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Help Change America - Support Barack Obama
Barack Obama is a truly inspirational candidate who has
shown great intelligence, dignity, compassion, courage and
inclusiveness in his campaign to date. I believe that he
has the strength of character required to face whatever
challenges a new presidency may bring, and the leadership
qualities to create a new vision for Americans - and a
new place for America in the world.
Learn more about Barack Obama at www.barackobama.com.
And read Caroline Kennedy's New York Times Op-Ed
article, A President Like My Father.
Regarding the controversy surrounding Obama's
recent remarks about "guns and religion,"
do not allow the cynical manipulation of his
words to distract from the truth of what he said:
that many Americans are angry and disillusioned
about politics and that they do cling to traditions
and beliefs when voting that sometimes result in
the election of politicians who do not have their
best interests at heart.
Read the text of Obama's explanation, in
Muncie, Indiana, of what he intended to say
with his original remark.
And be sure to read the text of Obama's
remarkable speech about race - or watch him
deliver it here on YouTube.
Also read Dylan Loewe's fine analysis of Obama's
speech - and candidacy - in Ready Before Day One
in Britain's Guardian newspaper.
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Alexander Chow-Stuart (aka Alexander Stuart) is a Los Angeles-based, British-born novelist and screenwriter, whose books have been translated into eight languages and published in the US, Britain, Europe, Israel and throughout the world. His most controversial novel, The War Zone, about a family torn apart by incest, was turned into a searingly emotional film by Oscar-nominated actor/director Tim Roth.
Stuart is currently adapting Toby Barlow's extraordinarily moving, passionate and violent Los Angeles-based epic poem, Sharp Teeth (published in the US by Harper), for Film4. And writing the novel, Chinatown Nights, a noir thriller and love story set in 1919.
Screenplays include: Head Shots, for Paramount with Jodie Foster and Lorenzo di Bonaventura producing; Whiteout, for Universal (now Dark Castle Entertainment/Warner Bros), starring Kate Beckinsale; Bitten, for Warner Bros with Angelina Jolie attached; Under The Skin, for Industry Entertainment/Film Four with director Jonathan Glazer attached; The GoodLife, based on Keith Scribner's novel; and a feature adaptation of Bill Buford's Among The Thugs for Kiefer Sutherland.
Internet Movie Database details are at IMDb.com
Wikipedia entry is at Wikipedia
International Representation by Charles Walker
at United Agents, London:
tel: +44 (0)207-166-5266
email: info@unitedagents.co.uk
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The War Zone screenplay, published by Film Four Books.
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Stuart's books include The War Zone, Tribes, Life On Mars (which inspired the television documentary, The End of America), Five And A Half Times Three (written with Ann Totterdell, about the death from cancer of their five-and-a-half-year-old son, Joe Buffalo), and the children's books, Joe, Jo-Jo And The Monkey Masks and Henry And The Sea (written with Joe Buffalo Stuart).
In addition to scripting Roth's film of The War Zone, Stuart also served as executive producer of Nicolas Roeg's Insignificance, which brought together a fictionalized Marilyn Monroe, Albert Einstein, Joe DiMaggio and Senator Joe McCarthy, on one hot and humid night in New York.
Before moving to the United States, Stuart lived in London and Brighton, England. During the 1990s, he moved to Miami Beach, where he wrote Life On Mars, and taught screenwriting at the University of Miami.
In 1997, he was commissioned by the Miami Art Museum to create an artwork, Filmloop/Fragments, to accompany a sculpture installation by the Polish artist, Magdalena Abakanowicz.
He now lives in Los Angeles, and is married to Charong Chow, with one son born in 2004. On September 22 2006, Stuart was sworn in as an American citizen. In 2007, he informally adopted the surname Chow-Stuart to celebrate the fusion of both family names in his son's surname.
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Below is my amazon.co.uk review of Toby Barlow's stunning literary debut, Sharp Teeth, a book I have the privilege and pleasure of adapting into a film for Britain's Film4. The book is published in the US on January 29, 2008, by Harper, and is available from amazon.com. Read it!
A truly stunning debut
With Sharp Teeth, Toby Barlow has written one of the most stunning, compelling and at once violent and compassionate books that I can recall ever reading.
Filled with passion, wrenched apart by unrequited love, written in plain verse that reads as effortlessly as breathing (or as a graphic novel without the graphics), it is almost surprising that the tale of Sharp Teeth is so contemporary and so real - especially when you consider the fact that it concerns rival gangs in Los Angeles (but think Robert De Niro's intelligently structured gang in the movie, Heat, not some bunch of fools) who just happen to be able to transform themselves into wolves and wild dogs who run in the canyons and arroyos of Southern California's nighttime wilderness. To call this a werewolf story is to reduce it to a pointless and totally insufficient label.
Lark, its central character, is a man of finely tailored clothes and still more finely tailored thoughts and emotions. The Girl (for she is never named, nor should she be) that he loves is damaged and wild and finds feeling and brief solace in the arms of one Mexican-American dog catcher named Anthony, whose own soul is as complex and driven by passion as both the woman he loves and the man (Lark) who so completely and unconditionally loves her.
There is savagery here, in the transformations from human to animal, and surprises, whether it be the iconic Surfer Pack, with its seductive Annie (filled with the warm innocence of a summer night, yet every bit as primal as those with whom she runs), or the Bridge Tournament in Pasadena, attended by the perfectly-named (like every single character in the book) gang members Cutter and Blue, which strikes echoes of Chandler and Hammett at their sly, dry, sardonic best.
Or, for the sheer joy of the prose, take this, from when The Girl first meets Lark ("She's leaned on Lark for so long now/you'd think it was love"):
"The talk went on until the moon disappeared
and she bit her lip and looked down and knew that
whatever it was, she would agree.
But he kept talking,
until she finally wanted it so bad,
she could feel the night's darkness
vibrating inside her."
The intelligence and intent of the book can be sensed in the epigraphs that open each section of the narrative. For example, at the start of Book One, Walter Benjamin's "There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism," transposed with Warren Zevon's (RIP) "His hair was perfect."
But perhaps the love and loss, the power plays and empathy and sheer manic energy of this explosive, wholly original modern day myth, are best captured by the quiet simplicity of this quotation from Plato, which appends Book Four:
"Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle."
Toby Barlow has done what all writers, not least all new writers, dream of doing: he has redefined a literary form and made it his own. And created magic in doing so.
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There Will Be Blood
I haven't written much about movies lately, but Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood is just so extraordinary - and so extraordinarily powerful - that I must mention it.
This film raises the game for everyone out there. I have loved all of Anderson's work, including his greatly underrated Punch-Drunk Love, but this is a huge leap from any of the previous movies into a realm, as others have said, inhabited by classics such as Treasure of the Sierra Madre - and then some.
Every element of this film is astonishing, from the opening twenty minutes, which feature virtually no dialog, to Jonny Greenwood's score, which I have heard criticized as too imposing but which seems just about perfect to me (and brings to mind the non-Blue Danube elements of 2001 at its most experimental).
Daniel Day-Lewis' performance is in a league of its own: his voice, his mannerisms, his physical movement, his stunted emotions, are flesh and blood, and hauntingly so, in a way that even Tommy Lee Jones in In The Valley of Elah (which I thought was a pretty staggering performance) can't quite attain.
I will watch this film again and again simply to see something so raw and so moving and so gut-wrenching. This is why I love movies; this is what made me want to make movies when I was fourteen years old.
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This is Panel #1 from my new web manga
(not sure that it's strictly a manga
but it sounds cooler than "comic"),
+Breaking Rocks In The Hot Sun+
at www.breakrocks.com.
The heart-rending (and occasionally heart-mending)
tale of Rock-X, a courageous little rock who escapes
from a quarry after countless years of avoiding the
torturous pickaxes of the chaingangs,
+Breaking Rocks In The Hot Sun+
will be updated with a new panel every time
I can find the time to create one, and certainly
at least once a week.
Enjoy :-)
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