Category Writing

SouthLAnd: “Wednesday”

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SouthLAnd‘s fourth season explodes onto the screen like a roaring freight train with no brakes coming right at you.

Freeze frame.

This opening episode is a brutal, hard-charging statement of intent. The makers of this show know the only way to survive is to evolve uncompromisingly. They act accordingly.

Unfreeze.

From a fan’s perspective — hell, from every perspective — Wednesday was a fantastic episode, not just of the show, but of TV drama. The show moved faster, hit harder, got up in your face and never backed down, like Sherman facing down the yard full of gangbangers. SouthLAnd is a show that does not flinch, ever, and this opening episode was a searingly perfect example of that refusal to blink.

It all started with Jonathan Lisco’s script, which was a belter, a masterclass in taut & spare drama with its blistering dialogue, sky-rocketing tension, a pulsing sense of ever-present danger, brutally honed action scenes, gut-punching emotion, and genuinely, show-stoppingly horrifying sequences.

This is how you open a season.

Lisco’s script didn’t waste a second in throwing us into Lydia’s still-troubled existence, the much anticipated ball-busting banter between Sherman and Bryant, the introduction of Lucy Liu’s Jessica Tang, and, perhaps most highly anticipated of all, the return of John Cooper.

Everyone in this show brings their all to every scene; this episode was jammed with outstanding performances. Ben McKenzie and Shawn Hatosy were pitch-perfect in their back and forth; Regina King is one of the greatest actresses in TV drama; C. Thomas Howell killed it; Lucy Liu was truly great, while Lou Diamond Phillips laid down intensity and fire. And Michael Cudlitz brought true authority to the return of the beloved Cooper.

These razor-sharp performances were handled with breathtaking kinetic style by Christopher Chulack, backed by the legendary Jimmy Muro as DP. This was without a doubt the most visceral episode in the show’s history.

With humor, emotion, white-knuckle action, pyschological brutality, and outright horror, Chulack and Muro elevated the show’s brutal aesthetic to a whole new level. It was breathless, gasp-inducing television that flipped your expectations hard and didn’t give you a second to recover. Even when it made you laugh (and this is, sincerely, one of the funniest dramas out there), it was a jagged laughter, rough with pain.

Between them, Chulack and Muro forged a whole new style of filmmaking. It was as though they’d discovered a new dimension of light and motion. Chulack had the camera racing headlong throughout Los Angeles, while Muro captured everything from bleached-out sunglare to waves sadly lapping on the beach in dusk light.

It was a thrilling, gut-wrenching, brilliant hour of television. And as always, it reinforced, through the opening freeze-frame, what is, essentially, the show’s core belief: “our worst nightmare is just their Wednesday.”

If the opening episode was this good, it’s mind-blowing to imagine just how astonishing the rest of the season will be. Because this is a show that tightrope-runs on live-wires.

Even if you’ve never watched SouthLAnd before, start now.

From The Sky Down

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Early on in Davis Guggenheim’s peerless rock documentary, From The Sky Down, U2’s lead singer Bono talks about his lyric-writing process, inadvertently giving the movie its evocative name. Much like Wordsworth used to do, Bono sings sounds, inflections, ghosts of future lyrics, as he works out what the melody is, what shapes it needs to take, to best evoke the soul of the song. “It’s quite odd,” he says, “writing songs like that, from the sky down.”

It’s a typically Bono-esque moment, thoughtfully yet almost off-handedly wrapping a philosophy into a beautifully punchy, haunting phrase that lingers long after the words themselves are gone. It’s like his lyrics, and like the music of U2 at its best: a powerful burst of evocation and passion, an elemental hymn to transcendence.

Guggenheim captures many such moments as he documents how U2 came to the brink of implosion in Berlin in 1991, but instead fought through the darkness to create one of the greatest albums of all time in Achtung Baby. The movie strips bare the landscape of the band as they finished up the Rattle & Hum tour at the Point Depot in Dublin, on New Year’s Eve in 1990, and entered into what would be their most challenging, and ultimately most rewarding period yet. Those were heady times, ripe for a look back from a band best-known for relentlessly moving forward. U2 are a thoughtful group, well-used to analyzing everything that they do. A rehearsal for their headlining Glastonbury performance earlier this year is shown: the band finish a blistering version of The Fly, and then stand in a huddle to listen to the playback, to tear it apart and rebuild again. That scene is the perfect representation of what happened in the Hansa sessions in 1991, and the perfect summation of the band’s entire, multi-decade career. It’s why they were able to carry each other from the darkness into the bright neon, TV-screen lights of Achtung Baby and the Zoo TV tour. It’s why, three decades in, they have just stepped off the biggest rock tour of all time, the 360 tour, in which they played to more people than have ever been played to by a rock group before.

The relentless, unswerving, unflinching pursuit of perfection; the willingness to travel into the darkness in search of truth, and the ability to bring it back to the light.

All artists of every kind need it; not enough have it.

From The Sky Down brilliantly captures U2’s fierce commitment to the song, and shows us those fleeting, almost mystical moments of creation, when the alchemy of the group is in full effect. The documentary reveals the birth of a key track on the album. Guggenheim’s careful camera observes Bono and Edge as the original DAT tape from the session is played back. In the middle of Sick Puppy, which would morph into Mysterious Ways, some haunting chords emerge, built from two bridges that Edge drops into Sick Puppy as an experiment. From those fragments, Young Heart, as it is initially called, will become the world-conquering anthem we now know as One, the first song to fully come together, and the song that likely saved the band. We see those very first tentative steps as the band quickly realizes that magic is at hand. They immediately switch to finessing the chords, adding bass, vocal inflections: the thrill of creation is a beautiful thing.

But the lesson of the documentary is clear: it doesn’t come easy, nor should it.

If you had to sum up From The Sky Down, it would be about the importance of challenging yourself as an artist, and as a person, in order to truly become what you may or may not even know you can be. The band make it clear that they rarely trust anything if it’s too easy; it’s hard-won knowledge from the front lines of being an artist; of being alive. It’s what Yeats called “the fascination with what’s difficult.” Bono tells us at the end: “you have to reject one expression of the band first, before you get to the next expression. And in between, you have nothing. You have to risk it all.”

This takes up the theme put forth by longtime producing partner Flood earlier in the movie: “it’s fraught with danger, because you can fail at any moment. But that’s the beauty of it, if you’re prepared to remove the safety net, and you’re prepared to really expose yourselves, because your pursuit is after the magic moments, those moments of, ‘wow, I would never have imagined.'”

These are the moments all artists chase; and in life, we seek them too. Moments of transformation, of beautiful change, when we realize what our dreams are and how we can make them come true; or when they come true without our even realizing they were our dreams.

When the Rattle & Hum tour was in full flow, and U2 were embracing Americana, absorbing it, letting it take them to new places, Bono could never have known that his greatest achievements in self-expression were just around the corner, wearing Fly shades, shiny leather trousers, and layers of outrageous make-up. Visions can be hard to make real; but sometimes, out there slogging through the trenches, they take flight, usually after the darkest moments of self-doubt, the moment when you contemplate that the dream might always be just that. Hard work begets brilliance; transcendence doesn’t happen in a day.

As it turns out, the documentary, like all the best documentaries, ends up being about more than its nominal subject, which in this case is the hard-fought, hard-won creation of a brilliant piece of music. But From The Sky Down goes far beyond that, transcending the particular, becoming profoundly universal. It’s required viewing for any musician, writer, dancer… any artist of any kind. Its precise, clear-eyed view of the creative process is illuminating, inspiring, and full of truth about art, creativity, and life.

Welcome to the HOURGLASS

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It’s an exciting time in YA fiction; in fact, it has been for a long time. Blockbuster series have been rolling in with beautiful regularity and increasing frequency, from the original powerhouses HARRY POTTER, TWILIGHT, and THE HUNGER GAMES, to a new wave of thrilling sequences, including THE MAZE RUNNER (James Dashner), MATCHED (Ally Condie), DIVERGENT (Veronica Roth), and DELIRIUM (Lauren Oliver).

To that illustrious list we can now add a new time-twisting teen series in the form of HOURGLASS, by Myra McEntire. This extraordinarily accomplished first novel is, wonderfully, a more-than-worthy addition to this new, conceptually thrilling, thrill-seeking school of YA.

Not only is the narrative powerful, sneaky and full of reversals & shocking twists, powered as it is by a mind-bending conceptual heartbeat, but the novel as a whole is beautifully, poetically rendered. Achingly so.

On its surface, HOURGLASS is a love story, a Southern romance. But this is a novel that is all about what lies beneath and beyond those beautiful, shimmering, flowing surfaces: broken lives, sadness, darkness, loss… and life-changing passion and desire.

Especially that.

Emerson is a struggling teen, still coming to terms with the deaths of her parents, and the fact that she’s pestered by persistent hallucinations of people from the distant past (Scarlett O’Hara types, this being the South and all). The visions are getting worse, and so her brother Thomas reaches out to the Hourglass, a mysterious organization who claim to be able to help with the strange experiences Emerson is enduring.

Which is where Michael comes in.

Just older than Emerson, he represents the Hourglass. As Michael gets Emerson to talk about her past, and the people that she sees, the novel shifts gears. The easy rhythm of small town life gives way to electrifying chemistry and stunning revelations. HOURGLASS becomes a full-blown time-travel mind-bender of a book. With all its lovely and elegantly timey-wimey stylings, it’s like McEntire has taken a sonic screwdriver to the Southern romance genre and juiced it up into a starkly emotional and reality-bending tale.

Fantastic!

As the book plunges deeper into layer after narrative layer, we get drawn into the maelstrom of Emerson’s world, which is gorgeously, unflinchingly drawn. As more characters are revealed, the plot deepens, and the scope and implication of the time-rips that Emerson experiences gets wider.

HOURGLASS is elegantly powerful and fearsomely page-turning. Fortunately, it’s just the beginning: McEntire announced today that the title of book two is TIMEPIECE. As if that wasn’t enough, McEntire also just unveiled a deleted scene (containing possible spoilers) on her blog. It’s an alternate take from a key character’s perspective, which is not only illuminating, but also reveals just how many awesome secrets and revelations are lurking for the rest of the series.

Making it even harder to wait for book two.

So, yeah; a time machine would be useful right about now!

Overall rating:

Five out of five TARDISes  

(TARDII?)

The Last Werewolf

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I finished Glen Duncan’s The Last Werewolf in a state of breathless, delirious, heart-pounding wonder at the sheer goddamn power of words.

The experience of reading it feels thrillingly like the transformation that narrator Jake Marlowe endures every full moon, in his position as the last werewolf alive. Each sentence pulses with the throb of conceptual power and melancholy; each sentence has velocity and snap, like live-wires crackling.

Jake is, understandably, somewhat jaded and dissolute, having been alive for two hundred years, and facing the prospect of two hundred more. Finding out he’s just become the last of his kind only adds to his draining ennui. Especially since his mortal enemy, Grainer, leader of the Hunt and representative of WOCOP (World Organization for the Control of Occult Phenomena), has vowed to claim Jake’s scalp for himself at the next full moon. Jake knows it, and has a plan for waiting it out until then.

Naturally, things go quickly and massively awry. It’s a novel; what did you expect?

The narrative powers relentlessly along with genre-bending, mind-blowing velocity. It’s full of mythic arcs, James Bond-style thrills, Inception-level reversals, adrenaline-provoking twists, wickedly postmodern flourishes and scene after scene of undeniable beauty, savagery, poetry and sensuality.

The fact is, this book about a werewolf will show you exactly what it means to be human; will swell and fill your awareness of what being human means, and expand it accordingly.

In this sense — sentences of remarkable power, thrilling intelligence and gorgeous luminosity — The Last Werewolf is akin to Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, which, depsite being about Thomas Cromwell in the court of Henry VIII, was (metaphorically) darkly populated with its own particular brand of vampires and werewolves, and was forged in the complex, conceptual machinations of humanity at its darkest; and therefore illuminated us all.

If there’s any justice, The Last Werewolf will win the Man Booker Prize, just as Wolf Hall did.

As a writer, The Last Werewolf is one of those rare books that’s so jaw-droppingly brilliant, it stops you in your tracks, demanding one of two responses: (1) you stop what you’re doing right there, because this is just too damn good; (2) you take a deep breath, roll up your sleeves, and do it again, only better — step up even more, and make yourself a better writer. Spoiler: I’m choosing the second option. This book shows you exactly what is possible with words; creates a vertigo-inducing ontological shift: you never knew literature could be this pulse-quickeningly, heart-poundingly, world-shatteringly fantastic.

It makes you fall in love with words, with writing, all over again, even more than before. It pulls you in just as the moon drags the wolf through the blood of the human and pulls it out, snarling and wild and alive, seeing the world in a million glinting details you never noticed before. It shatters and rebuilds your perceptual world. It’s exhilarating in its transformative power.

It’s f**king good.

Read it.

Now.

P.S. please also visit the book’s website, www.thelastwerewolf.org, which is a brilliant example of how to promote a book in a rich, multi-dimensional way.

How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying

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Every now and then a perfect cultural storm rolls into the complex intersection between TV, film, stage, music, pop culture and even the economy, drawing on all of them simultaneously to create a truly unique moment. One such occurrence is happening now on Broadway, with a shiny new 50th anniversary revival of Frank Loesser’s 1961 hit How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying, starring erstwhile boy wizard Daniel Radcliffe, TV star John Laroquette, and the droll, non-giggling tones of Anderson Cooper in a culture-blending mash-up that draws from Star Trek and Mad Men as much as it does from Broadway history.

Following on from his critically acclaimed performance in Equus, Radcliffe has returned to NYC for his second Broadway starring role. Where Equus was a dark psychological analysis of a disturbed youth, How To Succeed is a brightly colored, infectiously energetic and hugely charming confectionary that belts out its song and dance numbers amidst ever-moving, coolly glowing TARDIS-like sets, and elevates the material in a raucous, entertaining manner through to its triumphant finale. Radcliffe has no problem shifting gears from one to the other, giving the impression that he was born and raised on the Broadway stage, American accent and dance moves comfortably in place. And he can belt out a tune with the best of them.

Image courtesy of derekmclane.org

While we’re still in the immediate, globe-spanning, culture-changing aftermath of the theatrical release of the final Harry Potter movie, the potentially disconcerting contrast of seeing the Boy Who Lived leaping around in a lively Mad Men-esque musical actually creates a unique & powerfully charged atmosphere in the theatre. Naturally, Radcliffe’s first appearance in the play is greeted with a massive roar from the crowd, and the energy in the room only goes up from there.

The play follows Radcliffe’s character, J. Pierrepoint Finch, as he reads from the self-help book (dryly voice-overed by Anderson Cooper) that gives the play its title, and attempts to carry out its lessons in how to make it in the tough world of Wall Street. It’s a funny, smart play, with the lyrics by Loesser and the book by Abe Burrows, Jack Weinstock and Willie Gilbert full of sly one-liners, quick banter, and still-sharp observations. It marries the whip-smart back and forth of old Hollywood movies to huge-chorused Broadway numbers, and it does it with a frankly excessive amount of charm to which it’s impossible not to succumb.

The dialogue, songs, actors and sets are constantly on the move in this highly kinetic production that never slows down, building to a finale in which Radcliffe runs, flips, dances and hurls himself throughout a number that keeps increasing its momentum, and causes the crowd to cheer and applaud numerous times before it all finally comes to a close.

Image courtesy of http://www.derekmclane.org

The original 1961 production was itself an adaptation of Shepherd Mead’s 1952 novel. Although the novel was already a comic work, the stage adaptation, produced by the team behind Guys And Dolls, upped the satirical and romantic angles, and brought in the legendary Bob Fosse to choreograph the dance sequences. The play has been revived many times since, recently in 1995 with Matthew Broderick in the starring role, and even in 1996 with former Karate Kid Ralph Macchio taking the lead. However, from a cultural perspective, director and choreographer Rob Ashford’s current revival may be the most fascinating of all. It has an edge over all other versions in that it comes after Matthew Weiner’s era-defining TV drama Mad Men changed the way we look at the New York office life in the 50s and 60s. It also exists in a post-Office Space/The Office world. All this adds extra layers of meaning and resonance. The current revival takes this proto-Mad Men world and fuses it with Derek McLane’s coolly-lit, elegantly retro-futuristic set designs, which come across as though Apple designed the interiors of the USS Enterprise of the original Star Trek series. The choreogaphy is wild and energetic as the actors hurtle around McLane’s beautiful-looking, imaginative multi-leveled sets, and the dance numbers are huge and deceptively complex. Added to that are the venerable, twinkling presence of  John Laroquette as big boss J.B. Biggley, and the undeniable star wattage of Radcliffe, their easy and occasionally improvised camaraderie ably supported by an excellent, charismatic cast of Broadway and TV regulars.

With this new production, Ashford has curated a heady, unique mix of past and future, of Hollywood and stage, which has an extraordinary energy as the cultural influences interact and become something far more than the sum of their parts. It’s both thoroughly entertaining, and, with this cast, it’s also an utterly unique cultural moment in time.