Doing some mindless channel-surfing yesterday, I came across A History of Violence on one of the cable channels.

I saw it on DVD whenever it first came out -- early 2006, I think -- and thought what everybody thought: damned good fight scenes, one great sex scene, some good dialogue, and some domestic scenes that don't work quite as well as the rough bits. (The kid who plays Viggo Mortensen's teenage son seems miscast.)

All that matched my memory of the movie from three years ago (except for the fact they couldn't show the sex scene on basic cable). What I'd completely forgotten about is the over-the-top genius of William Hurt as gangster Richie Cusack.

Quick plot summary: Mortensen plays a small-town restaurant owner who calls himself Tom Stall. He lives in the middle of nowhere with his incredibly hot wife, annoying teenage son, and quietly adorable daughter. When he foils a robbery in his restaurant, killing the two perps in the process, he gets his face in the news, and that brings some unexpected and unwelcome visitors.

Turns out, Tom is really Joey Cusack, a vicious hit man for the Philly mob and younger brother of mob boss Richie Cusack, played by Hurt. Or, at least, he used to be Joey. After his last escapade, which involved the unfortunate intersection of barbed wire and another gangster's eyeball, he fled the mob life, reinvented himself as a small-town family man, and lived in happy anonymity.

Which begs the question: Is it actually possible for a professional killer to just stop being a man of violence and, from pure force of will, turn himself into Ward Cleaver? 

One of the most memorable crime novels I've read is The Killer Inside Me, by Jim Thompson. In that one, a boring small-town sheriff, Lou Ford, is actually a serial killer who hides in plain site by being so predictably dull. It's a terrific conceit for a novel, although I'm not sure if anyone could really wear the mask of normalcy as well as Thompson's protagonist does for much of the story. 

A real-world example of a serial murderer hiding in plain sight is Wichita's BTK killer, who was a local city official and a leader in his church. He committed his final murder in 1991, and managed to go 13 years before he finally cracked and began drawing attention to himself again. 

But a serial killer isn't the same as a hitman; no matter how much the mob enforcer enjoys his work, he's still doing a job. So I guess it's theoretically possible for that guy to settle down somewhere. But could he get married, raise a family, and run a business without any trace of his former occupation emerging until he thwarts a robbery many years later?

If so, I think it would be one for the psychology textbooks.

Another great psycho performance I caught on TV recently was Richard Mulligan as General Custer in Little Big Man. The real-life Custer wasn't a guy who tried to hide from anybody; he was so fond of publicity that he brought a correspondent along with him to Little Bighorn. (It would've produced a great story, had either of them lived.) But as ego-driven as Custer was, it's hard to make the case that he was clinically insane. 

Which isn't a knock on Mulligan's performance. If anything, creating a certifiably loony Custer is even more of an achievement, given how familiar the audience was with Custer's story when the movie came out in 1970.

Still, if Custer really was even a bit unhinged, you'd expect his story to end badly, which it did. As for the fictional mob hitman played by Mortensen, whether he could really could become a new person is debatable.

That brings me back to the genius of Hurt's performance as his unhinged brother. He makes it easy to understand why Mortensen's character would want to get away. That's good enough for me. 

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I mentioned in the previous post that, to my shame, I read very few new books this year. And I feel guilty about that, like I'm a traitor to my profession. 

I'm not the only one feeling guilt. Check out this confession by David Streitfeld from last weekend's New York Times, in which he admits to buying used books from resellers rather than purchasing them new:

Here’s one example of how I casually wreak destruction. I was reading “Sylvia,” an account by the late short-story master Leonard Michaels of his unstable first wife. Looking for material about Mr. Michaels, I saw his friend Wendy Lesser had written a long essay about him in a book published last year by Pantheon. I could buy a new paperback edition of that book, “Room for Doubt,” for $13.95 plus tax in a bookstore. But there were dozens of copies from resellers available online for as little as one cent, plus shipping.

A penny felt a little chintzy, even for me, so I bought a hardcover copy for 25 cents from someone who called herself Heather Blue, plus a few bucks for shipping. Neither my local bookstore nor Pantheon — whose parent, Random House, announced this month it would cut costs by reducing five divisions to three — nor the author got a share. The book looked good as new.

Streitfeld then contacted the author, Wendy Lesser, to tell her what he'd done:

Ms. Lesser herself was philosophical. “I am a pragmatist, not a thin-skinned, delicate little writer who thinks everything needs to be what it is in heaven,” she said. Still, she sounded a little taken aback at the going rate for her books. “Twenty-five cents? That’s all it was?”

Which calls to mind the great line from Ruthless People, delivered by recently kidnapped Bette Midler when she discovers her husband refused to pay the ransom:

Do I understand this correctly? I'm being marked down? I've been kidnapped by K-Mart!

But another crucial element of book publishing had changed, and I think it's nicely articulated in this essay in the Village Voice by novelist Kevin Baker:

"The state of publishing is such that you can get all these great things, but people don't talk about the work. They talk about you," says [novelist Darin] Strauss. "There used to be serious critics and an audience. . . . Now, the audience is also in the critic business." The model becomes Amazon, "where any cranks complaining about books can have the same weight as The New York Times."

This should provide an example of Web democracy in action. But consider the fact that every writer I know nudges his friends and relatives to offset the mob rule by sending their own glowing reviews to Amazon and similar sites. The result is a culture where everything is a five-star book, and everything is fraudulent. It's not so much democracy but a corruption of the public square, one that doesn't so much improve writing as it forces each writer to become his own corporate PR department.

For Strauss, the result is a sort of vast, cultural "rot," extending across art, music, and cinema, as well as writing. "We have created sort of a post-talent age," where what began as the heroic overthrow of cultural elites has now devolved to the craven capitulation to the mob: "It's commercial elitism as opposed to intellectual elitism."

I'll admit this works in my favor, since I write books to be used, rather than reviewed. Most of the people who buy and use my books will end up getting good results from the programs, and the ones that review the books will say nice things and give them five stars.

I get nasty online reviews from time to time, and I won't pretend I'm tough enough to ignore them. They sting. (Kimberly tells me I have a unique ability to give one negative review more weight than 10 positive reviews.) But most of them are nice.

The reviews that mean the most to me are the ones that are clearly well thought out by people who've read the books carefully and done the workouts. Even if there were such a thing as serious book critics who reviewed fitness books, I wouldn't expect any of them to wait until they'd tried the programs before they reviewed one of my books. That's why feedback from readers who've made that investment is more important to me than anything else.

Inevitably, those reviews are mixed. No program that's intended for a mass audience is going to be exactly perfect for any individual. And although my writing style sits well with most of my intended readers, it annoys the shit out of some of them. So a truly honest, thoughtful review is going to include legitimate criticisms along with whatever praise it offers.

Those in-depth reviews are so rare that, when I see one online, I'll often try to find the reviewer's email address and write to thank him or her for the time spent composing it. I'll even make it clear that I agree with some of the criticisms, and if there's confusion about some aspect of the book, I'll try to clear that up, or at least explain how it came to be so confusing.

But that's just me. If I were writing books that were meant to be works of literary art, I'd have a different point of view. 

Either way, though, this is the way it works. I can't change it, so I may as well celebrate the parts of it that work better than the old system. 

Tags: personal , books , writing

When I started this blog, at the original louschuler.com, I gave an annual summary of my favorite books, movies, and events. (Or, in 2006, my favorite book.)

And from time to time, I would write about movies and books without any reason other than to note a trend I'd spotted. I particularly enjoyed writing this summary of recent biographical films. (Important lessons: If your brother dies when you're young, you will become addicted to drugs. But if you're not addicted to alcohol or drugs, no one will make a movie about your life, because you aren't interesting.)

This year, as usual, I haven't seen most of the movies that show up on the critics' top 10 lists. All I've seen are what's available on DVD. And, because of the Olympics and the election, I spent way too much time watching TV, and way too little time reading good books.

That's the windup. Here's the pitch.

MOVIES

I'll start by noting what was, for me, the most disappointing movie of the year: The Dark Knight. I know it's heretical for a male with a functioning endocrine system to profess anything short of a man crush on TDK, but to tell you the truth, I thought it was a mess. For all its outrageous visuals, the plot doesn't make sense until characters tell each other information, which I always find frustrating.

I confess I didn't watch it in an optimal environment, and I confess I don't want to get in trouble with certain members of my family by explaining why it was hard to focus on the movie in certain places. (I'll leave it at this: You don't realize how much noise gift-wrapping creates until you try to watch a movie while someone in the room wraps gifts.)

But even without the noise and other distractions, I knew the plot was taking too many shortcuts. All of a sudden, two major characters are kidnapped, and only one can be saved? In most movies, that would be the plot, but in TDK, it's just a convenient contrivance to kill off the annoying romantic interest and flip another character from good to evil.

I thought Batman Begins was a terrific comic-book movie (as I noted in my 2005 year-end review), but the makers of TDK seem to have learned the wrong lessons from its success.

Conversely, I loved Iron Man, which reminded me of Batman Begins in the way it shows its hero inventing his toys, as well as his superhero self.

My favorite comedy of the year is Tropic Thunder, and it's not really close. I don't think I've laughed that hard at a movie in recent memory.

My wife and I watched Tropic Thunder and Forgetting Sarah Marshall more or less back to back -- I can't remember if it was consecutive nights or consecutive weekends, but it was within a short time span. Interestingly, while my wife tolerated the former, she thought the latter was by far the better movie.

I was fine with FSM, but after years of watching every movie made about the Vietnam war, from The Green Berets to Platoon to Hamburger Hill, I was just knocked out by the deft ways Tropic Thunder skewered them all.

It was a good, possibly great, year for kids' movies. I loved Wall-E, a movie that's landed on a bunch of critics' top 10 lists, and liked a long line of others, including (to my complete surprise) Kit Kittredge: An American Girl, Kung Fu Panda, and Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa.

Bigger, Stronger, Faster is my pick for best documentary of the year, but I say that with two caveats: I only saw a handful of documentaries (and haven't yet seen some of the most highly praised, like Trouble the Water), and it just happened to be about one of my favorite subjects: steroids. (Nate Green interviewed the director, Chris Bell, for Testosterone Muscle.)

Two other documentaries I liked that came out this year: Taxi to the Dark Side and Gonzo: The Life and Times of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson.

BOOKS

I wish I could list 10 great books I read this year, but I'd be lying if I did. My standard joke is that I wrote so many books in 2007 and early 2008 that I didn't actually have time to read many.

But that's not remotely true. As I said earlier, I spent way too much time watching sports and political coverage on TV, and way too little reading words on paper.

I can think of only one novel I read this year, A Lion Among Men, and that's a Christmas present than I'm only halfway through. (It's the third book in Gregory Maguire's Oz series, which began with Wicked and continued with Son of a Witch.)

The best nonfiction book I picked up this year, Nixonland, is another one that I'm only halfway through. It's not for lack of interest; I fully intend to finish it. I just need a really long plane flight, or some other time when I have some open bandwidth between the ears. (In my defense, half of it is still 400+ pages.)

One nonfiction book that I managed to finish, thanks to its brevity, is The Bush Tragedy, by Jacob Weisberg. Weisberg doesn't manage to make the current President Bush likable or sympathetic, but that wasn't his intention. He wanted to understand the president's wrongheadedness, his unfailing ability to do the wrong thing at the right moment, to take credit for imaginary successes and assign blame to others for his own failures.

Weisberg tries to explain it all through Bush's relationships -- with his father, with Cheney, with Rove, with God, with his own image of himself as a modern-day Churchill. But it still doesn't quite explain, to my satisfaction at least, how Bush managed to get through life squandering so many opportunities. He went to Yale and Harvard without really opening his mind. He doubled-down on the mistake of ignoring pre-9/11 intelligence by ignoring pre-Iraq war intelligence questioning the existence of WMD. He ran for re-election in 2004 by promising to keep the country secure, but immediately upon winning announced that he was going to war against Social Security.

I don't know if Bush will go down in history as the worst of our country's first 43 presidents, but it's telling that his priorities resemble those of his chief rival, James Buchanan, who occupied the White House from 1857-1861, and left his successor, Abraham Lincoln, with the Civil War. Buchanan tried to stay neutral on slavery, but marched the army into Utah to take on the Mormons. Similarly, Bush rushed to Washington to save Terri Schiavo, but let New Orleans drown.

Historians will need a long time to sort all this out, and they aren't helped by the Bush administration's devotion to secrecy. Whatever records survive might give us more insight into how we got where we are today. But, as Bush likes to remind us, we'll all be dead by then.

SPORTS

I'm supposed to say that the most remarkable sports achievement of the year was Michael Phelps' eight gold medals at Beijing.

But for me that one comes in second, behind Tiger Woods' epic performance in the U.S. Open, when he won on the 19th sudden-death playoff hole. I've had gimpy knees off and on for the past 10 years, and I can't imagine walking 91 holes of golf in five days with the eyes of the world on me. Hell, I suck at golf riding in a cart with three guys watching.

After Woods and Phelps, in no particular order, I was excited by the Devil Rays and Phils in the World Series; by Albert Pujols' MVP performance with a bad elbow (and who knows how many other injuries he plays through season after season; and Usain Bolt's amazing Olympic performance in the 100 and 200 meters.

So that's it for me in 2008. You?


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Tags: sports , entertainment , politics , books , movies

For me, this holiday season was more exhausting and stressful than usual, for reasons that are ultimately positive.

I was busy with work, which is great. I love my new(ish) job at Testosterone Muscle, a magazine I admired for 10 years before I finally joined the team this summer.

Kimberly and I were driven like parental sled dogs this December, but I can't complain about that either. I love the fact our children do things that weren't available to us when we were growing up. When I was a kid, I got a few karate lessons and could only play sports if my parents didn't have to drive me back and forth. Kimberly got to do even less. Yeah, it's a pain to shuttle Harrison to karate twice a week, and Annie to ballet, and Meredith to all the things she's involved in, and it's unfortunate that everything culminates in concerts and recitals at the exact same time of year. But if the alternative is not having busy, active, engaged kids, I'll take this.

Another level of complication, which was only occasionally stressful in the second half of the year, is the fact I had four books released between November 20 and December 26.

First was Built for Show, a book I wrote with Nate Green. (You can read an excerpt here.)

Next was Huge in a Hurry, which I wrote with Chad Waterbury. That one came out December 9. (Chad talked about it in this interview.)

Today, two of my books -- The New Rules of Lifting and The New Rules of Lifting for Women -- come out in paperback for the first time.

I know the last two don't count as new books, and the first two are only "my" books in the contractual sense -- I wrote the foreword to Nate's book, and my name only appears in the acknowledgements of Chad's. So I didn't have the duties that come with introducing a new product with my name on it, a process that can dominate your life for weeks, if not months. And the work on all four projects was mostly finished by the time I started with Testosterone in July.

But I still feel some of the same jitters, wondering if the books are going to find an audience and help readers in their quest to transform their physiques. I may not be checking the books' Amazon rankings every hour, as I do when I'm the primary author of a new release, but I confess I've been doing it at least twice a day.

There's also a little sadness in seeing NROL and NROL for Women come out in paperback. For the past year, I've had an odd little distinction: I'm pretty sure I'm the only fitness-book author with three titles in hardcover at the same time -- those two plus The Book of Muscle. When stores sell out of their stock of NROL hardcovers, I'll have just one book that isn't a paperback.

I know, it's stupid to be nostalgic for an insignificant distinction. And it's even more stupid to mention it when, on my last trip to the local Borders, I not only had three books in hardcover on the shelves, but also the NROL paperbacks, plus Built for Show and Huge in a Hurry, plus two earlier titles: Home Workout Bible and Testosterone Advantage Plan. Who can complain about having nine books for sale at the same time?



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Tags: books , media , publishing , personal

Each year, we give our local trash collectors a Christmas card with a small gift inside, usually $10. This year, because the guys have been exceptionally nice to our dog -- throwing him doggie treats whenever he's outside when they arrive -- we decided to bump it up to $20.

So imagine my surprise when I woke up Monday morning, looked out the window, and saw that the card I'd carefully taped to the garbage-can lid was missing.

At first I thought it had blown off during the night -- high winds combined with frigid temperatures would probably be enough to defeat the clear packing tape I'd used.

This year's card was in a white envelope, which would be hard to find on our snow-covered lawn. So I recruited my wife, her brother (who's in from Albuquerque for the holidays), and the three kids to search for it.

Just as I was kicking myself for not doing what my neighbor had done -- tying the card to the handle of his garbage can with a ribbon -- I noticed that his card wasn't there either. The ribbon was there, but the card wasn't.

That's when it hit me: The gifts to the garbage men hadn't blown away. They'd been stolen.

My brother in law, still groggy from the two-hour time shift, said he'd seen something unusual late Sunday night. A car had pulled into our cul-de-sac, but cut its lights as it got near our driveway. And if that wasn't strange enough, the driver had gone through the cul-de-sac clockwise, whereas cars typically come through counterclockwise. Of course that makes perfect sense if the goal was to steal the cash intended for the trash collectors. By driving through from the left side of the street, he'd be able to reach out from his driver's-side window to snatch the card without having to get out of his car.

I pulled out another Christmas card, put another $20 into it, and hand-delivered it to the trash collectors when they came around two hours later. When I told them about the thefts, they already knew all about it. Not only that, they knew who'd done it: a disgruntled former trash collector who'd been fired sometime before Christmas last year. This was the second year he'd made the rounds, stealing gifts intended for his former coworkers.

You can see how it would be a lucrative crime spree: Hit 100 houses, stealing an average of $10 from each, and you've got $1,000 for a night's work. It would be easy for a guy who not only knows the neighborhoods, but knows the garbage collectors' routes as well.

What I can't imagine is sinking low enough that this would seem like a reasonable idea. Not only are you stealing from the people whose houses you used to pull up to every week as a trash collector, but you're stealing Christmas presents from guys you worked with five days a week, year in and year out.

There's a serious pathology at work there.
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Tags: christmas , crime , society