And now we take a break from book banter and move slightly to the East for . . . kung-fu banter. Specifically I’ll be taking on the wuxia genre, which translates to something about a ‘flying world’ but to me means Chinese guys with funny hats, flying, unrequited love, and lots of ninjas. Today’s review is “Moon Warriors,” which is reportedly George Lucas’s favorite kung-fu movie. Not that we should hold that against it.

You can tell “Moon Warriors” is going to be awesome because it has a village wiped out in the first minute, ninjas in the first five minutes, and the immortal line: “Your majesty is so kind, and the villains are so cruel” in the first 10 minutes. And how cruel are the bad guys? The main bad guy cuts someone’s head off with his BOWSTRING, shoots an arrow into the airborne head, and then jumps up and kicks the head into the fire. That’s how you punish your lackeys old-school, people. The new generation just doesn’t know how it’s done.

The plot has something to do with a young Andy Lau protecting the good king from his evil brother– while macking on the king’s bethrothed, a girl named Moony. (No kidding about the name. I’m sure it sounds less goofy in Cantonese.) But the plot in these movies is not really the point. The point is to see people making speeches about righteousness before kicking some ninja butt. And at that, “Moon Warriors” excels.

Also, this movie features Shamu kung-fu. That’s right– at some point in the film a killer whale dishes out fishy vengeance on the bad guys. Everyone calls the whale “Sea-Wayne,” because that’s the only name he answers to. (I guess Killer Whales don’t approve of method acting.) There’s also a love scene with a rainbow, wild flowers, baby bunnies, and soulful flute music. Saying “Moon Warriors” is over the top is kind of beside the point. It’s a mess, but it’s a glorious mess. Highly recommended.

A word of warning if you’re not used to the genre: EVERYBODY DIES. Well, almost everybody. Which leaves the awkward question of who inherits the throne. (I think it’s the Killer Whale.) It’s not a spoiler because EVERYONE DYING is a genre convention; I just put this here to warn us Western folk who are addicted to happy endings. I’m also warning you because the ending is kinda random. It’s like the director said: “Oh no, we only have ten minutes to wrap things up. Okay, big fight, everyone dies. Roll credits.”

P.S. Shamu kung-fu!

A lot of people have been raising some hoopla about Amazon’s Kindle, e-books, and the death of print. Consider this post a hoopla-lowering exercise. I think people are right in saying that some books are slouching off to the Internet for all perpetuity: cook books, encyclopedias, some types of text books, computer instructions, etc. You know, searchable stuff. That’s entirely reasonable: I’d much rather my doc look up “The Beauty of Spleens” on her iphone than lug around an out-of-date copy of the “Gray’s Anatomy” doorstop. And some people will buy the Kindle, read a lot of e-books, and save some space in their carry-on. I’m cool with that. But print, as we know it, is not going to go away completely.

The chart below demonstrates why:

Can you:

• Stab it? Books Y, E-readers N
• Shoot it? Books Y, E-readers N
• Sit on it? Books Y, E-readers N
• Drop it? Books Y, E-readers N
• Freeze it? Books Y, E-readers N
• Soak it? Books Y, E-readers N
• Bury it? Books Y, E-readers N
• Scratch it? Books Y, E-readers N
• Put it near magnets? Books Y, E-readers N
• Put it near children? Books Y, E-readers N
• Put it near cats? Books Y, E-readers N
• Squash bugs with it? Books Y, E-readers N
• Use it for exorcisms? Books Y, E-readers N
• Leave it in your attic for 40 years and know people will still be able to use it? Books Y, E-readers N
• Burn it? Books N, E-readers N

The score? Books 14, E-readers 0. We have a winner. Seriously, though, in college I was lucky enough to touch a page of the Gutenberg Bible. It was a very, very awesome experience. I was tingly all over. The page was in such great shape because printers used to make paper out of cloth: they would pay beggers for their rags, which the printers would bleach and chop up into pulp. The longer the fiber, the longer the page lasts. Cool, huh? Any medium that can survive hundreds of years gets my vote. Try reading something from a 8″ floppy disc today. Now try reading a page from a Shakespeare folio. That’s right–paper kicks butt. You heard it here first.

Psst. You. Yeah, you, movie executive guy who removed the Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers dancing clip from YouTube. You, sir, are completely missing the point. It boggles my mind that the same companies that take down a four-minute YouTube clip with thousands of hits will turn around and pay millions for a 30 second TV ad. Is anyone else seeing the disconnect?

Relax, movie executive guy. Nobody is going to watch “The Ten Commandments” in its entirety on a teeny-tiny three inch by two inch screen with grainy res. They are, however, going to watch a two-minute Yule Brenner/ Patrick Stewart mash-up sponsored by the Hot Bald Guys of America–and might even consider buying your ancient, ancient movie as a result. Don’t think of it as copyright infringement, think of it as free, targeted advertising to your main audience. Consider it a loss-leader. So put the X-files blooper reels back up. Put the CSI/Veggie Tales music video back up*. And for heaven’s sake, give us our Fred and Ginger. Honestly.

Second verse, same as the first: If you persecute your fans, you will have no fans. No fans, no customers. If your business plan revolves around having NO CUSTOMERS, you need to rethink your strategy. Trust me on this one, guys. YouTube is your friend.

*Oh, come on. That one’s pretty funny.

This is not a new literary smackdown, but it’s a good one. Way back in ought-three, literary critic Harold Bloom objected to the National Book Foundation giving Stephen King an award for “distinguished contribution” to literature. Specifically, Mssr. Bloom called it “another low in the shocking process of dumbing down our cultural life.” Well, damn. Mr. Bloom has no love for J.K. Rowling either: “I went to the Yale University bookstore and bought and read a copy of “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.” I suffered a great deal in the process. The writing was dreadful; the book was terrible.”

Mr. Bloom, you snobby, snobby old man. Kindly go back to the 8th century BCE, where you can join the ‘Things Were Better In My Day” club with Hesiod, who said: “I see no hope for the future of our people if they are dependent on the frivolous youth of today, for certainly all youth are reckless beyond words. When I was a boy, we were taught to be discrete and respectful of elders, but the present youth are exceedingly wise and impatient of restraint.” (Also, keep in mind Mssr. Bloom actually criticized rock and roll and rap music for promoting sex and violence in today’s youth in his book “The Closing of the American Mind.” His ideas about the darn kids on his lawn are unknown.)

In fairness to Harold Bloom, he is irked that the unwashed masses are reading Stephen King instead of King Lear. I can sympathize with that a little bit. Side-effects of reading too much Stephen King may include an irrational fear of Maine and an inability to end things properly. But after a long day at the salt mines, I don’t care if people curl up with a copy of “It” or “The Wealth of Nations”–as long as they’re reading.

Mr. Bloom falls victim to the bias of time. It’s easy to read the classics when we’ve had a couple hundred years to see which books don’t stink. It’s much harder to pick which of your contemporaries will be interesting to the Martians in 2300. And even literary geniuses don’t play nicely with each other: see Mark Twain’s savaging of James Fennimore Cooper here. (Best line: “[Cooper's book] has no invention; it has no order, system, sequence, or result; it has no lifelikeness, no thrill, no stir, no seeming of reality; its characters are confusedly drawn, and by their acts and words they prove that they are not the sort of people the author claims that they are; its humor is pathetic; its pathos is funny; its conversations are — oh! indescribable; its love-scenes odious; its English a crime against the language.” Now THAT’S a literary smackdown.)

In short, Mr. Bloom needs to chill the hell out and read “The Shining” alongside his Ovid.

Speaking of cranky old men, here are some wise words from Peter the Hermit, circa 1274 CE: “As for the girls, they are forward, immodest, and unladylike in speech, behavior and dress.” And proud of it, Petey.

You are a poor heroine saddled with a hideous family. (Alternately, you can be a rich heroine saddled with a hideous family.) During 400 pages of misery, do you:

A) Sleep with a family member? (5 pts. 10 pts if it’s non-consensual)
B) Become a prostitute? (5 pts)
C) Become an alcohol/cocaine/laudanum/opium addict? (5 pts)
D) Commit suicide? (5 pts. 10 pts if you walk into the sea or on-coming traffic)
E) Join a psychotic hit-man on a murderous rampage? (5 pts)
F) Leave town, start your own business, and date a nice man who respects you? (-4000 pts)

Add up your total. Congratulations! Your genre is:

5 pts: Women’s Fiction
10 pts: English Lit
15-20 pts: Russian Lit
25 pts: Southern Gothic Lit
30 pts: Frank Miller Comic
-4000 pts: Chick Lit

This blog is supposed to be about banter, and here I’ve sidetracked it with talk of Spider-Man’s marital woes. So here we go back on track with two short reviews of two short screwball comedies. I’ll go into detail about what makes them screwball comedies rather than standard rom-coms later, but here’s a quick summary: screwballs involve class commentary, wise-cracking fast-talking heroes/heroines, an equally screwy cast of side characters, and a happy ending. Midnight and Easy Living are written by two of the greats, Billy Wilder and Preston Sturges, and are reworked fairy tales.

Midnight (1939) stars Claudette Colbert as a penniless showgirl who wanders around Paris in a gold lame’ gown. She connects with charming taxi driver Don Ameche but runs off to crash a fancy soiree’–only to run into drunken nobleman John Barrymore. Barrymore backs up Ms. Colbert’s bid to pass herself off as a Countess in exchange for her wooing a rich guy away from Barrymore’s wife. And then the taxi driver shows up, determined to find the girl he loves. The movie has a bit of a slow start, but once everyone shows up at Barrymore’s place in Versailles the situation gets increasingly complicated. This movie is also one of the few to have the heroine explain *why* she wants to choose money over love (hint: her poor parents? Not happy.) Elegant and effortless, this one coasts more on a Continental charm than whip-smart bon mots–though the situation twists at the end are great. Recommended.

Easy Living (1937) stars Jean Arthur as a magazine writer who runs into a streak of luck when a Wall Street tycoon drops a fur coat on her from a great height. She tries to return the coat, but Mr. Wall Street refuses to take it back–and she’s seen walking around with him. Naturally, everyone assumes she’s his mistress. Add in a swank hotel owner who wants to drum up his failing business with a celebrity and a hilarious side-plot involving insider stock trading, and you have the most market-accurate screwball ever. Also, Mr. Wall Street’s son Ray Milland hangs around trying to make it as a waiter. Naturally, he falls in love with Jean Arthur and complications ensue. There are some great scenes involving a hobo free-for-all at an automat (an old-fashioned restaurant with food in little microwaves) and our heroes trying to find out how to work a fancy bathtub. And the apartment Jean Arthur gets is just enormous. It makes a Brooklynite like myself drool. The more I think about it, the sweeter the movie seems. Highly recommended, but if you want sharper repartee’, look to Preston Sturges’s later works.

SPOILERS for Indy Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skulls.

The good editorial staff at CHUD have an interesting post-mortem on “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skulls” here. There are many points, but it can all be summed up by: “BOO! HISS!” Where things get puzzling are on the CHUD forums, where quite a few commenters fault the movie for having Indy get hitched. One commenter describes the marriage as a “fundamental misunderstanding of the [Indiana Jones] character.” Another calls it “emasculating.”

Excuse me? Indiana Jones quitting archeology to run a Modern Dance studio would be a fundamental misunderstanding. Indiana Jones marrying Sallah in Hawaii would a fundamental misunderstanding. Indiana Jones working on Wall Street and reading Ayn Rand would be a fundmental misunderstanding. But Indiana Jones marrying his childhood sweetheart, the love of his life, and the mother of his child? That’s not only a misunderstanding, but emasculating? Please.

If Indy got married in his 20’s, I could see how it could be a drag. Who would want to miss out on blonde Nazis and shrieking showgirls? But “Crystal Skull” has Indy pushing 60. Sixty-year old dudes who sleep around but can’t commit aren’t awesome, they’re just kind of sad. Is this what the vox populi wants? “Indiana Jones and the Thanksgiving at Boston Market?” “Indiana Jones and the Geriatric Escort Service?” “Indiana Jones and the Mysterious Rash?”

I don’t want to sound like those nutso talk-show radio folks who wax poetic about the “War on Christmas/Marriage/Apple Pie”–but there does seem to be an extreme anti-marital bias in the action hero world. Consider that in the Marvel/DC Universes there are only two characters that stay happily married past the honeymoon: Spider-Man and Superman. And recently Spider-Man erased his marriage from space and time in a deal with the devil to resurrect his old and busted Aunt May (who didn’t even want to continue living). Why not just have Spidey get a divorce? Marvel thought it might send a bad message to the kiddies. (Deals with the devil, however, are totally cool.) And Superman only got hitched to tie-in with the popular ABC comedy “The Adventure of Lois and Clark” (guilty pleasure #392, thankyouverymuch). The other 42 bazillion heroes have a series of one-night stands with Women In Refrigerators.

But I digress. My point is that Indy has a right to commit to the love of his friggin’ life before he’s too old to keep his whip up–and that guys who think marriage of any kind at any age is “emasculating” need Cate Blanchett to stick her rapier in an uncomfortable place and yell: “Vat iz wrongk weeth you, darlink?”

SPOILERS for “White Jazz” and “Find a Victim.”

What’s with all the incest as literary devices in hard-boiled detective stories? I just finished Ross Macdonald’s “Find a Victim” (hint: he found many) and James Ellroy’s so-hardboiled-it-falls-through-the-concrete-and-lands-in-the-sewers “White Jazz”–and to my surprise, both feature incest as a shorthand for predicting violent behavior. It seems odd to use the old “Father Knows Worst” chestnut as a lynchpin to justify murder. But considering how sorry I felt for the murderers in both books, maybe that proves the tactic works.

A word of caution here for readers of a gentle nature: you might not like “White Jazz.” If the phrases “my standard post-murder shakes” and “I broke his wrists and took the heroin” leave you recoiling and clutching your pearls, please find your way to the nearest exit. Those with strong stomachs and a high tolerance for sentence fragments, however, should soldier on. Underneath the novel’s amphetamine-paced shotgun narrative beats the heart of a corrupt, violent, sister-loving cop. Considering how many people the protagonist mows through during the course of the novel, I should feel apalled–but such is the power of Ellroy’s narrative that you can’t help rooting for the psychopathic son-of-a-gun. Of course, Ellroy cheats: almost everyone else in the novel is even worse. (I’ll certainly never think of eyeballs the same way again.) The incest angle works here because the cop yearns for his sister, but never actually goes through with it–that tension gives him a teeny smidgen of complexity.

Ross Macdonald’s “Find a Victim” doesn’t fare quite as well. Mr. Macdonald isn’t going for a po-mo experiment in how many grammatical parts you can remove from a sentence before it loses all meaning–he’s playing it straight. So when The Murderer turns out to be a survivor of an incestuous household and keeps saying things like “my father– I mean my husband”, it seems like a bit of a, well, cop-out. It reminds me a bit of the “Chinatown” spoofs that were all the rage in the 80’s, where the cop would smack the Faye Dunaway character so she’d change her story: “She’s my sister! My daughter! My brother! My second cousin on my father’s side!”

I’m not a big fan of serial killers, so I haven’t been dipping into modern detective novels as much as I probably ought. Does anyone know if the “incest as justification for moider” angle is used in the non-noir titles?

Hello, world. This is a test, and only a test, of the emergency blogging system. This blog will feature screwball comedy reviews, book reviews, and other bits of a snarky and informative nature.