Cinema Speculation by Quentin Tarantino

The filmmaker as critic

I think Tarantino is a brilliant filmmaker, and I always enjoy listening to him talk about movies. His unabashed love of action, horror, kung fu and other "disreputable" genres is refreshing to someone who isn't always enamored with the sincere, slow-moving art-house films and Oscar bait that more respected critics seem to favor. If you share his tastes in that regard, you might want to check out the Video Archives podcast Tarantino co-hosts with his fellow filmmaker Roger Avary after you finish reading Cinema Speculation.

Review

In this book, Tarantino focuses on a slice of (mostly) 1970s American cinema. For some reason Cinema Speculation doesn't have a table of contents, so I'm going to provide one here: "Little Q Watching Big Movies," "Bullitt (1968)," "Dirty Harry (1971)," "Deliverance (1972)," "The Getaway (1972)," "The Outfit (1973)," "Second-String Samurai: An Appreciation of Kevin Thomas," "New Hollywood in the Seventies: The Post-Sixties Anti-Establishment Auteurs vs. The Movie Brats," "Sisters (1973)," "Daisy Miller (1974)," "Taxi Driver (1976)," "Cinema Speculation: What If Brian De Palma Directed Taxi Driver Instead of Martin Scorsese?," "Rolling Thunder (1977)," "Paradise Alley (1978)," "Escape from Alcatraz (1979)," "Hardcore (1979)," "The Funhouse (1981)," and "*Floyd Footnote." Obviously the time period covered here roughly corresponds to what is known as the New Hollywood (or American New Wave). The old studio system was dying, and Hollywood was experimenting with new directions that tended to be auteur-driven, explicitly violent, morally ambiguous, and less conventional in narrative structure.

Quentin Tarantino was born in 1963, so he was still just a kid when this ferment was beginning to take place. (He was, for instance, five years old when Bullitt came out.) But, as is revealed in the first chapter, "Little Q Watching Big Movies," by 1970 his mother and stepfather were taking little Quentin with them to enjoy the counterculture programming at the Tiffany Theater. He learned quickly that if he kept his mouth shut and his eyes open, the adults would continue to let him tag along. Because he was allowed to see movies the other kids couldn't, Quentin felt like he was the most sophisticated kid in his school class.

After the introductory chapter, the book settles into a groove of discussing -- chapter by chapter -- movies from the late sixties and early seventies that made a strong impression on young Tarantino. His analyses are often revelatory, sometimes including first-hand information that the older Tarantino got directly from the directors or screen writers. He also, amusingly, incudes his impressions as a naive kid watching these movies for the first time, explaining how scenes can work even if you don't fully understand what's going on. Tarantino's digressions can often wander far afield, which has the potential to be annoying but I find them entertaining.

"Second-String Samurai" is the first BIG digression from what we had assumed was the groove the book had settled into. In chapter seven, QT takes time out to talk about his favorite Los Angeles Times movie critic, Kevin Thomas. Tarantino begins by talking about the Times' main movie critics: Charles Champlin (basically a tool of the studios), followed by Sheila Benson (wholly unfit for the job), and finally Kenny Turan (a "real" critic but a particularly nasty one). Tarantino had little use for any of them but greatly appreciated the Times' second-string critic, Kevin Thomas, who not only went to see the art-house, foreign, and exploitation films the other critics didn't have time for, he had a deep appreciation and understanding of them which Tarantino learned from. While Tarantino didn't always agree with Thomas' opinions, he described the way Thomas approached exploitations films as being like a devoted sports writer writing about a good high school team -- always rooting for them.

In "New Hollywood in the Seventies," Tarantino breaks down what he sees as two distinct directions filmmakers took during that period. The Anti-Establishment Auteurs -- who included Altman, Rafelson, Penn, Peckinpah, Cassavetes, and others -- looked back on the old Hollywood and didn't like what they saw. They aspired to make films in the spirit of Fellini and Truffaut rather than Hawks or Wyler. These directors made movies that were often unsettling and hard for audiences to understand. Perhaps in reaction, they were soon followed by the first generation of filmmakers to have attended film school. These "Movie Brats" included Bogdanovich, Coppola, Scorsese, De Palma, Lucas, and Spielberg. What set them apart from their predecessors is that they were film geeks -- they loved old movies, including genre movies, and, at least in some cases, wanted to make the best genre movies ever made.

For most of the rest of the book, Tarantino returns to his rambling, discursive discussions of specific movies as the decade wears on. "Sisters" dives into the early filmography of his favorite director, Brian De Palma. "Daisy Miller" serves in part as an excuse for remembering the largely forgotten actor Barry Brown. "Taxi Driver" illuminates how screen writer Schrader and director Scorsese conspired to remake The Searchers as a contemporary revenge thriller, while "Cinema Speculation" imagines how the film would have been different if De Palma (who was originally slated to direct) had made Taxi Driver instead. And so on. The book concludes with a fond reminiscence of Floyd Ray Wilson, a guy who dated his mother's friend and lived in their house for a while. Like Tarantino, Floyd also loved movies, and he had a profound influence on young Quentin's thinking. He also ultimately moved Tarantino, in an unexpected way I'll leave it to you to find out, to write one of his later movies.

This is an immensely entertaining and informative book for anyone who likes Tarantino or shares his movie-watching sensibilities. The one knock I have against it is that the book is poorly edited. I give it credit for distinctly retaining Tarantino's voice, but far too many typos and grammatical errors made their way into the final text. Surely HarperCollins can do better than this for their authors!

Needful Things by Stephen King

Uncle Stevie has just the thing for you

By a quick count, I figure I've read more than thirty of Stephen King's books at this point, which is about half of his output so far. I just now got around to reading 1991's Needful Things, and I'm sorry to say it's not going on my favorites list.

Review

The premise is simple and quite promising: A stranger comes to the small town of Castle Rock and opens a store, a kind of a curiosity shop to outward appearances. The owner (Leland Gaunt) always has in stock (or will soon) the one item that each individual who comes into the shop desires more than anything else. Of course, the real price of that item will be far greater than money.

The premise is simple and very promising: A stranger comes to the small town of Castle Rock and opens a store -- kind of a curiosity shop to outward appearances. The owner (Leland Gaunt) always has in stock (or will soon) the one item that each individual who comes into the shop desires more than anything else. Of course, the real price of that item will be far greater than money.

Introducing a supernatural or alien element into a small town and watching its inhabitants spin out of control is a plot device that King employs often and well. King excels at creating a large cast of characters, each with their own compelling back story, and playing them off against one another. A great deal of the novel consists of Gaunt snaring the locals with irresistible bait and thereby enlisting them in his scheme. When he trips the final switch on that scheme, the town erupts into an orgy of madness and violence that has you turning the pages as fast as you can.

The problem is that the scheme is so elaborate it takes a painfully long time to set up and entails a lot of repetition of the same elements. It's obvious from the beginning what kind of creature Gaunt is (there are no twists at the end). When reading a story about the supernatural you have to suspend disbelief to some level, but the final battle between Gaunt and the sheriff involves some less-than-believable elements that just seem silly.

King says he intended Needful Things to be not so much a horror story as a satire on 80s greed and consumerism. Clearly, the "needful things" are also a metaphor for addiction, and King is said to have just gone clean from all of his (except cigarettes) when he wrote this novel. Whatever the author's intentions, Needful Things ultimately doesn't come together as a fully satisfying work. 

Summer of Night by Dan Simmons

Simmons writes science fiction, horror, and mysteries

After an intriguing opening, this 600-page tome felt like slow going for a long time; but the action and suspense definitely pick up in the second half.

Review

Summer of Night (1991) reminded me in many ways of Stephen King's It (1986), which I suspect provided Simmons with a great deal inspiration for the later novel. In both books a group of kids come together to fight an ancient evil that has been lying fairly dormant in their small town for a while. The flashbacks in It are set in 1957-1958, while the action in Summer of Night takes place in 1960. The 30-year "Nostalgia Pendulum" was in full swing for both authors.

Summer of Night also reminded me of Robert McCammon's Boy's Life, which was published in 1991 and set in the early 1960s as well. It and Summer of Night feature ensemble casts of kids who work together to fight the evil that is out to get all of them. But, while his friends play their roles, Boy's Life is really Cory's show. Coming-of-age horror novels are fairly common. (Stephen King has written a slew of them, from Carrie to The Institute), but I don’t believe there are a lot where a group of kids work together and are all more-or-less equally important to the narrative.

It's a long, slow read but ultimately worth the time investment. Simmons uses those 600 pages to craft believable characters and interesting relationships between them. The novel ends with a pyrotechnic blow-out as the kids finally confront, on its own turf, the evil entity that has lurked in the placid town of Elm Haven all these years. 

The Loop by Jeremy Robert Johnson

 

Did this Robert Johnson meet the Devil at a crossroads? 

I hate marketing copy that says a book is like x crossed with y. It's lazy and it's rarely accurate. Mostly, the marketing department is looking for an easy way to grab onto the coattails of what is popular at the moment. Right, so... I'm going to make one of those comparisons in this review, anyway. 

Review

In the early pages of The Loop, a high school student begins having some sort of seizure in class. He suddenly becomes hyperviolent and, before first-responders to the scene shoot him, viciously murders one of his teachers in front of everyone. This happens near the end of the school year. Rather than try to bring students back to school after the traumatic event, the district cancels classes for the rest of the year, and graduating seniors will be mailed their diplomas rather than receiving them in a ceremony. As a result, a number of students in this small, central Oregon town decide to have an end-of-school party one night at some caves in the nearby mountains.

In the wake of the killings, the son of one of the more prominent families has gone missing. While the authorities are searching for him fruitlessly, he is holed up in one of the caves where the party is going to take place. Whatever was wrong with that other student is wrong with him, too, and he plans to share. Before the party night is over, a plague of violence will be unleashed on the town. Only a small group of students who managed to escape the infection will remain to stand in the way of the others.

The blurbs for the book inevitably invoke Stranger Things, but that's a misleading comparison. It's not a book about kids on bikes fighting otherworldly creatures. The more apt comparison -- one I think the author himself made -- would be Dazed and Confused crossed with 28 Days Later. The students are slackers, druggies, jocks, and all the other social gradations to be found in a high school. In an interview, Johnson said he was inspired by the social dynamics of S.E. Hinton's The Outsiders, with its the rich kids versus "greasers," to attempt something similar in a more up-to-date context. The main protagonists, Lucy and Bucket, are perhaps the ultimate outsiders: an adopted Peruvian orphan and a child of Pakistani immigrants. They both have to navigate not only the tensions caused by their racial heritages in a mostly white rural town but also the pressures of a town where the disparity between rich and poor is stark.

While the setup and the inspiration may be Young Adult, the novel doesn't stay in that lane. By the second half it has veered into something closer to what David Schow called "splatterpunk." The high school kids have the homicidal energy of the infected in Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later or either version of The Crazies, and the author isn't shy about describing the mayhem in vivid detail. While tourism may be the town's main industry, its most prominent employer is a biotech firm called IMTECH. And it is, of course, an IMTECH experiment gone wrong that has unleashed biomechanical parasites engineered from alien octopus tissue and an Internet-based hive mind on the unsuspecting denizens of Turner Falls.

The Loop starts slow, taking time to build out its young protagonists as believable characters, and then it kicks into overdrive with a fast-paced narrative style that invites you to quickly rush through to the end. To the author's credit, he follows the logic of the book's premise to its bitterly inevitable outcome. Honestly, it's fine, but there's nothing new here. My only complaint is that there aren't enough new ideas or narrative-shifting twists to warrant the novel's 300-page length. I'd give it an extra star if it were a hundred pages shorter. 

The Store by Bentley Little

Bentley Little rarely makes public appearances.

The Store is the first novel by Bentley Little that I’ve read, but it probably won’t be my last. It reminded me a bit of Stephen King's books, and I’m a Stephen King fan. The King novel that especially comes to mind when you read the description of The Store is Needful Things. Both are about a new store that opens in a small town, offering a full inventory of Evil to the residents. That’s pretty much where the similarities between the two books end, though. 

Review 

While the nefarious store called Needful Things is a small curio shop, the store that comes to Juniper, Arizona, is a Big Box like Walmart or Target. Like Walmart in particular, the corporation behind The Store looks for small towns that don’t have pre-existing competition from other large, national chain stores. When The Store arrives, it’s the biggest thing around, and it quickly begins to drive the independent “mom ’n’ pop” stores and restaurants on Main Street out of business. The Store also quickly becomes the biggest employer in town. (New employees soon learn, however, that The Store’s HR department isn’t exactly up-to-date on enlightened workplace practices.) 

Protagonist Bill Davis is a telecommuting tech writer, so his fortunes aren’t as tied to those of local businesses as is the case with other characters in the story. A least, not that he realizes at first. He repeatedly goes before the town council to express his opposition to The Store’s exemptions from environmental requirements, its predatory practices, and more – but it soon becomes clear that the council is fully in The Store’s pocket. And, despite his opposition to their doing so, Bill’s own daughters take jobs with the store because it pays better than any other employer in town. 

As the story develops, The Store takes over more and more of Juniper, including the schools, the parks, and even the police department. Besides that, you really don’t want to meet The Store’s pallid, emotionless “night managers” because they have a simple solution for dealing with troublesome citizens who resist The Store’s plans. Without going into detail, let’s just say opponents end up becoming night managers themselves. Resistance truly is futile. 

Ultimately, in his effort to stop The Store’s reign of terror and free his daughters from their employment contracts, Bill confronts the owner. Like Leland Gaunt, the proprietor of Needful Things, the CEO of The Store (Newman King) might just be Old Scratch himself, or possibly one of his minions. He offers Bill a deal: take our training, become manager of the Juniper store, and you can do anything you want with it. The deal seems too good to be true, and, of course, becoming manager of his local Store and virtual dictator of his whole town presents Bill with temptations and challenges that make it difficult for him to hold on to his moral core. The devil knows his business. 

The book isn’t without flaws, including some plot holes and character inconsistencies that can be hard to swallow. But overall it’s a fun, fast read, that lingers with you.

Thérèse Raquin by Émile Zola

I recently read Stephen King's new novel, Billy Summers, and was intrigued by the incidental fact that Billy was reading a novel by Émile Zola called Thérèse Raquin. King never describes the novel, but he mentions it several times, as if inviting you to take a look at it for yourself, So, I did. 

Review

If you distilled Thérèse Raquin down to its essential plot points, you could almost turn it into an EC horror comic. Thérèse, through no agency of her own, is married to a sickly, boring young man named Camille. One day, Camille makes the mistake of introducing his wife to a robust, virile former schoolmate of his named Laurent, In time, Thérèse and Laurent become attracted to each other and begin to have an affair behind Camille's back. Eventually, they decide Camille is the one thing keeping them from complete happiness, so they plot his murder. The murder itself is played out in horrific, violent detail as Laurent drowns Camille in the Seine while Thérèse watches.

The lovers succeed in making the murder look like a boating accident, preempting any suspicions of foul play. Since it takes a while for the body to turn up because it had been pushed down into the current, Laurent takes to visiting the morgue each day, hoping to identify the body and help the police close the case. These visits, described in chapter thirteen, turn into a bit of Grand Guignol as Zola describes the corpses in vivid detail. We learn, along the way, that visiting the morgue is an entertainment for many.

Sometimes gangs of small boys came in, mere children of twelve to fifteen. who rushed along the windows and only stopped in front of female corpses. They leaned on the glass with their hands and ran their impudent eyes over the bare breasts, nudging each other and passing smutty remarks, learning vice in the school of death. Young louts have their first women in the Morgue. 

With Camille finally buried and their crime unsuspected, the lovers decide to avoid each other's embraces for a while to further divert any thought that they might have had anything to do with it. They depend on mutual friends to ultimately suggest that perhaps the two of them should get together, which was also part of the plan all along. But each of them has become haunted by guilty visions of Camille's corpse. By the time they are joined in matrimony, each is repulsed by the other, and they are no longer able to experience the pleasure they felt when they were together illicitly. What follows is a gradual descent into hallucinatory madness, physical abuse, and vicious recriminations. The final paragraph of this nasty little novel is a masterpiece of degradation and spite that would, as I indicated earlier, have been at home in a pre-Code horror comic. 

I have, of course, left out important developments and characters in this short summary, but it should be enough to let you decide if this is the sort of thing that interests you. I found the first half of the novel to be compelling reading, but it began to drag in the second half as the author prolonged the suffering of the two lovers. Nevertheless, I admired the unflinching way Zola examined the motives of his characters. In the beginning, when Thérèse falls for Laurent, Zola makes it clear that she does so for the physical pleasure of sex -- there's no mincing of words here. Even Laurent is a bit frightened at first by how much she enjoys it.

Reactions to this novel are fairly mixed. In its day is was famously described as "putrid" by one critic. While Zola held it up as a study in naturalism based on the interplay of character types, the novel is definitely overheated and "over the top" in all sorts of ways. Others have pointed out the similarities to Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment and Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart. While I don't see any similarities to Billy Summers, I can certainly see why Uncle Stevie thought Thérèse Raquin worth bringing to his readers' awareness. 

Mexican Gothic by Sylvia Moreno-Garcia

 

Moreno-Garcia's master's thesis was on women
and eugenics in Lovecraft's works

As I was reading Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, the one thought that kept running through my mind was, "My, God! This woman writes beautifully!" She crafts her sentences with such limpid clarity that the book is a pleasure to read on that level alone. That's helpful because the story develops very slowly for fully two thirds of the novel's length, carefully putting each element in place, before the full horror is finally revealed. Review Reviewers often mention Rebecca and Wuthering Heights when reaching for comparisons to Mexican Gothic, and they could also invoke My Cousin Rachel for the plot device that motivates our heroine Noemí Taboada to visit High Place. The real progenitors of this novel aren't so much gothic romances, though, as they are gothic horrors like Bram Stoker's Dracula and Matthew Lewis's The Monk, as well as weird tales like Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper and H.P. Lovecraft's The Colour Out of Space. For the record, Moreno-Garcia cites the stories of Horacio Quiroga and the horror films of Carlos Enrique Taboada as influences, though I confess to being unfamiliar with them. The evil patriarch of High Place is Howard Doyle, the name being a bit of a tribute to Howard Philips Lovecraft and Conan Doyle. Howard Doyle's "enormous jawline," of course, evokes Lovecraft's unusual appearance. Discredited theories of eugenics play an important role in this novel (a reference to Lovecraft's racist beliefs), as do the legacies of colonialism, racism, and misogyny in Mexico. But the real villain of this piece is Virgil, a Dracula-like seducer if there ever was one. The mounting disquiet that Virgil invokes draws you into the narrative as Noemí finds her mind gradually slipping. The eventual denouement does not disappoint. With suddenly escalating tension, disgusting rituals, and the revelation of a loathsome abomination in the catacombs below, this is gothic horror at its finest.

The Forgotten Island: A Horror Novel by David Sodergren

David Sodergren loves his pug

Short Review

David Sodergren's The Forgotten Island won't win any literary prizes for skillfully drawn characters or plausible sequences of events, but it is a fast-paced yarn that pulls you along with mounting suspense. And, best of all, it takes you to a "lost" tropical island that's infested with scary-ass monsters. If you like good, old-fashioned monster stories, this will scratch that itch. It's just begging to be turned into a low-budget, creature feature by a budding young Sam Raimi or George Romero wannabe. If I were Joe Bob Briggs, I would have tallied up the dead bodies and bare breasts for you. I didn't, but -- trust me -- there are plenty. 

The Last House on Needless Street by Catriona Ward

As a young teen, Ward woke up each night feeling a
hand in the small of her back pushing her out of bed.

Review

You should go into this novel knowing nothing about it. I'll do my best to avoid "spoilers" in this part of the review because they really would spoil it.* 

The author writes with sensitivity and the best of intentions, seeking to reveal aspects of how the human mind can work that are puzzling and, possibly, signposts pointing toward a better way of understanding who we are. That sounds pretty heavy, and I suppose it is. I have to admit, though, that I respected this book more than I enjoyed it. The author uses misdirection, unreliable narrators, and slow reveals to keep the reader off balance and guessing for two-thirds of the book. Even as certain truths begin to come clear, other layers remain to be peeled away. Frankly, my patience was tried almost to the point of giving up by all this peeling away. I'm glad, however, that I did stick with it. The author rewards your patience, though perhaps only just.

While The Last House on Needless Street uses certain tropes of the horror novel, it is not, in the end, what it appears to be. The author herself admits the novel is "disguised as horror." However you decide to categorize it, the work sits more comfortably at the literary than at the genre end of the spectrum. It has garnered high praise from many critics, but I found it only mildly interesting and not entirely convincing.

I have more to say, but in doing so I have to give away some of the twists. I've moved the rest of the review to a new section below the footnote.

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*And, by all means, avoid looking at the author's afterword and end notes for the book until you have either finished reading it or until you've gotten at least two-thirds of the way through.

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Commentary with Spoilers

The Last House on Needless Street attempts to show how a mind can deal with trauma through dissociative identity disorder (DID), which used to be known as multiple personality disorder. In the early chapters of the book, we see events unfolding through different first-person perspectives -- a man named Ted, his daughter Lauren, and his cat Olivia -- as well as from the perspective of a young woman named Dee who suspects the Ted of having abducted and/or murdered her sister Lulu when the sister was a young girl. As the story unfolds, we suspect Ted's "daughter" is really the abducted girl and that perhaps the "cat" is really a second personality Lauren/Lulu has created to deal with the abuse dealt out by Ted. 

Dee buys the house next door to Ted's house and uses it as a base to spy on his activities. As she does so, she becomes more and more certain that Lulu is a prisoner in the house, though at one point she breaks into the house and doesn't discover her. Ted makes trips to see a psychiatrist who he tries to fool, trying to get information about how to deal with Lauren by describing situations on TV shows that he makes up. The psychiatrist isn't fooled, except that he really is fooled in a way that finally becomes clear. Like Dee, the psychiatrist believes that Ted may be abusing a young girl that he is holding prisoner. He doesn't report his suspicions, though, because he wants to use Ted as the subject for a book.

But Lauren doesn't exist. She is another facet of Ted's personality. As is Olivia. It is Ted who was abused as a child, and Ted whose personality has fragmented into separate "people." All those years ago, when Lulu disappeared, it was Dee who was responsible for her falling onto the rocks at the nearby lake. Dee began to run away in a panic, but turned back when she realized her little sister might not be dead, When she returned to the rocks, the little girl was gone. Dee saw someone driving away with the body and came to believe it was Ted who stole the dying child, but it was Ted's mother. Ted's mother saw it all, and Ted's mother liked to perform "experiments."

There are more twists and turns, but this is the essence of the book. The author keeps the reader disoriented and guessing through most of the book, which isn't a bad thing at all. Nevertheless the story is filled with implausible coincidences and convenient plot devices that, for me at least, make the whole thing hard to swallow. Ward might have gotten away with those infelicities in a more fast-paced or thrilling narrative.