I apologize.

For the longest time, it was just you and me in a room, and the stories too. Stories of good and evil, stories of Potter and Atreides, nutrients for my boyhood imagination. And then high school happened and I had to bump up the ante. It became embarrassing for some reason to admit that I read Gary Paulsen, so what was I to do except ask you to start reading me “the greats” like Catcher in the Rye and A Clockwork Orange, which I agreed were great but didn’t know why they were at the time, though—as you and I both know—I could bullshit a fierce intellectual conversation about nearly any book.

Then came the hard stuff. The “English major books” are what you’d call them, I suppose.  Do you remember how long we spent with Ulysses and Infinite Jest? Reading and analyzing and expanding my imagination with books from all over the timeline, which was just fantastic for my intellectual development but for my ego? Not so much.

You know what I’m talking about.

You don’t have to act as though it’s all water under the bridge before I’ve even uttered a word regarding the matter. I became a snob. I wouldn’t let you read me a book or take any of your suggestions unless said book had a certain amount of acclaim or was a “cult” book. And unfortunately a contemporary book having acclaim seems to mean that it’s more concerned with form than content or that it has to been written in such a way to satisfy the supposed cynic within every reader. We have novels and short stories where soulless protagonists do awful things to themselves and to everyone around them, and that’s it. There is no other conclusion to be reached, no insight to be gained except for someone to say that  these books, filled to the margins with the atrocities of mankind, serve as a reflection of the world we live in.

I used to buy into that philosophy, but you, my friend, knew that because it was one of those topics we discussed more than a few times and one that you, with your quiet, patient maturity, would never bother reprimanding me about because you knew that I would eventually form my own conclusions. And, in fact, I have come to my own conclusion, which isn’t to say I created it or anything, though. After all, David Foster Wallace and Raymond Carver have both said variants of what I’m about to say, which is that we don’t need mirrors to tell us how awful the world is.

I have windows and television screens, endless news streams that I can tap into. I repeat: I do not need a novel to tell me how awful the world is. This should not be the purpose of a novel. A novel should reflect its world, certainly, but it should not fall into the narcissistic trap of being obsessed with its own reflection. If a writer can capture the ambiance of an age, that’s great, but I want more. I want story. I want humanity in places where  humanity cannot, should not, exist, whether it be within the confines of a POW camp, a distant planet or dimension, or even  the gizmo filled living room of a modern house that bears unnerving similarity to our own.  Perhaps even a flickering flame of hope here and there wouldn’t hurt.

So I come to you now, my friend, truly sorry for how I’ve treated you over the past three years. And I was hoping that we could start again. Like the old days, except maybe we don’t have to read the old stories again. We can find a middle ground, I believe. There are certainly new stories waiting to be written, wouldn’t you say? Stories written by men and women who are not content with simply creating shallow and nihilistic portraits. People who are not afraid to use the old words and concepts, the ones that have always worked: love, hate, good, evil, despair, and soul.

There’s so much soul out there waiting to be put into story form.

So let us begin again, old friend. I will sit here quietly as you read, and you may read to me whatever you wish and not fear my criticism. If the pages drip with sentimentality, let them. If the tragedy is overwrought and the characters wooden, oh well.  Just please please please please please please please tell me a story and teach me how to be human again.

With love and respect,

A reader

Random book picture thrown into meet picture quota. Move along. Nothing to see here.

I am not the type of person who continues to push forward like some brave adventurer roaming the unknown. More accurately, I’d say that I’m the mortally wounded invalid who’s stupidly trying to climb Mount Everest.  The idea that someone does this writing thing for joy of it seems viable, but is largely bullshit as far as I’m concerned. I don’t ever actually get joy from own writing unless I hear about someone finding what I’ve written to be worthwhile, or I happen to read the final product quite some time later and enjoy it still. There’s rarely any point in the process where I think to myself that ‘hey, I’m having a good time.” The only exception to this are screenplays, which start as a delight to write but become more like actually work when you go back to try and spiff everything up.

Writing to me is like putting on deodorant. If I don’t do it, I feel off, strange, paranoid even. It’s been that way since about high school when I started considering myself as a “writer” in the sense that I wanted to do this for a living, and maybe become skilled enough –and lucky enough—to get paid for it. So, why do I continue to push myself to add thousands of words every week to steadily a growing narrative that may or may not turn out to be a waste of time?

I write out of spite.

My novel is an asshole. Even worse, he’s the type who goes about being an asshole by providing the criticism—both constructive and unnecessary—that I don’t want to hear but listen to anyway. My novel says that I’m too young and stupid to write a book, that my language is inadequate, my stories insipid, and that I should just stop wasting both our times. And to think that he say all this to me by merely showing me what I’ve already written.

Depending on my mood, I may agree with him and shut off the machine in a fit of rage and self-doubt, or I may keep writing. He’s not right about everything, after all.  I shouldn’t have to modernize the phrase “rosy-fingered dawn” just for the sake of being hip and edgy; it’s always worked for everyone else and, in my eyes, is still as good today as it was yesterday or three hundred years ago, for that matter.  I also shouldn’t have to tailor my writing to an audience. It should be more than readable: it should be fantastic in its own way. But I don’t think I need to tweak each sentence or subplot to appeal to teenyboppers or a publisher’s intended demographic.

Of course, I don’t mean to imply that my novel and I are warriors in some arena, ready to fight to the death over a debatable comma splice or high-brow literary allusion. Instead, I’d like to think that we’re just two quasi-gentlemen, sitting in a room, sipping mugs of coffee, and having conversation.  More often than not it’s a heated conversation complete with glares and profanity, but it’s not as bad as it used to be. Don’t misunderstand me: I don’t ever think we could be friends in any sense, my novel and I. But I think that eventually, once we’ve found some common ground or shouted ourselves hoarse, we might start working toward some common ideal. Not world peace or anything, but instead, maybe just crafting a piece of work that will be worth fourteen bucks to a stranger someday.

Javy Gwaltney whenever he sits down to write.

Zomboid is about learning what the phrase "insurmountable odds" really means.

You slam the door behind you and lock it. Outside, you can hear them moaning, the shuffling of their feet upon the unkempt lawn. You back away from front door and hear your wife’s panicked voice from upstairs call, “Honey?”  There is a burning in your lower stomach and you touch the sticky wound. You feel a profound nausea but manage not to vomit.  A window shatters as one of the undead begins to climb through the window. As soon as his rotten foot touches the carpeted floor of the living room, you blow the top half of him back outside with a blast from your shotgun. No matter.  Another one begins to climb through the window. You hear glass shattering in the kitchen as your wife screams, “Bill!? What’s going on?” You load the gun with your last two shells and aim down the line.  You fire and take two of them down, but your throat goes dry. There’s a crowd of them surrounding the house. More come through the window.

 Three of them approach. Their stench overtakes you. You lose whatever strength you have in your body as you fall to your knees. The last thing you hear before they descend upon you is the shrieking of your wife.

Such a scene isn’t uncommon in Project Zomboid, a video game project being developed by independent developers Indie Stone. One of the main attractions of Zomboid is its uncompromising bleakness.  Let’s be clear about something: you will die. You will die horribly. In many ways—whether it’s from having your head chomped on or from having it blown off your neck by another survivor’s shogun.  And when you die, it’s not simply a matter of quick loading your last save. You have to start the game over again. Yes, from the very beginning.

This might seem to be a little archaic and annoying—as I thought it was the first time it happened to me—but it’s actually a genius mechanic. This is, after all, the end of days. Zomboid is a nearly perfect apocalyptic simulator. If you make a mistake, such as forgetting to close the door to the house you’re scavenging only to come back and find the horde waiting for you on the front lawn, you will pay for it. And not only will you pay for it, but you wife will as well.

The wife is one of the more intriguing aspects of the game and it works well. The setup for the free demo of Zomboid, and for Story Mode in purchasable version, is that you are a married man with a noticeable bald spot taking care of a bedbound wife during a zombie rising.  Zomboid isn’t the first game to utilize the “survivor must care for loved one” plot device as a major component of Dead Rising was just that. However, the issue with Dead Rising was that the feature simply didn’t work. Capcom gave their gamers one of the more intriguing sandbox worlds to explore, but then punished them when they wanted to deviate from storyline of the game by exploring it. Zomboid doesn’t make that mistake. If you hate your wife, then fuggedabouther.  You’re living in the days of the apocalypse—there are no laws. Be an evil bastard. Go explore the neighborhood. Let her rot in bed. Or care for her. It’s your choice. And that’s ultimately what Zomboid is about: choices.

"I don't care if there are frigging zombies at the supermarket. Don't forget the damn bread this time."

Not just choices in terms of the generic morality options seen in games such as Fable, Fallout, and Infamous but actual choices that count.  Should you risk running across the street in daylight to scavenge the house for some fruit or painkillers? What about navigating the (mostly) abandoned stores in town for a weapon or two? Should you use that weapon’s precious ammo to pick off zombies for your delight or should you conserve it for when you’ll truly need it? Even seemingly minute choices can impact your game. An example: I was cooking soup for my wife and forgot to turn off the stove. Guess who showed up as uninvited dinner guests when my safe house caught on fire?

Zombies aren’t the only things you have to worry about in Zomboid. I actually escaped the aforementioned soup fire (my wife wasn’t so lucky), running past hordes of zombies and into the rain. I was in the downpour for quite some time, looking for a place to hide. After finding a cozy little apartment next to the general goods store, I went to sleep (rather quickly for someone whose bad cooking killed their spouse now that I think about it) and woke up to discover that I had a cold. Of course, I didn’t think that was a big deal. A light cough here and there…and then that light cough became a heavy cough—a cough that every zombie in the neighborhood could apparently hear. I was cornered in a diner by 20 of them; I had only a hammer. Less than ten seconds later, the game’s scrolling text informed me that I had survived 4 days and 10 hours. What else could I do but restart the game and try to beat my record?
Zomboid does have some bugs, but that’s fine: it’s an alpha and it’s an alpha that’s more fun than most polished games released by giants such as EA or Activision.  IndieStone has copied Minecraft’s business model by releasing an early version of the game at a cheaper price ($7.99 at this point in time). Customers who buy the game now will receive all updates and new versions of the game for free. Later on, customers who buy an updated, more complete game will be charged a higher price. I was hesitant about buying the game since, as one of my friends so aptly put it, “Seems boring and like The Sims.” But two playthroughs with the demo quickly changed my mind. The Sims never had zombies trying to eat rip out your entrails while you were searching a stranger’s house for painkillers.

The bottom line is that Project Zomboid shows a good deal of potential. It could very well be the next Minecraft. If you’re the type of person who wants a more realistic and legitimately frightening experience than the one offered by Left 4 Dead, then Project Zomboid is for you.  

How long will you last?

Download the demo

Buy it now at a discounted price

When I watched the trailer for 44 Inch Chest and saw the starring talent  (Ray Winestone, Ian McShane, John Hurt, and Tom Wilkinson to name a few) I was sold. I was fortunate enough to find a used copy of it at Blockbusters for 5 dollars and bought it without a second thought. As soon as I got to my little apartment, I microwaved some pasta, opened a soda, popped the DVD into the player, and sat down to watch a British gangster film. Sadly, what I ended up watching was a soggy imitation of a David Mamet play with cockney accents thrown in for giggles.

The story is straightforward: Colin (Ray Winestone) has just had a bomb dropped on him by his wife—she’s leaving him for someone she’s been having an affair with. Colin’s friends, who are all seedy London underbelly types, kidnap his wife’s lover and try to convince Colin to kill him. That’s it—that’s the whole film in a nutshell.

44 Inch Chest isn’t a bad movie, but it isn’t a good movie either; everything, from the limited set locations (there are a grand total of 4 or 5, I believe, and 3 of those are only on the screen for a very limited amount of time) to the performance of the actors strongly suggests that this should have been a play. And I’m all for experimental and artsy films, but I do think I’m in the right when the advertising for the film seems to be promising the viewer a revenge thriller that may or may not have some intriguing philosophical questions that are discussed through the plot and through the interactions with the character, and gives them something completely different (the trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZuMNJVImHe4). The same kind of tactic was used when Universal Pictures advertised Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas as a kind of stoner comedy which, while still being inaccurate, was at least within the same ball park as the movie since Fear and Loathing is kind of a comedy.

44 Inch Chest has very few thrills outside of the first five minutes; there’s very little movement  which makes this hour and a half movie seem more like a two and a half hour flick. I felt every minute passing by as I watched 44 Inch Chest, and I could have forgiven that if the dialogue or character development was up to snuff.

The great cast here is ultimately wasted. Ray Whinstone, who is supposed to be the center of the movie, spends half of it in a comatose-like state, emerging every so often to bemoan his station or to curse a lot. The supporting cast is the one untainted positive quality about the movie: McShane, Hurt, and Wilkinson are magnificent with the parts they had been given, but those parts are underdeveloped, sacrificed for Colin’s quest to retain his lost manhood. We’re given bits and pieces of these characters’ lives (Wilkinson’s character doesn’t have time for a woman because he’s caring for his ailing mother, McShane is a gay playboy who seems to have it all, etc.) but they never go anywhere. As for the dialogue, well, it’s like I said, Mamet profanity with cockney (with John Hurt providing most of it), which is entertaining for the first half hour.

If 44 Inch Chest was released as theatrical production, I would go see it because I think it could be a pretty great play. However, this movie tries desperately to  be the new Glengarry Glen Ross and doesn’t come close.

Hunter S. Thompson

Okay, okay, it actually isn’t Hunter S. Thompson himself (but you probably already knew that since he’s dead). In fact, this guy probably looks more like Johnny Depp than he does the actual HST, which probably has to do with the fact that I’ve watched Terry Gilliam’s 1998 film adaptation of Thompson’s Fear and Loathing so many times that I wore the first disc out and recently had to replace it. I’ve also read the book either 5 or 6 times not because it has magnificent, poetic prose; an intriguing, multi-layered plot; or even engaging character development (Dr.Gonzo and Raoul Duke are after all little more than caricatures).

So, why oh why do I come back to this book—and this grumpy storyteller—again and again?

You swine!  Hunter snarls.  Are we going to go through this again or not?

Attitude. The one thing that Thompson did really well was present his larger-than-life, rebellious attitude, and win the reader over with it. From the get-go I’ve always imagined Thompson as a man who transforms into a grand storyteller with the assistance of liquor and cigarettes, a guy who spins hilariously disturbing tales about paranoia, corruption, and the fall of modern civilization.

We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold, Hunter starts. I remember saying something like “I feel a lightheaded; maybe you should drive…”  And suddenly there was a terrible all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and driving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas. And a voice was screaming: “Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals!”

Within the first paragraph of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Thompson (besides skillfully presenting the set-up while simultaneously bombarding the reader with the first of many humorous hallucinogenic visions) has established his voice—wacky paranoia intertwined with a take-no-bullshit temperament. And that voice is precisely the quality that keeps bringing me back to this small devilishly delightful masterpiece.

I have only come to this revelation concerning the importance of the author’s voice recently. Thompson’s book, which gets away with having flat characters and an almost nonexistent plot, does so because of his unique voice. Not only does the book get away with it; it becomes a classic that can be read over and over. Of course, Thompson isn’t the only one to develop a highly memorable and unique voice as the following passage from a book written by a different writer demonstrates:

“Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies — “God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.”

Who could forget lovable, kindly irreverent and sage-like Kurt Vonnegut? Vonnegut’s voice is as different from HST’s in almost every way imaginable; the only quality that each writer shares is their mutual terseness, though Vonnegut tends to be even shorter than Thompson. When one reads SlaughterHouse-Five, Breakfast of Champions, or Bluebeard he or she cannot but help hear the grandfatherly voice of Vonnegut coming through as he unpretentiously tells a story with the intent to help you realize that, yes, the world is  a fucked up place, but that shouldn’t be reason enough to discard your humanity.  Vonnegut is another writer who has written several books that I’ve read multiple times.

So, the big question: does a writer need a great voice to write a great book? Well, in this literature enthusiast’s humble opinion, no. A couple of years ago I read a little work—you might have heard of it—entitled Anna Karenina.  AK is one of my fondest and painful literary experiences—ranking alongside Ulysses, Gravity’s Rainbow, and Infinite Jest.  It is a novel of unspeakable beauty and a piece of art. However, I would never ever pick it up again unless I was assigned to read it in a class simply because Tolstoy’s weakness was his voice (blasphemy!). He was a legendary writer who had the ability to mix philosophy with storytelling, and unmatchable descriptive prose, but his voice…eh.  But he wasn’t the only one: This also applies to the other classic Russian writers such as Chekov, Dostoyevsky—their voices were as dry as the vodka they were drinking. In fact, the only classic Russian novelist that comes to mind that had an interesting voice—though he lacked the scope and character-writing skills of Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy—is Mikhail Bulgakov. Of course, there are other non-Russian classics that have uninteresting voices as well: Hard Times, Nausea, The Scarlett Letter, and so on.

Does the lack of a unique, interesting voice make a book bad? Hell no. However, it means that as a reader I am less likely to return to that particular book more than once. I will probably read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,  Slaughterhouse-Five, Post Office (Bukowski) What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (Carver), and  The Crying of Lot 49(Pynchon) several times before I’m through with them completely. Crime and Punishment, The Broom of the System, and Midnight’s Children? Probably not, but that doesn’t make them any less special in my mind. I just think that a unique voice allows the actual storyteller to seem personal to the reader as though the story was designed just for he or she, which is egotistical but I still get a kick out of it.

Woody Allen is no stranger to this category.  Annie Hall, Manhattan, and Hannah and Her Sisters can be seen as bittersweet love letters to New York, the director’s birthplace.  His newest feature, Midnight in Paris, is a love letter to the city of lights. More accurately, it is both a love letter to contemporary Paris and the Paris of the 1920s. Luckily, Allen—whose films over the past two decades have largely been misfires—manages to make his vision of Paris seem fresh and interesting despite all the trips the audience will have made to it in literature and recent films such as Paris, I Love You.

Midnight in Paris is, like any Woody Allen picture, funny but it isn’t the gut-busting kind as he doesn’t rely on physical humor or satire of political affairs. But that’s okay because he doesn’t want to do that; he wants to tickle your brain instead.  With Midnight in Paris, in a move that will either annoy audiences or win them over, Allen both dares and trusts his audience with his special brand of witty jokes. He trusts us to have some knowledge of Paris in the 1920s, to know exactly who the hell F.Scott Fitzgerald and Hemingway were, and I applaud him for that.  Sadly, it also explains why no American studios were involved with financing the flick. I mean, let’s be honest here, if Allen had to get Fox or Paramount to finance this movie, a movie about a disenchanted writer traveling back to 1920s Paris, we would have had a CGI DeLorean  flying around the Eiffel Tower.

Speaking of Fitzgerald and Hemmingway, the performances in this movie are top-notch and subtly funny.  Owen Wilson is above-average as the protagonist of the movie, Gil Pender, an efficient screenwriter struggling to write his novel and clearly showing signs of cold feet before his marriage to Inez, played by Rachel McAdams whose utter bitchiness is almost enough to make us like Pender despite his habit of bemoaning his station. Fans of Woody Allen’s previous films will either take delight in or dislike Wilson’s attempt to utilize Allen’s own anxious personal habits: rubbing his own arms constantly, eyes downcast, speedy nervous way of talking—it’s all there in Wilson’s performance, for better or for worse.    Alison Pill (Zelda Fitzgerald), Tom Hiddleston (F.Scott Fitzgerald), and Kathy Bates (Gertrude Stein) all shine, but Corey Stoll as Ernest Hemmingway steals the show.  Stoll’s caricature is one of the funniest roles I’ve seen in a long time, and yes, he is everything you would expect Hemmingway to be: concise, manly, drunk, and deadpan…but mostly manly.  Adrien Brody also pulls off a hysterically wacky Salvador Dali—or perhaps that’s just the mustache doing all the work.

To whether or not Allen’s representation of 1920s Paris is accurate, I know not. I can say, however, that I bought it: all of it. I believed the Movable Feast was on the theater screen in all its glory and that’s good enough for me. The deceptively simple set designs (be sure to take EVERYTHING in) coupled with more than adequate performances was enough to engross me, so that I never once questioned the historical validity of the movie.

To say this entry in Allen’s long list of films that he has written and directed is a return to form would be inaccurate. His earlier films, such as Annie Hall and Love and Death, are completely different animals—I firmly believe that they are incomparable.  However, I believe that this is the best of his later period films, films more concerned with traditional storytelling than his amusing philosophical and sexual musings. I hope that Midnight in Paris receives the accolades it deserves, and that its release marks the end of an immensely talented director’s dry spell.

Fast-forward to nearly a week ago. Super 8 –after much hype— has been released to theaters everywhere and has garnered critical praise. A friend of mine urges me to stop being a curmudgeon and go see the movie, says that he can get me in to see it for free.   Why not? I decide. The worst that can happen is that I’ll have felt like I wasted my two hours.

I can safely say that that’s far from the case for Super 8, which is pretty impressive considering everything that was stacked against the movie in my mind.  As I sat down in the theater, and the trailers were rolling, I kept thinking to myself man, this movie is either going to suck or be decent at best. That’s when I realized that I needed to shut up and stop thinking about Cloverfield, and not level judgment against a movie I haven’t even seen.

Then the movie began and it played all the way through to the end, and I was left with feeling I haven’t felt within a theater in ages: I wanted more…in a good way. There are movies that need to have more scenes in them either for plot explanation or character development (Green Lantern), but not this movie.  Super 8 is a complete piece by itself with the perfect amount of suspense, horror, humor, and action.  And the best part is that the movie forces us to care about these characters—characters that simultaneously could have been ripped straight out of Stand by Me, and yet are their own.

Joe Lamb (played by Joel Courtney) is the star of the show, a boy dealing with the death of his mother alongside the growing pains of puberty. Courtney is more than sufficient in the role: he shines.  For the majority of the movie, he is the focus of the camera, and he carries every scene he’s in with a talent that makes us believe in Joe’s pain and earnestness.  Of course, there’s more than just the ability of the star to admire in the movie’s acting department.

Riley Griffiths, Ryan Lee, Gabriel Basso,  Zach Mills, and the soft-spoken yet fierce Elle Fanning round out the rest of the teenage characters.   Riley Griffiths’ performance as Charles is nearly as remarkable as Courtney because he is able to play Joe’s foil with ostensible ease.  Joe is small, shy, a tad anxious, talented, and kind. Charles, on the other hand, is brash, rude, loud, and expects to get what he wants whenever he wants though his ambition and wit is almost guaranteed to keep audiences from disliking him more than the intended. As for Fanning’s performance, I need only say that she has at least as much talent as her sister, and perhaps a little more.

The performances of the adults in Super 8  are not as spectacular as the children’s or even as the special effects, but that’s understandable and completely justifiable for two reasons.  The first of which is that they simply do not have as much screen time as the as the main characters; the second is that it makes sense within the context of Super 8. None of the adult characters are meant to be anything other than one-dimensional: the police officer father concerned with his son’s safety and the safety of the town, the evil military colonel, the alcoholic bum father, the pothead. The world of Super 8 is the world of children, who often see adults as one dimensional characters.

The acting in the movie is really the quality that carries it. The story isn’t anything spectacularly new, but it’s still fantastic and  the actors are able to use it just as well as Abrams and cinematographer Larry Fong are able to shoot it—and boy do they shoot it.  I honestly hope that the opening shot of Super 8 goes down as one of the best ever as it so simply and effectively sets the tone for the movie and establishes the side story. As far as Super 8’s special effects go—they’re super enough. There isn’t anything new we haven’t seen, but the train crash scene is spectacular enough as well as some scenes that I won’t discuss so I don’t spoil the movie for anyone.

Some reviewers have referred to Abram’s movie as being  a tribute to old Spielberg movies (The Goonies, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T.), and I think to a certain extent that’s correct, but I don’t like that the term “tribute”   since it seems to suggest that Super 8 is somehow inferior to these films because it isn’t.  This is not merely tribute; Abrams takes that genre and makes it his own.  The fun humor of The Goonies and the thrills of Close Encounters may be here, but there’s also something else—the film’s message, its heart. The message is universal and beautifully, earnestly conveyed:  bad things happen but life is bearable.

                Super 8 is simply a superb movie any way you cut it. I actually felt guilty that I was getting to see it for free, but I’m sure I’ll be heading back to the theater to see it again soon in order to give Abrams and his crew their due.

Go See It

Gomorrah is based on Italian journalist Robert Savino’s nonfiction novel Gomorrah, which deals with the Camorra crime syndicate. Following the release of the book, Savino has since gone into hiding. I picked up the Criterion edition of Gomorrah because I had heard a great deal about it over the past year. Critics such as A.O. Scott and Josh Rosenblatt absolutely adored the movie; several blurbs around the internet had professional critics saying that the film was one of the best mobster movies in years, a post-modern mafia movie meant to attack the romanticism of violence and the mob in The Godfather and Scarface.

However, to say that the film’s main purpose is to launch an assault on that romanticism is to do the movie an injustice.  Realism is indeed one of Gomorrah’s aims, but its main purpose is to tell a story about desperate people living in a deadly world while raising social awareness about the Camorra situation. I can confidently say that the movie manages to achieve all three goals impressively.

There isn’t one story in the film, but five separate ones with their own respective protagonist. Toto is a young adolescent who is slowly being drawn into the lower levels of the Camorra syndicate because of his desire for social acceptance. Pasquale is a Camorra tailor who dangerously moonlights as a fabric worker for a Chinese group that the Camorra are competing against. A fresh college graduate named Roberto is drawn into plot by his boss Franco, a Camorra member, to buy up cheap land from desperate landowners so that the syndicate can make more money by offering  to  dump companies’ toxic waste cheaply. Don Ciro is a Camorra accountant who is drawn into a war that breaks out between two warring sections within the family. Finally, there is the story of Marco and Circo, two very stupid and ambitious young men who try to start their own independent operation while quoting Scarface.

By all accounts, Gomorrah should have been a terrible movie. The plot summary sounds like a hodgepodge of short stories cooked up by group of high-schooler buddies who have just watched a marathon of Martin Scorsese’s best. However, Garrone’s direction, the fact that these stories never cross in an Robert Altman-esque way, and the performances of the actors make this movie rise above the junkyard of mafia flicks.

The movie is shot like a documentary with a slightly shaky camera, but only when it needs to be; there are no nausea inducing Bourne sequences here. However, there’s also a rawness about it that makes that documentary feel of the movie more than just a gimmick, making it transcend the gangland specials on TruTV.  An example of this can be seen in one of the most memorable sequences in the film: the manhood test. In this particular scene, Toto and the other teenage Camorra initiates stand in a dark urban setting–a dark opening is in front of them.  We aren’t really sure where they’re at, but imagine if the bowels of hell were an urban underpass, and you’ve got the right idea.  A gunshot is heard and the line of initiates winces in fear; a moment later one of their kind emerges from the darkness that lay before them with a huge grin on his face. Next kid goes, gunshot, and so on and so forth until it’s Toto’s turn. He enters the dark area and has a crude bulletproof vest that’s way too big for him shoved down onto his tiny body by an average-joe looking kind of guy with a handgun. He insults Toto, fires a round into the body vest, and congratulates the kid on becoming a man. SMASH CUT to Toto standing in his bathroom where he takes off his shirt and touches the bruise that the bullet’s impact left; he traces it with his finger and then looks into the mirror—meaning he looks at us. Chilling.

There are very few cuts outside of the necessary scene transitions between stories—transitions which are handled deftly. We are given bits of each of story and just as we’re getting really involved into the individual story, it switches over to another character’s story in a way that is frustrating but not frustrating enough for us to complain or turn the movie off.

Gomorrah isn’t perfect, though.  Thirty minutes could have been trimmed off the movie easily because Ciro and Pasquale’s story are practically the same. There’s also the slow pacing that may cause some viewers to fall asleep. That being said, many art-house films have slow-pacing just for the sake of slow-pacing, just because the director wanted it like that (Tarkovsky and Fassbinder come to mind). In Gomorrah, the slow pace is used in order to demonstrate just how tedious it is being part of the crime syndicate. It isn’t all opera, cannolis, and sleeping with fishes, folks; but when things get ugly they get really ugly. Death is fast, unexpected, and brutal in the world of Gomorrah. The ending of the movie is particularly unsettling in this regard, and memorable to boot.

Contrary to what some critics have said, Gomorrah isn’t better than The Godfather.  Francis Ford Copola and his crew wanted to tell an grand, sweeping story while using the mafia as a microcosm for America. Compare The Godfather with Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America or Citizen Kane, but not with this movie.  Gomorrah has more in common with The Battle of Algiers and The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum than it does these sprawling epics.

If you want a blood soaked mobster flick, you’re better off watching Scarface or Goodfellas. However, if you want to watch a movie that brings something innovative to a dead genre, then Gomorrah is more than worth your time and money.

Final Verdict:

4.5/5

Rarely have I ever been so disappointed with a book considered a classic. It’s more than just an issue of thinking this book is overrated; this novel is almost a bad book, not quite, but it’s almost there. The story of TSoP, if you haven’t read it, can be summed up rather easily.  Egotistic Princeton student Amory Blaine tries to climb the social ladder at the university and attempts to court someone almost as vain as himself—both efforts net only failure. He goes to fight in World War I, has another failed romance with a woman I’m assuming is a caricature of Zelda Fitzgerald, and so on and so forth.

Despite my dislike for the book, I still got something out of it–it gives me hope. Fitzgerald’s main problem with his first novel is one shared by most novice writers including myself—he’s too personal.  There are universal themes here certainly: greed, love, egotism, disillusionment, facades, faith. But it’s a messy novel that just glazes over most of them. It is a work that is trying too hard to be A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man early twentieth century American style. However, I must admit that there are places where Fitzgerald’s prose really does shine, places where we see glimmers of Gatsby, such as when Amory reflects on the disillusionment of his generation in the aftermath of the war:

“There was no God in his heart, he knew; his ideas were still in riot; there was ever the pain of memory; the regret for his lost youth — yet the waters of disillusion had left a deposit on his soul, responsibility and a love of life, the faint stirring of old ambitions and unrealized dreams.”

It’s still a passage that’s still somewhat anchored to Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus, but it is has a style that’s breaking away from Joyce, a sign that Fitzgerald is developing a literary voice–his own voice.

As a historical piece used to examine Fitzgerald’s progress as a writer, it’s more than worth a read, but as a novel—not so much. It is true that I could be being unfair to F. Scott. Perhaps I’m comparing his first novel too much to Gatsby even though I mentally told myself that I wouldn’t (If a complaint is to be made on this point though it seems more accurate to say that I’m comparing it too much to Joyce’s work). Maybe the work simply hasn’t aged well, and I’m failing to put  myself in the necessary mindset to enjoy it.

Whatever the reasons hopefully I will enjoy Tender is the Night more when I read it more than I enjoyed this piece.

We favor the expression of the soul only if it is boxed within intricate labyrinths, buried beneath layers of subtlety and levels of allusion. To say what one means up front is shameful and unacceptable.

Be warned: I run the risk of being unacceptable.

For the last four years,  Winthrop University has served as the crux of my universe. It has played an integral part in crafting my personality. I can say with great confidence that I have received the finest education from this university. The education I speak of is, of course, not the education received in classrooms or study sessions. I’m speaking of the Henry Adams’s brand of education: the education of experience, the education that will never satiate you but will keep you busy until you take that last breath.

That education began for me four years ago shortly after I moved my belongings into my dorm room.  I don’t think I will ever believe that anything is more bittersweet than the passing of time. My former self, the young man lying in the bed of his dorm room, unsure about what to do with his life, vexes my present self. His laziness and naïve romanticism aggravates me, but his innocence , his kindness, and patience I can’t help but admire and miss dearly.

And things he saw! What I wouldn’t do to relieve some of them, what I would do to forget some of them. He watched as the norm was finally broken and a black man was elected president, he watched as the newest building on his campus, the technological pride of the university, burned slowly. He watched as each class ahead of him graduated and left the confines of the camps to emerge into that cliché, “The real world,” as though they were trading one reality for another, becoming nothing more than shades and memories.

He watches and waited with excitement and dread for his turn to come, and now it has—within a month I will graduate.  That is to that I, my present self, and the former self that I have haphazardly discarded will become a shade as well. I suppose this is normal; you must give up parts of yourself to form relationships and pursue ambitions, to be educated.

I wonder…I wonder who will take my place: my physical space. Who will sleep in my bed? Who will sit out on the Bancroft green and read where I once read (more importantly, what will they read?)? And, for that matter, whose space did I take up? Who did I replace? What did they see? What parts of their experience can I not fathom?

I suppose in the large view none of these things are truly important. What is significant are not our difference, but instead the similarities that we have throughout the ages; that every Winthropian has left footprints in the same patches of grass, has heard Tillman’s bell, has been in pursuit of an education that will forever elude us but, for those among us who are hunters, will color our lives with passion and purpose.

This is an observation that can be applied to an even larger scale—the universe that exists beyond the campus. The failures and triumphs for every generation are made of the same stuff. They are made of dreams of love, nightmares of anguish, of things that exist in and out of time. It is merely context that separates us all.

I will not skirt around the issue: these are bleak days. I will not make the contention that the Winthrop experience prepares, or has ever prepared, anyone for the “real world.” I will say that I believe it has given us a fighting chance, and that’s the most you can ask for.

I began by mentioning sentimentality and will close on that same subject. It is our ability to express that allows us to cross those lines of context that separate us, by allowing us to bypass the particulars and speak in a nearly universal language, a language comprised of tears, smiles, and heartfelt declarations.

So, I hope that the next time you see someone crying, you inquire about their sadness. That the next time someone says something to you like “A penny saved is a penny earned” or “love conquers all,” you will reflect on it before you dismiss them. Most importantly, I hope that when you want to say something like “Please stop making that irritating noise,” or “I love you” that you will not hide beneath bunkers of irony or behind passive aggressive wit. That you will you say what is you have say. If we don’t, our cleverness may prove to be our undoing.

Finally, while my voice is still somewhat relevant allow me to say to the Winthropians of the past, of the present, and of the future: I love you all.

Cheers and happy graduation!

Javy

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