Tag Archives: gregory maguire

Oz The Great and Powerful

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Image courtesy of Disney.com

I went through several stages in anticipation of Disney’s “Oz The Great and Powerful.”

First, I felt resentful. If Hollywood was going to produce a big-budget epic on the subject of Oz, how could they overlook the material from Gregory Maguire’s Wicked series? No, I committed to myself. I was not going to shell out my money to support that unforgiveable betrayal.

Then, through a combination of my partner’s enthusiasm and the ubiquitous movie trailers, my curiosity was piqued. They came up with a compelling cast. I thought: could a movie really be bad with James Franco, Michelle Williams and Rachel Weisz? It looked like fun. And really, maybe the film world is big enough for more than one new story about the legend of Oz.

But next, I read the New York Times review. Wow. I haven’t read such a lambasting in quite awhile. I was back to the stage of writing off this new rendition of The Wizard of Oz as a highly likely disappointment. Here’s a little excerpt from film critic Manohla Dargis:

Can the major studios still make magic? From the looks of “Oz the Great and Powerful,” a dispiriting, infuriating jumble of big money, small ideas and ugly visuals, the answer seems to be no.

Ultimately, I decided to judge for myself. I went to see the movie with my honey-bunny and a friend just this afternoon.

The one sentence synopsis: “Oz The Great and Powerful” is about a charlatan magician Oz (James Franco) who learns how to change his shifty ways when he’s transported to a fantasy world, and he’s the one person who can serve up justice for a people terrorized  by a wicked witch.

So what can I say? The kids in the audience liked it (and there were plenty of them). But as a cross-over movie for adults, “Oz The Great and Powerful” fell flat for me. There wasn’t much to hold my interest in the story. Meanwhile, the one-dimensional characters and cutesy devices (a rescued porcelain doll) worked against that interest, in an eye-rolling and cringing way.

It’s unfortunate because I think kids’ films can work for adults, through delightful imagination (the Harry Potter series) and/or an interesting subtext (The Golden Compass). “Oz The Great and Powerful” has a little bit of the former, but mostly it felt to me like an unsuccessful mash-up of vintage and modern fantasy sensibilities. On the latter score, you could find a more intriguing subtext in a pre-school picture book. Good is good. Evil is evil. And according to Sam Raini’s Oz, only men have the psychological complexity to waffle a bit in between the two.

 

 

Gregory Maguire’s The Next Queen of Heaven

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Showing how far behind I’ve gotten in my reading, I just finished Gregory Maguire’s late 2009 release The Next Queen of Heaven.

If you’ve poked around my site, you know Maguire is a literary hero of mine (maybe you noticed a particular sidebar icon).   My appreciation for Maguire is manifold:   his intricately re-imagined fairytale worlds, and the sly twists therein; his sense of humor—a winning combination of absurdity and crotchitiness; and his expert rendering of hapless anti-heroes.

The Next Queen of Heaven has all of these peculiarities to recommend it.   Even as a departure from Maguire’s retold fairytale stock, there’s still a backdrop of magic and myth, vis-a-vis the Virgin Mary and the simmering possibility of another Christmas “miracle” in the works.

A little synopsis:   40-something, thrice divorced Leontina Scales is desperately concerned about her 18-year-old daughter Tabitha, a foul-mouthed, intractable, near drop-out high school senior with a knack for sleeping around with small town losers.   So Leontina stages a paradoxical intervention.   She’ll show Tabitha the error of her ways by shaming her with a strong dose of bad behavior.   But the plan is thwarted when Leontina gets accidentally hit over the head by a falling Virgin Mary statuette, rendering her aphasic and unable to care for herself (or, maybe it was all part of her plan).

Not a bad premise, and combined with the setting—the marginal upstate New York town of “Thebes,” that’s inching toward Y2K with angsty superstition—things start off with plenty of quirky narrative drive.

I laughed out loud quite a bit while reading, particularly during Tabitha’s wry, fatalistic observations, and a hilarious Christmas pageant scene that is some of Maguire’s best literary humor ever.

In a sense, he’s freer to take things to extremes with an original story.   And, at the same time, there’s an added relatability to his contemporary characters.   Passages about Tabitha’s discovery of sexual pleasure, with the local bad news-heartthrob Caleb, are haltingly vivid (not graphic).   Brought in later to the story is co-protagonist Jeremy Carr, who can’t break free of a shattered love affair, or the small town Catholic community where his gayness is a dirty secret.  He’s the kind of guy most of us know, or have known.   The denizens of tNQoH’s Thebes are each uniquely handicapped by personal hang-ups, but not meanly so.   Even the homophobes, like Tabitha’s brother Hogan, manage to achieve a measure of redemption in their earnest, if misguided pursuits.

They’re doing the best they can with what life dealt them.

Maguire’s break into contemporary, realistic fiction (realistic applied loosely:::things approach send-up on occasion) is not without its uneven moments, however.   Things start out quick, drag in the middle a bit, then pick up nicely.

It’s an issue of the narrative drive not quite meeting the demands of the subject.   A degree of character floundering by Elphaba in Wicked, or Liir in Son of a Witch, worked well for Maguire’s epically lost heroes, where the scale of personal, even philosophical, discovery was vast.   But in a modern context, where the characters’ problems are “smaller” and more familiar, the meandering character journeys get a little sluggish.

For a good part of the story, Tabitha is on a search for Caleb, who has clearly moved on from their sexually-charged relationship, and I was anxious for her to move on too.   Same thing with Jeremy, who is shown in repeated scenes of passive snits with the guy who dumped him.

A plot diversion in which Jeremy’s gay men’s chorus (actually, a trio) has to negotiate rehearsal space at a neglected convent—the Sisters of Sorrowful Mysteries—provides a clever observation about what gays and nuns have in common in a heteronormative society.   But it doesn’t quite hit the wacky heights of life with the Maunts of the Cloister of Saint Glinda from the Wicked trilogy, of which it is a rather plain derivative; nor does it serve such a critical purpose.

As Maguire’s first work that explicitly deals with modern gay and bisexual men and their troubles, tNQoH treads familiar themes—AIDS, loneliness, estrangement from family—but the delivery is matter-of-fact and ultimately heart-warming.

Tabitha’s younger brother Kirk, the beleaguered “good son” of the family, is immensely charming, and a spot-on portrait of queer coming of age.   The bisexuality of Willem, Jeremy’s old flame, is handled equitably and effectively, forgoing a typical “is he or isn’t he?” debate (or at least, that’s up to the reader to decide).

Everyone, gay or non-gay, is looking to escape something, in most cases the social confines of Thebes itself.   Like much of Maguire’s work, the future of these embattled characters is unclear; but there is hope.   For Jeremy, it comes in an opportunity to get discovered while performing at an AIDS charity concert in New York City.

So, my bottom line:   the journeys here are worth following.  Will sexually-loose, ungoverned Tabitha make something of herself?   Will Jeremy transcend heartbreak and musical mediocrity?   And there’s worthwhile wisdom along the way, i.e. if you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get, what you’ve always got.

tNQoH gets my full-on recommendation, even if it doesn’t sustain the engrossing quality of Maguire’s re-imagined subjects, my favorites—Wicked, Son of a Witch, and Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister.

In Search of Retold Stories

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I love writing retold stories.

It may seem like a cop-out to take a proven successful plot and characters, tweak them and call the story your own. But to me, if your story entertains, what’s the big deal?

You could probably make the case that all contemporary fiction is derived from ancient mythology, folktales, or parables–there are no original stories out there even though everyone sets out to be fresh and original. The advantage of a novel that is unapologetically re-imagined is there’s an immediate connection with a readership who liked the story the first time and are curious to check it out a second.

I just finished a phenomenal book: Douglas Clegg’s Mordred, Bastard Son, which is drawn from the King Arthur legend.

I had to reorient myself to the source material since my only recollection of Mordred was a snivelling, effete Roddy McDowell singing: “The Seven Deadly Virtues” in the musical Camelot. Creepy stuff. I may have come out years earlier if I hadn’t seen the show.

Luckily, Clegg’s Mordred is an entirely different guy. He was an entirely different guy in the earliest King Arthur legends, Clegg points out in his Foreword. Already I was hooked. We gays have always gotten a bad rap.

Clegg’s Mordred is a misunderstood young man condemned to a life of hiding by his father’s hideous transgressions. Arthur raped Mordred’s mother and stole the sword Excalibur from its sacred place with The Lady of the Lake. A nice thread in the story is Mordred’s finding his place in the world as a gay man. Pre-Medieval Brittanica is not particularly homophobic–it’s still a land of pagan sensibilities–but there aren’t many boys like Mordred while he’s growing up. He’s lonely, curious and frustrated by his attraction to boys he meets that he can never have. Then his mentor Merlin hands him an impossible challenge: he must remain physically pure until he reaches manhood (at approximately 18) or he will lose his potential to master the magickal arts.

The rich development of Mordred is what makes the book so enjoyable and engrossing. He’s a well-intentioned kid constantly thwarted by the people who are supposed to love and protect him.

There’s a love story with the Knight Lancelot who’s the most freely re-imagined character from the conventional tale. Clegg’s Lancelot is the best friend of Mordred’s

father, and he helped Arthur steal Excalibur and try to kill Mordred’s pregnant mother so his bastard son wouldn’t be revealed. When Mordred meets him, Lancelot is estranged from Arthur, living as an outcast, steeped in guilt and desirous of a male companion.

Here Clegg almost lost me. I’ve always thought of Lancelot as the epitome of male heterosexuality. But as I settled in to the latter half of the book, the romance between Mordred and Lancelot was awfully compelling. Lines like: “You’re my hunter, and I’m your stag.” probably make other people cringe, but set things up right and I’ll swoon right in my seat on the train.

Clegg also writes one of the best depictions of magic (magick) I’ve read. It’s inspired from nature–the elementals–and has more in common with native religion than the wand-brandishing wizardry of Harry Potter or the archaic incantations of Lord of the Rings.

The only thing that disappointed was the projected sequels to the book appear to have disappeared unless Clegg and/or his editors are taking their sweet time (it’s been four years since Mordred came out).

Gregory Maguire is of course my favorite author of retold stories. Beyond his humor and his capturing of otherness, he’s a master of setting–the dark but quirky land of Oz, early Renaissance Amsterdam in Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister, and the Italian countryside of the 16th century Borgia family in which he places his re-imagined Snow White in Mirror, Mirror.

So anyone have suggestions for reimagined legends while I wait for Gregory Maguire’s next novel to come out (and perhaps, in vain, for a sequel to Mordred)?

Meanwhile, I’ll be going dark next week while on va-cay in Provincetown.  Wishing good times for all this late summer.

Are you a cat or are you a Cat?

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It was only a matter of time before I put up a post about Chloë, Miss Chloë the vet tech calls her at the animal clinic.  She’s my tiger-stripe domestic short hair, and she keeps me company every night while I’m typing on my desktop (or playing on-line Scrabble during my too frequent literary lapses).  My partner and I have a two-bedroom apartment and I’ve dubbed the guest bedroom:  “Chloë’s room,” sometimes to discourage unwanted houseguests, as in “Sorry, but Chloë doesn’t like sharing her room.”  But before Chloë came along, the guest bedroom was my home office so we’ve worked out a co-habitation arrangement—she’s not allowed to jump on the computer desk and I’m not allowed to harass her while she’s sleeping under the guest bed.  Actually, neither of us follow these rules, and we end up glowering at each other for stretches of time over the invasion of our respective personal spaces.  But we never stay angry at each other for long.

The title of this post references Gregory Maguire’s Wicked series (the “animals” and “Animals” that inhabit Oz), and like a true Maguire geek, at least once a week I take Chloë aside and ask her the question.  Chloë is immensely interested in household chores like sweeping, dusting, cleaning the toilet and washing the dishes.  It’s awfully annoying to have someone watching you do all the work without even offering to help out a little.  So my partner and I fantasize sometimes that we could dress up Chloë in a maid’s uniform and cap and have her bus our dinner dishes, tidy up the kitchen, mop the bathroom every now and then.  The least she could do is clean up her own litterbox considering she is so fascinated when I do it.

Chloë doesn’t think much of books.  She prefers television, but when it comes to entertainment, she’ll forsake any kind of media for the joy of attacking my shoe laces or batting around a shiny piece of foil.  She’s really quite a tom boy.  When we bought her a fancy glass beaded collar, she was insufferably tetchy and greatly relieved when we took it off of her.  But in case any Christian evangelists are thinking that her unladylike tendencies (she’s downright bullying at times) are the result of her upbringing by two dads, let me make this clear:  she was born that way.  At six weeks old, she used to chase me around the apartment like Davey going after Goliath.  I like to tell our friends that Chloë is a lesbian, but really, Chloë keeps her own counsel regarding matters of the heart.  It wouldn’t matter to me if Chloë chose a boy cat or a girl cat.  I’m open minded that way.

Someday I’ll write a story about Chloë.  It will have to involve birds, toilet flushing, chewing up flower arrangements, cracker boxes—all her favorite things.  I envision something in the thriller genre, maybe a detective novel, though she doesn’t have a long enough attention span for a convoluted plot.  Or mayble I’ll write a story in the vein of M. Night Shyamalan.  Like most cats, Chloë can see dead people.

Last Post of 2009

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This post feels like it should be a benchmark of sorts wherein I talk about everything 2009 meant to me. But I’ll keep it brief and leave deeper introspection for another time. This was an awesome year. I finally got a publication!! Plus I launched my  very own website and am damn proud of it. There.

I couldn’t do much writing over the past week with the holidays.  In my little bit of free time, I started a “low impact” project: proofing THE REGISTRATION. Per a writer friend’s advice, I’m trying to cut 5-10 words from every page to get it into range for YA fantasy. So far I’ve slashed about 300 words. Only 4,000 to go!

I also caught up with my favorite podcasts and blogs.  My dear friend Jerilyn Mettlin has a really fun podcast The Because Show that is kind of like The View for LA moms who like to shop and keep up with the trends.  They recently did a plug for The Next Family, a resource for non-traditional families, the emerging majority—adoptive, interracial, same sex couples, etc. They’ve got a great looking site plus super cute photos of kids.

Another site I like is andrewjimenez.com.  Andrew is a NYC-based musician, poet and unabashed romantic who I’ve been following for awhile. He writes about his everyday experiences, and there’s an intimate, honest quality in his work I really admire.

I’m still reading Felice Picano’sLike People In History as part of my self-directed, long overdue study of gay literature.  I said last week I’d have a word or two to say about Andrew Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance.  Here they are.

Holleran is an amazing writer.  There are passages in his book that are some of the most lyrical and transportive prose I’ve read. The story takes place in the 1970’s where a group of gay men are getting laid like 10, 20 times a day on a quixotic mission to find beauty and love but more often coming up with STD’s and deep, angsty grief. This is a world before AIDS and the mainstreaming of gay culture, but there’s a gay archetype there that holds up pretty well today. I say archetype rather than caricature because caricature implies superficiality or falseness.  Archetypes hold some level of truth; they tell us something about ourselves. So while I’m not crazy about this particular archetype, I think Holleran does a dazzling job illuminating a facet of gay male life.

Archetypes can be subverted, redeemed or catapulted to tragic ends.  In any case, the important thing I think is that we learn something true about the human condition. In Holleran’s book, what’s revealed is the exhiliration yet impossibility of possessing perfection and I think the confusion between beauty and love, which is a problem not exclusive to gay men but certainly common among us in my experience. For Holleran’s characters, beauty is physical perfection and finding it is more intoxicating and more addictive than all the drugs they take and, of course, a fleeting experience.

About halfway through the book, I became impatient with this repeated cycle and wanted a reason to care about the characters beyond their hipster lifestyles. Especially the main character Malone. Besides Malone’s initial struggle to find his place in the world in the first quarter of the book (my favorite part), there’s not much to like about him. His journey is a downward spiral of the internal conflict variety so he becomes like that self-destructive friend who complains he can never find the right guy but subotages every potential relationship. I suppose the psychology should appeal to me as a social worker, but Halloran doesn’t give many clues to Malone’s psychic workings. Malone just wants to possess beautiful men. He’s given up on himself. I can get behind a character thwarted by personal hang-ups if I can relate to the hang-ups and/or feel a transformation has occurred by the end of the book. Like Neil McCormick in Scott Heim’s Mysterious Skin – Neil is certainly not the most likeable guy and puts himself in insanely dangerous situations, but I felt where he was coming from and was rooting for him to the end.  This didn’t happen for me with Malone. There’s an open ending to his story leaving readers to guess his fate. I think he drowned intentionally trying to swim back to the mainland from Fire Island or got killed in the fire at the Everard Baths as many of his peers speculated. It came across as tragedy for tragedy’s sake – affecting like any suicide or preventable death, but it didn’t pack a bigger punch, similar to my reaction to Brokeback Mountain.

Now to close on a happier note…Santa brought me the perfect Xmas present:  an autographed copy of Gregory Maguire’s Matchless!!

Happy New Year!!!