My first memory of Langston Hughes is a cassette tape my father brought home from the public library. Generally, I have very little interest in poetry, but I remember being fascinated by Hughes' voice. He had an odd, halting, somewhere-in-New-England accent, and before each selection he would say, "This, is a poem, I wrote . . ." All his O's were very round, and I imagined his lips briefly making a perfect circle.
The truth is, I have no idea what he looks like, but many years after I heard that tape, a friend gave me a copy of his second autobiography, I Wonder As I Wander, the sequal to The Big Sea, which I have not read. When I read on the book jacket that it was Hughes' second autobiography, I was a little suspicious. Even Winston Churchill didn't write two autobiographies, though his ego certainly warrented it. But the book very quickly made it clear that Hughes' life could easily fill more than just the two 400+ page volumes. Every chapter is easily a book in itself: one for driving around the American South reading his poems, one for his trip to Haiti, one for living on the beach in California, perhaps two for his trip to Russia and his trip on the Trans-Siberian railroad, one for his stay in China, one for his trip to Japan and subsequent deportation by the secret police (he says they were very polite), plus some shorter books to fill in the gaps.
The chapter on Russia was definitely my favorite. It's the '30's, and the Cold War is still cutting it's teeth. Hughes, along with a troupe of other Harlem intellectuals, gets invited to Moscow to make a movie about the opression of Southern Blacks by the evil industrial capitalists. After a long series of bureaucratic disasters, the movie project implodes, and the Harlemites are dispersed. Somehow Hughes fenagles a tourist visa across the rural Southern and Eastern provinces, a place where many Russians are not even allowed to travel. Moscow is marching along on it's Five Year Plan to a perfect communist state, but as Hughes discovers, the provinces are not necessarily walking in step. Many of the inhabitants have not even heard of the Five Year Plan, often because they do not speak Russian. This chapter is a glimpse of Russia that few people, and certainly no Americans, could normally ever see.
For you lovers of travelogues, this is a must-read. For you historians, this is a must read. For you race theorists, this is a must-read. For the rest of you, this is a must-read.
Before I discuss the movie, let me be clear about a bias: I love animation. I like goofy animation more than I like realistic special effects. And the more stylized it is, the better. That said, I didn't like the Final Fantasy movie (realism makes boring art), and Disney hasn't made a good animated movie since Aladdin. Sadly, Disney is wasting massive animation resources on worthless plots, and their animators are spending more time drawing hidden penises into their movies than innovating their art. (And for those of you who think that is an urban legend, I've seen the recalled first edition of The Little Mermaid--holy towering cocks, Batman!) But Dreamworks, the up-and-comer, has been making some good movies.
Now that you understand my bias, let me say that I really liked Shrek. The animation is fun, and the story is engaging, but the best thing about this movie is the voices. John Lithgow steals the show as Lord Farquad, and Cameron Diaz and Mike Myers are both quite good. Eddie Murphy is his usual self, but with one drawback: the writing. A lot of the dialog is a bit flat, and though mostly the actors rescue their characters, the poor donkey is often beyond help. In this one case Dreamworks could have taken a lesson from Disney, who let Robin Williams improvise most of his lines for Aladdin and told the animators to try and follow along. Actually, I like to imagine the donkey more like Eddie Murphy Raw than Eddie Murphy PG13. ("Donkey, leave me alone!" "Kiss my ass, Shrek, you ugly, punk-ass, swamp-living, no-money, afraid-of-women motherfucker.") I've always wanted one of these studios to make a good animated movie specifically for adults rather than kids. I like to imagine what a script for something like Pulp Fiction would have looked like as a good animated feature. The closest anyone has come has been Who Framed Roger Rabbit, which was great, Cool World, which sucked, and Bill Plimpton's I Married a Strange Person, which no one saw. Also, though I think Myers did a good job, his going back to Dreamworks after they had finished recording the voices and convincing them to spend another huge chunk of money to rerecord his part with that faux Scottish accent was a wee bit pretentious of him.
But in the end it is a good, fun movie; made for kids, but with some clever little gags wrapped up for adults. I read somewhere that it is the best date movie in a long time, and if I hadn't watched it by myself at 2am on New Year's Eve, I would probably agree.
