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Guaranteed: many spoilers
Flight (2012), directed by Robert Zemeckis, is fatally muddled. It is two movies smushed together. The first is an exemplary aviation thriller where a genius pilot saves a plane-load of people by flying the broken plane upside down, then gliding it into a field. The second, longer and duller movie is a lecture on binge alcoholism, already so familiar from "Days of Wine and Roses", "Clean and Sober", "When a Man Loves a Woman", etc. But, because Hollywood can't even do that well, the movie--deploying charismatic stars like Denzel Washington as the pilot and John Goodman as his best friend--makes binge drinking rather attractive and funny. Its squarely in the old Hollywood line of the magnetic gangster--think Jimmy Cagney--who gets shot down at the end. A bizarre, funny scene in which Goodman shows up with cocaine to help Washington overcome inebriation so he can testify before the NFSB is a full-blown Hunter Thompson tribute--Goodman is channeling Dr. Gonzo as the wild-eyed, funy sidekick-facilitator-purveyor. When the movie ends with Washington in prison, soberly lecturing a prisoner's AA meeting, the whole thing has settled down to a really dull and trite lecture: "Don't do what we show you; do what we say."
Telegraph Avenue (2012) by Michael Chabon, disappointed me a little. There are novelists who should stay well away from home and the present. Science fiction writers such as Patricia Anthony, who create wonderful bizarre puzzle-boxes, lose much of their interest when they start writing realistic novels, can even sound lonely and whiny. I find that I want Chabon to write about golems, Sherlock Holmes, medieval swordsmen, Jews in Alaska. Instead, this is a story about a black community in California-- all lively and interesting, but some of the characterizations and dialog sound very much like a white guy writing black people. Its a complicated question, worthy of an essay in the Spectacle, whether at this late date a white guy should ever write a black dude wearing loud purple pants or talking jive.
Joseph Anton (2012) by Salman Rushdie presented a problem I expected to have when I started it: I don't like him very much, and wind up feeling guilty about it because of the ordeal he endured. In this autobiographical account of the fatwa and his years in hiding, he indignantly describes his own vilification at the hands of some quite famous and progressive-thinking people who should have known better (John LeCarre for one). It clearly was inappropriate to hold Rushdie responsible for twisting the tiger's tail--what happened to him wasn't foreseeable, as well as being brutal, primitive and immoral, and there is nothing in "Satanic Verses" which indicates any desire to achieve maximal shock effect, as opposed to working through private philosophical issues in the way most novels do. But a lesson I learned when I was researching Auschwitz is that not all who suffer are saints. Rushdie succumbs to many of the vanities and inanities of celebrity autobiography, last observed when I read the Patti Smith bio: constant name dropping (when I finally met Madonna.... Gabriel Garcia Marquez told me..... Thomas Pynchon and I....Gorbachev...Tony Blair.... President Clinton.....) and worse, betrayals (naming a well known woman he had a one night stand with, publishing a personal letter of apology from Harold Pinter). Worse, the man has been married four times, twice to women who sound rather noble, faithful, self effacing, loving and supportive, on whom he cheated with his next wives, who were flighty, vain and chaotic. In the end, the book, perhaps unwittingly, works best as a description of the process by which an artistic personality is made monstrous by money and media attention.
God is Not Great (2007), by Christopher Hitchens, contains a large number of familiar arguments for the arrogance, brutality and general poisonousness of organized religion, usefully pulled together and presented in Hitchen's engaging, funny style. The book forced me to confront the fact that in my life and The Spectacle I have frequently given various religious hierarchies a pass, endorsing the occasional compassion and tolerance they display, while turning a bit of a blind eye to the bigotry and interference with science and health. I read the book partly in reaction to a conversation at Thanksgiving in which a guest told us there is no archaeologic or historic record whatever of the story of Exodus: either of Jewish slavery in Egypt or a migration across the desert. (A proposition Hitchens mentions in passing.) The last two years, my wife and I have conducted a rather secular version of the Passover service in our home, a last concession in my life to a religion which for me is largely a cultural identity and not a fountain of belief. Another guest pointed out that despite the trappings of freedom and tolerance which have come to be entwined with the holiday, it is named after an episode in which a violent and vengeful God is said to have slain Egyptian babies while "passing over" the Jewish ones. The Catholic Church, which I still associate largely with warmth and sympathetic ritual (midnight mass with an Episcopalian girlfriend at St. Martin in the Fields, London) is now, as of recent years, largely identified as a haven for child molestors. I resolved to be more outspoken here about the largely dangerous role still played today by power hierarchies using religion as an excuse and cover.
I reread the Lord of The Rings trilogy, which I do about every ten years. More than before, I understood it as a sad chant about entropy--a theme which sang to me, but which I couldn't fully understand, when I first read it almost fifty years ago. All of the races and people in the story know that they were formerly greater than they are today: men were nobler and lived longer, elves knew and celebrated higher things, dwarves delved deeper and created greater treasures. They have fewer resources to oppose entropy--Sauron--and if they succeed, will be lesser still. Galadriel declines the chalenge of possessing the ring, and says;"I will diminish and go into the West." Its a gorgeous book, like watching the setting sun, knowing that the number of times it will rise again has decremented by one, that all things wear out, tire, pass away.