They need to prove something to themselves. Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions, and General Tales of Ordinary Madness, The Captain Is Out to Lunch and the Sailors Have Taken Over the Ship, Portions from a Wine-stained Notebook: Short Stories and Essays, Charles Bukowski: Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ham_on_Rye&oldid=1056996657, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0, This page was last edited on 24 November 2021, at 20:05. Written in the first person, the novel follows Henry Chinaski, Bukowski's thinly veiled alter ego, during his early years. Interesting view into the life of a boy who just never caught a break. this is going to be fun to shootits like shooting a bunch of still lifes, , he continued. They literally haunt my dreams., a short film that he produced and directed in 2016, opened at the Brattle Theatres Virtual Cinema on October 23, where it remains available to rent now, As Prices Soar, Fossil Fuel Industry Looks After Its Interests On Beacon Hill, Photo Dispatch: Ukraine Day Rally In Bostons Copley Square, State Wire: EPA Encouraged To Strengthen Air-Quality Standards For Soot, Mass Baby Bonds Bill Aims To Close Racial Wealth Gap. However, he rarely is completely confident with his own abilities and often second-guesses himself. As well as an Anywheresville sense of place, Taormina uses form plus brilliantly imprecise costuming and propping to pull Ham on Rye out of any one time period. The first part of the picture bounces around in an unnamed town (it was shot in the San Fernando Valley) that is dubiously situated in time: We see cellphones only a few times, and nothing about costumes, hair or background music roots us firmly in the present. Boys and girls start pairing up as if they were choosing teammates for a kickball game, and not everybody is picked. The post-facto rationalizations they concoct for their hostility, however, involve his inability to play sports and his being viscerally revolted by cruelty to animals, the latter being one of the favorite past-times of neighborhood men and boys alike. The following guest essay on the making of Ham on Rye is from cinematographer Carson Lund. Taormina sets us in suburban America, among high school students, walking through a social ritual of conversation, dance, and food at a local deli. Following a nocturnal tour of the now much-less-populated location (in a scene that for me betrays Lunds appreciation of movies by landscape-minded film artists like James Benning and Peter Hutton), were on the wrong side of the tracks, where the films atmosphere, mood, and suggested cultural signifiers all land in a much darker and frankly lower-class place than before (this change perhaps betraying some of Taorminas own stated influences for Ham on Rye, like 1993s Dazed and Confused and the films of David Lynchboth of which seem to undergo serious temporal shifts as nightfall commences). In this case, the transgression is, oddly enough, staying at home with your familyand its definitely not a cool one. Increasingly fearful Louisa insists on returning to her own apartment. Yet by placing its emphasis on the shared cultural detritus of American teenagerdom, like all those tokens of first cars and first kisses seen in the loving insert shots that dominate the first halfrather than underlining its more specific themes or subtexts (which Broyles, Lund, and Taormina say were pared back even further than expected during editing)Ham on Rye reaches a very interior place: an evocation of an experience, or maybe even just a feeling, rather than a meaning. How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 8:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so? 49 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of Ham on Rye. As they wend their way through more or less quiet streets, the boys talk, crudely but with awkward innocence, about sex. Where are the writers and directors who are thinking of beginning things?! Whether his thoughts are good/bad, right or wrong, he said them! Like his previous autobiographical novels, Ham on Rye centers on the life of Henry Chinaski, this time during his childhood and teenage years. Always an outsider. Weird story about a boy's difficult childhood and rise to maturity in the 1920s. Tyler Taorminas debut film starts in the vein of classic high-school comedies until it turns toward a dark surrealism. Charles Bukowski (16 August 1920 - 9 March 1994) was a German born American poet, novelist and short story writer. Well come to identify most with Haley (Haley Bodell), a mild-mannered girl who, like her two friends (Audrey Boos and Gabriella Herrara), is more dressed for a conventional school dance than most attendees. And thats the beauty of LA: theres so many different landscapes to choose from you go two hours outside LA in any direction, and [you can find] anything., Which also helped because we were looking for a sense of the economic differences in the town, added Lund. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. Inside the shop, the boys form one line, the girls another, music begins and, with hand gestures for language, the kids pair off into couples. As Chinaski progresses through grammar school, the focus of Henry's attention is on sports, violence, and girls. The teenagers most of them acting first-timers, with an untrained awkwardness in tune with the off-kilter vibe collect into little tribes, on their way to a bizarre social event, held at the uninspiring Montys Deli. I was able to participate in a group reading of that last work quite recently and found it, somewhat predictably, to be exceptionally pictorial in natureeven on the page. Bukowski's words aren't going anywhere at this point. So to both make and spruce up the required disclosure, let me say that I not only consider Carson Lund a close friend, but that I also consider myself a dedicated fanof his film criticism (which also includes notes for the programs of the Harvard Film Archive), his music, and now of course his filmmaking practice, which in addition to his cinematography for Taorminas feature also includes a short film that he produced and directed in 2016, Starr Farm, and a screenplay that he co-wrote and hopes to direct sometime in the near future. This was surprisingly tender in places amongst his usual cynical and brutal musings on life. The vista of the road was super important, or houses that were pushed far back from the curb, said Taormina. 65. Production companies: Tago Clearing Film Studio, Omnes Films Ham on Rye is not obviously political, but it is also deeply political, pointing out, in lazy, absurdist, carelessly clever frames a deep-set American wrongness that was quietly murmuring away long before the current blowhard moment, and that will continue long after. Producers: David Croley Broyles, Michael Basta, Carson Lund, Sergio Uguet de Resayre, David Entin We had done a music video right before going into production on this that was very psychedelic, with a lot of superimpositions and really garish lighting schemes, so maybe that was feeding into it as well.. Ham on Rye opened at the Brattle Theatres Virtual Cinema on October 23, where it remains available to rent now. "That boy," said my grandmother, "when I tried to pick him up out of Now, as a memory growing more distant every day, all thats left is the dreamlike impressions of these places Ive loved so much and then abandoned. On this Wikipedia the language links are at the top of the page across from the article title. Charles Bukowski. What's immediately delightful about Ham on Rye is the ghostly sense of escalation. Tyler Taormina's debut 'Ham on Rye' follows an anonymous town's teenagers through one fateful day. The other has varied over time - first Jeanette Winterson's The Passion, then Donna Tartt's The Secret History, then Philip Roth's The Human Stain, alternating between them, back and forth - but always side by side with Ham on Rye. Carson Lunds superb cinematography, apparently influenced by photographers like William Eggleston and Stephen Shore, picks out boys riding skateboards, borrowing Dads Volvo, and talking about the crucial importance of boning, like its a philosophy, like theyre the first ones ever to have had so original a thought. Sad, gloomy and angry. Quiet and carefully made but cryptic, it relies on the viewer to complete its metaphors. Can anyone explain the end of 'Ham on Rye'? Reddit and its partners use cookies and similar technologies to provide you with a better experience. Thats as misleading as calling Eraserhead a reluctant-groom rom-com. [2] The story takes place at home, at his different schools, at the doctor's office (for his never-ending acne treatments) and at various other locales around town. So, , was the realization I made about her character.. fandango. With the snow falling heavily, the ride back itself may only substitute one danger for another. Mailboxes were very hard to find. Henry is not athletic but wants to be and therefore tries hard to improve. So sometimes the film is Dazed and Confused via Picnic at Hanging Rock, sometimes it is Carrie via Superbad and sometimes, as in a shot of a flowering hedgerow seething with chirruping crickets, it is absolutely Blue Velvet overtly acknowledging that you cant really do suburban surreal without begging the Lynch comparison. ". Even the oddest moves seem welcome. The unease is existential, as the fates of some of the couples make clear. Cinematic didacticism has given way to filmmakers content to raise questions they wont or cant answer. among other publications, he began writing reviews for our paper earlier this summerthough I first met him long before that, in 2014, when we had a conversation at the Harvard Film Archive regarding the films of director Wojciech J. This stems in large part from his home life, in which he is beaten frequently (often for no reason) by his father. . Distributor: Factory 25 Football is difficult for him, but he enjoys the violence that comes with it. There are dorky guys in ill-fitting suits and bowties; worldly girls in short ruffled skirts and make-up riding on foot-scooters; cooler types who rock up to the parking lot in a car; and theres the central threesome of girls, dressed in demure virginal pastels, who are walking to Montys through untended suburban wilderness that makes them sometimes look like fairytale princesses in an enchanted forest. As Mass Reconsiders Life Without Parole For 18 To 20-year-olds, Will Race Matter? But it is also Inauguration Day 2021 and Ham on Rye is heartening evidence that even throughout the last few years of permanent, screeching crisis, there have been filmmakers paying attention to the smaller things, to the more mundane cruelties of our world, that will require much more than a change of administration to address. The grotesque-looking boils of his acne vulgaris will eventually turn their excuses for hating him into an ostracizing trifecta. 5 (3): 6. It focuses instead on the vaguely insidious side of life that we not only tolerate, but embrace. , and what does it give her? Afterwards, you get a sense of the sadness and defeat of the people who are left behind. Ham on RyeNot rated. "Let the boy play the piano," said my grandmother. This study guide consists of approx. Discomfort rises to terror as Louisa meets Jakes parents, played intensely by Toni Collette and David Thewlis. You might even feel the anticipatory dread of the familiar: oh no, not another prom movie tenderly observed, with just enough acne-ridden raunch to give a little edge to its otherwise placid, complacent lament for childhoods passing not again. Charles Bukowski. Press J to jump to the feed. I dont get it. Bukowski keeps his descriptions of his hometown grounded in reality, paying more attention to the people that make up Los Angeles than to the city itself. Then tables are cleared, and a kind of free-form movement begins, with awkward teens trying out idiosyncratic dances. Image from Ham on Rye, courtesy Factory 25. Chinaski has been compared to both Frankenstein's monster and Kafka's Gregor Samsa, because of his alienation and outcast resulting from his "monstrous" appearance. Ham on Rye makes no such assurances which of course makes it more honest, even if its oblique lessons will be heard by a tiny, tiny fraction of the number who navigated adolescence by the. But what other shorthand would you use for this strange, atmospheric work, which is 100 percentnot a comedy but does share a spiritual connection refracted through art-film aesthetics and anomie with the aforementioned landmarks? A lot of that was captured in Sylmar.. Both Ham on Rye and Im Thinking of Ending Things deal with the tensions of young Americas uncertain future. That was very hard to find. And then some of them are magicked away, a process that happens here with a crude, pencil-eraser-style effect the whole film is drenched in old-fashioned stylistic flourishes, that somehow manage not to foreground themselves but create a mood of heightened ambiguity: long, slow-fading dissolves; abrupt sound edits; janky close-ups; and sudden, non-sequitur inserts, like of a father giving his son a manly, go-get-em pep talk. We were pulling from those reference points a little bit. And its here that the film matures into a weirdly sorrowful look at what our world does to teenagers, at the exceptionalism peddled to them without any sense of what they are exceptional from, and how much more likely it is, when you deal in the currency of exclusivity, that you will end up among the excluded. The end of Ham on Rye was most likely meant to emphasize that Chinaski was done with trying. Were not told when the film is taking place, or where the film is taking place, or even whats the deal with this big local event all the kids are moving towards. Haley (Haley Bodell), the closest the film has to a protagonist, flees the deli ceremony, casting herself off as Amy Irving's character was cast off in Carrie. The 1960s were about pushing boundaries and breaking societal rules to make a strive towards enjoyment and the American dream. My mother smiled. And with the exception of a couple of surprising mood changes on the dance floor and off, thats about all in the film you could describe as a plot. Ham on Rye isn't a film about buried secrets. Turns out, Taormina mistrusts the high school dramedy as much as you do, and hes here to skewer its inanity with odd insight and deep, perhaps angry melancholy: a cocktail stick of profundity pins this hoagie through the heart. And itll cause you a lotta grief. But in the bazillion short stories and poems and recorded interviews, you do eventually start to hear some of the same stories again. Throughout the course of the novel, Bukowski develops his misanthropic anti-hero character that is seen in his other works like Post Office and Hollywood. He only wanted to be left alone to drink. The Review of Contemporary Fiction. In the beginning, and just for a little while, Tyler Taormina's "Ham on Rye" seems like every other no-budget suburban coming-of-ager you've ever seen, if maybe better shot. Except where otherwise indicated, Everything.Explained.Today is Copyright 2009-2022, A B Cryer, All Rights Reserved. Brewer, Gay. What defines Ham on Rye insteadoverwhelming all the foreshadowing and other narrative suggestions littered throughout its first halfare its faces (even the youngest ones seem tired and weathered, like kids in films made before our time), its sense of humor (which comes out via strange turns in dialogue and even stranger turns in performance, like a small boys mechanical golf-clap or a moms oversized chomps at lunch), and its numerous motifs, which include picture frames and oblique references to swine. He said them a better experience with your familyand its definitely not a cool one stories poems... Way to filmmakers content to raise questions they wont or cant answer if they were teammates! Made about her character.. fandango story about a boy who just never caught a.. Were pushed far back from the article title classic high-school comedies until it toward... That were pushed far back from the article title the tensions of young Americas uncertain.... 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