FILM ROUNDUP

KEITH UHLICH

Apollo 10-1/2: A Space Age Childhood (Dir. Richard Linklater). Starring: Milo Coy, Jack Black, Lee Eddy. Writer-director Richard Linklater gets personal with his latest project, a deceptively gentle drama (animated in a similar style to the filmmaker’s previous features Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly) about a young boy, Stanley (Milo Coy), growing up in Houston, Texas around the time of the 1969 moon landing. Fantasy and reality intertwine, as does fiction and autobiography: Stanley’s utopic coming-of-age (days of 31flavor ice cream and Dark Shadows; nights of barbecues, record playing and tender family squabbles; political unrest relegated to the evening news and a wacky relative or two) is clearly inspired by Linklater’s own upbringing. Every scene is suffused with the specificity of lived experience, even the make-believe B-plot in which Stanley imagines himself as the single-handed savior of NASA’s Apollo 11 mission. What’s particularly impressive is how the film eschews rose-colored nostalgia. Instead, Linklater compassionately portrays a child’s slow awakening to the fact that the world is filled with as many horrors as wonders, and that one needn’t cancel out the other. [PG-13] HHHH Everything Everywhere All at Once (Dirs.

Keith Uhlich is a NY-based writer published at Slant Magazine, The Hollywood Reporter, Time Out New York, among others. He is a member of the New York Film Critics Circle. His personal website is (All (Parentheses)), accessible at keithuhlich.substack.com. Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert). Starring: Michelle Yeoh, Stephanie Hsu, Ke Huy Quan. Better title: Too Much and Not Enough. Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert’s (credited as The Daniels) intimate action epic doesn’t lack for invention or star power. Its most inspired stroke may be the casting of martial-arts superstar Michelle Yeoh, Temple of Doom and Goonies icon Ke Huy Quan, and inimitable character actor James Hong as an immigrant family facing troubles micro and macro. Yeoh’s Evelyn runs a laundromat that is close to bankruptcy (Jamie Lee Curtis memorably plays an unforgiving tax collector), and her relationships with her husband (Quan) and daughter (Stephanie Hsu) are close to breaking points. What a perfect time to discover

Author Don Winslow on Matunuck Beach, South Kingston, Rhode Island. Photograph- Rick Friedman/The Observer

A.D. AMOROSI

CAUTHOR AND PROGRESSIVE ACTIVIST Don Winslow paints real-life crime dramas like Picasso wielding oils. Whether there is a blue period (The Force, or the author’s Cartel trilogy, commencing with The Power of the Dog) or his angular, cubist moment (Savages, Satori) to consider, Winslow’s incisiveness and research-heavy attention to detail make him potent and irresistible. Since 1991’s A Cool Breeze on the Underground, his first novel, what Winslow has never done is look homeward and back: to his youth growing up in New England among the tight crews of Irish and Italian crime families. That is until now, with his new novel, City on Fire. This is the first book in yet another Winslow trilogy, in which the author uses Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey and crackling dialogue such as “Let the dead bury the dead” as jumpingoff points for his true-tale life amongst the ruins.

City on Fire takes you back to your roots in New England, something you’ve shied from in the past. Why look back now?

Thomas Wolfe famously said how you can’t go back again, and I think I believed that for a long time. I left Rhode Island when I was 17. Now I’m in my 60s. I think that I just needed the time and the distance—the physical and emotional space—to go back to the places of my youth. That’s always something of a confrontation—going back, confronting who you were, who your family was, what’s changed and what’s stayed the same. I think that it took me this long to fall back in love with the space again.

Knowing these people in your youth, gang or mob members, were they part of your everyday existence?

Rhode Island is the smallest state, and being there was a very parochial existence. That makes for real and genuine intimacy, which is one thing that makes its crime world unique. If you’re writing a mob novel about New York, it's a larger terrain where not everyone knows each other. Everybody knows each other in Rhode Island. So protagonists such as Danny Ryan aren’t always people I directly knew—some are—but they were certainly people I saw around, who made up the landscape. They were talked about. You knew of them in the bars, restaurants, and beaches. I’m intimately familiar with these guys.

Why did you chose the model of The Iliad and The Odyssey to tell this tale, the classical schematic that frames these characters?

About 25 years ago, I realized how narrow my educational path was. My focus was on African studies, which is wide and still a passion. So I started to read the great books list. Early on, I hit upon the Greek classics where I was immediately struck by how its themes and stories reminded me of real-life events in the criminal world that I had grown up around. I wondered if I could take those stories and place them in a contemporary crime setting so that they could stand alone from the myth, and you could enjoy them apart from any connection to the classics. The goal was to merge the poetry of the Greek classics and the poetry of the crime genre I know so well.

Having spoken to you in the past and read all of your work, I think I know something about how you operate. How

CRIME, THE CITY, AND DON WINSLOW

did revolving around The Iliad change how you went about writing City on Fire? How was the character capture and action different than, say, Savages or the Cartel books?

Something like the Cartel trilogy is based on reality, documentary-like in that everything that unfolded had already happened. Here, I had to go back to classics that captured timeless human themes— love, lust, compassion, power, revenge, subjugation—and become familiar with those ideals in a classical sense. But, there’s also this old saying, ‘if you meet the buddha on the road, kill him.’ Here, that means that I couldn’t go into the writing of all this without Aneas, Cassandra or Helen. They had to very much be my Danny, Patrick, Pam and Cassie. I would absorb those themes in the poetry but EARLY ON, I HIT UPON THE GREEK CLASSICS WHERE I WAS IMMEDIATELY STRUCK BY HOW ITS then make a deliberate effort to set that all THEMES AND STORIES REMINDED ME OF REAL-LIFE EVENTS IN THE CRIMINAL WORLD THAT aside and write this very modern novel. I HAD GROWN UP AROUND … THE GOAL WAS TO MERGE THE POETRY OF THE GREEK CLASSICS AND THE POETRY OF THE CRIME GENRE I KNOW SO WELL. If we’re touching on Anaes, your

Danny Ryan is an outsider. Who is Pam of Rhode Island, if not your Helen of Troy, the ultimate siren?

I chose to focus on Anaes and Danny Ryan because they were what you’d call ultimate outsiders. That’s what I wanted and needed to tell City of Fire. It might have been easier to tell this story from one of the main character’s perspectives, yes? But I wanted someone apart from the fray, with that outsider’s slant. I wanted someone who had one foot in and one foot out and, therefore, could comment on the action while in the middle of it all. I found Danny compelling enough to carry him through two additional novels after this: he’s lost everything, and all that he goes through is so poignant. You want to follow him. He's so compelling. In terms of Pam, she is a siren, undoubtedly, but she is also the scapegoat. Go back to the Greek tragedies: everybody blames Helen for starting the war, and yet whether it is the war within The Iliad or the New England mob wars that I grew up in, the issue is always money, power, and territory. Anything else is a pretext. n