The Rake Magazine

Occasionally, I'll give my creative writing students an exercise that goes something like this: take a candelabra, a piece of fishing wire, a map, a casual lie that can't be taken back, and come up with a story. It must contain all of these elements, but beyond that the world of fiction is open to you. Now, just let yourself write. . . .

The 3 people (Dick Clement, Ian La Frenais, and Julie Taymor) who worked on the screenplay for Across the Universe seemed to be operating on a similar paradigm. Take all the Beatles songs you can think of, match them up with random historical events from the 60's and 70's, and create a story based on the characters and situations therein. Ready, set, go!

The result is a herky-jerky peace-love-and-war narrative that plays like Forrest Gump (another weak, insipid film, in my opinion) on acid. As in Gump, there's a slender, blonde heroine with woeful eyes, a rather dense love interest, a best friend who goes to war and comes back changed. A stoic mother, a mysterious father figure, the list goes on and on. . . .All this film is missing is the footage of John Kennedy, a character with AIDS, and Buffalo Springfield's "For What It's Worth," which is a sad omission indeed.

Across the Universe follows -- and I use that term loosely -- the life of the bastard Liverpudlian Jude in his quest to find his American father. He meets up with Max (who does, in fact, wield a hammer, though it's not silver), Sadie (sexy as all get-out), and Lucy, that doe-eyed heroine who does, by the end of the film, actually appear from out of the sky. The whole lot lives together in a walk-up in Hell's Kitchen, hopping from one bed to another, experiencing the turbulent 60's, visiting smoky bars and relying for spiritual sustenance on rock-and-roll. They ride a psychedelic bus and debate the war and hurt one another on the road to finding true love. Sound familiar?

It is. And it's probably not a bad story, even if it has been told 3,000 times. But what's missing in this film is good old-fashioned plotting: rather than allowing events to lead from one to the next -- giving the impression of an organic and inevitable outcome -- everything in this film is gerrymandered to fit the music. The screenplay reeks of writers who wandered around thinking, "Oooohhh, the race riots in Detroit, I can link those to Let It Be." and "Strawberry Fields. . . .whoa that's deep." Those song lyrics that don't lend themselves to an easy narrative device, such as the strawberries, simply get wedged in: Jude, the artist, staring at a bowl of fruit; Jude going into a frenzy and pinning strawberries to the wall; Jude struck by inspiration as he watches the strawberry juice bleed. Uh, yeah.

There are some incredibly watchable scenes in this movie. You'd have to have a heart -- and ears -- of stone not to be overjoyed when Joe Cocker appears on screen, dressed as a beggar, a prophet, and a pimp, to belt out Come Together. But in the gestalt, this is a well-intentioned mess of a movie that uses a flimsy narrative device rather than simply telling a story. As a teacher, I'd give this effort a C+. And that's if it was executed by my sophomore students at Macalester.

My advice? For the best, most startling wartime tales, check out Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried. For a heartbreaking and beautiful tribute to the Beatles, read the Modern Love written by novelist Ann Hood on the event of her daughter's death. And if you want to see a couple landmark films about re-entry after Nam, watch Coming Home and The Big Lebowski. In that order.

Across the Universe is showing on two screens at the Edina Cinema.

Movie musicals--I love 'em. This magical celluloid hybrid of dancing, singing, acting, and (very importantly) cinematography simply amazes me. If Broadway's your bag, that's wonderful, but I'll take cinema's version any day: on stage, it would impossible to track Gene Kelly as he splashes through the Hollywood streets in that iconic scene in Singin' in the Rain. To make that scene perfect, you need the camera swooping around the hoofer as his umbrella swings around and around, and then you join him as he ascends the streetlight, the camera rising to meet him in the sky... simply awe-inspiring. Furthermore, if you want to experience the full force of these treasures, well, get thee to the big screen, my friend. This week, our pals at the Parkway Theater are presenting, for our viewing pleasure, two sassy little Gene Kelly/Frank Sinatra MGM numbers, On the Town and Anchors Aweigh.

On the Town is a personal favorite, the first MGM musical to be filmed on location in New York City. The story, as usual in a movie musical, is nothing more than cotton candy: three sailors, Gabey, Chip and Ozzie, (Kelly, the Frank, and horse-faced Jules Munshin, respectively), have a one-day leave. So they decide to hit the town, visit all the sights, drink milkshakes and dance... you know, like sailors do on leave. Along the way, our heroes meet three girls--the saucy cabdriver Brunhilde Esterhazy (Betty Garrett--what a cutie) who lusts after Chip with singular determination; the anthropologist Claire Huddesen (Ann Miller, whose last role in this world would be the creepy landlady in David Lynch's Mulholland Dr.), who sees in Ozzie the remnants of a sexy prehistoric man; and Ivy Smith (Vera-Ellen), Miss Turnstiles, a dancer whom Gabey falls in love with.

By some insane coincidence, Miss Turnstiles is from the same milkshake-and-clover small town that Gabey also calls home, there's a mean old Russian piano teacher who has Ivy in her clutches, and a horrible running gag about Lucy Shmeeler (Alice Pearce) being just about the ugliest woman in the world (it's actually quite disturbing how they make fun of this poor lady). But the musical numbers are dynamite, with its book and lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green (who gave us the masterpiece Singin' in the Rain). Despite the fact that it was filmed on the Brooklyn Bridge, in Rockefeller Center, and the Empire State Building, directors Stanley Donen and Kelly (again, the minds behind Singin') gave On the Town the needed intimacy that one would usually associate with a movie shot in a studio soundstage. And being a Gene Kelly musical it has one of those crazy dance sequences toward the very end.

Anchors Aweigh is also highly regarded--it's famous for the scene with Gene dancing with the cartoon mouse Jerry. Frank Sinatra's also in tow, and the pair also play sailors on leave.

These are a pair of great movies for young and old--I imagine children especially taking to dancing like cavemen in the "Prehistoric Man" number from On the Town, or singing, as I did when I was a pup, that movie's opening tune "I Feel Like I'm Not Out of Bed Yet", and trying to hit those low, low notes. I still sing that song today--it just gets the morning started right.

Ken Burns' The War launched last evening. It was virtually impossible not to know this, as it had been advertised almost literally everywhere, and if you have any interest in anything that public radio or television broadcasts, you'll have heard or seen tons of ads already. As usual, Burns is exceedingly earnest, and, as usual, The War--like The Civil War, Baseball, and Jazz before it--is being not-so-subtly billed as the definitive account of that incredible event. Unfortunately, the first episode is an unholy mess, weighed down with cliched narration and an irritating soundtrack, a confused narrative that lurches forward and stumbles back in time, and interviews that are both startling for their candor and startling for their tedium.

I had the very great pleasure to interview dozens of World War II vets for an unpublished (and unpublishable) first novel that I wrote many years ago. As in The War, the men I spoke with were gentlemanly and brave--it is no small feat to recount such horrors, not to mention to pause mid-sentence to try to keep oneself from weeping in front of a perfect stranger. But these were the fascinating interviews: in every conflict are the men and women whose lives only marginally touched the grinding machine of war. Some of the men I spoke with (they were all Navy combatants) had enlisted at the tail end of the war and the whole of their experience was tooling around the coast of America.

There's nothing wrong with that--my own Grandfather Derr was drafted into the occupying Army that wandered the ruins of the far East in the wake of World War II. He had no horrors to recount, and I'm damn glad for that. My other Grandfather, Grandpa Schilling, was a medic who landed in Normandy two hours after the first soldier hit the beach on D-Day. He was haunted by that experience his whole life, and never spoke of it except to my Aunt Mary. I wish that he had seen only peace. But there were also countless people who remained at home, and many have great stories to tell about the trials of living at home during the war.

But Burns doesn't seem to get that there's also a lion's share of people whose experiences were, well... they were boring. Perhaps because he limited himself and the scope of his film to the tribulations of the citizens of four small to smallish towns in America. (Those towns are Sacramento, California; Mobile, Alabama; Waterbury, Connecticut; and Luverne, Minnesota.) For instance, Burns gives us the testimony of the man who befriended a young English kid, and we're told that this British boy lost his dad to a German submarine, and he (the narrator) felt just awful hearing about that. Well, Mr. Burns, it is probably much more potent to have interviewed someone who actually lost their father, rather than a second hand account. There are many such discussions, usually with the same people.

Even worse, Burns got into some trouble for initially excluding Hispanics and Native Americans from this story, which is a grievous error. So Burns tacks on a few interviews with Hispanic soldiers (after a heinous Norah Jones song that was obviously meant to close out part one.) This section is suddenly riveting, and makes it appear as if the protest were less about including Hispanics and more about making this thing actually entertaining.

Would it have been so awful to have included a major city in The War? Why only small towns? Including, say, either Los Angeles or Detroit would have given Burns myriad sources from various cultures and first hand accounts of two of the most famous riots in history: the Zoot Suit riots of '42 or the Detroit race riots of '43, both of speak volumes about race and the war at home.

The War is a diffuse effort, a film that juts and sways all over the historical map and can't seem to find its footing. One minute you're in Hawaii during Pearl Harbor, then you're in Europe in 1939, then you're back listening to an elderly woman recount how they really didn't like Hitler in Mobile, Alabama, and you go "what?" Tom Hanks makes his appearance, narrating--they can't make a movie about the Second World War without his participation. Too often, we get lofty speeches about what the war meant, in lieu of first hand accounts of the suffering. The old soldiers descriptions of Bataan and Pearl Harbor say so much more than you ever could, Mr. Burns.

What The War made me yearn for was some Studs Terkel and specifically his World War II masterpiece, The Good War. The Good War is a surprising work, and its people never boring, but often shocking to the extreme. Studs knew enough to find folks from every walk of life, in the small towns and the great cities, in the halls of Washington and the ghetto. He spoke to the men and women who felt the war was justified, the downtrodden who fought despite knowing that they had their own fight for freedom back home, and the few brave souls who objected to this war and sat out. It is a crazy book, and Burns could stand to have some of the real madness that accompanies war in his epic.

Let's call this a hybrid of the fictional Brazilian exposé City of God and Errol Morris's police procedure doc The Thin Blue Line -- both tremendous entertainment. Manda Bala (send a bullet) is a bizarre documentary detailing the rise of corruption in Brazilian culture as well as the country's kidnapping epidemic. "Men will steal with a gun or a pen," says one talking head. The film boasts garish cinematography, a dynamite score, and perhaps best of all, a fearless director who can get even the worst, most hardened criminals to open up. Stories include money laundering through a frog farm, images of the booming plastic surgery trade (all the ears cut from kidnap victims need replacing), and kidnappers philosophizing about the meaning of life. --Peter Schilling, Jr.

Opens Friday at Landmark Theatres, 612-825-6006.

Flaunting its fabulous new facelift, the Parkway Theater opens its doors on Sunday to this month's Fearless Filmmakers event. Don't be confused if you see a lot of youngsters in the lurking about. It's not the venue; it's the event. Acknowledging our overwhelming focus on adults in the art world, Fearless Filmmakers has taken a stand to correct the oversight by focusing on "Kids in the Biz." The evening will begin with music by Now, Now Every Children -- a lovely, languid sound. And Joe Minjares, owner of the Parkway and Pepitos Restaurant, will even provide appetizers and drinks. The screenings will begin at 6 p.m., and will include 15 films made by kids between 7 and 17 years old. Following the screening, there will be a Q & A session with the filmmakers, and an after party with a Guitar Hero competition.

Sunday at 5 p.m., The Parkway Theater, 4814 Chicago Avenue, Minneapolis; 612-822-3030; $9, students $7, children $5.