Grindhouse

I have said it before and I will say it again: Quentin Tarantino is a genius, and Robert Rodriguez is no slouch. Grindhouse, which released in US theaters April 6, is an absolute work of art. Though box office receipts have been disappointing, it says nothing about the film. First, this is a film lover's movie. Tarantino and Rodriguez have created an homage to the 70s double feature of exploitation genres--splatter, sexploitation, zombie, cannibal, women in prison, and other films.

T&R created two films for Grindhouse, Rodriguez's zombie film Planet Terror and Tarantino's slasher Death Proof. Planet Terror is typical zombie fare, a bio-weapon gone terribly wrong, a government conspiracy, and a group of disparate survivors fighting for their lives. Bruce Willis plays the army commander whose unit was first infected with the DC2 gas, Rose McGowan is Cherry the go-go dancer who loses a leg to the zombies, which is replaced eventually with a M4A1 assault rifle, and Freddy Rodriguez plays El Wray who becomes the leader of the band of survivors. In Tarantino's Death Proof, Kurt Russell is a Stuntman Mike, a sadistic killer who stalks young women, using his death proof stunt car as his weapon of choice. After killing five women in Texas, Stuntman Mike escapes to Tennessee only to meet his match in four Hollywood film workers, including two stunt women including real life stuntwoman Zoe Bell.

The genius of Grindhouse is in T&R's ability to recreate the cheesiness of exploitation movies as well as the poor quality of the physical film itself. On the big screen, Grindhouse looks like a film that has been shown over and over so often it is damaged, at times beyond recognition. Both movies have missing reels at the end of the second act, leaviing viewers wondering about the details that they missed (but still able to follow the story). In Death Proof there are actually ten seconds where the screen just says 'Reel Missing.' There are also the internal inconsistencies like the use of cell phones in a movie that otherwise feels like it was filmed in the 1970s. Even in the story-telling itself, Grindhouse lacks the character development and emotional depth associated with good film making, but the visuals are compelling because they titillate and transfix the viewer.

Like the original double features found in grindhouses, the movie includes trailers and advertisements. Some of the best work on Grindhouse is in the fake trailers. Machete, Werewolf Women of the SS, Don't, and Thanksgiving are hysterically funny, zeroing on what made the exploitation genre so compelling, the advertising. The fake trailers were directed by some of today's most creative directors including Rodriguez (who wrote Machete in 1993 as a feature film), Rob Zombie (House of a 1000 Corpses), Eli Roth (Hostel) and Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead). There is even talk of making a couple of these into a Grindhouse II.

What makes Grindhouse standout from most of the exploitation genre is that like Tarantino's Kill Bill, this is a movie that empowers women. They are not only equal to men, but in fact, they are stronger than the men. It is Rose McGowan in Planet Terror who becomes the leader of the surviving humans, and Stuntman Mike gets his just desserts from three women. Though many will complain about the post-millenial violence, few can complain about its treatment of women.

The Order of the Phoenix is almost here!

I just had to post these trailers. It is going to be an all-Harry summer with the movie of book five, HP and the Order of the Phoenix comes out on July 13 in the US. The finally installment of the series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows releases a week later on July 21. Needless to say, I will be re-reading the entire series in anticipation of this momentous month. Two more movies, and the entire enterprise is done and a era is over.

What's so great about Seattle?

So, I have these friends who are bi-coastal, living part of the time in Boston and the other part in Seattle, and they invited me to visit them in their new home. Finally, I went. It has been achance to visit with good friends and answer the nagging question, What's so great about Seattle? Now, after spending a few days in the city, I think I have an answer...just about everything.

Let's start with the obvious, Seattle is quite possibly the city of coffee, maybe it has someth to do with all of that rain. In 1971, a little shop opened in Pike's Place Market specializing in quality coffee beans. Thirteen years later, that same little company decided to bring the Italian espresso bar culture to Seattle, serving their first cafe latte. Thirty-five years later, that one little coffee house now spands the globe with more than 12,000 shops. For me, Seattle was a pilgrimage to the very first Starbucks, and though they are the best known of Seattle's java purveyors, they are by no means the only.ing Whether from small local chains like Cafe Ladro, specializing in fair trade, organic, shade grown coffee, to the tiny shops like Cafe Bambino, there is always a good cup o' joe for the asking.

While sipping your latte, there is pleanty of art and culture to contemplate. Though there are literally dozens of indivdual galleries with everything from Old Masters to contemporary to glass, it is Seattle's monumental art that lends such a cosmopolitan air to the city. Though the Space Needle may be the best known of Seattle architecture, this city of 3,000,000 has not one but buildings by two of today's best international architects. The Experience Music Project, the museum of music funded by Mircrosoft co-founder Paul Allen, resides in a building designed by Frank Gehry. Like all of his designs, the EMP is a collection of curves without a single flat plane. Though much maligned, its bright colors and bizarre design are breathtaking. Even more impressive than Gehry's creation is that of Rem Koolhaas, Seattle's Public Library. This glass and steel immensity, a collection of odd angles and criss-crossed steel girders, is in some ways the very opposite of Ghery's EMP. Most impressive about the Public Library is that it was publicly funded. Seattlites' willingness to assume the cost of a major architectural feat such as Koolhaas' is an example to be followed by every city that wishes to be great.

New this year to the Seattle art scene is the Seattle Art Museum's Olympic Sculpture Park. Situated at the edge of Puget Sound, this nine-acre industrial space was on the verge of being sold to a developer to be filled with more upscale condos (just what every city needs) until a concerted effort was made to preserve the last undeveloped waterfront property. With the help of wealthy donors who ensured the park's operational budget, making the park open to the public, the waterfront was preserved, giving Seattle residents a place to experience the beauty of art and nature in a single place. Filled with an array of sculptures from the sublime to the ridiculous, the Olympic Sculpture Park is a huge success.

"Love and Loss" by Roy McMakin and "Split" by Roxy Paine are probably my favorite pieces. The first is a three-dimensional collage including poured concrete benches and pathways, a living tree, a table, and a neon, rotating ampersand. The use of language and objects, both living and inanimate, forces the viewer to contemplate what love and loss means in the rhythms of our life and the rhythms of nature. "Split" is a stainless steel tree that begs the question of the relationship between art and nature.

Seattle is a city of food and wine second to none. With nationally recognized chefs like Tom Douglas (a Seattle force of nature with six restaurants and a catering business), it is easy to find something fabulous to nosh. Focused on quality ingredients from the Pacific Northwest and innovative preparations, my two favorite places were the Steelhead Diner and The Brooklyn. At the Steelhead Diner I started with a caviar pie that was decadent in the extreme. With cheese, hard-boiled eggs, and three different roe, it was the perfect way to start. Though there were too many goods things to choose for an entree, the ivory King Salmon (an albino fish with a slightly sweeter flavor) was perfect. Everything was so good, I went back for lunch two days later for the dungeness crab cake (beautiful chunks of meat, no filler) and a slow cooked pork sandwich served with flawless frites, crunchy on the outside, tender on the inside, and perfectly salty, no condiments needed.

The Brooklyn is a steak house from the old days, with expert service and a kitchen staff that cares deeply about providing a great meal. I had a steak au poivre the first night and an Alaskan halibut in a meyer lemon burre blanc the second night. both were prepared to perfection. Even better than the entrees, though, were the oysters, a specialty of the house. These Northwest beauties ranged in flavor from subtle melon (Miradas) to balanced and briny (Penn Cove) to sharp and metallic (Deep Bay Flats). For the oyster and steak lover, The Brooklyn is where to go in Seattle. Wherever you eat in Seattle, you are bound to find a wine list filled with Washington wines, and they are worth sampling.

A city should have something for everyone says a friend. By that definition, Seattle is a not just a city but a great city. It has art and architecture, food and wine, and I didn't even mention music. What more could you ask for?

The River of Doubt

In November of 1912, Theodore Roosevelt—author, police commissioner, Navy secretary, Rough Rider, governor, cattle rustler, vice president, president, big game hunter—suffered one of the most inglorious defeats of his life, either personal or professional, when he lost the three-way race between himself, William Howard Taft, and Woodrow Wilson. TR's attempt to establish a viable third party in the form of the Bull Moose (Progressive) Party had failed, the phone that so recently rang incessantly at Sagamore Hill was silent, and TR was in desperate need of distraction.

In The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey historian Candice Millard recounts the the Brazilian adventure that would serve as just such a distraction. Invited on a speaking tour of South America in 1913, TR welcomed the opportunity to defend both the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine and the Panama Canal. The trip would also allow him to pursue his childhood dream of field work as a naturalist, collecting samples for the the American Museum of Natural History, a New York institution found by his father. Accompanied by George Cheerie, the renowned scientist and South American explorer, TR planned to explore some of the best tread tributaries of the Amazon. All that would soon change though.

Upon arrival in Brazil, TR was offered the services of Brazil's greatest explorer, Colonel Candido Mariano da Silva Rondon, as guide and tempted to jettison his staid itinerary for the chance to reconnoiter instead the unexplored River of Doubt, a thousand mile tributary deep in the heart of the Amazon rainforest. Accompanied by Cheerie, Rondon, his son Kermit, Brazilian doctor Cajazeira, and a massive company of Brazilian commaradas, Roosevelt accepted the challenge.

The expedition was nearly doomed from the beginning. Prepared in the states by a failed arctic explorer and a priest with delusions of grandeur, they lacked proper provisions, canoes, or even a sense of the danger that awaited them. Pairing down the expedition time and again, exacting both equipment and people, TR finally set out on the river after more than 300 miles of overland travel only to discover a rainforest unwilling to supplement their meagre rations and filled with dangerous enemies from Stone Age Indians tribes to pirranha and Coral snakes to malaria and dyssentary. The rapids choked river nearly broke the company, taking the lives of two commaradas while witnessing the murder of another by a fellow commarada.

Everyone, with the exception of the Brazilian commander Rondon, was laid low by the effort to survive. Unwilling to be treated with the deference due a former American president, TR worked right along side the Brazilians he came to respect (and no one worked harder than his son Kermit). TR nearly left his bones in the rainforest (a Roosevelt tradition of being buried where one dies) when he developed a severe infection after smashing his leg on a boulder in the river trying to save the canoes from being smashed instead. The infection, combined with malaria he had developed weeks earlier, led Roosevelt to contemplate suicide in order to allow the expedition to continue without the burden of bringing him out.

Ultimately, as we know, Roosevelt survived to see his home on Oyster Bay once more. The Amazon, though, would claim his life. The infection he suffered returned, eventually leading to the president's death in 1919. Candice Millard treats this historic episode as it ought to be, as a page turning adventure. Her rearch is impeccable, making ample use of the diaries and post-expedition writings of the company to tell this compelling story. Though her focus is the Amazon adventure, Millard contextualizes the event with a succinct look at the four major players (TR, Kermit, Cheerie, and Rondon) before and after the fateful exploits on the River of Doubt. I can't wait to see what she tackles next.

The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters

While reading Gordon Dahlquist's debut novel The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters, one is filled with the sense of being transported to a different time, not just in the timeline of the novel but in the wirting as well. It feels like the pure Victorian gothic of the nineteenth century serialized novel, worthy of Edgar Allan Poe, almost but not quite. It has all the requisite parts, compelling characters each with their own different motivation, a twisted plot, and an alchemical process that fundamentally changes the the moral character of the people and psyche of those whowillingly or unwillingly suffer throught it. Add to this murder, mayhem, and a mystical pregnancy and you have the formula for the suspenseful thrills of the classic gothic novel with a modern twist.

The forces of good, at least for the purposes of this novel, are a triumvirate of misfits drawn together by common cause against an unknown enemy. Celeste Temple is a provincial girl of wealth just come to London from her Carribean home to find a husband; we meet her in the throes of grief from having been dumped by her fiancé without a whiff of an explanation. Cardinal Chang is a man who gets things done, for the right price; he first spots Celeste on the train returning from an assignment to assasinate an dragoon colonel. Doctor Abelard Svenson is the medical escort (and spy) to the Crowned Prince of the German duchy of Macklenburg. When his prince disappears and he discovers a blue glass filled with others' memories, he teams up with Temple and Chang to find his charge. As each pursues their own ends, they find themselves more closely united to one another against a cabal of power-hungry aristocrats, government officials, and prostitutes who have discovered how to drain memories (particularly memories of the sexual variety) into books of cobalt blue glass which can then trap their readers, leaving them at powerless before the will of the cabal.

The difficulties of Glass Books are two-fold. First the length, which has been a common complaint; it is well over 700 arduous, overwritten pages. Second, as one friend said, the book is all middle. If a good story has a beginning, a middle, and an end, Glass Books lacks the former and the latter. Yes, we do learn about our protagonists throughout the book, the fact remains that the novel begins with Celeste's dumping and and subsequent adventure. As for an ending, there are enough loose ends to weave a Persian rug of the most complex detail and highest quality.

The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters reads like a screen play just waiting to be produced. (Which makes since as Dahlquist is a playwright by trade.) The visuals would be stunning, and the SFX guys would have a field day. In fact I can't wait to see it! As for reading it, if you can get through the first thrid, you might just be sucked in enough to finish. Then again, maybe not.