Today’s Little Movie You Really Need To See: NORMAN (2017)

Posted on November 4th, 2017 by Adam-Troy Castro

Today’s career-height performance and great film of the year on Netflix Disk: NORMAN: THE MODERATE RISE AND TRAGIC FALL OF A NEW YORK FIXER (2017; Israeli/American), starring Richard Gere, with support from Michael Sheen, Steve Buscemi and Harris Yulin.

I would almost call it, THE TRAGEDY OF AN UNIMPORTANT MAN.

Norman Oppenheimer (Gere), is an outsider. He’s one of those people who hover around the rich and influential, currying favor, always trying to make connections, always hoping that one will allow him to make the great deal. He’s presentable enough, but everybody does seem to know him, but all of his important business calls are made in the street, and all of his deals are always just pending (and far bigger than he makes them out to be, when he tries to use them to leverage bigger deals, still.)

Comes the day when, following a minor Israeli bureaucrat around for blocks, he finally works up the nerve to talk to the guy, and schmoozes, and schmoozes, and schmoozes, and ingratiates himself, and so on, and they walk into a ritzy department store together, and is with the guy when he tries on a pair of shoes, and says, “You know what, I’ll pay for them,” The bureaucrat says, no, no, I could never, Oppenheimer (paling at the price), says, no, I absolutely will, and mostly to get rid of him, the Israeli walks out wearing the shoes, and Oppenheimer has a contact who will be next to useless to him.

Five years pass.

And that bureaucrat, now the newly-instated Prime Minister of Israel, spots the trembling Norman on a receiving line with plenty of press and many movers and shakers in attendance, and cries, “Norman! My old friend!”

This is not a good thing. Norman does not have the access he imagines. The Prime Minister is more compromised by his association with this nobody than he imagines.

This will hurt them both.

Norman is a fascinating character. He is clearly a man who has never amounted to anything, but who has always ached to be the arranger and “fixer” of the title, even if everybody he meets with any real power sees through him right away. We don’t see how he lives. We don’t see the family he references and might be lying about. We do see that his wardrobe, while well-kept, never seems to change. And we see that his current association with an important man is not good for either of them.

Gere has played many powerful men, many who radiate money and influence; see PRETTY WOMAN, CHICAGO, many others. As a young star, when he wasn’t playing for sexual magnetism, he was playing young men in the process of becoming powerful men. Here, he plays a powerless schmuck, whose desperation is all over his face, whose improvisations are an exercise in getting the people he’s harassing to just listen to him for five more minutes. The fear keeps flashing on his face. He speaks with this rhythms of Woody Allen, and if it is odd to hear Gere give the performance of a Woody Allen, it is also tremendously effective. If Allen played exactly this role in exactly this screenplay, it would be a given that his pretenses of being an important man would never fool anybody for five minutes. With Gere, you get that he might be able to temporarily fool the mighty (like the billionaire played by Harris Yulin, here) into thinking that he MIGHT be somebody. (Though that doesn’t last.)

It plays like a comedy, but is really a tragedy. And is some kind of capital-g Great film. You need to see it.

Tags: Harris Yulin, Movies, Richard Gere, Steve Buscemi, Woody Allen | Category Movies

A GHOST STORY (2017)

Posted on October 25th, 2017 by Adam-Troy Castro

Last night’s maritally divisive ectoplasm on Netflix Disk: A GHOST STORY (2017). An actual work of art, I think, but not a whole lot of fun.

Casey Affleck is a young husband who gets slammed by another car on his way out of his driveway, dies, and rises from the morgue slab, an actual low-rent Halloween-style ghost, with an all-concealing sheet draped over him. He spends all but a few minutes of this film concealed in this way, watching in mute stunned shock as he wife mourns, as he moves away, as a new family moves in, as the whole march of human life moves on without him. There is one other ghost, a child-sized figure draped in another sheet, whose communications with him are conveyed via subtitles. They are both waiting for their loved ones to come back to them, to see them, but it is course not to be.

The character of the wife is played by Rooney Mara, who after the husband’s death says almost nothing, because there is of course no reason for her to walk around her house having conversations with herself. There is a killer scene where she sits on the floor and devours an entire pie delivered by a compassionate neighbor; the camera lingers on her throughout the consumption of that pie, a damned serious piece of business that gives her no pleasure or relief, while the draped form of her dead spouse watches invisibly in the distance. It’s a great one-take scene, riveting because of the mundanity of the action and its emotional undertone, and its extreme length is one of the reasons it works.

And it, alas, underlines both the film’s primary strategy and its chief weakness, its stillness. There are an awful lot of scenes that are just the shrouded ghost standing silent in empty rooms, underlining that this damnation, this endless waiting, goes on for years. The movie could drop literally a third, maybe a half, of its running time just by eliminating the frames without movement and not lose any plot, but then, the suffocating silence is also its source of power.

I thought it was a flawed masterpiece and damned difficult to sit through. Judi thought it was a promising idea and even more damned difficult to sit through; she didn’t make it. I imagine that some of you will get half an hour in, cry, “To hell with this,” and press the eject button, and I won’t blame you a bit. I imagine that some others will watch rapt, aware that you’re watching one of the most remarkable supernatural films ever made — let alone one of the most remarkable performances, given that its lead actor is for most of his screen time obliged to communicate any emotions his character is feeling with minor shifts of his head. I believe that every reaction from aggravation to deep emotion is wholly appropriate. It’s a great film, I think. Just be aware that you might not find it a wholly watchable one

| Category Horror

General News Update October 2017

Posted on October 25th, 2017 by Adam-Troy Castro

Okay, so the list of stories coming out by the end of 2017 just went up by one: “The Mouth of the Oyster,” a collaboration with Alvaro Zinos-Amaro, will be out in BEYOND CEASELESS SKIES “next month,” though I don’t know the exact date. There will be a podcast.

One story that will *possibly* be out by the end of the year is one I consider one of my all-time best horror stories ever, “The Hour In Between,” in the next SHIVERS anthology. I’ve been waiting for this one to see print for a long long time, folks, even after the sale. As I say, an all-time career highlight. (A couple of you have already read it, or heard me read it at conventions.)

Then in December some of you will already have access to my new Draiken novella, “Blurred Lives,” which will be in the January / February 2018 ANALOG. (Some copies and of course the e-edition will already be floating out there.) I am eager for you guys to see this, too, as I expect howls upon the very last line.

Meanwhile, reminding you that just this week, LIGHTSPEED published my latest, “What I Told My Little Girl About the Aliens Preparing to Grind Us Into Hamburgers,” and in just a couple of months, the same venue will publish “The Streets of Babel.”

That’s where we are on imminent short fiction.

The novel just passed 117K, and I still have eight floating good things, in various stages of negotiation, waiting to land. Stay tuned.

Tags: Draiken, writing | Category Books, Science Fiction, Writing