Making up for The Notebook, Nick Cassavettes channels his inner Sociologist

This review was written in 2006 for the online magazine Athens Exchange. The piece is rather rusty- it was my first attempt at writing in many years. But it's a decently funny write-up about an unexpectedly funny movie. Enjoy, hate, comment and criticize.


You’ve already seen Alpha Dog. You’re familiar with its genre- teenie bopper gangster- you just didn’t know that it had been identified. Kids get too stoned, watch violent and exploitative music videos and take hostages whenever their Cherry Lane drug deals go south. Suburban privilege has been consistently wasted on the young, Alpha Dog preaches, and the only difference between Alpha Dog and Over the Edge is these kids speak like they were raised in Detroit public housing.

For the x-y generation, these films are pretty blasé. Being raised in the secretly permissive 90s means having at least a secondhand knowledge of petty criminality. Let’s go ahead and say that we live in a post-gangster rap world. So, if you didn’t hang out in the smoking section in high school, or, if your 16 year old didn’t get gonorrhea at a weekend slumber party orgy while rolling, maybe you’ve seen one of the many attempts at documenting the after hours world of teenage vice.

In the past decade and a half, films such as Kids, Thirteen, and Bully have placed a cinematic face on the whole teenage behavioral problem. Alpha Dog, much like a shaky teenager, either really wants to be a Larry Clark movie- naked teens using drugs, youthful exuberance going too far- or a white trash criminal’s morality play. It performs neither task well. Luckily, I love crime movies-even the weak pasty white boy kind-and I find bong hits really, really funny to watch on screen.

Alpha Dog recounts a week in the unraveling high life of Johnny Truelove (Emile Hirsch) and his gang. Helped by his father-Bruce Willis impersonating Italian leather-Johnny supplies his Southern California neighborhood with drugs and employs thugs of the usual low self-esteem. He’s a Scarface for the four-bedroom brick ranch posse.

Business becomes complicated when Jake (Ben Foster), a telemarketing speed freak with a $1200 debt, evades payment and fights spit with fireballs when Johnny’s hires try to muscle the money out of him. A pissing contest ensues with Truelove eventually trumping Jake by kidnapping and murdering his little brother (Anton Yelchin).

Cassavettes’ film is based on events surrounding the demise of San Fernando Valley drug kingpin Jesse James Hollywood. Hiding out in Brazil until his capture in 2005, Hollywood became the youngest person ever to make the F.B.I’s Most Wanted list. With production having wrapped some months prior to Hollywood’s arrest, Cassavettes was forced to reshoot the film’s original ending.

Watching the film and understanding that the writer/director kept the narrative as fact based as possible, it feels like a really well shot A&E special. Alpha Dog rolls along much like a true crime show; for the most part, the drug use hangs hazily over the scenes, allowing these idiot characters to mess up their own damn lives. Although, I think watching a red-eyed Justin Timberlake take bong hits-and become “so high that (he) can’t even see”-will be a favorite scene of any moviegoer. Cassavettes use of the film within the film device, a faux documentary, will bore most viewers- its depth level is set at spork.

Unfortunately, Alpha Dog is subject to the rigors of its reality. A malady that Nick Cassavettes’ narrative efforts can’t quite surpass. Example: Ben Foster’s Jake Mazursky. I’d seen him before as the long greasy haired brooding arsonist in Hostage and as the bleach blond brooding Angel in X-Men 3: The Last Stand. Here, he depresses himself into a tattooed Jewish neo-Nazi (?) with a penchant for kung-fu. Foster is powerful as Jake: he fills every scene like a 2-litre soda that’s been shaken some. He fizzes for a moment, and you are unsure if he is going to blow his top this time or not. Usually, he does.

It’s difficult to discern if Foster’s performance is powerful due to talent or the fact that he is not included in the final hour plus. Nothing happens to Jake-he doesn’t get capped-Cassavettes found it impossible to write the character into scenes that he just didn’t factually belong in. The truth tricked the director’s fictions. Foster is responsible for most of the energy early in the film; serving not only as a catalyst, but also as pure entertainment, the story suffers without him drop-kicking it along. As his character gets fact-ed out to the picture’s sidelines, the film shifts its weight to Emile Hirsch’s Hollywood and rookie Justin Timberlake.

The metamorphosis of Justin Timberlake over the past few years will surely quadruple the film’s exposure. He’s finally released some music that hasn’t been totally written off by the serious music press, adding many new fans to the hordes of maturing NSYNC groupies. The word is still out on whether irony or true enjoyment is to blame for his rise in popularity.

As for acting, he’s not horrible. During the exposition, he appears as comedic relief, some of it unintentional: lifting weights during a “yo mamma” scene, smoking weed during a suck my $!*% scene- he coos and laughs like pretty boy furniture. Playing a stoned Southern California surfer type does not make an actor

But as you watch Timberlake in his final scene, he slowly, and with the methodology of someone who thinks he can’t turn back, tapes up the mouth of the young boy he is about to kill. His goofiness is shed at this point: he is the same stoned out kid for whom “bitch” is a word with multiple uses. He is about to become a real, hard core criminal and he is not sure how to behave. Maybe I’ve caught the same bug everyone else caught, this Justin Timberlake is now cool flu, but I think you’ll leave the theatre at least respecting him.

I really want Alpha Dog to be viewed as a true crime dramatization and nothing more. But that’s impossible. It will be compared to movies of the “bad kids” ilk. It will be viewed as a mirror to some bigger problem in our country. In the end you don’t watch the film as a meditation on crime and punishment, which would have made the whole thing more enjoyable. Cassavettes wants this movie seen as a social critique of suburbia.

Bully told its true life suburban teenage double cross with extreme brutality, the graphicness of its sexual violence forcing me to look away from the screen. Thirteen, obviously more feminine, tried to offer insight and familiarity into what seem to be bland, age specific problems. What is Alpha Dog’s entry into the youth film lexicon? Well, Bruce Willis’s declaration that “this is the fault of bad parenting” is wrong. But that is the determined sociological undercurrent surging through the movie, the directors’ insistence that there is a fall guy, and I don’t think any of you are going to care. A scapegoat for our social ills will in no way make this a better movie. The only thing society, as a great intangible being, has to do with this movie is that it can’t provide a way to keep everybody out of trouble at all times. But remember one thing, crimes make really good movies.

Rock School, Part 1

Tuesday’s New York Times found columnist David Brooks, along with Little Stevie Van Zandt, musing over the “fragmentation of rock and roll.” The two reach back into their pre-Reagan memory vaults, back when music was integrated, long before the niche marketing of the 1990s and beyond. Not only has rock been boutiqued to death, they argue, but today’s music makers have discarded the “long conversation” that rock inherited from blues, blues from what’s his name, and what’s his face from so on and so on.

Luckily, Brooks isn’t the only aging fan out there worrying over the cultural lessons our entertainers aren’t teaching us. He quotes Sasha Frere-Jones and Carl Wilson, two writers who recently weighed in on rock’s current sociological mess. Frere-Jones’s New Yorker article noted that white indie rock, the genre atop most critics’ best-ofs, has a serious inability to shake its ass- at least in a blues and Africa influenced way. Wilson argued in Slate that white indie rockers can and do create danceable music; rock’s real problem is that it’s become the strict domain of upper-class liberal arts majors.

Brooks views this fragmentation as part of the larger problem from which our country suffers. He sees it necessary to “set up countervailing forces- institutions that span social, class and ethnic lines.” Van Zandt wants to teach American music history in the schools to “establish a canon, a common tradition that reminds students that they are inheritors of a long conversation.” And I agree. Knowing one’s roots is becoming an exceptional quality in the technological society. Unfortunately, most of the other kids will laugh at you for preferring T.V. to YouTube, or being able to recall what 45 rpm means.

An unfortunate side effect to having a well-schooled knowledge of any subject is that it creates a barrier between the knower and the common appreciator- I understand the subject with greater depth and am therefore more capable of discussing its worth.

It becomes difficult to enjoy the new without weighing the work against years of supposedly better, authentic material.

Also, having a brain full of facts and names only causes the knower to drop those names on other people’s toes.

For example...

This summer, my local rock weekly reviewed an album that I felt rather indifferently about- the extremely popular British singer Amy Winehouse’s Back to Black. Her music can be easily described as throwback, it borrows heavily from old R&B and her singing style is reminiscent of old torch song women.

The reviewer did what’s easy to do: write her album off as paint by numbers aping- you might as well go buy an old Betty Lavette or Etta James record, the critic wrote. This type of criticism is often true, but it’s only a vital critique to those of us who exist in a context of vinyl collections, a population of folks that was never very large and is continuing to wane. Winehouse and her fans live on the web and are too mobile for any dusty references.

Speaking of fragmentation, lack of cohesion, and the increasing focus on the individual as a boutique market- a student of American music would likely use any newly unearthed performers as a way to differentiate themselves from the throngs on MySpace. It’s exactly what has happened following the popularity of the Strokes, White Stripes, the neo-folk scene and even the ska rage. We like to create new musical and fashion identities as quickly as possible; there is nothing new about this phenomenon. Musicians and fans are constantly rediscovering old tastes and reinterpreting them, albeit badly, for their own times.

All this makes an institution which spans social, class and ethnic boundaries both desirable and impossible. We should wholeheartedly teach American music history in the schools, right along side art appreciation one-oh-one. But I wouldn’t hold any breaths over its sociological effects…the fragmentation we are talking about started long before thrift stores were selling out of flannel shirts. (I’ll save class, race, and pop music for the next post.)

The Mystery Guest by Gregoire Bouillier

Bonjour, So I've decided to give blogging a shot. I'll begin by posting an essay I wrote last spring on Gregoire Bouillier's The Mystery Guest. The essay was originally published by The New Humanist, an arts and culture ezine based out of Athens, Ga. Please enjoy, hate, and comment.

Lying Liars and the Nation who loves them

In 2006, when publishing company Farrar Strauss and Giroux unleashed the marketing juggernaut behind The Mystery Guest, George Bouillier’s memoir became the first book to be published including a live action trailer as part of its marketing strategy. Flash animation paired with rock music had become common as publishing houses adapted to internet advertising, but never before had a book been sold using actors, directors, and best boys alongside the usual jacket blurbs and book tours.

What’s amusing is that Bouillier’s book is not some action-packed, Dan Brown mud flap, or similar airport snoozer. It’s a lean 120-page memoir of a lost lover’s return, told with heavy French irony, which has drawn comparisons to Woody Allen’s films from U.S. reviewers.

What’s more amusing is that it’s a memoir, published in 2006, that doesn’t stink of its genre or of the times, to put it lightly.

2006 saw the unraveling of James Frey, one of America’s most popular memoirists, the threads of unraveling of Augusten Burroughs, another famous memoirist, as well as the plagiarism trial of critically acclaimed author Ian McEwan and the dirty dismantling of Kaavya Viswanathan, the Harvard text stealer.

The Mystery Guest is refreshingly void of reckless drug use and tortured suppressed childhoods. No hardscrabble coming-of-age saga. No over-sentimentalized tragedy. It contains none of the sad-sackery that has become synonymous with the memoir. Just some 40-year-old French guy writing self obsessively about broken hearts, fate, books he likes, and wine. The Mystery Guest even has a moral. And it’s also relevant and important - trust me.

Before refund-seekers ripped page 163 from their copies of A Million Little Pieces, before Oprah publicly admitted to feeling deceived by his work, James Frey wanted to be a writer.

“I wanted to be a writer that had an impact,” he told The Guardian’s Laura Barton last fall. “I wanted, and still [want], I want to write books that change people’s lives, change how we think and live and read and write. I [want to] write books that are read in 50 or 100 years.”

His heroes are the tough American male writer archetypes. Miller, Hemingway, and Kerouac- writers whose wild, macho histories go a long way toward explaining the main fallacy in Frey’s memoir. The auto collision and subsequent cop brawl that his book is famous for is a far cry from being arrested for drunk driving and released the same night on a $750 bond. Surely, he felt the need to beef up his tale to mirror his mentors. Unfortunately, his mentors had the good luck of publishing their work as fiction.

As far as he’s concerned, Frey is a victim of marketing, which is also where the book’s publisher, Doubleday, and Frey part ways: “I remember somebody at the publishing company told me that if the book’s 85% true there’s no problem,” he told The Guardian. Frey’s statement that his text was originally conceived as a work of fiction and that once contracts were signed and selling copies became the issue, the text became formatted as a memoir, is not corroborated by Doubleday. As far as they‘re concerned, they got duped just like Oprah. Without being able to sit down with Frey and attempt to measure his authenticity, I want to side with the guy on this one. Can you imagine him saying, “Hey, behemoth publishing company, let’s pretend all this stuff is real so that we can sell more copies.” You only have to turn on the television, watch “Survivor,” or the minute-by-minute live courtroom sagas to figure this one out. Readers and watchers are buying non-fiction by the ton.

Running with Scissors, Augusten Burroughs’ melo-memoir of his teen years, is probably the most popular memoir of the past decade. Its reputation is cemented rather infamously by the recent Hollywood film made in its image - a best selling book whose movie incarnation was neither positively reviewed nor attractive to its audience.

And while Burroughs has yet to draw the true ire of the press, his work is facing increased scrutiny. One New York Times reviewer quipped that he was one reporter away from being the next Frey. But the inquiry into Running with Scissors is decidedly more legal than Oprah-atic in nature.

Burroughs’ adoptive family, who comprise a substantial part of his story, banded together, filed a lawsuit, and told their side of the story to Vanity Fair. The suit, according to the article published this past January, states that “Burroughs and St. Martins (the publisher) intentionally fictionalized the portrait of the family to make the book more sensational and therefore more marketable” and that “the author, with the full complicity of the publisher, literally has fabricated events that never happened and manufactured conversations that never occurred.”

All allegations have been denied by Burroughs and St. Martins, and no official comment has been made; but Burroughs, in a separate Vanity Fair article, said “this is my story…it’s not my mother’s story and it’s not the family’s story, they may remember things differently.” It seems Burroughs decided against informing his subjects that he was writing a book about them, as is the protocol of many memoirists.

Now, I don’t want to be presumptuous, but I’ve got a feeling that a confession will be forthcoming from Mr. Burroughs. Just a guess. Times are getting tough for writers and storytellers. As audiences demand realistic blood-curdling drama en masse, their requirements of authenticity for said bloodshed is becoming stricter; it follows that the punishment for failure to meet those requirements will also be ugly. In the above mentioned Vanity Fair article, Buzz Bissinger wrote “the more shocking it is, the more sensational it is, the greater the prospect of fame and fortune.” Honestly, I had kind of hoped that the written world would’ve been spared from this kind of Hollywood-style competition.

How sensitive to lying are we? As a country, we’ve always been picky. Watergate and Iran-Contra were both episodes of fraud that neatly finished with pardons. President Clinton’s lies cost millions in lawyer’s fees footed by the general public. Bush Junior’s fallacies require advanced algebra to calculate their costs. We are so imbedded in the “truthiness” of our political leaders, and more so our celebrities, that adding another smokeless gun to the pile is something we just can’t handle and, perhaps, as Laura Barton wrote, “our recent desire for facts is an indication that we are recoiling from a culture that has grown increasingly synthetic.”

We are demanding that storytellers follow the same rules as journalists. And while I would love to point the finger at some lying politician for betraying our trust, as much as I want to point to 9-11 and say that this is all a result of our national fears - it’s easier to just chalk it up to money.

Writing about plagiarism for The New York Times, Charles Isherwood posited that our obsession with truth and originality is a symptom of viewing ideas as hard currency. “[It’s a] shift in cultural attitudes toward the meaning and uses of personal experience,” he wrote. “We are living in an age marked by a heightened sensitivity to the idea of one’s own life, and one’s own words, as a commodity with prospective commercial value.” Guy Debord may want to rephrase: “the Society of the Saleable Spectacle.”

The long lines of Americans ready to debase themselves on national television are indicative of Isherwood’s thoughts, even though he was talking about a higher art. Memoirs, journalism, blogging, mud wrestling, television, and war - we’ve all just got to get paid, right.

“Just when you think you’ve thought of everything,” Gregoire Bouillier writes in The Mystery Guest. “You forget the book sitting right there on your bedside table.”

That’s how Bouillier came into my life. Specifically, how Bouillier became important in my life. As 2006 turned muddier and the muck thickened into something sure to carry over well into 2007, this slim tale of love and literature offered more hope and promise than I could have ever asked for.

The day after Michel Leiris, Bouillier’s friend and mentor, passes away; Bouillier receives a call from an ex-girlfriend inviting him to a party. The circumstances of their breakup had always bothered him and this from the blue call, coinciding with Leiris’ death, seemed reason enough for Bouillier to give the party a shot.

The party is a bust: lots of snooty Parisian performance artists and hangers on, his ex barely acknowledged him. As he grabs his coat lying near a bouquet of flowers and his exit, she comes up behind him and says “roses are the only flowers I can bare to see cut.” Frustrated, Bouillier bolts. But by the time he gets home, he’s been awakened to the meaning hiding in her words. He searches his apartment frantically for the right book - it’s here somewhere, the old copy of Mrs. Dalloway she lent him so many years ago. There it is, piled near his bed. He flips through the text and finds the line “roses are the only flowers I can bare to see cut.” Virginia Woolf, his ex’s favorite author, had written them much earlier that century, and here they were cleaning up a messy break-up and heartache.

“Certain books can find their way into our lives and literally help bring them to fruition,” Bouillier told Yann Nicol in an interview for Villa Gillet. In his book, Bouillier explains his love affair in relation to Virginia Woolf’s novel and how it had affected his ex’s life down to her amorous decision-making. “What I’m trying to say is that literature has a use,” he continues in Yann Nicol’s interview. “Books don’t just have a market value. They’re not just a good way to kill an hour.”

Bouillier believes that truth and fiction are intertwined. Rather than just being stranger than each other, they influence each other in larger ways than we are willing to accept. We like our stories to be massaged by facts, but Americans are asking that even “truthy” fact-based work, such as memoirs, be held to a severe accountability like our politicians.

We have two American writers accused of fraud: James Frey has been cold-cocked because he fudged the edges of his life, sold it to us as truth, and when we found out he wasn’t completely forthcoming, we strung him up. Burroughs gave us a tale of his debauched, bad luck childhood; he correctly read our society’s desires, wrote a dirty story for us that wasn’t very factual, and soon, he might be hanging from those same gallows.

But we shouldn’t be so shocked at their lying because we asked for it. We like hearing about other peoples’ suffering: their drug use, their sex lives, and their childhoods. Each story must be increasingly filthy; it was only a matter of time before entertainers started faking it for money - hell, even sweet little Frenchman Bouillier. He made an overly sarcastic book trailer, a bland marketing ploy, assigning visuals to his work before the public even had a chance to read it, sensationalizing his tiny tome into a super modern commercial of pronounced French noses and cigarette smoke. But I forgive him.

“If there is a mystery, it’s that people write books and other people read them,” he told Yann Nicol. And that’s the simplicity we are losing; that journalism, novels, stories, and even television and film exist to serve not the greater good, just a good. I didn’t like his story, don’t like his style, his “truths,” but I have to agree with Augusten Burroughs when he emphasizes that “it’s [his] story.” And to call James Frey a fraud is to call yourself one as well. At least he publicly announced his flaws, emasculated himself to the nation at large.

Michel Leiris, Bouillier’s mentor, said that writing must “illuminate certain matters for oneself at the same time as one makes them communicable to others.” And I agree, especially when we allow our creative types to fudge their work a little and wink while they do it.

Bouillier Photo (c) Gerard Berreby