Stone Reader

Haven't read Stones of Summer but I honestly thought the movie was crap. [ducks] Sorry. I stopped watching it at the voice over about Joseph Heller's death with the little boy wandering around a fair. "I'm really sad as I write this... I have a tear in my eye..." Puh-leeze. [making jerking-off motion]

i can honestly say that stone reader may be the worst movie that i have ever watched all the way through (i finished out of a kind of stubbornness, i guess). the preview had made it look good to me, but i just couldn't believe it - moskowitz, the narrator, is a literary groupie; he may as well be collecting guitar picks or set lists. and early on you learn something strange about the "quest" that is the supposed reason for the movie's existence: moskowitz only read "stones of summer" a couple of months before he decided to make the movie. he found it lying around, read it, looked on amazon for more books by the guy, didn't find any - and thus begins a story the likes of which have never before been told. to everyone he meets (mostly sub-editors and retired reviewers), moskowitz asks, "what could make a guy publish just one book and then disappear?" "well..." they all say, "maybe he stopped writing. maybe he only had one book in him. maybe he died." "wow!" and that's about an hour and a half of the movie right there. when he finally does find mossman (listed in the phonebook - some quest), it's much more sad and creepy than inspiring. the one way in which the movie does work at all is as an exercise in unreliable narration. moskowitz is so wildly oblivious to the feelings of everyone he meets, mossman included, that you might actually laugh, if you're able to stop cringing.

and what apparently makes "stones of summer"'s disappearance so puzzling is that it once received a rapturous review in the new york times book review. the review ("it burns with a sacred Byzantine fire, a generational fire, moon-fire, stone-fire...") seems to me a product of pharmaceutical rather than literary rapture.