The Gospels in most standard Bibles – Matthew, Mark, Luke and John – talk a great deal about the birth, ministry, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. But there are about thirty years of his life missing from those narratives. A question asked by many (including myself) is: what happened during those thirty years? How did they help shape the Son of God’s ministry? Christopher Moore, an author and humorist I’d rank with Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett, attempts to answer that question with Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal.
Levi bar Adelphus, who is called Biff, is raised from the dead by the archangel Raziel to write a new Gospel. Kept under house arrest – or rather hotel arrest, as they’re staying at a Hyatt in St. Louis – until he finishes, Biff sets his mind on the task of recounting his journeys with his best friend, Yeshua bar Jehovah of Nazareth. Josh & Biff both work for Biff’s father as boys, and take turns courting the irrepressible Mary of Magdala – Maggie, for short. When an angel appears to Josh and tells him he needs to find his destiny, the two embark on a journey across the continent in search of answers.
In addition to making an attempt at shedding light on one of the most influential men in history, Lamb also takes a fascinating look at some of the other faiths and philosophies in the world, such as the teachings of Confucius, the tenants of Buddhism and some of Hinduism’s darker sides. There are a pile of references to everything from the world being round to evolution, and a great deal of it is done with tongue firmly planted in cheek. I don’t know if I’ve ever even heard of an elephant doing yoga before I read this book.
This is a very funny book. If you’re reading it in public, especially in a library or a study hall, you are very likely to disturb others. I lost track of the number of times I burst out laughing reading it. As I said, Christopher Moore’s work is of a high caliber of satire and humor. This was my first time reading one of his books, and I know I’ll be reading more after this. I also know I’ll be reading Lamb again because, as a Christian, I’ll admit I got a great deal out of it.
I know there are people out there who consider any reference to Christ in literature outside of the Bible to be blasphemous or false or something like that. They might think that portraying Him in any way other than fearful reverence dilutes the power of His message. Christopher Moore proves thoroughly and completely that this is not the case. The notion is that a divine and omnipotent intelligence alien to our own responsible for the creation of the universe incarnated as a normal human child to experience the range and depth of the human experience without the bias of an omniscient point of view. Lamb shows the confusion, determination, delight and humanity of Joshua, treating him with respect throughout the work. His desire for understanding and compassion is balanced very well against Biff, who acts as a sarcastic and realist foil for the Messiah. It could be said that Biff shows us what it’s really like to have a “personal relationship” with Christ, in that sometimes Biff gets smacked a bit hard, and sometimes Biff yells at Josh for one reason or another. It’s a friendship, a very deep and human bond, and I think this review is going a bit more serious than I intended so here’s a picture of a bunny.
Apparently Josh liked bunnies. Anyway, Lamb is a great book, on many levels. It’s funny, interesting, powerful and tender. It never disrespects its source material, has a lot of good research behind it and just tries to answer a few questions that might nag anybody who looks on the life of Christ with their brain engaged. Questions like “What was Jesus like as a young man?” and “What if Jesus knew kung fu?”
Here’s some free advice for anyone looking to become a critic: be prepared to experience things you don’t like. If you just write up reviews of things you like, you’re a reviewer, not a critic. I know I’ve fallen into this trap, and I’ve touched on it before, in this very series, so I’ve been looking for an opportunity to encounter a film with which I’m unfamiliar but probably wouldn’t be terribly interested in watching otherwise. When my co-worker insisted that we watch Grandma’s Boy at our monthly Movie Night, and the film began as it meant to go on with stoner humor and jabs at gamer culture, I could feel myself smiling. Not at the humor, because there isn’t much of that despite this being a comedy, no – I was smiling because I was watching an atrocious movie and I couldn’t wait to tear it apart.
Grandma’s Boy, released in 2006, has absolutely nothing to do with the pioneering feature-length comedy of the same name released back in 1922. The older film was about a cowardly man who needed help from his grandmother to overcome his fears and win over the affections of a girl. The 2006 film follows Alex, a single 35-year-old video games tester, as he is thrown out of his apartment because his roommate blew all of the rent money on Filipino hookers. He eventually moves in with his grandmother (thus making him a grandma’s boy, get it? Get it?), charms the female middle manager brought in to help get the video game in production ready for release, and participates in antics related to getting stoned, making fun of the company’s resident genius programmer and getting his grandma and her girlfriends into Antiques Roadshow. If this sounds disjointed in the narrative broad strokes, wait until you see the end result.
Let’s get the praise out of the way so I can go into detail about what doesn’t work in this deplorable movie. The two people whose efforts make this movie watchable are Doris Roberts, as Alex’s grandma Lilly, and Linda Cardellini as Samantha, the middle management troubleshooter. Doris is a delight, one of the few members of the cast with real comedic experience, and her bits show a woman who loves her grandson and has learned to take everything in stride. Linda’s Samantha isn’t terribly well developed, but she’s charming and also rolls well with the punches, on top of being the kind of middle manager anybody in a day job situation would be lucky to have. She’s the kind of manager who knows well the sort of people she has working under her, and also is capable of interfacing with the superiors in the company on their level. She comes off as a true go-between interested in overall success, rather than being out for herself. I’d almost call her a positive female role-model, but given the sort of movie she’s in, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised when she gets just as high, drunk and wild as everybody else the audience is supposed to care about.
Having your manager look like this doesn’t exactly hurt, either.
On the other side of things, we have Allan Covert as our “hero”. It’s not that his character, Alex, is unlikable. His jabs tend to be mostly delivered in a good-natured way, since people do need to get along with him otherwise the audience won’t buy him as a protagonist. No, what bugs me about Alex is that his motivations are more clouded than the room in his dealer’s basement. When I think of good comedies, I think of people who are in a situation where they want to do something better or make something of themselves. Sheriff Bart in Blazing Saddles is dedicated to succeeding when the white men in power would have him fail. Marty McFly in Back to the Future wants to fix his past to make a better future, since he’s kinda stuck there anyway. Jason Nesmith in Galaxy Quest is looking for something meaningful, a fresh start after riding his washed-up sci-fi television career just about as far as he can. Adrian Cronauer in Good Morning Vietnam wants to support his fellow troops with the truth and great music, not the stuff his superiors consider “safe”. In all of these situations, we have protagonists who are somewhat down on their luck, looking upwards and struggling to become more than they are. This doesn’t have to fit every comedy for it to be successful, but at least Ferris Bueller and Jeff Lebowski have clear motivations. Ferris is having a great day off while helping his friends, and Jeff wants his rug back. It really tied the room together.
Alex in Grandma’s Boy feels like someone tried to cross Ferris Bueller with Jeff Lebowski but the experiment went horribly, horribly wrong. Ferris was a kid who had everything together, a sense of ambition and poise, and used his smarts and charm to show his friends a fantastic time. Lebowski’s a stoner, an unmotivated deadbeat, but this plays into the events that occur in his story and remains consistent throughout. Alex waffles back and forth between being an ambitious smart guy and a pothead slacker with little to no warning. He’s trying to be a video game programmer instead of just a tester one minute, and saying “fuck it” and getting baked the next. If the writers wanted to do something with these shifts in tone and make Alex out to be some kind of manic depressive who needed to get a hold of the aimless direction his life had taken, that probably would have worked. Instead we have things working out for him mostly due to contrivance. Real quality storytelling there, Allen.
“Yeah, these assholes actually gave me money to make a movie! Can you believe it?”
Now, not all comedies should have meaning or messages or even necessarily need good characters. But if you’re just going to be a movie about stoners or gamers or race relations or family matters, then in my opinion you should pick one and run with it. The Gamers got this, and was very funny to me as a result. This flick starts with some gamer humor and then meanders into stoner territory before it begins a rather annoying habit wandering back and forth. Waffling between spheres of humor like this just makes the whole thing shamble along like a Frankensteinian construction of Half-Baked and Hackers. Or, more to the point, it feels like Half-Baked bent Hackers over a railing and went to work on its nether regions with a variety of blunt and phallic objects.
The most glaring thing for me when it comes to Grandma’s Boy‘s shortcomings, however, is its sense of time. For one thing, the sense of comedic timing necessary to good humor seems absent for most of the jokes. They either go on for too long or are delivered so poorly that you’re lucky to elicit a bit of a chuckle. And speaking of going on too long, moreso than the comedic timing problem, this movie might only be 96 minutes but the way it is shot, written and acted, it feels quite a bit longer. Good comedy knows not to overstay its welcome. Grandma’s Boy is the sort of comedy that crashes on your couch for six months, doesn’t pay you any rent or grocery money, and leaves the whole place smelling like pot.
At least Doris never failed to class up the joint.
There are so many better comedies out there than Grandma’s Boy. Any of the movies I’ve mentioned previously are much better investments of your time than this turd. The jerk programmer’s neuroses are never fully explored or explained, existing instead so we can laugh at his weirdness and inability to interact with real people – though, in fairness, if I had his office setup I’d be tempted not to deal with my co-workers either. There’s stuff that makes absolutely no sense, like Dante’s obsession with exotic animals protecting his stash or what I like to call the Giant Space Party From Nowhere. And just when you think you couldn’t be any more repulsed by the movie’s failing attempts at humor that go on for way too long and ultimately aren’t all hat funny, up pops David Spade to remind you he’s still trying to be as funny as he was in Tommy Boy. Which he isn’t. You might get a couple of laughs out of Grandma’s Boy but ultimately it’s the kind of sloppy, flaccid and almost mean-spirited comedy that Hollywood seems to think is what the slack-jawed popcorn-gobbling public wants to see. If nothing else, we see how humor in the style of Adam Sandler’s movies turns out when Adam Sandler isn’t directly involved. As much as some of his comedy falls flat from time to time, when we watch some of Sandler’s roles we feel like he’s got two things necessary to be a viable human being and a good humorist: a brain, and a heart. Grandma’s Boy has neither.
Josh Loomis can’t always make it to the local megaplex, and thus must turn to alternative forms of cinematic entertainment. There might not be overpriced soda pop & over-buttered popcorn, and it’s unclear if this week’s film came in the mail or was delivered via the dark & mysterious tubes of the Internet. Only one thing is certain… IT CAME FROM NETFLIX.
In case you didn’t know, writing is difficult. It’s grueling on an intellectual level, isolating on a social level and ultimately unrewarding in terms of both criticism and payment. Despite the banality of their works, Stephenie Meyer and Dan Brown are rarities, in that they’ve managed to make fortunes for themselves (and, in Ms. Meyer’s case, the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints) in the world of printed fiction. Even more rare are gifted writers who tell good and deep stories, and then there are films like Adaptation.
I wasn’t sure what this movie was really about, when I put it on my Netflix queue. I’d heard it was quirky and funny, and I guess I was expecting the kind of dry, pretentious comedy that tries to be the polar opposite of populist slapstick. I was looking for something hard to watch because it was face-palmingly gut-wrenchingly bad. I should have known better. Adaptation. is not hard to watch for those reasons, but it can be a bit difficult for me because I relate a great deal to the protagonist, Charlie Kaufman.
Charlie, played by Nicholas Cage at his neurotic best, is a struggling screenwriter fresh from his work on Being John Malkovich. He’s hired to adapt the novel The Orchid Thief, a story that he believes is merely about flowers. This excites him since he’s not interested in cliché over-marketed screenplays (I can’t blame him). However, he begins to have serious problems, losing sleep and struggling with a way to even open his screenplay. He studies both the subject of the novel, John Laroche, and its author, Susan Orlean. The more we learn about these two, the more the story between them is revealed and yet, the more Charlie struggles with his work. His mooching twin brother, Donald, takes it upon himself to write a screenplay of his own, going right for the clichés that Charlie loathes. As the film goes on, we go deeper and deeper into all of these characters, and the film seems to become more and more self-aware, unfolding like a flower before our eyes.
This is a feeling I know very, very well.
I know there are people out there who don’t like Nicholas Cage. They’re not fond of his taste for the scenery he often chews on, and some find his popping up in action or adventure movies like National Treasure or Ghost Rider to be a gross misappropriation of talent. While I don’t think this is necessarily true, Adaptation. is hands-down one of the best Nicholas Cage performances I’ve yet to see. It’s like my favorite performance of Ben Stiller’s, way back in Zero Effect, in that it’s delightfully understated and leaves the scenery mostly free of bite marks. In playing both Charlie and Donald, Nick gives us a pair of unique, nuanced characters that are totally believable as twin brothers. The delivery of their lines, the way they move and interact, even tiny things like the shapes of their disparate smiles speak to a rare talent that often goes overlooked in those aforementioned blockbusters. It was so compelling that the Academy Awards nominated both Charlie and Donald for Best Adapted Screenplay that year, making Donald the first and only fully fictitious person ever nominated for an award.
That same year, Chris Cooper won the Best Supporting Actor for this film, while Meryl Streep was nominated for Best Supporting Actress. They so completely inhabit the celluloid personifications of real-life ‘characters’ John Laroche and Susan Orlean that at times the film almost feels like a documentary, and this is without the use of any major contrivances. I could go on about the cast, like Brian Cox playing story seminar luminary Robert McKee at McKee’s suggestion, but I think this starting to become another one of those reviews where I’ll need to really struggle to find something critical to say about the film.
Meryl Streep is stunning and Chris Cooper has no front teeth.
And here it is: it might be too intellectual. Most of the first two acts of this movie are in the head-space of very smart people, specialists in their field. Charlie Kaufman, for all of his neuroses, is a very gifted screenwriter with a unique point of view. Orlean is a journalist and novelist that should inspire lady writers everywhere, and even Laroche, played by Chris Cooper as something of a backwoods eccentric, is actually well-read and published in his own right in the world of horticulture. The mitigating factor that makes all of this brainpower interesting is that these people are every bit as passionate as they are intellectual. Kaufman is haunted by his previous success and his desire to continue to rail against the common conventions of the movie industry. Orlean is a deeply lonely woman, trying like hell to uncover some sort of meaning to her life. Laroche is driven by a series of personal tragedies that lurk just behind his toothless grin and devil-may-care attitude. Which leads me from Adaptation‘s only obvious flaw to its greatest strength.
To say that Adaptation. is about writing, or flowers, or the fallacy of writer’s block would be true in a sense, but would also be doing the film a disservice. What Adaptation. draws our attention to is people. The crux of this movie involves the depiction of its characters as something much deeper than the standard shallow stock ones that usually wander across movie sets. It seems to be telling us that people are a lot more multi-faceted and capable of more growth than that for which we typically give them credit. The ways in which a given human individual can both rise and fall are so different and endless as to boggle the mind, and yet it’s something taken for granted. Among other things, Adaptation. struggles to shake us free of that complacency, and in a sarcastic deconstructionist world delivers an optimism and appreciation for individuality – amusingly, in a deconstructionist and occasionally sarcastic way.
Happy together.
The last thing I’ll touch on here is that this movie is by no means afraid to take the piss out of itself. A few of the jabs here and there are aimed at the film industry in general, but Adaptation. has a level of meta-awareness that’s incredibly rare. When Charlie asks how his twin brother plans to convey the multiple-personality serial killer, essentially putting two people who are the same person into the same room, Donald shrugs and remarks, “Trick photography.” To put it another way, Nicholas Cage’s character tells Nicholas Cage’s other character that he’s going to achieve an effect to have two characters played by the same actor talk to each other with trick photography. It’s meta humor, and it’s not for everybody, but I got a big charge out of it, to say nothing of the film’s third act – which, without giving anything away, I believe all takes place as a conversation between Charlie and Donald that we never see or hear.
Anyway, those’re my thoughts on Adaptation. and I highly recommend it for the reasons I’ve cited. I’ll say that I’m sure it’s not the kind of film everybody is going to like. In fact, I can see people downright hating it. But as someone aspiring to make their living writing, someone who’s come to appreciate good meta humor and the kind of person who enjoys deep character explorations and interesting dialog just as much as car chases or gunfights, this film is an absolute standout. I can’t say the same for this review, however. I’ve once again gushed about a film that, while some people might not have seen, others will probably have seen the subject line of the review and rolled their eyes, as if to say, “Oh, here we go again, he’s going to love it and not tear it a new asshole.”
Tell you what, conjectural nay-sayer: You start paying me to review shitty movies, and I’ll be more than happy to tell you how shitty they are. Sound like a fair deal? Do you think MovieBob really wanted to sit through New Moon? How much do you think Yahtzee enjoys reviewing JRPGs? They’re professionals. I’m just an amateur center-of-attention pseudo-intellectual wanna-be pissing away hours of my life because this is something I’ve discovered people tend to think I’m halfway decent at doing. It’s the same reason I code websites for my dayjob. But hey, if someone out there on the Internet with hiring power actually stumbles across these reviews and thinks I’ll marginally increase their Google page rank, maybe I can get underpaid for doing this job, too.
Josh Loomis can’t always make it to the local megaplex, and thus must turn to alternative forms of cinematic entertainment. There might not be overpriced soda pop & over-buttered popcorn, and it’s unclear if this week’s film came in the mail or was delivered via the dark & mysterious tubes of the Internet. Only one thing is certain… IT CAME FROM NETFLIX.
In addition to doing a little writing (less than usual, I’ll admit), I thought I’d try a little experiment.
I recorded a little audio related to my Portal review while I had the room to myself this past Friday. I brought that audio into a program called Melodyne which, I understand, is the same software used by Valve for voice editing. Someone on YouTube had already played around with it to do the sort of editing required to make Ellen McLain sound like GLaDOS. Following those instructions yielded some interesting results.
Unwilling to post just another snippet of audio, and also wanting to make another attempt at doing something with AfterEffects, I started dropping in the results of Google Image searches for things like ‘Portal gun,’ ‘Chell’ and ‘Testchamber’. A few areas of text here, some interesting other images there, and suddenly I had a video presentation slightly more interesting than your typical corporate PowerPoint offering.
I added a little bit of Portal’s music as a last touch, but my hard-drive space failed me due to a bunch of old crap floating around the data section. So, while getting some Monday morning mundanity out of the way, I rendered the video from AfterEffects and then compressed it via Premiere.
Here’s the result. Let me know what you think.
As of 12:40, YouTube says it’s still rendering, so we’ll see how it looks once that process is complete.
Today’s Free Comic Book Day and holy crap are there a lot of free comics to be had. I’ve only managed to get through about ten of the thirty-odd offerings I plucked from the shelves of Cyborg One in Doylestown late this morning. Once I finish them all some time tomorrow I’ll be able to provide you all with an after-action report.
My better half and I are attending a friends’ game night over in Chesterbrook this evening. She was looking for a bit of a pick-me-up and said, “You know what I’d like? Bawls.” The usual jokes involving Bawls in one’s mouth ensued. I double-checked the drink’s website, and apparently Bawls is sold at 7-Eleven and Target.
Except in Horsham.
I went to 7-Eleven. No Bawls there.
I dropped by Acme. No Bawls to be had there, either.
Target didn’t have any Bawls.
Even Genuardi’s showed a complete lack of Bawls.
None of these stores have any Bawls.
…Okay, I’ve probably milked that joke enough. Point is, that’s where I’ve been all day. Still managed to bang out ~2k words on Citizen this morning, though.
So packing, comics and possibly more coming your way tomorrow. Same Blue time, same Blue channel.
