Videophile: Thunderbolt and Lightfoot

I heard an actor on Bill Maher’s Realtime remark the other day about how boring the 70’s were, how he had ‘barely survived the most boring decade ever.’ What?! I don’t get it. From my point of view, that was the greatest decade of my lifetime, at least in terms of Rock & movies, and what could be as important as that? This was the real Golden Age of movies (or should I say Paisley Age?), that splendid transition of experimentation between the end of Big Hollywood and the beginning of Independent cinema – before that term became so complex, when guys like Scorcese and Coppola and Lumet and McNally and…Micheal Cimino made their mark. When guys could start redefining what a movie should be, what realism is – grit and street and dirty houses -- slathering two hour productions with broodiness, oversexed stars, silence, remorseless violence, and best of all, clean well lighted plots....Then of course Big Hollywood was birthed again out of many of these same folks.

I bring up Cimino, who most people know from the Vietnam war classic Deer Hunter movie (the second half of which is melodramatic crap), because he wrote and directed this incredible movie I saw the other day for the first time. I’d heard about Thunderbolt & Lightfoot from various cult movie magazines, but I’d never managed to get a hold of it to view until the other day. And man, did this movie impress me. I was not disappointed. There are still treasure troves of cool flicks out there. Dig, man, dig.

I’ve always been a big Jeff Bridges fan, mostly because of the 1978 King Kong, which I think still is the best giant Gorilla movie out there (I’m laughing), even better than the recent Hobbit-inspired version; and while his range as an actor is extremely limited, Clint Eastwood is always appealing to me, probably because of the way he created that incredible killer in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, the most enduring and iconic cowboy movie of all time. Gotta love the T.E. Lawrence of the West. These are the two leads in Thunderbolt & Lightfoot. Eastwood plays an itinerant, veteran crook-burglar, and Jeff Bridges latches onto him as an exuberant, footloose sidekick. Together the two manage to avoid pursuit from an old embittered colleague of Thunderbolt’s (Eastwood) and then pull off a classic big bank heist.

That’s the plot, really simply put; but the movie is really about the relationship that develops between the older, wizened Thunderbolt and the reckless, charming young Lightfoot. It’s a buddy movie, that corny Hollywood genre that never dies (think Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid or more recently the shameless shlock Thelma & Louise), and it’s also an exploration of the depravity of humanity. These are not nice guys, at least not to the people they encounter, like a middle aged tourist couple at a roadside who give over their valuables to the men when the two of them just stare at them – never saying a word, never suggesting anything. The movie really is about the peculiar friendship that springs up between these two. They're nice to each other, and they teach each other something -- first, being on the lamb is rough on the soul, and secondly, friendships are possible. Lightfoot is unabashed in his affection for the older crook, but Eastwood’s character, as you might imagine, is more reticent, more jaded, less inclined to let himself get close to the kid.

But he does get close, close enough to put his life on the line for him. The only thing you wonder in a movie like this, which relies heavily on long car chases and gunfights, is this: are the characters rich enough? That’s a hard call for me because I become so immersed in the sets and styles of these movies. I love the desert setting, and the Pacific Northwest setting, and I love how the whole movie feels shot on location. The Kodachrome ‘grit’ of these blood-splattered, nicotine-stained, plaid framed 70s movies is incomparable. There’s dirt in the lense all the time, but that feels right, that feels like the movie itself is sweating, just like Jeff Bridges as he steals a car. You can lick the perspiration of the window. The movie opens with a car approaching a church, across a wheat vista; the dust kicks up, obscures the car, and then settles around the church. That’s what these movies like, and I love the feeling, the dust and grime, not only of the scenes, but of the people, slowly setting on you.

Quentin Tarantino made what I think is his best movie, by far, recently. Deathproof. I didn’t hear much about this movie, and I’m sure it’s because people wrote it off for the very reasons I’m compelled by a movie like Thunderbolt and Lightning. It was dirty, messy, highly 70’s styled, full of violence and sex, and all about a car chase. It was an ode to the feeling that these movies created in people my age, the matinee rancor of

 murder, sex, and desperation. God it was cool. An incredible car chase, which is what many of the 70’s movies like Vanishing Point are all about – the great modern boat voyage up a river or the spacecraft exploration of the depths of space is just like the car chase across the vast diverse American landscape. So much more to say here. Suffice it to say, in brief, that Deathproof was an incredible testament to the spirit, verve, and the hot mood of movies like Thunderbolt and Lightfoot. Plus, it has an Aussis stunt-girl delivering a two minute monologue about the greatest car chase ever made, Barry Sarafin’s epic masterpiece Vanishing Point. Does it get better? Tarantino’s a mess as a diretor, more about the small moments in movies than the overall movies, but he nailed this one, and I was impressed, bedazzled no less.

Is it cheesy? Of course. But is it rich? You bet. One particular motif comes to mind. Throughout the movie, the smart-ass naive Lightfoot is cracking jokes about the relationship he’s developing with Thunderbolt, pretty harmless homoerotic jokes. And then what happens at the end of the movie? No, it’s not that kind of movie, but Cimino certainly plays with your mind a bit, as Bridge ends up wearing a wig and dress for part of the heist scheme. So, we get treated in one way to Bridges in drag with Eastwood at a drive-in movie theater where they’ve gone to hide from the cops. And to make it more believable, what does Bridges do? He siddles up to Eastwood in the driver’s seat. Think that wasn’t deliberate? What’s being said here? All kinds of things. Pay attention to the soundtrack too, that warm strumming guitar and bluesy beat like some hybrid of Cat Stevens and James Brown.

And that’s what happens in this movie as a whole. Each scene is filled with layers of meaning, style, and point-of-view. It’s about violence, of course, and it’s about men, and it’s a long meditation on desperation, the search for being a hero. As Lightfoot is dying in the car he’s always dreamed of owning, he says, ‘I feel like a hero. I know we did something wrong, but I feel good.’ He's dying of some freak injury to the head he got after he managed to pull of the heist, barely. And there’s Eastwood driving the car with his taut jaw and America sprawling behind him. The Man With No Name has become the Driver, the Journeyman. Still bad as hell, no doubt, but now we get a peak at his heart. His partner's death devastates him (but doesn't stop him).

Why does it work? Still trying to figure out. But I think it all has to do with the notion of realism that a guy like Cimino brought to the movies. Oh, and, there’s a great villain in this movie, too, played by George Kennedy. ‘Red,’ is his name, and he’s a hot-tempered, cheap-suit wearing killer from Thunderbolt’s old days. You know his fuse has been dipped in kerosene, and the longer the film goes, the closer he gets to smoldering, then blowing. He’s also ugly as hell, which I wish more actors wear nowadays. The folks in this movie look like people; that, I guess, is key. Great literature is driven by character, and so, too are great movies like this.

From My Bookshelf: Dirty Work

Dirty Work was Larry's Brown's first novel, and I don't think he ever wrote something as compelling, experimental, and startling as this book. The plot sounds almost too contrived -- two old soldiers in a VA hospital, one white and one black -- struggle with the horrific wounds they suffered years earlier in the Vietnam War. Slowly they come to tell each other the history of their sufferings and the pain of living with their injuries. 

If I remember right, there's some controversy about this book, for a couple of reasons. First, it's a book about the Vietnam War, or at least veterans of that war, written by an author with limited access to the war. Secondly, it's told in alternating points of view -- between the black and white man. So, what you've got here is a white author writing in a black voice, for much of the book. 

Well it's an experimental novel all around; it's just not your regular type of novel. (And shouldn't all novels be experimental?) And for that reason alone, I can forgive Brown for any type of transgression he may be making by writing across race. In general, I don't think it's a good idea. But as experiment, I think it's healthy. Now I can't assess whether Brown's black voice here is authentic, but I would argue that's not the point. All novels are artificial, all the voices contrived. The point is not to make something like life; the point is to make something more than life, or what's usually called Art. 

This book succeeds in that regard, tremendously. Brown borrows (as so many writers have) from Faulkner with the double-narrator technique. I've always liked this because it gives the narrative such depth; and we aren't challenged to wonder what X character is seeing versus what Y character is seeing. We see the whole story from both sides; and the voices ring true to me, if not too different from all of Brown's voices -- strong, robust short sentences in Southern drawl, unadorned prose, clean, efficient.

The plot is slow-going, but the book isn't so much about what happens as what is said. They talk about religion, culture, sex, violence, their dismal pasts, their injuries, their dreams. These are rough, impoverished, achingly desperate individuals, and the question as a reader is 'How do they go on?' That really is what stuns me about the writing, and about this book. It's about how to go on living, or not, when the suffering is so intense, so void of humanity. You have these two poor souls (not treated with any sentimentality) drinking through a long night of conversation and remembrance, and there they are, struggling with the most base of questions under the direst of circumstances: what makes this life worth living when so much of it is pointless suffering?

From My Bookshelf: A Prayer for the Dying

Stewart O'Nan's novel A Prayer for the Dying is one of those rare second person novels. I didn't think I'd like this -- I'm always such a conventional writer -- but this is a phenomenal read. The narrator here (second person) is a preacher, mortician, sheriff of a small Civil-War era American town that suffers a horrendous plague which essentially is taking the life of every one. The book is a deliberately paced, hellish account of the town's demise and the narrator's gradual immersion in the death, dying, and suffering. 

The challenge, it seems to me, is writing this type of Apocalyptic novel with a heart. I'm a sucker for the dismal, desperate setting, the lone man cast against a bleak universe. That's a classic heroic narrative, and this novel follows that tradition in many ways. The preacher tries to keep his mind and his community together in the face of bleak odds and a rampaging, violent disease. O'Nan does manage to give the narrator (you) a kind of heart; but the overwhelming horror which encounters, scores of dead that include his own wife and child, make it hard for the novel to be about anything but what the narrator witnesses.  

That said, I like this book tremendously. I'm impressed by the story, and I'm impressed by the plot, which has a stunning turn near the conclusion. I think as a reader it's less important to me to have that "heart" than to compel the reader in some dramatic human way. There's no indulgence here, no rambling, no moralizing. I also admire the quickness and efficiency of the prose. There's very little wasted here. You (now I'm in second person) could easily see another writer mucking this story up with grand paragraphs on the nature of humanity, sickness, God, morality, etc. But O'Nan doesn't do that. (In some ways, I wonder what Cormac McCarthy would have done with this story.) I think he realized that at some point the most compelling thing about this novel's subject is the clean narrative line, what happens to this preacher/sheriff/mortician as he ambles through this personal hell. 

It is a book about humanity that does not romanticize the good or the bad in human beings. It is one of those books which moves me because it's so honest. The preacher is this lone, doubting, forlorn soul grappling with enormous issues of life, death, and sickness. O'Nan does a superb job of describing his thoughts without getting in the way, without being too 'writerly.' That's something I admire. The book speaks, not the author. 

Medlock Park

I’m new to Atlanta, and I have no idea where I’m driving most of the time. But, today, I had a plan for my little girl Tallulah after I picked her up from school. I’d driven by a vast park on the way to the grocery store recently, and I knew she’d love it. I had the directions in my head, and so getting there was no problem. 

For most instances, if I don’t have something written down or on the iPhone telling me exactly where to go, I’ll get lost. I don’t have much of a memory and even less a sense of direction.

We got the park around dusk. Tallulah wore this new hat she’d bought with her mom the other day at the massive REI Store off 85-South. The hat is pink, with multi-colored dots, and it has extensive ear flaps. She looks ludicrous in the hat, somehow like an eccentric bag lady.

We did the swings for a while. There was a woman pushing her tiny kid right next to us. This kid was stuffed into his clothes so much we couldn’t tell if it was a boy or girl. This kid’s hat made Tallulah’s hat look like a beanie. The hat had about four layers to it, various forms of wool and nylon and moose. Never mind it was fifty degrees.

The whole time on the swing, the mother said only one word: doggie. I couldn’t see a dog any where, and I wasn’t up for small talk. But we were there beside her for a good twenty minutes, and the whole time, it was doggie, doggie, doggie. I wanted to throw in “kitty” but I restrained myself.

When we left, Tallulah asked me about it, and I told her that the woman only knew one word, which was probably not the right thing to say, but it was funny to imagine a person knowing only one word and then passing it on to her child. You’d think it would be a bigger word with more possible meanings, or maybe doggie, depending on the inflection, could have hundreds of different meanings.

Tallulah crawled around on this arabesque plastic marvel of a playscape. She was the only kid now, but no matter. She insisted on playing by herself, some kind of elaborate pirate game, and I took this as a good sign. You have to let them imagine and build their own minds.

In the middle of the playing, however, Tallulah had to use the bathroom. It’s usually at an urgent stage when they can’t walk and they’re walking with their knees are bent at forty-five degree angles. I felt we lucked out because I saw a bathroom in the brick building next to a Little League baseball diamond. We got inside without incident, but the place was a mess. Only one of the four toilets was not overflowing and discolored. I managed to suspend Tallulah over a toilet without her skin actually touching the seat. Tallulah held her hand over her mouth the entire time.

As we were driving home, through some back neighborhood roads, I realized that for the first time in a while, I knew where I was. We were not lost, not even a little. Tallulah was singing some song to herself in the car seat, and then, she’d bring up the stinky bathroom and giggle. I drove slowly, carefully. There were Moms pushing strollers, and there were men with leaf-blowers, and there were joggers out, and they wore reflectors, the luminous strips glowing like warnings in the deepening darkness.

First Day

I've redone the website, and I've set-up a blog to tell friends and family what's going down with my life and writing.