Some Clickhole

If you don't know already, clickhole.com is the Onion's response to Buzzfeed.  And, every now and then, they have some great lit-themed posts.  Specifically their advice from eight famous authors and the absolutely hilarious series of letters between Hemingway and Fitzgerald discussing early drafts of The Great Gatsby. 

From Page to Screen to Screen: Hemingway's "The Killers"

THE SOURCE:

"The Killers" is a short story by Ernest Hemingway first published in 1927 and is part of his series of Nick Adams stories.  Two men in trenchcoats walk into a lunch counter in Summit, Illinois, cynical, condescending men who talk circles around the owner.  They make Nick, who's eating at the counter, go into the kitchen, where he and the cook are tied up while the owner turns away any customers that come in.  They say they're there to kill a Swede named Ole Anderson.  It's nothing personal, mind you. There killing him for a friend.  When it becomes clear that Anderson isn't going to show, the killers leave.  George unties Nick who runs off to warn Anderson.  Anderson, a former boxer, clearly knows that the killers are on their way, but refuses to do anything about it.  Nick returns to the cafe and declares his determination to get out of this town.    

Like the other Nick Adams stories, the theme of disillusionment is major.  There's the cowardice of the cook and owner, the former advising Nick to not get involved at all.  The final lines of the story:  

[Nick Adams says]"I can't stand to think about him waiting in the room and knowing he's going to get it.  It's too damned awful."

"Well," said George, "you better not think about it."

The story also relies on Hemingway's iceberg theory.  It's mentioned late in the story that Anderson "must have got mixed up in something in Chicago."  In the 1920s, the mob was a big deal in Chicago.  When law enforcement started cracking down, many relocated to Summit.  

Overall, this is an excellent piece of minimalist literature.

THE FILMS:

THE KILLERS (1946):

Director: Robert Siodmak

Runtime: 97 Minutes

The movie starts with a fantastic, nearly blow-for-blow adaptation of the original story.  The killers, played by noir character actors William Conrad (the fat man in "Jake and the Fat Man") and Charles McGraw, are sinister and distant in equal amounts.

Nick Adams (Phil Brown aka Uncle Owen from Star Wars) runs off to tell the Swede (Burt Lancaster in his first film role) that two men are out to kill him, but the Swede is resigned to his fate.  

Conrad and McGraw as the Killers

Enter Jim Reardon, played by Edmond O'Brien (The Wild Bunch, Oscar win for The Barefoot Contessa), an insurance investigator.  Nick Adams and the Swede were both employed by the same service station, which gives its employees a small life insurance policy.  While Reardon is going through the Swede's belongings, he finds a green handkerchief with a gold harp embroidered on it. This reminds him of something, but he can't quite put his finger on it.  At the morgue, he sees that the Swede's right hand is busted up, so he figures the guy must have been a boxer.  Thus begins his investigation.  

He discovers that the Swede's name was Ole Anderson, a boxer who turned to a life of crime.  The detective who arrested Anderson was once his good friend, and agrees to help Reardon figure out what happened.  Anderson fell in love with femme fatale Kitty Collins, played perfectly by Ava Gardner (Showboat, On the Beach) and took the fall for her when she was caught with stolen jewelry.  When he got out, he found that she'd gone back to her ex, crime lord Big Jim Colfax (Albert Dekker).  Along with two other established crooks, Colfax and Collins invite Anderson in on the score of a lifetime: A $250,000 daylight robbery. (That's over $3 million adjusting for inflation.)   

For reasons that will become clear later, I have to give away the rest of the plot.  If you'd rather watch the movie before finding out the ending (which I highly recommend), stop reading now, watch the movie, and come back.

Lancaster and Gardner

Reardon recognizes the handkerchief as the mask worn by one of the robbers at the Prentice Hat Robbery.  It turns out that Anderson, believing that the others were going to double-cross him, stole the entire score and, unbeknownst to the rest of the gang, ran off with Kitty, who then ran off with the money.  Reardon has a violent altercation with one of the other criminals, Dum-Dum Dugan (noir character actor Jim Lambert) who is trying to find where the money is and gets Reardon to admit Kitty ran off with it.

Reardon gets in contact with Jim Colfax, who's gone legitimate, and tells him what's happened.  He soon gets in contact with Kitty, who sets him up to be killed, but Reardon manages to get a drop on the killers (who we haven't seen since the opening) and escape.  Reardon goes to Colfax's house where Dugan and Colfax have just shot each other, and we get the final twist:  Kitty was working with Colfax the entire time.  She convinced Anderson to take all the money, so she and Colfax could have it without giving out shares.  

This is a fantastic noir film, with a great plot, solid pacing, and fantastic acting.  It was nominated for four academy awards, including directing and screenplay, but lost out to The Best Years of Our Lives on both.  

THE KILLERS (1964):

Director: Don Siegel

Runtime: 93 Minutes

We start with two mysterious men walking into a school for the blind, looking for a man named Jimmy North.  Someone gets word to North that two guys are after him and they mean to kill him, but North refuses to run.  The two men find North, who offers no resistance when they shoot him.  Or rather, they shake their guns at him, because apparently silencers mean there's no muzzle flash, shells, or any other thing one normally associates with a gun going bang.

We next see the men on a train out of town.  Lee Marvin (The Dirty Dozen) plays Charlie Strom, a grizzled veteran hitman with great screen presence, while Western character actor Clu Galager plays his partner, Lee, a living cartoon character.  

Clu Galager and Lee Marvin

Strom realizes three things.  1. He was paid $25,000 for this hit, when he'd never been paid more than $10,000 2. Jimmy North had been involved in a million dollar robbery and ran off with the money.  3. If North had the money, they would have been asked to lean on him, not kill him.  Therefore, whoever hired him has the money.  And maybe they just oughta get that money for themselves.   

It turns out that Jimmy North (Oscar nominated actor/writer/director John Cassavetes) used to be a racecar driver, so they go to his old mechanic for information.  Fourteen minutes into the movie, we get our first flashback.  The flashback lasts thirty goddamn minutes, and about half of that is driving footage with terrible greenscreen.

Yes, there's a go-kart scene.  No, it never makes sense.

Jimmy North falls for Sheila Farr (Angie Dickinson).  His mechanic keeps claiming that Farr is bad for him, and she'll ruin his focus.  Well, North has a blowout and crashes, leading to a period of hospitalization.  He finds out that Farr is a kept woman, her benefactor being crime big shot Jack Browning (Ronald Reagan).  Now, at the 45 minute mark, we cut back to Strom and Lee, who we haven't seen for two-thirds of the screentime so far.  They find Mickey Farmer (Norman Fell), Browning's right hand man, who tells them what happened next.  This flashback takes another twenty. goddamned. minutes.  Basically, North is washed up, Farr gets him involved as a driver on a big score that Browning is organizing, and North double-crosses the group and makes off with the money.  Now, over an hour and ten minutes into an hour and a half movie, we finally see Strom and Lee again.  They confront Browning, and demand to see Farr.  They go to Farr's apartment, threaten her, and she has a flashback (a mercifully brief five minute one this time) about how she convinced North that the gang was going to double cross him, and how she and Browning took the money and shot him.  The killers leave the apartment building and are shot at. Lee is killed and Strom is hit.  Strom makes his way to Browning's house, where he shoots Farr and Browning before bleeding out.

My god, the pacing in this movie is a wreck.  The inexcusably long flashbacks destroy the pacing for the investigation storyline, and the constant driving scenes destroy the pacing for the rest.  Look, car chases can be fun and exciting to watch.  Driving, on the other hand, is not exciting at all.

There's only one good thing about this movie and his name is Lee Marvin.

Unfortunately, he gets practically no screen time.

THE BEST ADAPTATION:

THE KILLERS (1946)

In addition to a spot on direct adaptation of the story, Burt Lancaster is a solid Hemingway protagonist, the honorable tough man with big feelings.  While in the 1964 version, the sum total of the similarity is two hitmen kill a guy who doesn't resist.  

THE BEST FILM:

THE KILLERS (1946)

It's strange that the movie from the '40s has aged wonderfully while the movie from the '60s is so outdated.  The 1946 version is fantastic.  Pacing, acting, plot, aesthetics.  It's a great film.  The 1964 version?  It's plagued by terrible decisions.  Besides the aforementioned flashbacks and boring driving sequences, perhaps the most unforgivable is Angie Dickinson's character.  In the 1946 version, Ava Gardner is tough, she steals every scene she's in, and you never know where her loyalties lie, or if she even has any.  In both versions, there's a scene when the robbery is being planned.  The femme fatale and the future murder victim flirt, much to the chagrin of the fatale's current beau.  In the 1946 version, Big Jim Colfax threatens to slap Gardner.  Lancaster makes a move but Gardner tells him she can take care of herself.

In the 1964 version, this happens.

Angie Dickinson spends half of her screentime flirting with the male characters, and the other half getting beaten up.  All this does is make her a far less compelling character.  In fact, every character in this version is worse than the 1946 one.






NEXT WEEK:

It's a Hemingway double-header!

We'll look at the 1937 novel To Have and Have Not, and it's three film adaptations:

The Bogart/Bacall vehicle To Have and Have Not (1944)

The John Garfield crime thriller The Breaking Point (1950)

And the Audie Murphy action flick The Gun Runners (1958)

Before and After Quiz #8

Here we go again!



1. A glamorous American couple rent a villa in the South of France, while their lives unravel due to the accidental kidnapping of 'Sandy Claws.'



2. Two noble friends get caught up in a tragic royal murder-revenge plot, end up being executed, and now free the souls of the soon-to-be-deceased as 'reapers.'



3. Marco Polo regales Kubla Khan with many different stories about the same location: the Texas-Mexico border in the 1950s.



4. After their cruise ship is capsized by a rogue wave, a boy and his aunt's slave escape on a raft and float towards freedom.



5. After the evil queen tries to have her killed, a beautiful princess runs into the woods, only to discover herself trapped in the middle of an airborne toxic event.


Scroll down for solutions!







1. Tender Is the Nightmare before Christmas (From F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night 1934, and Tim Burton's The Nightmare before Christmas 1993)

2. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead Like Me (from Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead 1966, and Bryan Fuller's tv show Dead Like Me 2003-4)

3. Invisible Cities of the Plain (from Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities 1972, and Cormac McCarthy's Cities of the Plain 1998)

4. The Poseidon Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (from the 1972 film The Poseidon Adventure and Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn 1884)

5. Snow White Noise (from the European fairy tale Snow White, and Don DeLillo's White Noise 1985)

What I'm Reading/Watching

The Signet Classic paperback on Voltaire:  I had already read Candide, but this collection includes a couple novellas (Zadig and Ingenuous) and thirteen short stories.  Some were very topical, dealing with specific Jesuits and Jansenists and their feuds, while others were more broadly philosophical and always witty and insightful.

The Pun Also Rises: How the Humble Pun Revolutionized Language, Changed History, and Made Wordplay More Than Some Antics by John Pollack:  Pollack, winner of the 1995 world pun championships, has a brief (154 pages, not counting bibliography, acknowledgments, etc.) account of the history, popularity, and neurolinguistics behind puns.  Very accessible, but at times a bit disorganized, it's a fun read on the subject.  Its original research is limited to asking questions of comedians, writers, linguists, and and neuroscientists, so it's really more of a summation of existing research.

Ended up seeing Lucy (2014) on DVD.  Holy crap was that movie stupid.  The whole 10% of the brain thing would be okay if Besson didn't try to make the movie seem profound by having characters ponder the meaning of being human his liberal use of nature footage.  Then there's the problem of having an action movie where the main character can manipulate matter and no one else can.  There's never any sense of real danger for Lucy.  That said, I can see this having a cult following.  It has a couple big names (Scarlett Johannson and Morgan Freeman), the plot is laughably stupid, and it has some pretty cool visual effects.

Vonnegut's Novels: A Personal Ranking

I'm a pretty big Vonnegut fan, and I felt I might as well get around to ranking all 14 of his novels.  So here goes.

1. SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE (1969)

No surprise here.  Slaughterhouse-Five combines Vonnegut's direct style, unconventional techniques, and personal tragedy into a masterpiece.

2. BREAKFAST OF CHAMPIONS (1973)

Despite Vonnegut himself giving this novel a C grade (in Palm Sunday), it is here that Vonnegut takes his technical experimentation to its greatest heights.

3. MOTHER NIGHT (1961)

The memoir of Howard Campbell Jr., an American dramatist in Germany during the outbreak of WWII, he is asked  by the Nazis to be a propagandist, and U.S. asks him to take the position so he could transmit encoded messages.  The novel deals with Campbell's guilt and his attempts to justify personal neutrality in a morally disastrous world.

4. CAT'S CRADLE (1963)

A parable for the Mutually Assured Destruction, Cat's Cradle lampoons mankind's self-destructive nature, as well as inventing Bokononism.  Is it any surprise this novel was accepted as a Master's thesis in Anthropology?

5. THE SIRENS OF TITAN (1959)

Part space opera, part investigation into the nature of free will, The Sirens of Titan is one of the great works of the Golden Age of sci-fi.

6. GOD BLESS YOU, MR. ROSEWATER (1965)

Eliot Rosewater is the rich heir of a rich and politically connected family.  But the town that bears his family's name is a slum.  This novel asks a question that's only becoming more and more relevant as our economy becomes more and more automated and digitized:  What do we do with people our economy doesn't need?

7. TIMEQUAKE (1997)

Vonnegut's last novel describes a timequake: time jumps backwards and everyone, though conscious of the future, is forced to relive the past on autopilot.  Meanwhile, Kurt Vonnegut is writing Timequake.

8. GALÁPAGOS (1985)

A disease has wiped out mankind's ability to reproduce.  The only people who aren't affected are a group of tourists stranded in the Galápagos Islands.  But, as natural selection takes it course, what exactly constitutes 'human' is about to change.

9. PLAYER PIANO (1952)

Vonnegut's first novel, briefly published under the title Utopia-14, Player Piano presents a dystopian future where almost all jobs are handled by machines.  Similar to God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, it asks just what our society will do to those it no longer needs, and what, exactly, is the end goal of capitalism?

10. BLUEBEARD (1987)

The autobiography of Rabo Karabekian, avant-garde abstract painter first seen in Breakfast of Champions.  While I know it's almost counter-intuitive to complain about lack of agency in a Vonnegut protagonist, the protagonists in this and the last four novels on this list seem to be almost completely apathetic to their own lives.  Even Billy Pilgrim, who believed everything he did was predetermined, spent time trying to convince people of that fact.

11. HOCUS POCUS (1990)

Eugene Debs Hartke is a teacher and Vietnam vet at a private school for wealthy but educationally challenged youngsters.  The novel takes the form of hundreds of scraps of paper written on while Hartke awaits trial for helping perpetrate a jailbreak at the nearby penitentiary. 

12. SLAPSTICK (1976)

Slapstick seems like Vonnegut took every SF premise that was floating around in his mind and tied them all together in one novel.  There are plenty of individual passages and ideas I like, but the novel as a whole seemed aimless.

13. DEADEYE DICK (1982)

Rudy Waltz accidentally shoots a neighbor as a kid, leading to a lifelong trauma.  The entire novel is Rudy flashing back and forth from his present to scenes throughout his life (or, rather, the lives of people around him.  Waltz seems more of a documentarian than a character) and hinting at the complete destruction of Midland City.

14. JAILBIRD (1979)

To me, Jailbird's protagonist, Walter Starbuck, was a ghost.  After serving many years as a minor accessory in the Watergate scandal and released from minimum security prison, and finds himself in the middle of a mega-corporation conspiracy.  The parts of this novel that deal with the Red Scare are good, but come few and far between.  Overall, I just couldn't get myself to care about what was going on when the protagonist clearly didn't.

2015 Commencement Speeches

I was fortunate enough to see Robert De Niro's commencement speech for NYU Tisch's graduating class, and it's worth a watch:

I also ran across John Waters' commencement speech at the Rhode Island School of Design:

2014: The Fault in Our Stars by John Green

The Author:

John Green (1977-    ) was born in Indianapolis, Indiana but grew up in Orlando, Florida and Birmingham, Alabama.  He double-majored in English and Religious Studies at Kenyon College, graduating in 2000.  After graduating, he worked as a chaplain at a children's hospital, then began working for Booklist and was a frequent contributor to NPR's All Things Considered.  In 2005, Green published his first novel, Looking for Alaska.  In 2006 he married Sarah Urist and published his second novel, An Abundance of Katherines.  In 2007, John and his brother Hank Green started vlogging under the name Vlogbrothers.  They now have over two million subscribers on youtube.  He wrote Paper Towns (2008) and co-wrote Will Grayson, Will Grayson (2009) with David Levithan.  His most recent novel, The Fault in Our Stars, was published in 2012 and was adapted to film in 2014.  John Green lives in Indianapolis with his wife and two children.

The Book:

Length: 313 pages
Subject/Genre: Teen issues/YA Romance


The Fault in Our Stars is narrated by Hazel, a 16 year old girl with thyroid cancer that spread to her lungs.  At a youth cancer support group, she meets Augustus Waters, a 17 year old boy who lost a leg to osteosarcoma, but will probably remain healthy.  Hazel has a terminal diagnosis, though an experimental medication has bought her some (but no one knows how much) time. Their budding (and inherently doomed) relationship is the focus of the novel.

Green uses the protagonists' cancer to amplify the typical teenage experience: angst over the future, the feeling that no one really understands you, obsession with mortality, etc.  He avoids being overly cloying or preachy, which he could have easily resorted to.

I rarely read YA.  This isn't meant as a condemnation of the genre, just a general lack of interest.  So while this novel wasn't my cup of tea, I'm happy to say it wasn't an unpleasant experience.  Before now, my limited experience with YA has mostly been of the shitty variety, where the author, either due to lack of talent or disregard for his/her audience, publishes what looks like a rough first draft.  I'm happy to say that Green doesn't do this.  While I don't find the novel particularly profound, I'm happy to say that its well-written, not only moreso than other YA I've read, but moreso than some of the adult fiction previously reviewed here (cough Valley of the Dolls cough The Da Vinci Code cough).

Despite being published in 2012, The Fault in Our Stars didn't become the #1 annual bestseller until 2014, which is when the movie adaptation was released.

The movie was a financial success, with a $48 million opening weekend.  Oddly enough, Fox's Bollywood studios have announced their plans to produce a Hindi remake.

I just realized that this is my last recommendation after over two years of doing this (and the post goes live on my birthday, no less).  Anyway, if you like YA and/or Romance, you'll most likely enjoy The Fault in Our Stars. If you're not into either of those genres, it's still an okay read, though you'll likely remain ambivalent.

Bestsellers of 2014:

Print:
1. The Fault in Our Stars (trade paperback) by John Green
2. The Long Haul by Jeff Kinney
3. Divergent by Veronica Roth
4. Insurgent by Veronica Roth
5. Killing Patton by Bill O'Reilly and Martin Dugard (non-fiction)
6. Allegiant by Veronica Roth
7. Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
8. The Fault in Our Stars (movie tie-in) by John Green
9. The Fault in Our Stars (hardcover) by John Green
10. Frozen by Victoria Saxon

Kindle:
1. The Fault in Our Stars by John Green
2. Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
3. Divergent by Veronica Roth
4. The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt
5. Insurgent by Veronica Roth
6. Allegiant by Veronica Roth
7. The Husband's Secret by Liane Moriarty
8. If I Stay by Gayle Forman
9. Orphan Train by Christina Baker Kline
10. Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand (non-fiction)

Also Published in 2014:

The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan
The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell
The Serpent of Venice by Christopher Moore
What If? by Randall Munroe
The Martian by Andy Weir


Sources:

"Biographical Questions." JohnGreenBooks. John Green Books, n.d. Web.

Green, John. The Fault in Our Stars. New York: Dutton Books, 2012. Print.

"John Green." Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale, 2014. Literature Resource Center. Web.