Sep

21

A Saga

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Yesterday I finally got finished with what has been a good month or more of reading.  The book, The Forsyte Saga, is actually three novels with two interludes by John Galsworthy, a Nobel-winning author who was quite popular in the early 20th century.  I’d never heard of Galsworthy or his books and only stumbled upon them because I’d been watching Band of Brothers, which stars Damien Lewis, who was on my favorite cancelled show, Life.  I was wondering what else he’d done and found a BBC adaptation of The Forsyte Saga and figured I’d read the book first.  The big fat book and I have been spending lots of time together every night before bed.  I gave myself credit for 3 books on my book list, because one just wouldn’t be fair.  (Actually, this little trilogy is the first in a trilogy of trilogies.  Seriously.  The guy wrote one set of three novels, then another set of three novels, and then a final set of three novels, all of which go together in a giant set of three sagas.  I think I’m good with just the one, and the library doesn’t have the next one anyway.)

I’m a big fan of turn-of-the-century Brit Lit, so it’s not surprising I enjoyed the novel.  It follows the rather massive Forsyte family (don’t look at the family tree at the beginning!!  It has spoilers!!!) who weren’t much to speak of 75 years before, but have worked their way up into society.  They’re as high as you can get without having an aristocratic background and they manage to represent that particular class quite well.  Galsworthy is obsessed with their “sense of property,” which you could describe these days as their feeling of entitlement.  The entire saga centers on one event that takes place near the end of the first novel involving rape within a marriage.  At first I felt surprised that such a large thing was so nonchalantly described, but then I figured it was just the way things were back then.  Turns out Galsworthy is just a sneaky writer and this one act which is initially described so casually has massive repercussions and you see that he really does see it as an immoral act.

You definitely have to read all three books.  The main relationship, a marriage between Soames and Irene Forsyte, left me with a really unclear picture of Irene.  A lot of this is on purpose, Irene is presented through the eyes of others consistently through all three novels.  Your picture of Soames changes a lot, too.  I chuckled at Galsworthy’s introduction where he said he suspected his readers would think he didn’t like Soames but he actually did.  I admit, I found myself thinking that very thing.  He’s a sneaky writer.  It’s definitely saying something that I got all the way through those hundreds and hundreds of pages and kept going to one novel then the next.  It’s a shame Galsworthy seems to have been largely forgotten.

I’ve also been trying to read Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon.  (It has priority because as a new book, it probably won’t be renewable and I don’t want to pay fines.)  I’ve read two of Chaon’s previous books, mostly because I’d read good things about him and I wasn’t crazy about either of them.  Maybe his writing is just too meditative and ethereal for me.  I felt the same way about the first half of AYR.  Fortunately, the second half picked up and I was actually surprised when the three separate stories all tied together in a very unexpected way.  The writing got tighter at the same time, so that helped, too.  Still, I think Chaon is one of those fancy writers who’s just a little too flowery for my personal straightforward tastes.

There’s a backlog of books to catch up on, Forsyte definitely kept me from reading other things.  Hopefully I’ll keep my numbers up for the year.

Sep

7

Starting Him Young

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Yes, we took the baby to a Quentin Tarantino movie.  No, it is not child abuse.  I checked.

Eric and I had discussed getting to a movie theater for a matinee now and then since the baby’s pretty portable and usually quiet.  He really wanted to see District 9 a couple weeks ago and I was happy to oblige.  It went very smoothly so Eric suggested we go see Inglourious Basterds, which I was really dying to see.  We have a good system worked out so far where we trade off baby duty and thus far it’s worked well.  I may go alone in the near future on weekdays, since early matinees during the week are nearly deserted, but we’ll see.

I’ve been brushing up on my Tarantino since I didn’t know how long it would be until I could see IB.  I hadn’t watched any of his early stuff in years so it was nice to go back.   I liked Reservoir Dogs about the same as the first time, liked Pulp Fiction less, and realized that Jackie Brown has some of the hallmarks of a Tarantino movie, but is basically the most by-the-book movie he’s made.  Granted, he did a great job of it, but I was surprised at how little it felt less like a Tarantino movie and more like a very smooth heist film.  (One thing that definitely stayed the same in my response to Jackie Brown: the cast is really top notch.  I’d hoped that it would revive the career of Robert Forster, who is just heartbreaking as Max Cherry.  A quick glance at IMDB shows that it actually did, just not on a massive scale.  He seems to have had very regular television work since then, when it was more of a trickle before.)

I still like both volumes of Kill Bill quite a lot, but I really really miss Tarantino’s dialogue.  I may be one of the only people out there sticking up for his long, meandering dialogue and monologue scenes, but I really love them.  Maybe I’m the only person who likes the first half of Death Proof as much as the second half.

Anyway, with all that said, I was really pleased with IB.  I don’t know why my expectations were somewhat low, perhaps it was because I had forgotten how much fun it is to see a Tarantino movie for the first time.  I can understand why the film is polarizing, it’s definitely one where reactions differ.  Personally, I was really impressed at how much better a filmmaker he is, especially after just watching his earlier work.  Kill Bill may be beautifully shot, but it’s lacking in the plot department.  IB was beautifully shot and had plenty of plot.  In fact, its double plot was an interesting device.  Eric’s reaction was that he thought most people would be expecting a WWII movie and get a Tarantino movie instead.  I felt exactly the opposite, I was amazed at the sleek and stylish WWII movie that kept cropping up in the middle of the Tarantino movie.

Thinking about it, it’s actually quite Shakespearean.  Shakespeare comedies (and sometimes tragedies) often have a double plot where one serves mostly as comic relief and both converge at the end.  Here, the Basterds are the secondary plot, the stuff for the peasants, the source of the laughs.  Shosanna’s plot is the high-minded one that’s the heart of the film.  I think it works well, though, especially since the Basterd storyline highlights the revenge element that is central to the movie (as well as so much Shakespeare).    Landa is certainly a high-quality villain worthy of Shakespeare, don’t you think?  He certainly has Iago’s wit and silver tongue.

It’s always hard to tell just how high-minded Tarantino wants to be, though.  Looking back at Pulp Fiction I see not a high-minded film but an exercise in storytelling that was far ahead of its time.  Kill Bill is one long homage to kung fu movies, Jackie Brown and Reservoir Dogs are well-executed genre exercises.  The word has been that IB was years in the making, and WWII films usually have an agenda so maybe he is trying to say something more here.

In particular I’ve been thinking about the theme of propaganda.  During the screening of Nation’s Pride, I initially thought it was kind of hilarious that the entire movie was just Zoller shooting people, not that I expected anything different since he was just a sniper in a tower.  But as the scene played on I thought Tarantino might actually be saying something rather heavy and I wonder if I’m reading too much into it.  Nation’s Pride was obviously propaganda, and the film is a lot about propaganda, and it was rather sickening to watch the audience take such glee in the killing of American soldiers.  But then a few minutes later, Tarantino has us watch as a few hundred Nazis are shot and/or burnt to death and seems to expect us to have our own gleeful reaction.

I dislike films that seem to kill for killing’s sake.  I don’t mind much of the killing in Tarantino movies because it’s always about style over substance, at least it always was before.  In IB it seems to be killing with a specific agenda and it makes me question how easily we cast Nazis as villains.  Certainly their ideology and the party itself can be called “evil” but the mantra of the Basterds, which designates all Germans as evil seems just as reprehensible as the Germans’ designation of all Jews as evil.  I’m wondering how much of this he wants to stick with us and whether it’s just an accidental happenstance in a film that’s all about death and revenge.  After all, it is a big fat homage to American war movies, most of which were just as full of propaganda as the German ones.

It certainly does give you something to chew on, and that’s been somewhat lacking in Tarantino’s more recent films.  Don’t get me wrong, I love watching his style and I do enjoy Uma Thurman in that yellow tracksuit, but I think he’s able to mesh that with a real point of view in IB.  Then again, I don’t want to put words in his mouth.  I’d be curious to chat with him about it if ever given the opportunity.  And I’d like to see it again on DVD.