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As I said in my last post, Universal Pictures' planned adaptation of Moby-Dick will not be the first anime version of the novel. 

The science-fiction series Hakugei: Legend of Moby Dick aired in Japan between 1997 and 1999 and spanned 26 episodes. The series is set in the year 4699, when the galaxy is ruled by a totalitarian Federation that uses its giant white warship, Moby Dick, to make sure that planets tow the line. Ahab, still peg-legged, is transformed into a more light-hearted, slightly piratical figure (complete with eye-patch)  who leads a motley, futuristically cosmopolitan crew in the hunt for "whales" -- derelict ships that can be salvaged. Ahab has fought against Moby Dick in the past: "For the first time in my life," he eventually tells his crew in the fifth episode, "I experienced fear. I thought that white bastard was terrifying . . . but also beautiful. Our ship was blown to bits. I saw my crew torn apart, blown right into space." 


Ahab, his leg torn off, one eye blinded, survives, for reasons that he still does not understand. He spends time in prison, then escapes, spending his time hunting "whales" and running from the Federation. And then a boy named Lucky, an Ishmael figure, who isn't quite what he seems, tracks Ahab down: he needs Ahab and his ship, the Lady Whisker, to help him save his home planet, Moad, from the ravages of Moby Dick. And Ahab gives in to his desire for revenge.

The Pequod's collection of "isolatoes federated on one keel" is amusingly transformed into a group of oddballs who would be at home in any number of anime extravaganzas: a  laconic, tatooed, muscle-bound savage with an unlimited (and not too discerning) appetite (Queequeg?); a strangely precocious little kid (Pip?); a computer geek; a speed freak; a fat cook; a saturnine swordsman; and a doctor who's never seen without his armor on; and Dew, an android in search of a purpose (who has no real analogue in Melville's novel).


All 26 episodes of Hakugei have just been released in the U.S. in a six-disc box set by ADV films. In an interview that accompanies the discs, series creator Osamu Desaki says, "I did this work thinking I'd like to depict something from the point of view of a group who's been excluded from the world." It is also, he says, about the fact that "humans have feelings or longing, or rather awe, for gigantic things." Desaki takes great liberty with Melville's story, but from what I've seen so far, his vividly frenetic style captures something of the novel's unruly and inventive spirit. I can't wait to see how it turns out. I'll have more to say when I've finished watching the series.

Bryan's reference to the mid-1990s adaptation of The Scarlet Letter starring Demi Moore reminded me of a cartoon that ran in the November 20, 1995 issue of The New Yorker. Drawn by Warren Miller and entitled "Moby Dick the Demi Moore Version," the cartoon pictured a big, dead, white whale (with crosses for eyes) hanging from a scaffold. At the bottom left were a peg-legged man holding a harpoon in his left hand and hugging a buxom lass with his right arm. (Click the thumbnail at right to go to the cartoon's page at cartoonbank.com.)

The thing is, Hollywood has already made the Demi Moore version Moby-Dick -- twice.

The first was a silent adaptation called The Sea Beast (1926), adapted by Bess Meredyth and starring John Barrymore, Sr. as Ahab Ceeley (yes, they gave him a last name); George O'Hara as Ahab's brother, Derek (yes, they gave him a brother); and Dolores Costello as as Ahab's love interest Esther Harper (yes, they gave him a love interest!). Plus, there's a dog.

The film was remade with sound as Moby Dick (1930), with Barrymore reprising the role of Ahab Ceeley, though the writing credits are given to Oliver H.P. Garrett (for the adaptation) and  J. Grubb Alexander (for the dialogue and screenplay). Lloyd Hughes now plays Derek, and Ahab's love interest is renamed Faith Mapple and played by Joan Bennett.There's still a dog.


But this time, with the Melville Revival underway, the filmmakers decide to acknowledge that Moby-Dick is a classic book, so the film opens with a book opening:

And then we get some text. If you're expecting "Call me, Ishmael," you're going to be disappointed, though if you paid attention to the open credits, you've already realized that there can't be a "Call me, Ishmael," because -- well, there's no Ishmael.

So here's the text we see. It's not particularly Melvillean:

The next screen is a little bit better (but not much):

I often show clips from this version to my American Lit I classes, which have read Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin and learned about Hawthorne's remark about "d___d scribbling women." I suggest to them that what Hollywood does to Moby-Dick in these two adaptations is to transform the novel so that it fits into the tradition of sentimentality against which Melville was positioning his novel. Gone, with Ishmael, are any hints of the homosocial, though Queequeg is retained -- as Ahab's buddy.

Yglesias laments the recent announcement of a new Moby-Dick film adaptation -- directed by the guy with the unspellable last name who just directed Wanted, written by a team that has only teen comedies to their credit (including the Olsen twins vehicle New York Minute), and co-produced by the folks who're bring us the American history adventure series National Treasure. (Recall Nicolas Cage peering at the all-seeing eye on a dollar bill: "I think the Illuminati were trying to send us secret messages!")

Is it indulging in Ivory Tower elitism to join Matt in thinking: "Terrifying!" -- and not in a good, White-Whale-crushing-your-boat way?

Part of what's to be lamented, apparently, is that the writers are conceiving this as "an opportunity to take a timeless classic and capitalize on the advances in visual effects to tell what at its core is an action-adventure revenge story" -- something more akin to dramatizing a graphic novel.

Actually, Melville wrote that version of the story himself. And then he spent a year rewriting it into Moby-Dick. Biographer Delbanco draws on Melville's own words to set the scene as a vampire story:

Looking back at his labors on Moby-Dick, Melville saw "two books ... being writ ... the larger book, and the infinitely better, is for [his] own private shelf. That it is, whose unfathomable cravings drink his blood; the other only demands his ink."  Moby-Dick was Melville's vampire book. It sapped him -- but not before he had invented a new kind of writing that, we can now see, anticipated the kind of modernist prose that expresses the author's stream of consciousness without conscious self-censorship.

So what's lost in reducing Melville's two-in-one grand-slam to a film adaptation of a graphic novel? Lots, I suspect, as is true with all other film versions of the book. This time they're jettisoning the first-person narration, for one -- something most of the graphic novel adaptations of the book don't even manage, as far as I can tell.

The news of the new adaptation -- and its conception in relation to graphic novels -- led me to do some poking around. I quickly realized the graphic adaptation of Melville's book had gone through many more versions than I was aware of. I grew up on the old Illustrated Classics rendition; my wife picked up one for our kids when she worked for Scholastic. We own the pop-up version, of course. What self-respecting Am Lit professor under age 50 doesn't?

But I hadn't realized until this morning that there's a Will Eisner version, along with two others that feature major figures from my experience as a teenage comic book collector in the 1980s: Dick Giordano and Bill Sienkiewicz. And just this year Marvel published a six-installment adaptation, due for single-volume hardcover release next month (see illustration to the left). I've just put in orders for all of the above -- of course there are many more -- but I have to say that list of names here heartens me. Certainly some of these adaptations are smart? Maybe this will turn out better than the 90s version of The Scarlet Letter, before filming which Demi Moore didn't even feel the need to read the novel.

I woke up yesterday morning hoping not to think too much, this year, about 9/11. The Internets put an end to that, though, in the form of emails from friends and family, blog posts, and the newspaper. Maybe it should be an unplugged day from here on out. Then again, the calls and emails from friends remind me that there's a lot to celebrate -- and to be grateful for.

So I stopped my whining about not wanting to remember (Emerson: "What opium is instilled in all disaster?") and left the office a couple hours early to catch a matinée showing of Man on Wire.

What a perfect thing to do on the afternoon of a 9/11 anniversary. I have to admit, it was tough at first to watch all the footage of the Twin Towers being assembled. Those big waffle-wafers dangling from cranes look in retrospect like so much gingerbread! And the idea of being perched that high can't help but bring the jumpers to mind. But something about Phillipe Petit's giddy storytelling, the relentless egotism that fueled his wire-walking caper, and perhaps most of all the fact that he survived to tell the tale, ultimately constitutes a joyful remembrance of the buildings, even if 9/11 is never overtly referenced.



Something I hadn't expected, though: The film is as much about memory -- about the 30 years that separate the event and the retelling we witness -- as it is about the original events.  It's also about art. And most surprising of all it's about the relationships among the people who plotted with Petit and helped him pull it off -- about the damage done by an ego large enough to think up such a spectacular stunt. I'm not sure the storytellers intended it to go that way, but the film making itself is masterful, and I think the director ultimately put together a much richer story than the adventure narrative he may have set out to recount.

Much later in the evening, SSW and I went to see a film one of her high school friends (from an exchange student experience in Germany) had a hand in making. Able Danger, showing for the next week or so at Two Boots Pioneer Theater, may be the only film in existence that can claim the generic designation as "9/11 action comedy/noir homage." Its central character is based on Sander Hicks, owner of Brooklyn coffee shop/publishing house Vox Pop, which features prominently in the film, along with other neighborhood landmarks.



Reimagining Hicks as a hipster/geek superhero/secret agent, the film asks what would happen if Hicks's self-published book,  The Big Wedding: 9/11, The Whistle Blowers, and the Cover Up, actually resulted in the FBI and neo-Nazi nutjobs chasing him through Brooklyn on his bike. The comedic referencing of Maltese Falcons, MacGuffin devices, Great Whatsits and other noir staples take the edge off what could have slipped too close to paranoid "truthie" earnestness, though there's enough of the latter to send you home from a fun night at an indie film and deep into Google's recesses.

BY JESSIE MORGAN-OWENS

Woody Allen's article in today's New York Times, "Excerpts from the Spanish Diary," is such classic "Woody Allen" that before my first cup of coffee and before reading the by-line, I knew it was him, because his voice had taken over the usual reading-voice I hear in my head.

Try this as an experiment -- try to read the first line as Javier Bardem and not as Woody Allen:

"January 2nd: Received offer to write and direct film in Barcelona. Must be cautious. Spain is sunny, and I freckle."

Or this one, a love note to New York from Barcelona:

"I never like mixing business with pleasure, but I may have to slake the lust of each one in turn to get the film completed. Perhaps I can give Penélope Wednesdays and Fridays, satisfying Scarlett Tuesdays and Thursdays. Like alternate-side parking."

That last one works as Bardem better, but everything changes when you get to the Upper West Side.

The whole piece is a promotional piece for the film Vicky Christina Barcelona, which the Times held until after they ran their own review last week. But only Woody Allen gets to advertise both his movie and his sexual prowess on page 9 of the weekend Arts and Leisure section. 

The last line: "It's lonely at the top."

Penelope Cruz also has an interview, "Screen Test," posted on the site. She says, "I fell in love with New York the first time I came here. I was blown away. I said, I feel like I've been here before, I want to live here ... you can always feel like a student when you're here."
She then puts in a dig at Los Angeles, a la Annie Hall.

[The image above is taken from the nytimes.com.]

Jessie Morgan-Owens is a professional photographer and a doctoral student in the English Department at NYU. She has taught the Writing New York course with us for the past two years and will be a regular contributor to this site. To see examples of Jessie's photography, visit her site morganowens.com.

The New York Korean Film Festival begins today with a showing of  Jeon Soo-il's With a Girl of Black Soil at the Cinema Village. Sponsored by the Korea Society, the Festival continues through August 31 with films at the Cinema Village (22 E 12th St in Manhattan) and the BAMcinématek (at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, 30 Lafayette Avenue).

Here's a trailer describing the Festival:



The festival includes 15 New York premieres and a retrospective devoted to the work of actor Ahn Sung-ki, often described as "the national actor" by the Korean press. On Wednesday, August 27 at 6:30 p.m., a panel entitled "Korean Actor on the World Stage: A Discussion with Ahn Sung-ki" will be presented at the Korea Society (950 Third Avenue, Eighth Floor, corner of 57th Street). Admission is $15, $10 for students and members.

The showing of Radio Star  (2006, 115 minutes) at 6:40 p.m. on August 26 at the Cinema Village will be followed by a question-and-answer session with Ahn. Click here to see the complete schedule of films.

Last night we planned to see the new Woody Allen film (though they never bill them as the new Woody Allen films these days). Turns out we had the dates wrong and it doesn't open until Friday, so we caught a quick cab down the street to Film Forum where the Patti Smith movie (mentioned here earlier by Cyrus) was already a few minutes in progress. From what I understand we missed some opening footage of horses, horses, horses, horses.

The audience was made up mostly of fans (like me), judging from the appreciative response.  If you plan to see it but don't know the basic outline of her career, I'd suggest reading Sharon Delano's New Yorker profile from several years ago, which isn't on the magazine's site but may be accessible here or via Lexis-Nexis if you have an institutional subscription.

Patti Smith: Dream of Life is an impressionistic film, dreamlike (as the title would suggest), alternating between candid moments and short, tightly composed sequences rather than offering a traditional documentary narrative. We get a sprinkling of early footage, lots of photos from the 1970s, some memories of CBGB and the Chelsea Hotel, but this isn't an account of her rise to stardom so much as a portrait of her return from retirement. She gets the important details out of the way fast via a sometimes stiff voiceover: Living in Michigan for 16 years with her husband Fred "Sonic" Smith and their kids, Jackson and Jesse, she'd been a homebody rather than  the punk rock icon she'd transformed herself into by 1975. When Sonic died in 1994, she decided to return to New York and to performing, her kids in tow, and she hasn't stopped since.

The movie, which involved over 10 years of filming,  has only the barest hint of chronology, and even then it relies on you to recognize her kids as teenagers and then as early 20-somethings, as it toggles back and forth through those ten years. She mentions musician friends who helped her return to the public -- Dylan, Michael Stipe -- but the comeback isn't really what anchors the narrative. Rather, the film grounds itself via two recurring sequences. First, she announces that she's sequestered herself in a corner of her bedroom until the film is finished. Sitting there, she unpacks boxes of mementos -- a guitar given to her by Sam Shepard, her favorite childhood dress, her son's baby shirt from the hospital, an antique Persian urn containing a portion of Robert Mapplethorpe's remains -- and uses them as touchstones for reflections on her life.

The other pattern is weirder, and is what I think really makes the film: The woman loves graveyards. If Smith's self-conception as a Romantic poet isn't evident enough to her fans, the point is hammered home here. She sees herself as an Artist in a genealogy that stretches from Blake to Shelley to Whitman to Rimbaud to Picasso to Ginsberg and Corso and Burroughs to Jackson Pollock and Bob Dylan to herself.  These folks provide her with sacred texts that govern her cosmology; they also structure her world travels. She references all of them over the course of the film; she also visits most of their graves -- and in the case of Rimbaud visits his outhouse for good measure.



There's little in this world that could be more Romantic (in the capital R sense) than visiting graves of the poets, unless you want to go the Gregory Corso route and actually have yourself buried at your master's feet (we find him, in the film, buried as close as he could get to Shelley). When I asked, during a Q&A with the director, the fashion photographer Steven Sebring, about the tension between the film's emphasis on "life" (as in her life after the death of her husband) and its preoccupation with death and cemeteries, he made the point that Smith very self-consciously shapes her living in relation to loved ones and heroes dead and long gone: when she travels to a city she often books her hotel in proximity to a graveyard she wants to visit. "She seems to know where everyone's buried," he said.

The subject of literary tourism (and "necrotourism" in particular) has its own minor publishing cottage industry in the academy, one which interests me professionally. But it's rarer to find someone who carries on the practice today to the extent Smith does. She defines herself in relation to the dead -- family and friends, but the writers who shaped her personal and artistic identities (which clearly can't be separated for her). In our jaded, 21c world, it seems a little ridiculous: identifying as a Poet (black hood and cloak and all), taking appreciative rubbings of headstones, scribbling in notebooks everywhere you go, never getting tired of William Blake. But Smith comes to figure, in the film, as an alternative not simply to contemporaries like George W. Bush (whom she indicts in high style late in the film) but to those members of her generation who gave birth to postmodernism as well. She comes off not simply as the last great Romantic but as someone who advocates Romanticism as a way of life -- as a way through life. As much as the film relies on graveyard scenes, we find these visits (and her reflections on fallen friends) giving her the strength to survive her husband.

None of this should suggest that the film lacks when it comes to music. It's not a concert film, and some of the music will be unfamiliar to those (again, like me) less familiar with her recent work than with her classic recordings. But from her punkrock reading of the Declaration of Independence to spittle-laden, vein-popping renditions of "Land" and "Rock n Roll Nigger," the film reminds you that, contemporary peace activist or no, this woman still earns every bit of her title as the Godmother of Punk.

Smith appears in person at select screenings this week and next; see Film Forum's website for more details.

What's up with the weather at home? I'm sitting in the airport in Portland waiting to head east, but my flight's been pushed back for several hours.

Hooray for an airport with free wi-fi!

Checking my email, I find this from the Tenement Museum (108 Orchard St.), about tomorrow night's installment in their outstanding Tenement Talks series:

Scenes from the City: Filmmaking in New York with James Sanders

Tuesday, August 12 at 6:30 PM

From King Kong climbing the Empire State Building to the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man lumbering through Columbus Circle, New York has been the setting for some of the most recognizable moments on film. Filmmaker and author James Sanders joins us for an illustrated lecture about how movies like 42nd Street, Taxi Driver, and Annie Hall made an already famous city into a mythic one.

Maybe if my jet-lag's worn off by then I'll be able to catch it myself.

So I've spent the better part of the last week holed up in a cabin somewhere in the Rocky Mountains, without the Internet, about as far from Gotham as you can get. The Movie was playing in town on the local one-screener, of course, since we're still talking about planet Earth, but we skipped it in favor of fly fishing and hiking from ski lifts to waterfalls.

Until today, that is, when we caught a plane to Seattle (and a smaller one from there to central WA) and, within a couple hours of dropping off our bags, hit the theater.