Over the past year, there’s been a variety of movies taking a stance against the War in Iraq — a war for which public support has been pretty constantly eroding. We’ve had Lions for Lambs, Rendition, In the Valley of Elah, Redacted (which got almost no release) and Stop-Loss clearly in the anti-war column, with The Kingdom treading some sort of weird middle ground that never quite made up its mind.

These are all very different movies from nearly every standpoint but one — they’ve either tanked, or seriously underperformed at the box office. Stranger still, considering that movie critics (with very few exceptions) are supposed to be a bunch of pinko commie elitists, is that they haven’t exactly been embraced by the critical populace. Even the best reviewed of the lot, In the Valley of Elah, has an air of “close, but no cigar” tepidness in the responses. The question is why this should be so.

Broadly speaking, it’s not just a case that the movies aren’t very good. That might answer the question on a critical basis, because all in all the movies aren’t very good however noble their intentions might be. But as far as the moviegoing public are concerned, not enough people went to see these films for them to know whether or not they’re good. The problem then must be inherent in the very subject matter.

Historically, the anti-war film has given us a lot of notable titles dating back at least to Thomas H. Ince’s Civilization (1916), an allegorical pacifist propaganda piece that was designed to keep the U.S. out of World War I. (In case you missed this fact, it didn’t.) The first great anti-war film was probably Abel Gance’s J’accuse (1919), made just after the war — a signficant detail that seems lost on the makers of the current crop of anti-war pictures.

Probably the most famous — and still one of the best — of all anti-war films is Lewis Milestone’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), a large-scale adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s novel. It was gigantic, but kept sight of the intimate details in such a way that made it tragically human. The film’s penultimate image of Paul (Lew Ayres) reaching out of a trench in attempt to touch a butterfly is deservedly one of the most iconic in all film, while its final haunting double image of soldiers and a graveyard is still powerful. You might also note that it was made 12 years after the war.

Much the same can be said of Howard Hawks’ The Dawn Patrol (1930), though it’s a lesser film. In the same category is Mitchell Leisen’s The Eagle and the Hawk (1933) — even if you might not guess the extent of its message today, since the original version is seemingly lost to us. When the film was re-issued closer to the approach of World War II, its anti-war coda involving the Cary Grant character having become a conscience-stricken alcoholic for helping to promulgate the notion that Fredric March’s character died a hero. (The March character commited suicide, but Grant makes it appear he was killed in a dogfight.)

Anti-war films were not uncommon in the 1930s. William Dieterle’s science fiction picture, Six Hours to Live (1932), was at bottom a pacifist work. Even a fantasy like Mitchell Leisen’s Death Takes a Holiday (1934) makes ironic comment on the topic. Death masquerading as Prince Sirki (Fredric March) sarcastically refers to mankind’s “sacred privilige of blowing each other up,” and comments that he can never make out what the armies are fighting for ("It’s usually a flag, isn’t it? Or a barren piece of land that neither side wants"). The ideas might seem naive, but they reflect the mood of the day.

Both the Marx Brothers and the now largely forgotten comedy team of Bert Wheeler and Robert Woolsey made anti-war comedies — Duck Soup (1933) and Diplomaniacs (1933). The Marx film is the better of the two by a wide margin, but the tone of both is similar. War and the reasons for war are shown as absurdities, but sometimes the absurdities hit close to home, as when Groucho reasons that there has to be a war because “I’ve already paid a month’s rent on a battlefield.” The big musical number, “The Country’s Going to War,” in Duck Soup is such a deft skewering of mindless jingoism that it packs the same punch 75 years later that it did then.

By 1937, when James Whale made The Road Back, another Erich Maria Remarque adaptation, the anti-war tone and anti-German militarism was tamed down before the film even made it out of Universal City. Why? The Nazi government threatened to ban not just this film but all Universal releases if changes weren’t made. The Spanish government had done something similar two years earlier — on very different grounds — wih Josef von Sterneberg’s The Devil Is a Woman. In both cases, the interference all but destroyed both men’s careers.

The key to all this anti-war creativity is that all of these films were made in a time of domestic peace. You’ll find less such films as World War II draws nearer, and you’ll find no anti-war films at all during World War II itself. Of course, no one then or now is likely to take issue with the cause of World War II or the necessity of it from the Allied standpoint.

When anti-war pictures started up again, there was a tendency to go back to World War I for subject matter. It was a safer bet. There was a distancing effect, but more importantly it was a war that seemed less justifiable. Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory (1957) took this road, but strangely enough Lewis Milestone’s Pork Chop Hill (1959) did not. It took direct issue with the Pork Chop Hill episode as little more than an exercise in impressing Red China with American military power — and this was a war that ended a mere six years earlier. In many ways, the film marked a shift in tone in that it questioned the judgment of those high up in the U.S. armed forces. It wouldn’t be the last such film. It was a tone that would grow during the Vietnam era.

The interesting thing about the anti-war films that came about during the Vietnam war is that once again the tendency was to focus on other wars. The fact that anti-war films were being made at all during a war was remarkable, but the war at hand was all but off-limits — unless, of course, you were John Wayne making The Green Berets (1968), which is anything but an anti-war film.

The logic behind this is not entirely clear, though it may be a hangover from the McCarthy era when a hot-button political issue could only be addressed allegorically. Joseph L. Mankiewicz could make an anti-McCarthy film in 1951, but he had to dress it up as social comedy in the form of a Cary Grant vehicle, People Will Talk. Yes, Charlie Chaplin addressed McCarthyism head-on in 1957 with A King in New York, but that was from the safety of Great Britain — and the results didn’t play in the U.S. till 1973.

Whatever the reason, the Vietnam-era anti-war pictures took the allegorical route. The boldest of the lot was probably Richard Lester’s How I Won the War (1967) which was set in World War II — and like Chaplin, Lester had the advantage of working in Great Britain. At the same time, despite the presence of John Lennon in the cast, the film was not a huge success. This, however, probably had more to do with the complexity of the movie’s vision — this wasn’t just an anti-war film, it was an anti-war-film film — and its unrelenting Britishness. Though it was soundly embraced in the early ‘70s on college campuses, it was also obvious that many of the jokes baffled American audiences and the accents made some of the dialogue indecipherable.

Mike Nichols’ Catch-22 (1970) was more successful, but again it was a Vietnam-era film using World War II for its story. Bloody, anarchic, very much at odds with militarism it nonetheless sidestepped a direct confrontation with the issue of the moment — even if its sentiments didn’t really fool anybody.

The big winner from that time was Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H (1970). Altman himself made no secret of the fact that his Korean-war film was at bottom about Vietnam, but for viewers who didn’t want to know that, the film itself could be taken more literally and no bones were broken. That its sentiments were clearly leftist and totally anti-war seem pretty inescapable, but dressed up as hip comedy it went down better. Both How I Won the War and Catch-22 are also essentially comedic in tone, but the comedy is bitter and angry, not hip.

It’s not until after Vietnam that we really got films that directly related to that war. Consider Coming Home (1978), The Deer Hunter (1978), Apocalypse Now (1979) for starters. Even the musical Hair didn’t make it to the screen until 1979. Films like Oliver Stone’s Platoon (1986) and Born on the Fourth of July (1989) were even further away from the war itself, as was Brian De Palma’s Casualties of War (1989).

One of the most interesting — and complex — of all Vietnam-tinged films, Richard Rush’s The Stunt Man (1980) managed to actually address the issue of the anti-war film in its story of a Vietnam veteran (Steve Railsback) — and refugee from the law — with a somewhat tenuous grip on reality who becomes involved with a dangerously obsessive filmmaker (Peter O’Toole) who is making an anti-war film. The film being made is set in — you guessed it — World War I, referred to by O’Toole’s character as “the ultimate romantic insanity.”

What makes The Stunt Man stand apart from the pack is that the film actually understands the perils of making an anti-war film. At one point the O’Toole character remarks, “We’re shaking a finger at them, Sam, and we shouldn’t. If we’ve anything to say it’s best to slip it in while they’re all laughing and crying and jerking off at all the sex and violence.” Similarly, he notes that a friend of his once made an anti-war picture — a good one — and that when it was shown in the man’s hometown army enlistment went up 100 percent. The film fully realizes the gap between what is intended and how the audience may take it. Rush demonstrates at every turn just why Altman’s M*A*S*H worked with audiences.

This, I think, is exactly where and why the current attempts at anti-war films have failed at the box office and to a somewhat lesser extent with the critics. Each and every one of the films in question have indeed shaken a finger at the viewer — and they’ve done so without any distancing. It’s one thing to suggest that we as a people might have bungled something in the past, or that we were somehow not as attentive or aware as we might have been. It’s another thing to lecture the viewer that they’re doing the same right now. Nobody likes being lectured, and there probably aren’t that many people who feel the need to have a narrative film tell them what’s going on.

I’ve no doubt that one day a powerful anti-war film about Iraq will be made — whether it uses satire or drama or both — but to try to make that film in the midst of the war in question appears doomed to failure. Maybe those folks who turned to allegory had a better handle on things than we might have thought at the time.

Family
Even though last year’s Family: A Century of Blood and Tears (Tate Publishing & Enterprises, 2007) by local author D.C. Force begins nearly a century ago, it comes across as semi-autobiographical.

The novel is detail-heavy, thick with conversation, and reaches too far to be an actual family history (even if the author had access to extensive journals and records). But it’s the story of a family based to some extent on fact, and likely closely tied to some personal history. After all, the novel is set in the Northern Midwest (near Chicago) where the author grew up, and the final chapters in the book follow the character Celeste from the Midwest into N.C.; the same journey made by Force.

More importantly, Family offers readers a glimpse into the struggle of immigrants to the U.S., and how many generations it takes to truly assimilate and overcome the hardships that go hand-in-hand with outsider status.

The book is broken into chapters by decade, beginning on New Year’s Day, 1911 and continuing in a trinumeral pattern (2/2/22, 3/3/33, etc.). That tool provides little more than organization, though it’s an interesting choice and throughout the novel suggests a more significant meaning might be revealed (it’s not).

The book begins with German immigrant Anja who suffers abuse at the hand of her third husband. Still, she won’t leave him for fear of being ostracized by the tight-knit immigrant community in which her children have been raised. A decade later it’s Anja’s daughter Katherine who begins the chapter in what becomes a typical fashion for Family: having a baby. Katherine has married outside of the Catholic faith and is living as an outcast. Like most of the book’s characters, her speech is thick with accent.

“No more German, Kate,” Katherine’s husband Otto insists. “We want the babies t’learn English, don’t we?”

And later Katherine says, “I t’ought I couldt go back to bedt for a while.” It’s like that, the accent only finally fading during the 1966 chapter when a teenaged Celeste consciously alters her inherited speech patterns

Besides the time line and accents, Force also uses a flashback function, weaving history into the present-day telling of the story. These past passages are noted by a smaller font, but run on often for several pages at a clip so the reader quickly loses the time frame. And, while the detailed past passages serve to flesh out and explain the present passages, they often seem superfluous. A reader could understand the thrust of Force’s story line without constantly delving back into history.

Overall, Family is an interesting read that sheds light on what it meant to be an immigrant throughout the 1900s. Tracing the legacy of poverty, lack of education, alcoholism, addiction, abuse, neglect and — finally — hope makes for a compelling if not always pleasant journey.

Troubled State
A family history-based book that does draw from actual fact is Black Mountain-based author Gari Carter‘s Troubled State: Civil War Journals of Franklin Archibald Dick (Truman State University Press, 2008). The text is culled from the journals of Carter’s great-great-grandfather, a prominent St. Louis attorney and Assistant Adjutant General to Captain Nathaniel Lyon.

Dick, it turns out, was loyal to the Union in the midst of politically-tirn St. Louis, and his journals demonstrate his own misgivings about the war and concerns as to his own future. It’s an intriguing premise for a book, but worth noting that readers without more than a passing interest in battles and Civil War history will find Troubled to be a dense and fairly dry read. The 205 pages of journal entries are packed with footnotes — often four to a page — and are followed by detailed biographies and a genealogy of the Dick Family.

But there are rare gems tucked into the pages: Images of Dick’s letters to military personnel, a letter from President Abraham Lincoln himself, and Dick’s of-the-moment perspective on momentous events. “Mr. Lincoln, the President, was assassinated last evng. in Washington ...” he writes. “Here and now is the life of the Nation struck at by this vile rebellion. Mr. Lincoln throughout has failed to appreciate the wickedness of these people — pardons & pardons have fallen from him into the hands of guilty doers — who have turned again from their pardoned crimes, to again slay & destroy the defenders of Nation.”

Such weighty insights are an important contribution to the unfolding of American history, and Troubled, though scholarly and challenging, provides a keen look back in time.

Gari Carter reads from Troubled State at Malaprop’s on Wednesday, May 21. The event begins at 7 p.m.

— Alli Marshall, A&E reporter

Going by the dust-jacket bio for author Joshilyn Jackson (she’s a native of the romantic but vague “deep South,” a mother of two and — oh yeah — an award-winning author), unassuming is the first word brought to mind. But from the first page of Jackson’s recently-released novel, The Girl Who Stopped Swimming (Grand Central Publishing, 2008), this author reveals herself as a force to be reckoned with.

Swimming is a ghost story, a murder mystery, an examination of family dysfunction, a discussion of the third world living conditions that exist right here in the U.S., and how that form of poverty manages to touch us even in the most manicured and gated of suburban safety. It’s all of this, but with none of the self-righteous lecturing that could come from such socially significant themes. Instead, Swimming almost shrugs at its own depth and focuses, instead, on its wildly vivid characters.

Jackson creates, in polarized sisters Laurel and Thalia, such frenetic energy that the plot takes off at top speed and never slows down. Respectable good girl Laurel lives in a gated community with her inattentive husband and their teenage daughter. What she most wants (or so believes) is to forget the past. But the past continues to visit her in the forms of the clueless mother, the ghost of her dead uncle, Marty, and her loud-mouthed actress sister.

When Laurel awakens from a sleep-walking episode to find a neighborhood girl has drowned in her backyard swimming pool, events of the past race back into Laurel’s life, demanding to be resolved. And, despite an antagonistic relationship with her older sister, it’s Thalia to whom Laurel must turn if she’s to solve the mounting mysteries. Why? Because Thalia was there two decades earlier at the accidental death of Marty, the uncle who threatened to molest young Laurel. 

“Daddy would have called that bullet back before the sound of it rang out.” Jackson writes. “Daddy had turned Marty over with such careful love. He’d put his hands over the hole to try to stop the blood, and with all his will, he’d tried to make his brother not be dead.”

Readers will be kept guessing up to the breathless finish. But as much as Swimming offers fleet action and colorful mayhem, it keeps careful reign on its larger mission: to present a unique insight into a forgotten part of the Southern landscape. The poorest rural regions, the trailer parks, drug addictions and dead-end lives that Laurel must ultimately face, are part of that “deep South” culture that Jackson taps.

Joshilyn Jackson reads at Malaprop’s on Saturday, May 17. The event begins at 7 p.m.

—Alli Marshall, A&E reporter

Each week Xpress reporter Alli Marshall and WOXL DJ Pat Ryan team up to bring you their entertainment suggestions. Here are Pat & Alli’s Weekly Winners for Friday, May 16 through Sunday, May 18. Click here to listen.

Despite the occasional dousing of rain, last weekend’s Lake Eden Arts Festival in Black Mountain was, by most reports, a heck of a good time. Taking it all in was Mountain Xpress staff photographer Jonathan Welch, who ditched his digital camera for a good, old-fashioned Polaroid, capturing images as unique as the festival itself.

The Polaroid Corporation recently announced that it would discontinue the film, though stock supplies are expected to last for up to a year. Meanwhile, the Web site SavePolaroid.com has been a central gathering spot for Polaroid photo galleries — and the home base for a campaign to urge some other company to begin manufacturing the unique format again.

Welch says he chose to chronicle LEAF with Polaroids because of their signature style — their unvarnished, snapshot quality. “This project focused on color more than anything else,” he explains. Along with the family-photo feel of instantaneous, cherished moments that Polaroids convey, “color becomes the subject.”

Click here to see Welch’s colorful gallery of LEAF Polaroids, and check out Xpress‘ growing collection of photo galleries here.

— Jon Elliston, managing editor

This week, my third-grader will take end-of-grade tests for the first time. She’s nervous and I’m irritated.

For parents who aren’t there yet, end-of-grade tests are given to public school students in grades 3 to 8 in North Carolina during the last weeks of school. The tests are supposed to assess competencies as defined by the North Carolina Standard Course of Study. In other words, if your kid doesn’t pass the tests, your kid does not pass “go” and may not move to the next grade (forget collecting $200). After the first test failure, there’s remediation, then a second opportunity a week later. After the second failure, there’s summer school, a third opp, then it’s up to the principal whether or not the kid moves on. Basically, we test the kids least likely to pass as many times as possible and pray they figure it out along the way.

The EOGs debuted in North Carolina in the 1990s as part of standards-based educational reform. This type of reform also encompasses the infamous No Child Left Behind Act, signed into law in 2002 by our soon-to-be former president. Supposedly, setting high expectations and consistent goals helps all students succeed. That is, unless you’re a poor tester, have a learning disability or get woozy at the sight of all those little bubbles to be filled in with your No. 2 pencil (I took twice as long to vote last week because I had to check that all my bubbles were completely filled in). And if your school doesn’t meet the federal standards, you’re screwed—or according to the government, offered corrective action or restructuring.

So the tests are important, and my sensitive daughter knows it, which may be why she’s nervous. She also has high expectations of herself. While I have no doubt that she’ll pass the tests the first time, she’s less confident than she should be. I asked her teacher how to boost her confidence without overemphasizing the tests and making her more anxious. His answer: “If I knew that I’d be able to make a million dollars.” I’m rooting for him to figure it out, because I’d happily pay for any (non-medical) formula that could increase her confidence in her abilities.

I’m irritated about the EOGs for a number of reasons, in addition to the stress they’re causing my child. One, I don’t think these types of tests truly measure kids’ abilities and aptitudes. I was a decent student but a poor tester (thank goodness the SATs have an essay section). Two, I don’t like that teachers are forced to teach to the tests. At my daughter’s school, the teachers work to balance the curriculum and not overemphasize the tests, but the school’s annual evaluation, and thus, reputation, is affected by the test results. And bubble tests don’t exactly fit into the experiential learning methodology.

I also worry that we’re putting too much pressure on our kids at too young an age. Remember when kindergarten consisted only of socialization, snacks, and naptime? Now 5- and 6-year-olds are deep into reading, writing and arithmetic by the end of kindergarten. I don’t remember spending months preparing for bubble tests in third grade. All I remember is that I got on the wrong bus to go home the first day of school. When the driver realized I was the only kid left on the bus, he dropped me off at a gas station in South Atlanta with a dime to call home. That was a hands-on learning experience.

My daughter’s already a better tester at 9 than I was at 17. So I’m not sure why she’s so stressed about the EOGs. Is it the system or just her individual personality or both? I partially blame Enviro-spouse. Although he was an excellent student, he says one teacher told him that he should calm down about school or he’d give himself an ulcer. There must be a gene for high-strung competitive academics. And E-spouse passed it to our girl.

Today, as I again reassured my girl that she’ll pass the EOGs with no problem, she said, “Mom, I think kindergarten, first and second grades are like the minor leagues. Then third grade is the first year in the majors.”

So I guess she’s just moved from the Tourists to the Rockies. If only we could help her understand that she’s not standing at the plate in the bottom of the ninth with two outs. And we love her no matter what happens next.

Yes, I’ve got it. Call it the movie-going malaise. The cinematic blues. The crummy picture collywobbles. Whatever you call it, it ain’t pretty. No, I’m not burned out on the movies. Far from it. In the past few weeks, I’ve watched: Abel Gance’s J’Accuse (1919) (all nearly three hours of it); Ernst Lubitsch’s Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife (1938); Victor Saville’s Evergreen (1934); Frank Tuttle’s Waikiki Wedding (1937); F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise (1927); Josef von Sternberg’s Shanghai Express (1932); Woody Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989); and David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch (1991). And these were movies I didn’t have to watch. To this, you can add in the fact that I’ve picked up David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986) and Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (1985) and Tideland (2005). And there’s a copy of Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) just sitting here waiting for reappraisal.

I’ve seen new movies I’ve liked, including last week’s Iron Man and Flawless. And I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention The Counterfeiters on any list of recent viewings.

But there’s something missing. That little extra kick isn’t quite there. Discounting the usual run of last year’s releases that just penetrated the hinterlands this year, the only movies from 2008 on that list of titles I fully intend to buy the minute they become available are Be Kind Rewind, The Band’s Visit and In Bruges. Worse, there’s the question of just what there is to look forward to — and this is where it gets really grim.

Most people look at the trailers prior to movies and think, “That looks interesting” or “That might be good” or “That looks awful” or “I’d rather drink my own urine than see that” (usually reserved for the works of Uwe Boll) or “Who’d go see that?” The answer to that last is simple for me — either I will, or Justin Souther will (depending on the level of sadism I can live with). For you, they’re just trailers. For me, they’re more like some often unfortunate crystal ball predicting my future in widescreen color and six channel Dolby sound.

OK, so I hold out some vague hope that this week’s Speed Racer might at least be visually striking, while the very idea of David Mamet making a martial arts picture — Redbelt — starring Chiwetel Ejiofor (perhaps my favorite actor of current film) and Tim Allen (definitely not my favorite actor from any era) intrigues me. The less said about the prospect of What Happens in Vegas... the better, except to note that I won’t be seeing it. (Tee hee hee, he giggled sadistically.) I positively loathed The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (2005) and am not exactly looking forward to its sequel, Prince Caspian.

I’m probably one of four people living (there were five, I understand, but the fifth passed away suddenly), who has close to zero interest in Indiana Jones and the Impossibly Long Title. And do we really need a big screen version of Sex and the City? Could The Strangers look any less interesting or more derivative if they tried? Oh, but there’s Adam Sandler in You Don’t Mess with the Zohan, isn’t there? And Kung-Fu Panda.

More comic book movies are on their way, of course. Next up is yet another version of The Incredible Hulk — this one from Louis Leterrier, who gave us The Transporter and its sequel, and starring Edward Norton. What kind of casting is that? Does it matter? The CGI looks appalling, and anyway, I actually kind of liked Ang Lee’s Hulk (2003). Worse, Norton (who took a hand in “improving” the Frida (2002) screenplay, thereby helping to make that Julie Taymor’s least interesting film) was involved in the writing.

Of course, there’s more enticing comic-bookery afoot with Guillermo del Toro’s Hellboy II the following month. And while the first film was a big “so what?” for me, the trailer for this looks better, which is to say that it has a similar look to Pan’s Labyrinth. Does it look enough better to get me past the depressing news that del Toro has signed away four years of his creativity to make two Hobbit movies? Not really, no, especially when that presumably moves such tasty looking projects as his film of H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness to 2012 or beyond. Or will he simply follow Peter Jackson’s example and remake Son of Kong as a follow-up? Don’t get me wrong, I liked Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, even if the only one I felt truly compelled to see more than twice was the first one. But I’m kind of Tolkiened out, and can’t help but think that del Toro’s unique gifts could be better applied elsewhere.

Yes, Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight holds promise, and I have no doubt that it will be good. If nothing else, the late Heath Ledger’s performance as the Joker looks absolutely fantastic. But in all honesty, I’m otherwise having a hard time getting that worked up about another Batman movie. I’ll be delighted if Nolan and company can change my mind — and they just might.

Of course, somewhere along the way, there’s room for a new M. Night Shyamalan picture, The Happening. Yeah, I know I found some merit in Lady in the Water (2006), even while admitting its flaws, but I haven’t forgiven him for The Village (2004) or suckering me into temporary insanity and causing me to give Signs (2002) that inexplicably positive review that haunts me to this day. And can I be the only person who finds the trailer for this latest funny? The business where somebody comes down with the “mysterious disease” and we hear the sound of a body falling after the trailer cuts away to a title card is very droll.

Get Smart is admittedly well-cast (The Rock to one side), but another TV show going to the big screen? Why? And let’s face it, Adam Sandler’s pet director Peter Segal (The Longest Yard) at the helm is cause for pause — or cause to send you in search of the TV series. Personally, I can’t wait for the new Mike Myers picture, The Love Guru, to come out, but only because that will mean the trailer will go away, and petitions from Hindu organizations asking me to boycott the movie will stop landing in my in-box every two days. (Good Lord, I just got another one — and I’m not kidding.) Except that no one is protesting it, I have similar feelings about the prospect of the Disney-Pixar WALL-E. That trailer, with the world’s longest lead-in to the song “Brazil” (Terry Gilliam envy?), is just too cute for me.

While Timur Bekmambetov has made a cottage industry of the Night Watch series in Russia, the films have failed to make much of a dent (at least theatrically) here, but what are we to make of Wanted? It’s based on a comic book (does no one read, oh, I don’t know, actual books anymore?). It has a not uninteresting cast — James McAvy, Morgan Freeman, Angelina Jolie, Terrence Stamp — but the trailer looks like non-stop action of the Matrix rip-off variety.

Peter Berg’s Hancock will be a hit because everything Will Smith attaches himself to is, whether or not it deserves it. But am I enthused? No. Brian Robbins — the man who gave us The Shaggy Dog (2006) and Norbit (2007) back to back — returns with another Eddie Murphy comedy, Meet Dave. This one has Murphy playing a space-ship run by tiny aliens. (That’s what it says.) Obviously, it’s for people who can’t get enough of The Adventures of Pluto Nash (2002). What about Space Chimps? Doesn’t the title kind of say it all?

Meryl Streep, Colin Firth, Pierce Brosnan and Stellan Skarsgard are an imposing collection of talent, but have you seen the trailer for the filmization of Mamma Mia!? Ye gods. In two-and-a-half minutes it answered my question from last week’s Screening Room — why do people hate musicals? Yes, the ABBA songs are catchy (The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert proved that 14 years ago), but the musical numbers as depicted in the trailer are almost exactly the sort of thing that could send viewers in search of a torture porn flick as an antidote. I’m hoping the trailer doesn’t do the film justice.

The Will Ferrell machine grinds on with Step Brothers. Didn’t we just get rid of Semi-Pro? And what’s this? The Longshots — another family comedy with Ice Cube. Barbershop (2002) seems like ancient history. It’s the kind of thing that makes The X-Files: I Want to Believe look actually promising, except that nobody really seems to know anything about The X-Files, which may be a good thing. Even after it’s been here and gone, I’m guessing most people still won’t know anything about Henry Poole Is Here — the track record for movies starring Luke Wilson is far from whelming.

August looks a little better, if we charitably overlook the prospect of College (exactly what it sounds like), Babylon A.D. (the return of Vin Diesel!), House Bunny (from the director of Strange Wilderness!), Bangkok Dangerous (Nicolas Cage in a greasy wig as a hitman!), The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2 (this needed a sequel?) and Wild Child (can Emma Roberts become a star?). Griffin Dunne’s The Accidental Husband might be OK, if things like Made of Honor haven’t caused you to lose all faith in romantic comedies. The Apatow crowd will probably take delight in the stoner comedy Pineapple Express directed by David Gordon Green, but I can’t work up enthusiasm for the pairing of Seth Rogen and James Franco. The prospect of a third Brendan Fraser Mummy picture is only ho-hum-worthy in itself, but it becomes an essay in stark terror when you realize the director, Rob Cohen, gave us Stealth (2005) and xXx (2002).

My personal favorite bet for the end of summer is Ryuhei Kitamura’s The Midnight Meat Train from the Clive Barker story of the same name. I really don’t even care if the movie’s any good. The title alone sells me — and the title and trailer were the highlight of sitting through Good Luck Chuck (2007). The trailer is too much a jumble of images, interspersed with some unintentionally campy dialogue, to tell a lot about the picture, but some of those fleeting glimpses are downright freaky looking (in a good way). Regardless, this may just be the greatest title ever.

OK, so maybe it’s not that grim, but the prospects still feel like a mix of “yes, it is that grim” and the “maybe it’ll surprise me” range, meaning there’s a basic lack of real excitement here. And that could be offset if the fall/winter season looked good, but right now I’m not seeing anything other than Fernando Meirelles (The Constant Gardener) Blindness that really enthuses me. The problem is that folks like Wes Anderson, David O. Russell, Pedro Almodovar, Alfonso Cuaron, Neil Jordan, Tim Burton, etc. are all slated for movies in 2009. We’ve had our Michel Gondry (Be Kind Rewind) for the year. Julie Taymor doesn’t even seem to have anything in the works. It’s dispiriting.

Maybe there are surprises in store, something completely out of nowhere just lurking in the shadows. I certainly hope so. In the meantime, there’s Midnight Meat Train.

Drexel, N.C.-based author Susan Woodring‘s new book, Springtime on Mars: Stories (Press 53, 2008) is at once quirky, charming, confusing and comfortable. It manages to be all over the map, but also intricately rooted in family, dysfunction and place.

Part of the scattershot feel of the book comes from its format: like the title suggests, it’s a collection of short stories. The longest of these is 20 pages and the rest weigh in at about half that length. Among the stories, the point of views range from a young girl to a middle-aged man. This is jarring at times, moving from one story to the next, but Woodring seems to revel in the disparate nature of her prose. She unravels, in each installment, a nugget of a story. A single, awkward moment arrived at through a maze of mundane events and non-events. Nothing is happening but ordinary life, only Woodring gazes deeply into all that’s ordinary to distill the kernel of weirdness, of awkwardness, of dark secrets, old wounds, dreams unrealized, cracks in the foundation. And then, when that moment is finally revealed, Woodring leaves us there on the brink of understanding. We’re given a glimpse, but nothing more.

This is tantalizing, and even for the nudge of frustration at the paltry reveal, I found myself compelled to read on. Just one more story. After all, they’re short! Only 10 pages! Think of the sense of accomplishment!

Which is kind of how I approach short story collections, anyway. I like the near-instant gratification of polishing off an entire narrative in a setting. And, considering all that’s been said and written about the shrinking attentions spans of post-X generations, it’s surprising that short stories haven’t all but replaced novels.

But they haven’t. In fact, short story collections have been the underdogs of the literary business for some time now (to the extent that some MFA in writing programs replaced their short story concentrations for more popular genres such as creative nonfiction). But one thing that Woodring has on her side is a very enthusiastic publisher in Winston-Salem, N.C.-based Press 53.

The other thing working in Woodring’s favor is her way with words. Short those these stories may be, this author can spin a tale. This is evident from the very first chapter, where sixth-grader Lizzie struggles for a sense of normalcy while her mother loses herself in care-taking bees and speculating on UFO sightings.

“It frightened her to see her husband that way,” the author compellingly writes of another character. “And also somewhat annoying — why had Russell done such a thing anyway?”

It’s rare for a writer to move seamlessly between characters and reference points, to switch up genders, generations and voices like flipping through a cache of personalities culled from the psyche of Sybil herself. And though Woodring doesn’t manage a flawless delivery 100-percent of the time, she does an admirably good job — and pulls off a highly entertaining collection of tales.

Susan Woodring offers the workshop Martians on Main Street: How to Bring the Historic, the Scientific, and the Just Plain Weird onto the Pages of Realistic Fiction on Monday, May 12, at Malaprop’s. For info on the 7 p.m. event, call 254-6734.

—Alli Marshall, A&E reporter

Each week Xpress reporter Alli Marshall and WOXL DJ Pat Ryan team up to bring you their entertainment suggestions. Here are Pat & Alli’s Weekly Winners for Thursday, May 8 through Saturday, May 10.
Click here to listen.

Maybe I drank the Kool-Aid, but the more I think about the recent Josh Ritter show at the Orange Peel (Friday, May 2), the more I think it was something really special.

Part of it has to do with this theory I’ve been cultivating, that music both underground and mainstream is moving in a direction of more heart-on-sleeve, un-clichéd sincerity. Artists like the Kimya Dawson, Amos Lee and Melanie Horsnell have been breaking into a formerly cynical, bottom line-obsessed business with quirky, off-kilter songs about real emotion performed with admirably skewed style. Ritter seems to fit into that eccentric singer/songwriter classification, but there’s something more about him. Namely, energy.

I’m not talking woo-woo cosmic energy here. I mean the actual combustible kind that involves singing lots of words really fast while his band holds down a bombastic pace. There’s a sense of barely controlled madness, backed by an undeniable glee. On stage, Ritter grins like his cheeks are about to burst. He acts like a kid at his own birthday party and talks to the audience with an “aw-shucks” affect so hyper-sincere one would think he was just dropped off the turnip wagon.

But Ritter is hardly a hayseed, Idaho upbringing aside. He’s obviously business savvy, playing to a willing audience. He’s disarming, engaging, and holds tight reign on his well-heeled group of musicians. Even more importantly, he knows how to write a song. There are obvious nods to Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen, especially apparent on jangly, sonic melanges like “To the Dogs or Whomever.” It’s the vastness of organ, the kick peddle thump of bass drum, the talking blues style, the way he hammers home the chorus.

According to Wikipedia, Ritter went to Oberlin College to study neuroscience (in case you didn’t believe me earlier when I said he wasn’t a hayseed) but wound up graduating — no, not as a music major, that would be too easy — with a self-designed major in American History through Narrative Folk Music. My point here is the guy knows a thing or two about music. But what he does on stage — the performance, the goofy-suave banter, the nice-guy songs with their biting underbellies, the wrapping of the audience around his finger ... they don’t teach that at college. Not even Oberlin.

And it’s not just me who think this guy might be exceptional. After headlining with Joan Baez, she recorded a version of his song “Wings.” I mean, it’s not like Joan Baez is out there covering just anyone.

Ritter’s latest album is last year’s (not-so-unassumingly named) The Historical Conquests of Josh Ritter. Give it a listen.

—Alli Marshall, A&E reporter