RIP J.G. Ballard

Sounds esoteric as hell but one of my favorite memories of my late mother is our spending a rainy afternoon watching Steven Spielberg's adaptation of Ballard's novel "Empire of the Sun," on HBO a couple of years ago. My father was napping, of course. My then fiancee was back in DC hanging with her Howard girlfriends. I'd just come for a visit basically. In her unrepentent Brooklyn accent she said, "Christapha, woo-tch this movie with me. It's based oo-wn a book, right?" Yep. The film featured a little boy actor named Christian Bale, who was 11 when principal photography begain. This was "serious" Speilberg: "Schindler's List," "The Color Purple," & "Amistad" vintage. And semi-autobiographical: like Bale's character, Ballard was a Brit colonial (though older in real life) captured by the Japanese in the morass and tragically unknown World War Two front that was China and interned till after the atomic bomb ended the war. A few weeks after we saw the movie I got my mom Ballard's novel; she took it to Delaware for her beach reading but never got to it. As of this past season it's still there sandwiched between her old Ludlum tomes. Oh she understood who Ballard was, his import. But here's what she told me. She said the looks on the child's (Bale's) face in different shots, scenes, were enthralling, haunting enough. Reading the book would "spoil that." As an author that was troubling to me, but hey, it worked for her and I respected that.

Ballard wasn't a touchy-feely writer. He was the anti-Jodi Picoult, and with all due respect to my fellow Princetonian Ms. Picoult, thank God for that. If you ever want those bitter-sour-salty areas of your tongue assaulted to submission, taste his novel Crash, which was also adapted for film (Holly Hunter, James Spader were in it...it's not the one which won Best Picture starring Don Cheadle). Crash was about people who used car wrecks and accident injuries--both watching the mishaps, being in them--as sexual fetish. That was Ballard, all the way. I think Mom saw that one on Starz or Encore. Ballard's short story "The Sound Sweep" inspired the Buggles' iconic (and oddly prophetic) 80s pop song "Video Killed the Radio Star." In 1981 it was the first video ever played on MTV. I was home on Christmas vacation, with Mom, and likely saw the second, which had to be Haircut 100 or Duran Duran and I recall Mom asking "Christapha, whut that hell is that?" Perverse alright. MTV no longer plays real videos and Mom's dead. Would have made a great subject for Ballard's next dark study, had he not died.

Darkness wasn't what my mother and I shared in our love of Empire of the Sun, of course. Ballard's mezmerizing story, whether on screen or paper, was the key. Well, okay...not the key--the vehicle. She and I were the key. As sticky-uncomfortable, as Ballard's work was, there was always something more human, more hopeful than any of the sugar-coated crap or romances which constantly outsold him at Barnes & Noble. Funny, therefore, how it was over his stuff was what Mom and I shared a unique moment. I still joke with my wife, whenever I reminisce about my mother, through my warbling the notes of the soundtrack's song Exultate Justi by the Ambrosian Boys Choir. Okay, it's strange, but it worked. Just like Mom and I. Just like Ballard.

RIP, both of you...

Spike Lee & McBride do Good, not Great.

Okay, here's my ruminatant...moist cud spit for your inspection. That America is more tribalized than ever is axiomatic. The Sarah Palin white folks. Tyler Perry bamas (opposite sides of the same...er...coin). The former being the majority, don't look for EA's Call of Duty to incorporate a story line about black combat troops led in segregated units by incompetent, indifferent or outright racist officers into suicide missions. Or Nisei, for that matter--thrust into the most hellish of battles while their families are locked up in our own former Guantanmo, the "Internment camps" of Arizona. Call of Duty's still locked into the mythology that D-Day was the holy battle that decided WWII, when every day on the Russian Front and in the Pacific was Normandy. And thus...

Check the comments on Spike Lee on imdb.com and tell me the average white filmgoer "gets" him. Is that is own fault? Yes and no. Spike bought the rights to the deep and bitter sweet and unassuming novel by James McBride, my historical novel role model (since Michener's dead), Miracle at St. Anna. Yes, there's a lot of usual Spike preachyness and heavy-handed allegory...ego, lack of editing. But hey, he's Spike and James was likely so happy to be coopted by Hollywood, well, you know the story. And while Spike's attack on Clint Eastwood vis. Flags of Our Fathers was yet another indication that he's still got his head up his narrow ass, I'll say this time, he had the balls and credibility to back it, primarily because no one has ever addressed this aspect of our history. Yeah, there's a taste here in there in mawkish films like Glory, or underfunded, poorly written and acted (but for Danny Glover) crap like Buffalo Soldiers. White people don't like to viddy this schizophrenia that is America, especially when it comes to African Americans and this nation's wars. Clint touched on it in Flags by showing meek Pullman porters tending to the manufactured celebrities of Mt. Suribachi, and perhaps that what set off Spike's big mouth. Not Clint's intent to be superficial. Hardly. But he could have addressed this stuff as, for example, Spike did deftly (deft isn't often used with regard to Spike, who usually smacks you across the face) with a short scene. 70 year old Hector Negron silently watches John Wayne in the D-Day epic The Longest Day in all the Duke's cheezy patriotic mythic whatever-adjective -your -ass wants to add persona.

But there's vintage Spike in the rest of this film as he tackles these themes: religion as a function of individual sacrifice, redemption, love rather than tribal dogma. The racism of America versus that of the Third Reich. This dude is the only filmmaker in America who can be genius and annoying simultaneously. Yet these themes are reality based. German POWs welcomed in a Southern town's ice cream shop whilst black GIs are threatened at gunpoint, for example. But there are amazing craft points presented which you'd have never thought possible if you're as old as me and remember going to see She's Gotta have It on a Friday date with a silly girl. Lush cinematography. Complex subtitled scenes with Tuscan villagers, Italian partisans, an old strega (an Italian witch) and of course Germans (nice touch using Max Malestesta and Alexandra Maria Lara from my favorite Hitler flick, Downfall...with the beautiful and pouty Alexandra as "Axis Sally," exhorting black soldiers to throw down their guns "and dance," eat fried chicken and greens in her propaganda broadcasts). Things like that. I was impressed. I bet Clint is, so's Spielberg. The contemporary scenes (ca. 1983 per the book's plot) are much better, grittier and tighter (okay--due again to the book's plot) and less pat-syrup than anything from the look-at-the-old-men-as granddads now arcs in Flags or Private Ryan. Okay, maybe the last ten minutes are way to tear-jerking and fake, but hey...

The performances carry the flick when the over the top Spike Lee-ness over- or underwhelms you. Laz Alonso, Derek Luke and about three other dudes ...lord they are channeling Denzel in various persona, at various times in Denzel's career. And that's a good thing. Homage, fune-tuning, not imitation. Ex-Halle Berry beau Michael Ely is amazing. Omar Benson Miller as Train, the "Chocolate Giant" in the horror-addled fantasy of a little Italian boy, is out- Forrest Whittakering Forrest himself. Again I say imitation as homage, not copying, and pantomime, and his is about as close to McBride's vision in the novel as any character's. Yeah, there's Italian T & A (with Ely and buttery-bodied Valentina Cervi getting busy). Some anachronistic language. A view factual lapses (i.e. the 92nd Inf. wasn't a "liberal" experiment but rather the consolidation of venerable Buffalo Soldier regiments dating back to the end of the Civil War; the Germans along the Serchio River were crack parachute troops and panzergrenadiers who're veterans of North Africa, Sicily, even the Russian Front--not mud-humping greenhorn conscripts).

And then there's the 1944 Sant'Anna di Stazzema massacre. Here Spike shows you just how he's as much as auteur and master as any in our American pantheon of Scorsese, Spielberg, Jewison, Altman et al. Yeah, I said it. Hate him if you must, but give the little devil his due. And I say pantheon because once you remove comedy directors like Judd Aptow and Ben Stiller from the mix (and they are getting annoying too, despite Tropic Thunder), all you have is the rest of the clowns who think they are directing music vidoes or computer games like Tour of Duty. World War Two, at it's most terrible, unfolds in forty seconds as the SS murders babies, children, grandparents. Sorry, angry right wing New York Jews--I'd bet your nemesis Spike could do justice to a gut-wrenching Holocaust film, or something on the 1948 War in Palestine. Hell, maybe remake Exodus...

...but there'd be no Exodus without Paul Newman. And that's the next story...

RAFBN-Week 2

Week Two: Summer's "read a f-ing book, n- "series...

James McBride is my hero. An African American LITERARY author of somewhat popular note. A brother who is not plagiarizing Candace Bushnell and replacing the white girls with obese church ladies lookin' to score wid the pastor. Who isn't writing thug fables and calling it "the reality of the street" (Ha!). Whose lead character isn't a conflicted handsome, mysterious dude romancing female lawyers who look and act suspiciously like video hoes. Whose lead character isn't a conflicted handsome mysterious clown romancing MALE lawyers. His Song Yet Sung (buy it at the right) is a paeon to the Chesapeake, to the slaves who toiled, yearned and struck out for freedom at water's edge; of course I'll try to best him with Yella Patsy's Boys. His first foray into the historical fiction genre came a few years ago with Miracle at St. Anna. I offer this selection in honor of ALL vets and dead soldiers (except Confederates--why the hell should those redneck traitors count?) this Memorial Day.

The setting is Italy, WWII, 1944. The true event is the Sant'Anna di Stazzema massacre: retreating German (call them German...stop with this "Nazi" shit) Waffen-SS Panzergrenadiers rounded up about 500 women, children and old folks--in retaliation for guerilla activity--and shot them, then burned them (many were just wounded so they were burned alive). The other element is the 92nd Infantry--a segregated combat unit which encompassed most of the old "Buffalo Soldier" infantry regiments. Led by incompetent and racist white officers, plagued by so-called "Greatest Generation" white boy GIs on the one hand, they must also deal with a desperate enemy hell bent on taking as many Americans with them to the bitter end (the Waffen-SS were the most fanatical German troops).

Here's where it gets interesting. McBride gives us a sweet yet dim witted black soldier (think Lenny from Of Mice and Men with a rifle and a tan) who befriends an orphan against the backdrop of this atrocity. Allegory's all there on many levels, including a symbolic device with a statue's head; pain, bravery, treachery, love, redemption...an miracles...ensue. And don't look for the usual "cross-section of society" stereotypes re: the dudes in the group of four black soldiers caught behind German lines. Read/re-read this book before Spike Lee's film comes out. McBride penned the screenplay but Spike's already up to his old bullshit braying and self-promo--given his pretty much needless attacks on Clint Eastwood for "Flags of Our Father/Letters of Iwo Jima" and Speilberg for "Saving Private Ryan". Interesting as Clint's ALWAYS been a thoughtful, artful director and even did the Charlie Parker biopic. Did you, Spike? Nah. So shut up. Speilberg did The Color Purple and yeah--Amistad. Did you, Spike? Nah. So shut up. Why not A Soldier's Story? Or any number of films and TV-movies of the week on blacks and WWII, blacks and any war (hey you can option Yella Patsy's Boys once it drops and show the freed slaves burning down the White House with the British in 1814 if you want--one of those patented moving shots of your on Dolley Madison realizing she gotta run before she's caught would be cool...). Going into the merits of his attacks on the WWII movies is silly as the attacks are silly; again I'm sure 99.99% of it is just his ego/personality, and I'm praying my hero Brother McBride tempers that stuff. Would he allow Hollywood succubus to steal his soul, a la Mariane Pearl and Brangelina in A Mighty Heart? Likely not. He's my hero, after all. Read and learn.