The Official Site
The late Canadian director, Andrew Hull, died far too young.
Years ago, he optioned a story of mine for adaptation. Before he passed in 2010, he was almost finished shooting the film, a poetic interpretation of “Breaking and Entering,” from Kiss Me, my first published book. The film has been completed now by his partner, Shaan Syed, and the Estate of Andrew Hull.
Doubly moving for these circumstances of loss.
While we of the critical classes (critical masses?) have long played the parlour game of constantly assessing the worth of cultural thingies, the rise of the blog-arena has not just “democratized” the means of declaring something genius or crap, it has established an overwhelmingly dominant method for making such judgments. More and more, we base our reception of a book or movie or art show (or, seamlessly, a restaurant or vacuum cleaner or phone) against the perceived body of other receptions. Does it meet the hype? Was it as good as Rotten Tomatoes said it was supposed to be? Did you like it as much as that woman at the Times? Was it overrated or underrated?
We don’t judge anymore. We compare judgments.
Increasingly, nuanced justifications of our evaluations are rare as sushi in Swift Current. Instead, we make our assessments according to a two-step formula: 1) What does the Machine think of it?, and 2) Do we like it more or less than the Machine? In the name of attempting to position ourselves outside the dominant opinion-making machinery (you know, the people who aren’t you and your two or three super-smart closest friends, the zombie-like hordes of numbskulls who do what the marketing departments tell them to do), we can reassure ourselves that we’re better than that, we haven’t been tricked, we’re of our own minds. I thought The Avengers was way over-rated. See? Nobody can tell me what to think!
The problem with making Over/Under the only game in Culture Town is that it relies on a fallacy of the “mainstream” (and how we can choose to be “outside” it). How a given work is assessed by the rest of the world is a moving target, and depends on where you look and for how long. But what’s even more limiting is that saying a thing is over- or underrated just doesn’t say very much. Reacting to reactions divorces us from our experience of the work itself, leaving us as falsely rebellious voters casting our ballot in order to alter a snapshot poll result instead of expressing a belief of our own.
I’m no expert. Which, in the blogosphere, entitles me to an expert opinion.
The field of study today is movie trailers. Specifically, how this increasingly decisive aspect of the moviegoing process can be done skilfully – even artfully – and how it can also make you want to stick chopsticks in your eyes. I have selected, for the purposes of comparison, two upcoming, mainstream, popcorn Hollywood flicks (so as not to apples vs. oranges things with, say, Transformers vs. There Will Be Blood).
The first is for Ridley Scott’s Prometheus which is, according to the protestations of its producers, not an Alien prequel. (Side Note: Why bother denying the obvious fact that it is an Alien prequel? Especially when the movie looks as promisingly awesome as it does?)
Now compare to Chernobyl Diaries, a new horror movie from the people that brought us Paranormal Activity (I’m a fan, BTW), about a group of young “extreme tourists” who get stranded in…Chernobyl.
Okay, maybe that wasn’t fair. Or on the other hand, maybe it was.
Yes, Prometheus likely had ten times the budget of Chernobyl Diaries. But that’s still no excuse for a trailer (presumably composed of the movie’s best bits) showcasing an idiotic premise (“Screw Moscow! Let’s hit Chernobyl and get cancer instantly!”), laughable dialogue (“I’m not leaving without my brother!” etc., etc.) and worst kind of horror movie cliche after worst kind of horror movie cliche (the false shock at the pond, the van that won’t start, the dragged-off girl, the camera held by someone suffering the DTs). As a horror fan, this sort of thing breaks my heart. I’m not kidding. It. Breaks. My. Heart.
But there’s still Prometheus to look forward to…
More great news I can now share! (I don’t know what I could possibly post next week. “Dog craps on rug…AGAIN!” Or maybe “Toronto author proves that cure for common cold remains elusive”).
Anyway, it’s been announced in Publishers Weekly today that my forthcoming novel, The Demonologist, has a new publisher for all of North America in Simon & Schuster. The Demonologist is something of a creative departure for me – or perhaps more an escalation – and so it feels right for it to have a new home. I’m inspired by the brainstorms I’ve already had with my editor at S&S, Sarah Knight, and hope this is the beginning of a long, happy marriage. Like Fonda and Hepburn in On Golden Pond. Or something.
Here’s the piece in today’s Publishers Weekly:
This is pretty funny. Because it’s true.
However, if I were to do a Shit Writers Say, we would come out looking worse…
I have been a terrible host. Here I am, posting once-in-a-while blogs and stuff all this time and I haven’t bothered to invite you to Twitter. Yes, I’m there too. And I try my best to offer a daily bit of my brain to distract or amuse or confound. Is Twitter about anything else?
Please, come on by. I’m at @andrewpyper And I’ve made punch!
Twelve years after its initial publication, the French translation of my first novel, Lost Girls (published by L’Archipel), has been given * * * 1/2 stars (out of four) in La Presse.
It’s quite unusual for a book to do anything after more than a decade other than show up in the FREE! box at somebody’s yard sale (if you’re lucky). So I am enormously grateful to L’Archipel for bringing the novel to readers in France and Quebec alike. I feel like I’ve been born again…though without all the bible thumping and swearing off booze.
Carma Spence runs a very cool blog and site called The Genre Traveler (www.thegenretraveler.com) where, among other things, she posts podcasts with writers who till the fields of genre of all sorts. She looked me up and the result is a wide-ranging conversation about fear in literature, the excitement of initial ideas, and the inadequacy of “good writing” as the distinction between so-called genre and literary fiction.
Carma did some expert editing, too, as I sound more coherent than I recall. And we must have done the interview after my afternoon coffee: I can hear the caffeine in my voice.
Grey morning. Groggy. Kids climbing over me (“Daddy’s the human chair!”) Open the paper to see…The Guardians made The Globe and Mail Best 100 Books of the Year List. Make coffee. Feel better. Sun rises. More coffee.
I submitted a first draft of my new novel to my agents this week. They haven’t read it yet – nobody has, aside from me – so I have spent the last few days floating around, buoyed by a sense of accomplishment (another one!) but still tethered by the usual authorial anxieties (am I nuts?). It’s a strange netherworld, this state of having a finished story but without response, without the animation that comes with the engagement of another’s consciousness. It’s like the hour before the guests arrive for a party. Or telling a joke to yourself.
I have never been one of those writers who is indifferent to the concept of audience, a storyteller who is “only writing for myself.” I’ve always felt this view was either a) disingenuous, or b) sad, or c) weird. Even if one never seeks publication, even if the work is meant to be private, the most intimate journal or confession, the notion of engagement is alive during its composition. There is (it seems to me) always an “other” sitting over your shoulder in the writerly exercise, even if this reader is only some fractured aspect of yourself, or someone who will never actually read it, or an ever-observing God.
That’s not really the point I started out wanting to make here. So what is that point? Something along the lines of This never gets old.
This new novel will be my sixth. Sixth! It is a number even more surprising than the reminder of one’s age (particularly when a 4 or higher is the first digit). You might think there’d be an Auto Pilot kicking in by now, a professional coolness that diminishes the virginal excitements that came with finishing a big project back in the Early Days. But here I am, giddy as a teenager with a beer buzz. I’m a little terrified, a little exhausted, a little sentimental at soon having to say farewell to the characters who came to me this time around.
Though of course I’ll be seeing them all again soon enough in the Second Draft. And the Third. And the Fourth…