Savage Lullaby

Yesterday was an interesting day, media wise, for me.  I finished Chuck Pahlaniuk’s latest assault on my sensibilities with his book Lullaby.  For the first time Chuck actually had a hero who was somewhat sympathetic in Carl Streator.  He was a newspaper writer who lost his wife and daughter to a “culling song”  which basically kills anybody who hears it.  It wouldn’t be Chuck without some deeply disturbed characters and those are present in abundance.  This was an interesting read because Streator was the first of Pahlaniuk’s main characters who actually was likable and understandable in terms of motivation.  I really liked the book, maybe Chuck is growing on me.  Thanks out to my son in law who’s hopefully winging his way home from the depths of Malaysia where his band played this week.  My wife and I shifted date night to Wednesday which better supports her yoga classes with the opening of the new theater.  We saw the movie Savages last night which I was really geared up for based on the previews.  Then I learned Oliver Stone directed this and it went downhill from that point.  This movie was a complete mess with totally unsympathetic main characters.  The “heroes” were drug dealers involved in a weird three way romantic relationship with the “heroine”.  The only thing redeemable about this movie was Benicio Del Toro who was truly riveting as a sociopathic drug enforcer.  He steals every scene he’s in and should get an Oscar nomination if this movie doesn’t bomb totally.  Unfortunately that’s a real possibility with this lame movie.  As with most of Stone’s recent efforts this film was all over the place with dangling plot lines in abundance and weird tangents that lent nothing to move the plot along.  I really did not like this movie which is a shame because there were some good performances in addition to Del Toro – especially from Johnson and Kitsch but certainly not from Travolta who was laugh out loud bad.  As with many of Stone’s latest movies (everything after the laughably inconsistent and factually corrupt JFK disaster) he has an overlong movie that ends up trying to do too much and distracts from itself.  Pass on this.