Hollywood Land
09.27.06 (4:20 pm) [edit]Ben Affleck seemed to find his own spot; he appeared to be good for the first time. He was successfully embadoied the life of Holywood's typical typcast and the aftermath of it. Diane Lane was awesome. The meaning of the silence of Lane's Hollywood's tycoon husband's Japanese mistress offers some parallel of sexual politics working in Affleck's relationship with Lane; a needy man and a neglected wife of a powerful man who prefers a subordinate and literally speechless woman. What goes around comes around in a place like the world they belong to.
Coincidently the movie Black Dahlia offers exactly the same kind of epic and set-up; a murder mystery and sexual politics in Hollywood. This came out as idiotic as usual of this director's work. Besides a series of obvious miscast might have made a lot of audiences crack up for the overstated gestures with very disengaged actings. Johanson's pose of cigarette smoking was somehow an iconinc moronness of this director, which almost made me feel sorry for him and all the production crew.
a case study; A Million Little Pieces
09.25.06 (3:41 am) [edit]I wonder what it would feel like to be James Frey, the author who had got two books published, A Million Little Pieces and the aequal My Friend Leonard, got applauds for a while until his writings that claimed to be non-fiction got exposed and scrutinized into pieces to be very fictional; heg got reproached by Oprah for the fabrication he got engaged in the books. Well, Oprah got offended because she had endorsed the book first, and found it a bunch of BS. How embarrasing it might have been to reveal herself to be total sucher. However, I am rather wondering about this man specifically today than mortification of Oprah, because I just found a copy of the other title of his for the first time in a drug store(!), which explains how prevalent his works are no matter how his works are infamous by now. I do not know if it is his first book or his second, but I opened the book My Friend Leonard and saw the apology, for it is a brand new edition, in the author's note put in the very beginning as saying most of the book is fictional, and he never was in jail for ninety days (oh, then ask yourself what were you looking for when you fabricated, deeply, so that you can learn something worthwhile about creative writing and why you wanted to write, what people's attention had to do with the impulse and/or urge had initially). I just wonder if it is embarassing, or if it does not matter to put the note that is saying pumping up the story got his book circulated well to the point that I found the copy in the drug store before midnight, so he cannot care less what the ethical was supposed to be.
I am questioning this because I read the book A Million... and found it very embarassing for its low quality of the writing. Back then, it was just like once I raise my eyes from the book, I saw someone else reading A Million...in the same car of the NY subway and I blushed for reading such a shitty book. (This is not an exaggeration. I swear this is what I really experienced and non-fiction!) I bothered with the book for I was very curious about the two incidents exposed and talked about vohemently at the same time, the one was LeRoy that I brought up before and this author's Frey's incident, which ended up coming out even bigger probably because of the anger he caused in self-help guru Oprah, which I heard that he apologized for. This sounds very different from the persona of the author he put up as the struggling addict back in those days in rehab. This might be the sufficient evidence to back up how his story might be exaggerated and/or fabricated. If they were meant to move audiences or to get the media atten tion, man, you are such an amateur.
I found a couple of interesting parts that I cracked up on, but mostly the whole book read as a immature one. I am not talking about the style that has got as its deliberate and distincitive tone and technique to sound raw, which I could understand why they were employed and what kind of effects the author was looking for. In a way, those were necessary choices made to incorporate the consistency and seemed to be successfully done. The thing that I could not stand was the author's very enfintile glorificat ion of machismo such as bragging about how wild he was and how tough he was back in those days. It was not even about if the story was based on facts, or how accurately it was recorded, but it was more about the authors view on what was the matter the addict was fighting over and what he achieved. Just because he started drinking young, and how fealess he was as a young man, so what? Do we have to be impressed by those very trivial matters? Man, I have no time for it. But to this author, those seem to matter a lot; how he was dagerously fearless, how he made friends with tough people like Leonard, a Italian organized crime leader (please), how rebelious and wild he was and how he got over the disease of addiction. There was something repulsive about this narrative after all.
There were a couple of things that I remember to be worthwhile as informations on addiction, interesti ng as episodes of his fellow patients and touching as struggle for survival.
Above all, however, people might have passed and overlooked those obvious flaws and/or its inadequate quality for its lisence of non-fiction that&nbs p;is known to sell better than fictions do in the current industry's climate.
After all, though, people should remind themselves all that matters is the quality of writing regardless of fiction or non-fiction. In that sense, Frey's works hardly passe my standard of publication. If a lot of books pass without being examined for its quality just because they claimed to be non-fictions, the industry is lowering the standard to please mass audiences. To top it off, it sounds too naive to me to judge writing by whether it is fiction or non-fiction. C'mon, everything becomes fiction once it is put on a piece of paper. Doesn't anybody know this very premise of the function of language? Or are people in the business so undereducated although they are supposed to be pros to make a tons of money out of those writings?