that believes:

• Kramer vs. Kramer was better than Apocalypse Now
• Ordinary People was better than Raging Bull
• Raiders of the Lost Ark didn’t hold a candle to Chariots of Fire
• Goodfellas wasn’t nearly as genius a piece of filmmaking as Dances With Wolves
• Forrest Gump was more awesome than Pulp Fiction
• The English Patient, Titanic, and Shakespeare in Love a) were good movies, and b) were better than Fargo, L.A. Confidential, and The Thin Red Line, respectively
• Crash — also known as the most expensive ABC Afterschool Special ever made — was the best movie made in 2005 (I mean, I could’ve dug through my home movies and come up with a better picture for that year).

Also:

I think I’ve made my point.

That’s only going back 30 years. Nearly every year since its inception, the Oscars has been a trainwreck of bad taste and lowest common denominatorism — and that’s not even counting the Debbie Allen dance numbers (Zing! Vilanch wrote that one for me). This year will be no exception, I guarantee. Let’s look at but one example: In 2009, the Academy had two movies featuring blue-skinned people (what are the chances?) that they could have nominated for Best Picture and they somehow managed to select the wrong one.

Zack Snyder’s Watchmen is an imperfect but ballsy and fascinating adaptation of a source (Alan Moore’s graphic novel of the same name) that many people believed was impossible to translate to the silver screen. It was ignored by the Academy because, well, the idea of recognizing a movie in which a left-wing douchebag in a latex suit and domino mask attempts to build a utopia on the corpses of hundreds of millions of innocent murder victims would send the wrong message (audiences might get the crazy idea that killing people is more morally repugnant than killing trees). Also, the movie didn’t come with Cliff’s Notes, so most Academy members probably couldn’t figure out what the hell it was about anyway. The official slogan of Oscar pandering is: Keep it (painfully) simple, stupid. There’s nothing much simple about Watchmen.

Luckily, Avatar was there to fill the “movies about blue-skinned people” void. And what better picture at which to hurl accolades than the best Michael Bay movie that James Cameron has ever made? It’s 45 minutes too long, stupid as hell, loud, full of explosions, vaguely racist, and features a villain slightly less nuanced than Snidely Whiplash. Somebody give it a gold statue!

It would be fitting if Avatar won Best Picture because the fact that I got duped into sitting through a small eternity of Stephen Lang enjoying a cup of Sanka while napalming blue cat people in 3D is the Academy’s fault in the first place. Once upon a time, James Cameron made awesome movies like Terminator 2 and Aliens. They were taut, vicious, eminently quotable, and so full of testosterone-fueled action that I actually grew a beard while watching them (and I was only a teenager at the time). Then the Academy awarded Cameron Best Picture and Best Director statues for Titanic, a 36-hour-long romantic drama filled with lame dialogue, Irish clog dancing, and the most annoying Celine Dion song ever (and, yes, I’m aware that picking the most annoying Celine Dion song is akin to picking the most evil concentration camp: it can be done, but it requires splitting hairs so finely that the exercise is pretty much pointless). Because of Titanic’s success, Cameron strictly adhered to its formula when making Avatar: simplistic moralizing, one dimensional characters, two hours of nothing happening as pretentiously as possible, and enough technical wizardry to fool dudes into thinking they’re watching an action movie and not something so chick flicky that it’s unfathomable that Meg Ryan didn’t get above-title billing.

So, the long and short of it is that as long as the Academy continues to reward Cameron for making terrible movies just because they earn more than the gross domestic product of most small countries (not to mention denying Scorsese an award until he finally buckled under and agreed to make a flick starring Marky Mark), there will be no Oscars ceremony for me. The entire farce is meaningless and best ignored.

And, in closing, The Hurt Locker better win Best Picture, and Kathryn Bigelow Best Director or I’ll be terribly disappointed.

What?

The following infographic is a projection of the final medal count for the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics had Team Canada consisted solely of actor William Shatner, Canadian extraordinaire.

I know what you’re probably thinking:

But, Dan, Shatner is a man. He couldn’t win the women’s events. It’s impossible!

They also said it was impossible to beat the Kobayashi Maru. And then Shatner showed it who’s boss (hint: Shatner is boss; very much so).

But even a man as manly as William Shatner can’t single-handedly win team sports like the four-man bobsled or ice hockey.

I repeat: Kobayashi Maru. Also: T.J. Hooker. Never underestimate The Shat. Ever.

I rest my case.

While gathering information to write a process for degaussing a hard drive this week, I was leafing through an old corporate job aid and came upon what may be the most awesome warning I’ve ever seen published in a technical document:

It offers a treasure trove of enjoyment for the hipster-technical writer-ironist: the all-caps; the dual exclamation points; the comet tail of asterisks; the use of the word “horseplay” (which, trust me, never appears in technical documents); the comma splice. It’s a cornucopia of bad taste and even worse grammar.

But don’t let the authorial incompetence obscure the warning’s poetically concise declaration of the frailties of the human condition. Let’s face facts: The minute you name something “Degaussing Wand” there will be horseplay. No warning will prevent it, which lends this particular warning a kind of sisyphean pluck. If, as Keats claimed, beauty is truth, and truth beauty, then this warning is gorgeous despite its typographical shouting and asterisk abuse.

Peace out, knuckleheads.

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