The Road

I read Cormac McCarthy's The Road in the winter of 2008, shortly after I moved to New York. I was living in the basement of a Hell's Kitchen apartment and it was cold and dark. I was under two comforters, wore ski socks and a hoodie with the hood pulled up. Perfect conditions for reading this book. I get into books, but I reached on new level with this. At 1:30 AM on a Tuesday I would still convince myself to read a few more pages. The book is darker than holy hell, at times disturbingly terrifying, but it maintains a hopeful undertone throughout. It shows how humans can survive and endure the most horrific times imaginable through love, determination, trust and hope.

Needless to say I could not wait for the movie to come out, and I had to wait a long damn time. Originally scheduling the release for fall of '08, the Weinsteins felt the film was a little too morbid for the economic situation and ended up pushing it back over a full year. I was finally able to catch it this past Saturday.

Usually I think it's best to look at books and their film versions as two seperate pieces and that they should not be compared. This one is an exception. Having watched this on a dark, rainy Saturday morning, I was happy I had read the book and understood its message of human perseverance because don't think the film is going to be able to accurately convey it to fresh viewers. Sometimes books are 'unfilmable.' On the other hand, this book was just too good not to make a film out of it.

Over the past couple of months the studio has put a hopeful spin on the trailer. The origial trailer showed an action-packed, post-apocalyptic thriller. The latest tells a tale of inspiration and grit and is actually pretty cheesy. After seeing it however, I can kind of sympathize with the studio--this film must have been really difficult to market. It has to be hard to get the average American want to watch a man and his young son run from cannibals in a savage wasteland.

But the film is great. The acting, the dialogue and the imagery were perfect. It was exactly how I imagined it, down to the cannibals' house and front yard. Viggo was perfectly cast and the costumes were amazing. The film wasn't too long but you still felt the length of the journey by The Man and The Boy. It seemed like all the pieces were there for the film to be just as powerful as the book and it got as close as it possibly could.

I think the gist of it is this: this story is as bleak as it gets. What makes the reader not want to reach for the razor blades upon its completion is a combination of McCarthy's remarkable prose and the depth of the relationship between the father and son he allows the reader to reach. The film does everything it can but cannot reach this level or convey McCarthey's message as effectively.

This is still one of the better films of the year and definitely worth seeing, if not for the perfomances alone. You just might want to pick up the novel first.

Not Too Sharpe

Last week we checked out Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes at Chicago's Lincoln Hall, the latest venue of the Schuba brothers. The place is awesome, a large front bar, wrap-around balcony and large main floor. And just like Schubas, plenty of beers (including Schlitz) on tap and a great juke box.

The show was scheduled for 10 but the THREE opening acts pushed Sharpe's set to start at 12:15. This, I believed, was horseshit. One well-hyped debut album does not give a band an excuse to make everyone wait over two hours to see them. You would also think that after creating such anticipation among the sold out crowd would motivate the band enough to come out with a tight, well-prepared set. Not with these guys. They lazily pushed their way through each song (the four I had the patience to wait through) and allowed up to a full minute in between songs to figure out which one they were going with next. This isn't the best strategy to fire up a crowd and it was apparent. But instead of getting his own shit together, Alex Ebert turned it back on the audience, saying that 'This room needs a first aid kit.'

Maybe we did. Maybe he should have smoked less pot before the show. Either way it made for a pretty crappy concert and I was happy when I left. Up from Below has some great tunes, but whether or not this band is legit remains to be seen.