The Shelf Monkey branches out to criticize more of the pop culture arts

I thought I should take a moment to digress from my prepared remarks (something about the 'death of books' or something, I can't read my writing. Probably not important.) to let you know of a fairly new venture I've recently been participating in.

I've been following the movie review site Flick Attack—its motto: hitting you with one random movie a day . . . whether you like it or not—since it debuted a number of months ago. Its creator, Rod Lott, was one of my first boosters when his site Bookgasm gave Shelf Monkey a sterling review, and we've remained in contact ever since, through the usual social medias that serve to distract us from the horrors of everyday life. 

Flick Attack is decidedly irreverent, with short, snappy reviews of any movie Rod and his cadre of reviewers happen to see, spanning the gamut from blockbuster hits to obscure D-movies, from Rambo to The Black Belly of the Tarantula to The Incredible Hulk Returns. It's a great site to discover true cinematic surprises and re-evaluations of past hits and flops.

Speaking of flops, I chose as my debut to tackle the Tobe Hooper weirdfest Lifeforce, one of my personal favourites, as it's practically five movies in one (which saves me all kinds of time.) 

Here's a taste:

Cannon Films clearly didn’t know what it had signed on for. Lifeforce flopped, with reviews generally negative or worse (although Gene Siskel liked it). But aided through hindsight and extended editions, Lifeforce is a geek classic. Certainly no one involved phoned it in; Hooper’s direction (never better) captures the style and dry wit of the classic Hammer Quatermass films (well worth checking out), the score by Henry Mancini (!) is appropriately quirky and bombastic, and John Dykstra’s (Star Wars) special effects are superb — the desiccated zombie design is wonderful, and the alien spacecraft is a thing of beauty. No CGI here, just craft and skill.

Click here to check out the rest of the review, and I'll be updating the site with further reviews when they're online. Next up: the superb British werewolf movie Dog Soldiers!

Tiny Monkey droppings - The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt

The Sisters Brothers (Anansi, 2011)

by Patrick deWitt

Description (from the publisher)

Hermann Kermit Warm is going to die. Eli and Charlie Sisters can be counted on for that. Though Eli has never shared his brother's penchant for whiskey and killing, he's never known anything else. On the road to Warm's gold-mining claim outside San Francisco—and from the back of his long-suffering one-eyed horse—Eli struggles to make sense of his life without abandoning the job he's sworn to do.

DeWitt spins a violent, lustful, hung-over and humorous odyssey through the underworld of the 1850s frontier. Doffing his hat to the classic Western, he then transforms it into a comic tour-de-force with an unforgettable narrative voice that captures all the absurdity, melancholy, and grit of the West -- and of these two brothers, bound to each other by blood and scars and love.

Film rights have been sold to actor John C. Reilly's production company in a major deal, with Reilly to play one of the brothers.

What the Tiny Monkey thinks 

If I hadn't recently read Charles Portis' classic western True Grit, I would have claimed The Sisters Brothers to have a glorious style and cadence utterly unique to me. I can see that deWitt has perhaps co-opted the overall style of another (an arguable point, as his first novel Ablutions [a terrific read as well] has much of the same voice), but who cares when the result is this much fun? Very likely my favourite read of 2011, deWitt has created a profane, violent, funny, and just plain awesome piece of work, and the fact that this novel—written by a Canadian who has long made the U.S. his home, and with nary a mention of Canada anywhere—is up for major Canadian awards tickles me. deWitt's dialogue is superb, laden with dry wit, and the characters of Eli and Charlie are wonderfully done, the perfect mixture of psychotic killers and melancholy dreamers. Some have complained that deWitt's style is too 'cinematic' to be considered literature (who ever complained of a movie being too literate?); I say, it's not the story, it's how you tell it, and deWitt tells his story superbly in a style that completely suits the story. I wish more novels were this bloody alive: dialogue as rich, subtle, and memorable as this is hardly any easier than obtuse poetic descriptions of windswept Canada prairies (I'm being snarky, I know, sue me). The cinematic possibilities are present, of course—the Coen brothers desperately need to get their hands on this; keep John C. Reilly as Eli, add Philip Seymour Hoffman as Charlie—but merely because a movie can be envisioned is no excuse for needless denigration. The Sisters Brothers is a major achievement, as gutsy and vital and just damned entertaining a novel as you could hope for.

TINY MONKEY ADORES 

Book Covers: After Dark! (a short film)

In a little slice of heaven, acclaimed (deservedly) director Spike Jones, along with director Simon Cahn, has taken over 3,000 pieces of felt and put together a wonderful animated hypothesis as to what happens on book covers when the lights go out.

Bittersweet, gorgeous, and a little bit naughty, Mourir Auprès de Toi ("To Die By Your Side") tickles this shelf monkey in all the best places.


Spike Jonze: Mourir Auprès de Toi on Nowness.com.

My thanks to the good folks at io9.com for the heads-up.

Monkey droppings - Damned by Chuck Palahniuk

Today, the monkey holds his breath as he steels his nerve for another annual onslaught of Palahniukian proportions.

Will Chuck return to form? Or will he continue his sad descent towards irrelevancy?

The monkey, being a cautious optimist, refuses to bet either way.

Damned (Doubleday Canada, 2011)

by Chuck Palahniuk

Are you there, Satan? It’s me, Madison. I’m just now arrived here, in Hell, but it’s not my fault except for maybe dying from an overdose of marijuana. Maybe I’m in Hell because I’m fat--a Real Porker. If you can go to Hell for having low self-esteem, that’s why I’m here. I wish I could lie and tell you I’m bone-thin with blond hair and big ta-tas. But, trust me, I’m fat for a really good reason.

So begins Damned, Chuck Palahniuk's newest foray into obscenity-laden satire. As a fan of Chuck's works, I once looked forward to each new novel with a tingling sensation in my nethers. Chuck was a carnival barker extraordinaire, an energetic guide to a literary freak show of humanity's worst traits. It wasn't for everyone, but when Chuck was on fire (see: Fight Club, Choke, Lullaby, Rant), there were few who could compare.

Then came Snuff, a divisive work about a porn star striving to break the record for most conjugal partners in one day. Many hated it; I found much to admire, although there was the sense of Chuck spinning his wheels a little. After Lullaby travelled into magical realism, Diary showed a growth to other genres (reminding me much of Rosemary's Baby), and Rant displayed a razor-sharp style akin to J.G. Ballard, Snuff seemed a step back.

And then came Pygmy, a limp terrorist satire that vastly outstayed it's welcome and became the first Palahniuk novel to ever become outright boring.

And then came Tell-All, about which the less said, the better (but if you are inclined, here's a link to my review, and another link discussing his publisher's dishonest promotional techniques concerning said review).

But being the cautious optimist that I am, Damned looked like fun. Described as a Judy Blume novel set in Hell, it promised an unusual experience, and (hopefully) a return to Chuck's glory days.

Annnnnnnnd . . . meh.

Damned is the tale of young Maddie Spencer, the thirteen-year-old daughter of a movie star and a real estate tycoon who crosses the threshold of life during an ill-advised exploration of drug use. Maddie, through her wicked ways, has been condemned to Hell (as, it turns out, will most of us):

As it turns out, the way-fundamentalist Christian creationists were correct. How I wish I could tell my parents: Everybody in Kansas was right. Yes, the inbred snake-handlers and holy rollers had more on the ball than my secular humanist, billionaire mom and dad. The dark forces of evil really did plant those dinosaur bones and fake fossil records to mislead mankind. Evolution was hokum, and we fell for it hook, line, and sinker.

Maddie spends her days in a cage, keeping her spirits up through hasty friendships with nearby cellmates, a Breakfast Club sandwich of a jock, a nerd, a prom queen, a punk, and herself (which makes her the Ally Sheedy of the group, I guess). The group sits in gore-encrusted cells, waiting to be devoured by passing demons, which isn't as final an end as it sounds:

If anything, life in Hell is like a vintage Warner Bros. cartoon where characters are forever getting decapitated by guillotines and dismembered by dynamite explosions, then being completely restored in time for the next assault. It's a system not without both it's comfort and it's monotony.

Damned is not without it's charms, one of which, unfortunately, is not Maddie Spencer, as annoying a protagonist as you could imagine. Part of this is because of Palahniuk's by-now-familiar style of meta; Maddie is forever reminding the reader that she is not an idiot, that she understands certain words, that she is smart. "Yes, I know the word absentia," she pouts. "I'm thirteen years old, not stupid - and being dead, ye gods, do I comprehend the idea of absentia." After a short time, these asides speed past precocious/cute and run headlong into precocious/put her outside already. Maddie never becomes a believable character, and her voice often grates with the worst tendencies of Palahniuk.

After a time in Hell, during which our heroine escapes and trudges past the Sea of Insects, the Great Plains of Broken Glass, the Ocean of Wasted Sperm, and the Swamp of Partial-birth Abortions, Maddie finds herself a job in one of the two major areas of Hellish employment; telemarketing (the other area is Internet porn). Maddie finds that she has a knack for it, and soon her organizational skills come to the fore, and it turns out that Hell may be exactly the terrain where Maddie can finally shine.

As I said, Damned is not without charm, if one can affix the descriptor 'charm' to anything Palahniuk writes. He has plainly done some research into literary depictions of the abode of the damned, and his eternal plane of misery is a vividly-described wasteland of torment. Palahniuk has not, it seems, lost his knack for shock, evident in a gruesome scene wherein Maddie uses the severed head of the punk to sexually gratify a particularly nasty demon. And when Damned starts to ultimately become an afterlife bildungsroman, the novel finally begins to catch the reader's attention.

But there's a laziness afoot. Comments that The English Patient and The Piano are the only movies that play in Hell smacks of an exhaustion of imagination. Ditto the concept of telemarketers as damned souls reaching out to make human contact, an idea not nearly as clever as Palahniuk thinks. The plot never decides what, exactly, it is satirizing, and there isn't enough energy to propel the plot over its massive rough spots. Damned is hardly as lazy a product as Tell-All, but it doesn't have enough sustained imagination to lift it past, say, Snuff.

Damned is hardly the worst thing ever, not nearly even the worst thing Palahniuk has written. There are sparks of effort, and near the end, when the narrative gains some momentum, the story begins to actually involve the reader beyond a superficial appreciation of Palahniuk's wilting wit. Damned could be seen as notice that Chuck is not yet spent, that there are reservoirs he has not yet tapped. But the man is treading water when he should be swimming.

VERDICT: THE MONKEY TRIED. LORD, HOW HE DID TRY. BUT HE'S GOING TO GO RE-READ LULLABY FOR A PICK-ME-UP.