In quarantimes, sometimes you stumble on something easy to distract you from the real-world disaster outside your windows. So it is with Netflix’s recent addition of Into The Night. End-of-the-world science fiction is quite a mixed bag. Budgets are rarely up to the scale of a global apocalypse. I enjoyed Into The Night quite a bit. This Belgian production is very watchable, especially if you don’t think about it too hard.
Premise: Jump on a jet and head west to outrun the sun because if sunlight catches you, you’re dead. We don’t know why, it just does, okay? Cue the crazed Italian soldier with insider NATO knowledge taking over a plane with a bunch of people onboard to begin the race against sunlight. The hardy and not-so-hardy group of passengers striving to survive are a diverse group from several countries. A few will struggle for leadership of the band. Not everyone will make it. At least one person will ruin the quest for safety, but justice and injustice will be served.
Pros:This is classic out-the-frying-pan, into-the-fire stuff. Every problem demands a short-term solution that causes another problem and the clock is always ticking. Season One of this series reminded me very much of The Langoliers.
Remember that Stephen King story from Four Past Midnight? Remember the limited TV series where Bronson Pinchot played the weasel you loved to hate? Wasn’t that fun? This is, too.
Into The Night is based on a Polish Novel, The Old Axolotl by Jacek Dukaj. What the six-part series gets right, I’m going to attribute to the author. For instance, yes, when the oxygen masks drop, the air supply doesn’t last long. It’s only meant to buy time so the pilot can get to a lower altitude. Such details, the interpersonal drama, and a glimpse of passengers’ back stories are the quality stuff. Jason George, of Narcos fame, must be the other power behind what’s good about this show.
Cons: There’s not much to complain about unless you’re some snobby film critic who writes for Slate. The audio is in English. Shut off the subtitles because the difference between the dialogue and what’s printed on screen is a bit of a distraction. Sometimes the geography makes no sense. You don’t land in Nova Scotia and head to Alaska over the Pacific. Another hiccup: To bounce around the globe as they do, Canada couldn’t be that much bigger than Lichtenstein. It really isn’t, not by a very long walk.
But really, that’s picking nits and who cares? We’re here for the fights, twists and the reversals. This is fun bubble gum for the eyes. Even with a few flaws in logic, the premise is a great big idea: The sun will kill us! Stay in the dark! Out fly the spin of the Earth and race the dawn! And, holy shit, what now?!
So many apocalyptic movies are done so badly, this is better than most by far. I would say it’s all well-acted, too. Pop the popcorn and enjoy. Each episode of Into the Night will fly by.
~ I’m Robert Chazz Chute. Besides killer crime thrillers, I write apocalyptic fiction. My end-of-the-world books are This Plague of Days (trilogy), AFTER Life (trilogy), Amid Mortal Words, All Empires Fall (anthology),Citizen Second Class, Robot Planet, Wallflower (time travel) and the Ghosts and Demons Series (Haunting Lessons, Death Lessons, Fierce Lessons,and Dream’s Dark Flight).
Please check out all my books at the links down the right side of this blog.
We’ve got plenty of movies about superheroes and cops tracking down serial killers. We need more good movies about writing. Here are my top picks (and why) plus a few runners-up.
Wonder Boys
Wonder Boys is one of my favorite movies. Based on the book by Michael Chabon, Michael Douglas stars as a college professor who can’t seem to bring himself to finish writing a massive manuscript. (The manuscript is called Wonder Boys, too, by the way.)
There are a lot of fun moments in that movie and Toby Maguire is cast perfectly as the weird and aspiring young writer, James Leer. There’s a great scene where three drunk writers make up fictional histories of fellow bar patrons. I do that, too (the making up part, not the drunk part.) Great characters and intrigue are everywhere.
Reading Wonder Boys, I find the interiority of the main character is interesting in its depth. There’s plenty to admire in Chabon’s imaginative use of language. In one scene, students stand by an open door blowing “bored clouds” of cigarette smoke. I found myself wondering how many editors would cross out that line and sneer in the margin: “bored clouds? Really?” (Typical editors, not all editors. In context, it’s a great line.)
If a book description includes the phrase, “beautiful language” I’m usually suspect that it will be a literary novel in which nothing much will actually happen. When critics of old felt they had to give a pulp writer any credit, they’d grudgingly observe that the prose was “muscular” or “workmanlike.” (They often used to say sort of thing about Stephen King and Dashiell Hammett.) From the mouths of snobs, they damned fun books and good writing with faint praise. Readers ate it up and couldn’t wait for more. In Wonder Boys, Chabon finds the middle ground. The use of language is often innovative but the guy can paint a picture and there’s lots of fun and hijinx going on.
I love the line about James Leer’s second-hand smelly overcoat. I’m going from memory but it goes something like, “Standing nearby you could feel your luck change for the worse.” Beautiful.
I won’t spoil what happens with Professor Grady’s overlong manuscript but it’s memorable if you love books at all.
Finding Forrester
Sean Connery plays the successful recluse whose novel hit huge (like To Kill a Mockingbird huge). He mentors Jamal Wallace, a young writer with promise played by Rob Brown. The student is ready, the master appears. The apprentice writer finds the old man has critiqued his work savagely, exing out page after page in red ink. Jamal has talent and his prose is visceral but needs refinement.
That’s not the moment that really sticks with me, though. What resonates is a moment when the young man walks home at night past a burning car. Cops slide past in a cruiser, giving Jamal the evil eye. It could have been a throwaway scene but it’s not. Jamal is intelligent, observant and vulnerable. That one short scene is a nod from the director that connotes: yes, he’s young but his experience of the world is complicated, painful and worthy of being written.
I never had to walk home past a burning car but that hit me hard. In my twenties, I worked in Toronto’s book publishing industry. I was part of an army of underpaid professionals filling editorial positions and working in the sales force.
We were young, often underestimated, underappreciated and sometimes even belittled. I met smart people in that profession but the smart ones weren’t all in charge. The industry valued us only as cheap labor. In one job interview, my prospective boss told me I wouldn’t get to have an opinion for seven to ten years. I told him I may as well go to med school because they’d let me perform cardiothoracic surgery faster than that.
In Finding Forrester, it was nice to see a movie that didn’t undercut the young simply because they’re young. I had lots to say back then but unfortunately, I believed I had to wait. If you’re a writer, don’t wait. Gather experience. Read more. Write now.
As Sean would say, “Punch the keys!”
Runners-up
There are several runners-up for my top three. Throw Mama from the Train stands out, especially when Mama comes up with the crucial word (“sultry”). That’s the moment Billy Crystal, playing the writer frustrated and blocked, decides he’s willing to murder her.
In Bullets Over Broadway, the struggling playwright played by John Cusack gives up. He announces, “I am not a writer!”
It’s devastating. As Cusack walks off-screen into The Future of Abandoned Dreams, I thought, No! Don’t give up! I was a child when I saw that but I wanted to be a writer. I took his failure personally.
Adaptation is pretty great. Nicholas Cage plays twins with an appropriate level of weirdness. The portrayal of Robert McKee is spot on. Playing the famous writing teacher, Brian Cox gives a blistering speech in which he eschews the notion that a plot point is unbelievable. That’s worth the price of admission. It’s also fun to watch the writer who insisted on no car chases ends up writing about a car chase.
Misery is a good movie but I prefer the book. I read it in fascination because most of the action takes place in one room. King keeps it going and flowing. In several of my books about global apocalyptic conflict, the settings are quite expansive, more like the structure of The Stand. (As in, “Meanwhile in Jakarta…) By comparison, watching Stephen King keep a whole novel to one claustrophobic space is almost a stunt.
I don’t think Barton Fink is a great movie. However, John Goodman screaming, “I’ll show you the life of the mind!” Gold.
Those are the runners-up but the bronze medal goes to…
Stranger Than Fiction
Stranger Than Fiction was good for me in part because of the great character work by Will Ferrell. However, it’s Emma Thompson standing on the desk that makes it for me. She’s imagining stepping out on a ledge and looking down, figuring out what it would be like to feel the wind between her fingers before she leaps to her death.
We don’t have to experience everything nasty in order to write about it. I forget who said that by the time we’ve gone through high school we’ve experienced enough trauma to write for the rest of our lives. Writers observe and imagine. We put ideas through the brain blender, bake it up and, if done well, the fiction souffle rises.
Imagination allows me to write crime thrillers packed with murders. I have rage. I am vindictive. Still, I keep it to the page. Somehow I’ve avoided killing anyone in real life just for the sake of experimentation. The truth is, I think about murdering people in imaginative ways quite a lot. I mean, a lot.
Writing novels allows me to make an acceptable living of which my family disapproves. It’s also a healthy and entertaining outlet. I never have to taste prison coffee.
What are your favorite movies about writing? Tell me.
BONUS
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When I think of the writers who have guided my writing life, three come to mind first. Here’s the who and, more important, the why:
1. Stephen King
I couldn’t get into the Dark Tower stuff but I’ve read everything else. I love how he provides an ordinary context that sets the scene for the extraordinary. His heroes are normal people and I enjoy finding out how they deal with extremes.
There’s a scene in Tommyknockers that hit me between the eyes. A good guy with a gun is about to use the weapon to save himself. The handgun misfires. Later I read an interview with The King. He said something to the effect of, “The girl is holding a knife she will never get to use.”
In other words: Good stories come from providing no easy solutions. The wide and easy road out of town isn’t wide and easy. It’s a gauntlet. Things get tough for your characters. Then they are made tougher and the noose tightens.
2. Kurt Vonnegut
I saw him speak once a long time ago. I like Vonnegut so much I made him a character in my time travel novel, Wallflower. What appeals to me is his humor and his humanity. He was a kind and decent human being as well as a writer who had fun and got his readers to enjoy themselves. He dealt in big ideas but viewed them through the lens of the individual. Good fiction feels personal.
Some of my fiction is pretty grim and gritty. Even so, I emulate Kurt Vonnegut’s work in that there remains a note of hope amid the rubble. Characters often make great sacrifices but they do so for good reasons and ultimately there is always payoff and a point. I think that’s an important role in fiction, to provide order to chaos. There’s enough chaos in real life. That’s what we’re trying to escape when we open a book.
3. William Goldman
He just left us recently but what a life and legacy. I’ve often said that people know him for his screenwriting. Everyone knows Goldman for The Princess Bride. We should all know him for his novels. The Color of Light is the best novel I’ve ever read. His non-fiction also happens to be hilarious. Want to work in Hollywood? Try Which Lie Did I Tell? and Adventures in the Screen Trade.
Lawrence Block said of Goldman’s writing that reading him “is like watching card tricks while I’m drunk.” Goldman had a method that has always guided me. He makes you think you knew what was going to happen next. Then he pulls the rug out from under the reader. You’re never safe. I was on the 28th floor of an apartment building in Toronto one summer night when I got to the end of one of Goldman’s books. I thought I was safely in the dénouement. The tricky bastard laid a trap for me in the last line that changed everything in the novel. I threw the book across the room in surprise.
Exhilarated and laughing, I knew what and how I wanted to write for the rest of my life: everyday people suffering suspense through funny, twisty plots.
In Bigger Than Jesus, the beat where you find out how Big Denny met my hitman Jesus Diaz? That moment was written by me. It was brought to you by William Goldman. (That hairpin turn caught me by surprise as I wrote it, too. The twist wasn’t in the outline. It rose organically. I’m mostly a pantser.)
In This Plague of Days, when the surreal becomes real and we discover the villain’s true motivation and ally? That’s a big idea made personal. That’s a Vonnegut moment. So is the last scene and the Afterword from the titular author.
In Brooklyn in the Mean Time, the main character is an ordinary guy in extraordinary circumstances. Saddled with a very problematic family, he ran away and turned to crime to survive. Coming home, he’s on a journey toward redemption but he’s barely got the right tools for the job. That character (who happens to be named Chazz and sounds a lot like me) could have stepped out of a Stephen King novel.
Sadly, two of my literary heroes are dead. Long live the King!
Question of the Day
Who are your literary influences? What book changed your life?
