Cormac McCarthy's The Counselor

in the Counselor people say lots of banal sentences like this (above)
convinced that they're telling you the wisdom of the ages... 

In America Cormac McCarthy is unassailable. He has a cast iron literary reputation, a legion of fans and highly placed champions in the upper echelons of American literary culture. All with good reason. His Tennessee novels are masterpieces and Blood Meridian is one of the greatest American novels of the last 50 years. But (and you knew a but was coming didn't you?) just as his reputation has grown over the last twenty years so his actual novels have - in my opinion - declined. I reckon we hit Peak McCarthy probably somewhere in the Blood Meridian/All The Pretty Horses years. I wasn't a huge fan of The Road which had great stretches of purple prose (and that's rich coming from me, but hey a cat can look at a king, right?), I found No Country For Old Men to be a wee bit hacky with the lyrical prose attempting to cover up gaping plot holes and some dodgy Palinesque tea party politics. And as for parts 2 and 3 of the Border Trilogy, they were, in retrospect, grim and rather tedious sub-par efforts. 
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So what to make of The Counselor, Cormac McCarthy's first foray into screenwriting at the age of 80? Maybe I'm not the right person to ask. Maybe you should ask a true McCarthy fan or maybe the screenplay should only be read in the context of the film, a film I have not yet seen. As you can see I'm doing a lot of hedging here because I found The Counselor screenplay to be a pretty excruciating business. It's the story of a lawyer, The Counselor, who gets mixed up with the Mexican Cartel and an exotic, beautiful woman. That's really all you need to know. It's McCarthy's universe so you understand that all is not going to go well and evil will triumph in the end. The Counselor reads like pretty much every American noir movie of the last 20 years and no cliche is left in the box: the femme fatale, the Mexicans, the drugs, the lifestyles of the rich and famous, the naive guy in over his head, misogyny, a reactionary ideology with an ever so subtle racism. (I expect you've noticed that for all Hollywood's supposed liberalism the vast majority of its films are deeply conservative.) We even get a cat stroking villain, although McCarthy must have thought that that was ok because the cat is a cheetah. 
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There are certain conventions in noir and if you buy into the logic of the story you can sort of forget all the cliches and just go with it but here I couldn't go with it because what really banjaxes up The Counselor is the dialogue. It's a complete embarrassment from start to finish. Humans don't talk like this. Not even in a David Mamet movie. Corny doesn't come close to describing this stuff. Go on read it here for yourself if you don't believe me. It's as if Cormac McCarthy has decided to channel not Quentin Tarantino but whoever the guys were who wrote one of those many post Pulp Fiction rip offs like Two Days In The Valley or Destiny Turns On The Radio. Yikes. The cod philosophy and the unerotic "dirty talking" made me hang my head in shame for the man who wrote Child of God and Outer Dark. If there's a precise inverse of the authenticity and integrity that someone like Louis CK brings to his screenplays The Counselor is exactly it. 
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But, of course, none of this matters. The Counselor has a 10 million dollar marketing campaign behind it and is completely critic proof. And at least three times in his career Ridley Scott has turned pretty ordinary scripts into cinematic works of genius. Its the final film that matters not the screenplay. And I guarantee you one thing: the film WILL be better than the screenplay because the screenplay is mortifying. I suppose the only long term damage will be to McCarthy's reputation: critics, especially British critics, will use the screenplay of The Counselor to prove that they were right to be skeptical and that the emperor really did have no clothes after all. 

The Not So Simple Art of Murder

I'm reposting this from June of 2009 as what I said then is more relevant today. This year (2013) New York has experienced the lowest murder rate since reliable records began in 1963 and last week there wasn't a single murder in any of the five boroughs. The number of white murder victims in Manhattan this year appears to be fewer than half a dozen. White Manhattanites are thus living in the safest large Metropolitan area in the world (safer even than London) although you wouldnt know that from the TV. Anyway here's what I said back in 2009. I've corrected the data for the latest available year (2011):
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The New York Times has published an interactive murder map of New York City which incorporates comprehensive NYPD data for the last eight years. The map is interactive because you can filter it by race/age/location etc. It makes for some interesting reading. I always thought it was amusing when I lived in Oxford that Inspector Morse stumbled across a murder every week when there hadn't been an actual murder in the city of dreaming spires in eight years. New York's plummeting murder rate has generated a similar dissonance. If you add up all the deaths on Law & Order, L&O SVU, CSI-NY etc. etc. there are easily 100+ murders in Manhattan every season and because most of the writers are white - and that's the demographic they skew to - most of the TV victims are also white. And this is where the dissonance comes in. If you look at the actual data around 92 percent of all murder victims in New York City are black or Latino. In Manhattan in 2011 27 people were murdered, four of whom were white. You heard me right. Four. (Although I am red/green colour blind so you might want to check that interactive chart for yourself.) Yes this is four people too many people and of course it still represents four tragedies but that's not my point. By several orders of magnitude there are going to be many more white Manhattanite crime victims on network TV, movies and in crime novels this year than actually died in real life. I reckon ten times as many white people will be killed on the Law & Order franchises alone than in the real world. Why is this? Well murder sells of course and as a crime novelist I don't want to put a stop to that but why can't the networks tell us the real story that emerges from the NYT interactive map? The real victims of crime in New York are black and Latino and they live in places like Harlem, Washington Heights, the South Bronx, Bed Sty. Places where the actors, execs and writers never go. Maybe the studios are worried that those stories wouldn't play in Iowa. Well the success of The Wire proves that realistic crime dramas can work, but it's not easy, you can't just give people formula, you've got to write intelligent believable characters; in short the writers would have to exercise that big muscle between their ears and the networks would have to stop playing it safe. Would Inspector Morse have been as successful a show if he had gone after bicycle thieves and cocaine dealers? Maybe. Maybe not. But I think a little dose of reality might have been fun once in a while. Similarly with TV, films and crime fiction. Perhaps they could at least make an occasional attempt to show the reality of murder in New York. It's a reality that mostly exists across 110th Street way beyond the comfort zone of most of the creative types, who if truth be told probably all live in Santa Monica anyway.

007 XXS - 50 Jahre James Bond "Liebesgrüße aus Moskau"

Vor fast genau einem Jahr erschien das Taschenbuch 007 XXS - 50 Jahre "James Bond 007 jagt Dr. No". Nun ist der Nachfolgeband da, zum zweiten Film Liebesgrüße aus Moskau (FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE), der in diesem Jahr sein goldenes Jubiläum feiert. Wieder hat Autor Danny Morgenstern viele amüsante und faszinierende Fakten rund um den Agententhriler von 1963 zusammengetragen, der nicht nur innerhalb des Franchise, sondern auch in der Welt des Thrillers allgemein als Klassiker gilt.



Insofern verwundert es auch nicht, dass der Film immer wieder als Referenz in der langen Geschichte der Filmreihe diente - wie man im Buch nachlesen kann - und sich zig Bewerber für die Bondrolle in bestimmten Szenen aus diesem Film probierten. Geschichte und Hintergründe dieses, dem realen Kalten-Kriegs-Geschehen wohl am nächsten kommenden Spionage-Abenteuers lesen sich sehr kurzweilig. Wie bereits beim Vorgängerband werden auch hier wieder selbst eingefleischte Bondprofis auf interessante Neuigkeiten stoßen. Da Autor Danny Morgenstern auch als Business-Knigge-Coach tätig ist, wird die Stil-Ikone Bond natürlich auch aus dieser Richtung beleuchtet. So wird der Agent im Buch beispielsweise nicht durch die Weinwahl des Schurken Grant misstrauisch, sondern durch seine Krawattenbindung. Aber selbst ein 007 ist in Stilfragen nicht perfekt.

Auf die Romanvorlage von Ian Fleming wird in einem gesonderten Kapitel eingegangen, so auch die erstmalig originalgetreuen Übersetzungen ins Deutsche. Ebenso der Bereich Synchronisation. Vielen Fans ist beispielsweise gar nicht bewusst, dass selbst im englischsprachigen Original zahlreiche Schauspieler nachsynchronisiert wurden. Hier kam sehr oft Schauspielerin und Sprachtrainierin Nikki van der Zyl zum Einsatz, die auch bei der Wiederaufführung von Liebesgrüße aus Moskau am vergangenen Wochenende in Braunschweig anwesend war. Im kommenden Monat wird zudem eine Ausstellung über van der Zyl und ihre Familie in Berlin eröffnet.

Ein Buch zu jedem Bondfilm ist eine sehr schöne Idee. Im nächsten Jahr wird Goldfinger dazustoßen, ab Feuerball muss man dann leider zwei Jahre auf einen neuen Band warten. Dafür arbeitet Morgenstern aber auch an einem umfangreicheren Werk, James Bond für Besserwisser (siehe Interview).

007 XXS 50 Jahre James Bond 

„Liebesgrüße aus Moskau“

Von Danny Morgenstern

144 Seiten, etwa 32 Abbildungen

Taschenbuch

LIMITIERTE 1. AUFLAGE: 1007 Exemplare

8,50 EUR (D), ISBN 978-3-00-042681-0

Erscheinungstermin: 10. Oktober 2013

DAMOKLES, Braunschweig

www.james-bond-xxl.de

Über den Autor: Kein deutscher Autor hat mehr zum Thema James Bond veröffentlicht. Danny Morgenstern war Mitarbeiter für das Stadtmagazin „Cockta!l“, zuletzt als Kolumnist, schrieb für die Boulevard- Zeitung „Extra“ und für die Braunschweiger Zeitung.

2001 war er Co-Autor beim „Lexikon der Idole“ (Schwarzkopf und Schwarzkopf) von Michael Völkel und Karsten Weyershausen. Im selben Verlag erschien Morgensterns Buch „James Bond XXL“ (2006), das als Standardwerk auf dem Gebiet „James Bond“ gilt.

Zuletzt erschienen die experimentellen Bücher „Stöhnen – aber richtig! Der etwas andere Oralverkehr“ (2010) und „Der LiebesLebenRetter“ (2011). Danny Morgenstern ist Business-Knigge-Trainer, schult Dienstleister in psychologisch fundierten Seminaren mit den Themen-schwerpunken „Moderne Umgangsformen“, Körpersprache, Kommunikation, Motivation und Umgang mit Kunden. Als Moderator führte Morgenstern durch mehrere große Veranstaltungen, die auch live im Fernsehen übertragen wurden (u.a. 2008 die „German Masters“, zusammen mit Isabel Edvardsson). Als Initiator des „World Freeze Day“ hat der Braunschweiger in den letzten Jahren deutschlandweit für Schlagzeilen gesorgt.