Remember Reading Rainbow, where Kunta Kinte/Geordi La Forge told us about how awesome reading was? I don’t, because I thought that show was The Worst Shit Ever. Well, we’re going to do the same thing, only with the Internet. Let’s talk about what we’ve been reading lately, because I’m about to finish reading Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (I proudly decided to keep the ‘Oprah’s Book Club’ sticker that adorns my copy) and could go for some recommendations, from you, my supportive and likeminded readers.

Most recent book finished: Blood Meridian: Or The Evening Redness in the West by Cormac McCarthy. I’d been meaning to read this for a long time, owing to someone (who was it?) recommending it to me, saying that it seems like the sort of thing I’d make into a movie. If I thought that Blood Meridian, which is of a scale and structure comparable to Homeric epics and the Book of Exodus, could make for a decent movie at all, I’d agree, because on a narrative and thematic level, its gothic, mythopoetic qualities are something I really love and connect with, and the sheer visuality of McCarthy’s prose is gripping. But I simply think Blood Meridian is too large, too verbal, and too sprawling to make for a good film. Which is why I’m glad it looks like Ridley Scott’s recent plans on the novel (seriously: how horrible would that be) seem to be for naught: the rights for film adaptation lie with Tommy Lee Jones, whose likeminded aesthetic sensibility (Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, which actually utilizes Guilllermo Arriaga’s achronological plotting to good use, is one of the best American debuts in recent memory, a vibrant, surreal fever dream on the Texas-Mexico border).
Also read recently: the Spring 2007 issue of Filmmaker Magazine, which is a terrible magazine, but which I read because we get it for free at the office and it ends up in the ‘Free Stuff’ bin. In addition to a mindnumbing piece about ‘choosing your shooting format’ (the entirety of which should read, “Choose the one that best suits your aesthetic and narrative purposes.”) and some admirable interviews with Julia Loktev, Charles Burnett, and a puff piece on Robinson Devor’s rightly acclaimed documentary on the Enumclaw Horse Case Zoo, we’re presented with an all-too-flattering ‘interview’ with Eli Roth in which he’s commended for shoehorning some hamfisted ’social commentary’ into his torture porn Hostel.

Most fascinating, though, is the extended article on ‘Mumblecore,’ which is some horseshit term some critic somewhere gave to link together the films of Andrew Bujalski, Joe Swanberg, the Duplasses, Aaron Katz and others. It’s interesting to observe this group for me - these are really the first filmmakers ‘of my generation’ to have received any sort of recognition, and there’s a certain manner in which their shambolic, poorly acted and filmed but trenchently idiosyncratic films have become the next filmmaking generation’s first (albeit minor) aesthetic movement (barf barf barf). I’ve made it known here and elsewhere that I like Bujalski’s Mutual Appreciation quite a bit - it’s smartly observed, winningly self-deprecating, and most importantly, aesthetically considered, with some nice black and white cinematography by Matthias Grunsky. Which is not something one can say for all of these ‘mumblecore’ filmmakers, most of whom have not made the splash Bujalski has because of their defiant adherence to some really ugly (but cheap!) DV as shooting format, and because none of them have figured out, besides Bujalski, how to market themselves independently of this label. Sad but true - marketing oneself matters in independent cinema, because making oneself a known quality is how you secure funding for your next movie. (Along these lines: there was a flap in the Paramount marketing department a few years back about how to sell Hustle & Flow when that film came out once everyone realized that, indeed, Craig Brewer is a white dude, and they couldn’t market the film as being by an up-and-coming black director. Brewer remains a fairly anonymous presence in the hearts and minds of moviegoers, as the miniscule box office take of his loveably cornpone Black Snake Moan evinces).

SO that’s where you come in, readers: seeing as how lately my eyes have been glazing over the awesome Cormac McCarthy and some not-very-good articles about filmmaking, what should I be looking at next?

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