One of Biblioklept’s favorite weirdos, China Miéville takes on a perceived overabundance of apocalypse movies in his article “The End, The End, The End, Etcetera” published in McSweeney’s #33, aka The Panaroma, aka the giant-assed newspaper issue (here’s a quick review: Jeesy Creezy the thing is massive. It’s like a bizarre aesthetic tchtochke that just happens to be overstuffed with all kinds of great writers writing on all kinds of great stuff. I’ve been trying to digest it on Sundays after breakfast with a few coffees but it’s too big. It’s really too much, and it’s also the sort of document that should tell McSweeney’s-haters to fuck off, or at least reveal them as kinda mean-spirited. It’s like a strange, thorough dream, where Stephen King writes your sports section and William Vollman does in-depth national reporting and Chris Ware handles the comics page. Hang on–that’s probably not a legit review. Anyway).
So Miéville basically tells Hollywood to give it a rest with all the apocalypse movies, saying that it’s not that he doesn’t love them, it’s just that there’s such a surplus as of late. “Hollywood has studied at porn’s knee,” he writes, arguing that end-of-the-world flicks like Armegeddon, The Day After Tomorrow, 2012, Wall-E, 9, The Book of Eli and Deep Impact are “sexual fantasies . . . These apocalyptes are clearly scratching various itches.” Miéville dubs the trend in disaster flicks “bukkakalypse,” arguing that these films are “obsessed not only with the world-drenching spurt itself, but with the Face of the Earth wet with its effects, stoically putting up with the soaking.” Charming. +100 internets to any soul daring enough to google “bukkakalypse.”
Miéville focuses the thrust of his article on John Hillcoat’s film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road. His shorthand review kinda sorta captures my own ambivalence about the film: “Is The Road a good film? Sure. Maybe. Whatever. It depends on what you mean by ‘good.'” Miéville suggests that, “For all its portent, The Road displays a preemptive nostalgia perhaps even more pronounced than in its pulpier cousins.” Citing the father and the boy’s use of a consumerist emblem, the shopping cart, to move on and “carry the fire,” Miéville goes on to argue that,
The film, then, is structured around a punning triptych. There’s that good, lost consumption early on [the loss of a consumerist world]. Then, in the absence of commodity, there’s the terrible, Hobbesian predatory consumption of cannibalism, relentlessly stressed as an ultimate evil, rather than the relatively everyday sordidness it would almost certainly become. And refuse to eat each other? What then? Then the final iteration of the term. The father at last doubles up, coughing bronchially, and hawks up blood. In that shopless nightmare, what else is afflicting him but consumption.
Puns! Okay. As a committed Marxist or materialist (or whatever he is), of course Miéville’s gonna read The Road as an allegory of apocalypse as loss of consumerist possibility (he reads the whole Coca-Cola-drinking episode as a version of lost sacrament). Fair analysis, I guess–not one I particularly buy, but without getting into a whole ball of wax over the intentional fallacy and whatnot, I think that Miéville’s criticism that the film (and book) doesn’t recognize the Darwinian endgame of “Hobbesian predatory consumption” as “the relatively everyday sordidness it would almost certainly become” kinda sorta misses the whole point of the narrative. In my own review of the book, I argued that McCarthy’s refusal to give into the infanticide that the novel’s schema overwhelmingly predicated was hard to swallow (“cop out,” I believe, was my term), but it also seems to me that the moral impetus of the novel involves a refusal of cannibalism, an idea that to survive as a human is more than just to survive as a body. But back to film.
I didn’t particularly care for Hillcoat’s version of The Road, even though I wanted to, even though the actors were great, even though it looked great, etc. I don’t know what I didn’t like about it (okay, I thought Nick Cave’s score was both awful and intrusive, but that seems minor here). It just seemed thoroughly unnecessary and ultimately unfun. Miéville again, this time on an end-of-the-world film I can’t help but love:
The “hope” at the end of Mad Max: Beyond the Thunderdome is that the lost tribes have managed to turn on a few lights in Sydney. Such hankering for drab normality doesn’t have to be particularly convincing to do its rhetorical job. Just as well, really, because seriously? After all the splendidly coiffed and colorful shenanigans of Tina Turner’s Bartertown, is living in a partially revived Bondi really an improvement? Couldn’t we take everything in a different direction altogether? Do something new? The aspirational Good Futures of these Bad Futures are always their pasts–our present.
Although Miéville gives The Road the credit it deserves for being one of the rare apocalypse flicks that “evades this pre-post-facto nostalgia,” he also reiterates my own criticism: it’s just not that fun. And the end of the world should be fun. Miéville doesn’t mention films like Zombieland, a forgettable but enjoyable farce that posits apocalypse as freewheelin’ opportunity, or the self-aware (but not too-self-aware) pastiche Doomsday, a film that fuses every hoary apocalypse trope into 90 minutes of escapist, ass-kicking, thoroughly nonsensical fun. Neither film aspires to great art (unlike Hillcoat’s take on The Road), nor do these films aim for the catharsis-via-annihilation of blockbuster fare like Armegeddon. They’re just good fun, which is all I really want from the end of the world.
I’d never seen this before. William Burroughs reads–and acts out–one of his infamous Dr. Benway riffs from Naked Lunch. Gross, engrossing, and hilarious.
So I finally got around to watching Jane Campion’s Bright Star last night, a film that quietly studies the final years of Romantic poet John Keats and his relationship with Fanny Brawne. When Keats moves next door to the Brawnes, eldest daughter Fanny, a talented seamstress and flighty flirt, soon becomes intrigued by the poet. Keats, with his love for beauty and truth, represents a world of greater depth than the wits and dandies who usually attempt to court Brawne. Their relationship is, of course, doomed from the outset. Perpetually broke Keats doesn’t have the moolah or means to properly engage Brawne in marriage, but that doesn’t stop the pair from undertaking a furtive, pensive love affair, carried out in long walks on the heath and passionate letters. Oh, and Keats gets sick and dies at 25. That shouldn’t be a spoiler if you’ve studied your Romantics properly, now should it?
Both Abbie Cornish who plays Brawne and Ben Whishaw who plays Keats are excellent in their understatement and reserve, but the standout turn in the movie comes from actor Paul Schneider (from NBC’s Parks & Recreation) who plays Keats’s bankrolling friend Charles Armitage Brown. Brown is a lesser poet whose love and envy of Keats leads him to vex Brawne and Keats’s love at every turn, plaguing them with doubt, and that enemy of Romance, Reason. Schneider invests his character with a boorish charm that never veers into the rote tropes that afflict modern romance film. It’s emblematic of the Campion’s film in a way: Bright Star has every opportunity to devolve into a mundane exercise in doomed romance or a stuffy period piece, but under Campion’s delicate care it manages to match the depth of its subject matter.
Campion wrote the screenplay, presumably using letters from the principals as her primary source. She honors her viewers’ intelligence — far too rare these days — by never cobbling her plot together with easy exposition or forced narrative developments, and it’s that sense of history that lends the film authenticity. Cornish’s Brawne is a protagonist whose personality transformations read as real, and Whishaw’s Keats is never a cartoonish mystic or a moody caricature, but a fully-drawn human. Campion also has the good judgment to let her cinematography convey her story, letting gorgeous shots of the English countryside and cloistered chambers alike convey the mood and rhythm of her story. At times, Bright Star‘s beautiful camerawork recalls Terrence Malick, another director who allows film to “happen” to the viewer as an evocative experience rather than a spoon-feeding. Campion also shows considerable restraint with the film’s wonderful score, never allowing it to color a scene unduly when her actors can do a great job on their own. Bright Star avoids all of the pitfalls that might afflict a period piece, and does a far better job handling the subject of Romantic poetry than a movie has any right to. The film is hardly for everyone (sorry guys, no Jason Statham), but it’s very, very good. Recommended.
The film adaptations of David Peace‘s Red Riding quartet make their American debut this weekend. The films look pretty cool — kinda like Zodiac. The screen adaptations drop the 1977 segment of Peace’s original quartet, opting instead for the trilogy treatment. You can read Manohla Dargis’s detailed review for The New York Times here and Keith Phipps favorable review at the AV Club here. Trailer:
David Foster Wallace’s 2003 interview on German TV station ZDF has been viewable for awhile in its full 84 minute glory, but it’s only just now been uploaded to YouTube in more digestible and manageable 10 minute chunks.
Okay. We admit that’s a stupid headline. Anyway.
We dove into our review copy of Don DeLillo’s latest novel (it’s really a novella, despite claims made by its cover and press materials) Point Omega last night. It opens with a protracted scene of a man at the 2006 MOMA showing of Douglas Gordon’s videowork, 24 Hour Psycho. Gordon’s project, first presented in Glasgow and Berlin in 1993, slows Alfred Hitchock’s classic Psycho to a crawl, stretching the entire film over 24 hours.
DeLillo’s description:
The slightest camera movement was a profound shift in space and time but the camera was not moving now. Anthony Perkins is turning his head. It was like whole numbers. The man could count the gradations in the movement of Anthony Perkins’ head. Anthony Perkins turns his head in five incremental movements rather than one continuous motion. It was like bricks in a wall, clearly countable, not like the flight of an arrow or a bird. Then again it was not like or unlike anything. Anthony Perkins’ head swiveling over time on his long thin neck.
Ah, DeLillo — “it was not like or unlike anything” — redact your own similes. There’s also this classic DeLilloian line in the episode, somehow both concise and oblique: “The film made him feel like someone watching a film.” Maybe watching this 35 second YouTube clip of 24 Hour Psycho will make you feel like someone watching a 35 second YouTube clip of 24 Hour Psycho.
Nanni Balestrini’s novella Sandokan, new in English translation from Melville House, tells the story of the rise of the Camorra crime syndicate in the small, poverty-stricken cities around Naples. Balestrini’s unnamed narrator occupies a fascinating insider-outsider perspective: one one hand, he, unlike many of his peers, does not join the gang, or “clan,” as its called–in fact, their behavior repulses him. On the other hand, he’s a native of the small town where Francesco Schiavone (aka Sandokan), Antonio Bardellino, and their henchman rule mercilessly, an eye-witness to the brutality and inhumanity of organized crime. The narrator is a sensitive young man who delineates clearly how the crime cartel was able to achieve such economic prosperity and power in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, detailing the various rackets the clan imposed upon the town, like stealing elections, peddling drugs, and manipulating the agribusiness that is the main source of income for average Neapolitan peasants. The narrator also explores why these small towns fall so easily into the terror of organized crime. The main reason: boredom stemming from little or nothing to do.
Balestrini’s narrator’s description of the Camorra is systematic, detailing the awful history and brutal practices of the syndicate in spare, concrete terms. His explications of the clan’s violence is not so much thrilling as it is ugly, as the narrator always shows how “normal people” (his words) are cheated, killed, or otherwise harmed by the Camorra. The narrator’s tone is often journalistic but never clinical; he always shows what’s at stake for the “normal people,” how they are affected by these crimes. At times the narrator is wryly funny, a tone that results in large part from his observation that the townspeople, the people he grew up around, begin to normalize the violence. It becomes part of their daily lives and affects them so directly that it becomes casual, and the sensitive narrator is one of only a few not to bow to it, ignore it, or take part in it–yet the violence and crime is so overwhelming that to live with it is to live with absurdity. Balestrini employs a punctuation-free rhetorical style in Sandokan that captures the breathless energy and frustration of the narrator. While many readers might balk at the lack of commas, periods, or semi-colons, I found the technique quite liberating. It enhances the immediacy of the narrator’s voice, the rushed sense of importance to his tale. It also promotes sustained readings of the text–I read most of Sandokan in three enthralled sittings.
Sandokan has its cinematic twin in the 2008 film Gomorra, directed by Matteo Garrone. The film, like the book, illustrates the affect that crime has on a range of “normal people,” mostly occupants of a housing project outside of Naples. As in Sandokan, the ordinary citizens find that they have no choice but to choose between sides as an absurd, petty gang war ravages their already decimated landscape. Where Balestrini’s punctuation-free rhetoric allows readers closer access to his narrator’s pathos-driven story, Garrone lets his camera wander freely over the grim landscape without ever imposing any clear narrative structure. It is not until the film’s final third that the five disparate stories he tells coalesce, and even then, it remains unclear who is on whose side. What is clear is that the violence and crime is quickly stealing–and killing–another generation.
In an age where violence is sensationalized and glamorized, particularly in gangster films and TV shows (do I really need to list them?), Sandokan and Gomorra both lay bare the Darwinian cost of crime. In both narratives, the violence is mundane and inescapable, meaningless yet awful, and very, very dark. Neither narrative is didactic in the least–or even hopeful, for that matter–but their is an implicit suggestion that if only there were some alternative to the Camorra–libraries, social clubs, movie houses–there might be another prospect for the young people in this area.
I highly recommend both Sandokan and Gomorra. As an end note, I’d love to see more of Nanni Balestrini’s work come into English translation, perhaps via Antony Shugaar and Melville House, who’ve done a lovely job here.
Wonderfully weird horror movie posters via Wrong Side of the Art‘s fantastic database.
We’ve always felt that Bedknobs and Broomsticks is one of Disney’s most unfairly shunned films. This 1971 psychedelic classic combines live action with animation to tell the story of three young children billeted out during the blitz bombings of London in WWII (shades of Narnia). They’re sent to stay with Miss Price (Angela Landsbury), an amateur witch who’s none-too-pleased to take them in. They discover her (very amateurish) witchery, and blackmail her into bewitching a bed into a kind of magical transport. They set off to London, where they hook up with Professor Emelius Brown (David Tomlinson), a conman running a fake-wizarding school with a stolen spell book. The fivesome take off on a magical journey to find the other half of a spell, Substitutiary Locomotion, that Miss Price needs to make inanimate objects come alive (shades of “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice”). Their quest takes them to a number of strange places, including a lovely under-the-sea journey:
–and a soccer match with some animals:
The whole shebang climaxes (as you would expect) with a battle against Nazis:
Fun, fun, fun. An ersatz family on a magical quest, cheap, addictive songs, trippy animation, telekinesis–what’s not to love? And who can resist the metaphorical implications of a bed as a site of magical adventure? We watched this on VHS about a million times growing up. It’s far-superior to Mary Poppins, and something of a proto-Potter take on magic (okay, maybe that’s a stretch). In any case, it’s a fun family film for Halloween, and perhaps one that too-often goes overlooked. Highly recommended.
In the preface to his Encyclopedia of Weird Westerns, Paul Green gives us the following definition:
Weird Western
A Western story incorporating horror, supernatural or fantasy elements and themes and usually including one or more of the following subjects: vampires, werewolves, mummies, man-made monsters, mythological beings, mutants, zombies, ghosts, haunted buildings, demons, witchcraft, Satanism, possession, demonic or possessed animals, mentalists, shamans, visions, restless or wandering spirits, damned souls, enchantment, shape-shifters, angels, goblins, faeries, sirens, flying horses, psychopathic killers, psychological terror, dismembered moving body parts, spirit guides, the occult, hexes and curses, rising from the dead, talking animals, superhuman abilities, and magical potions.
This fun, hyperbolic list would seem to be enough to cover all possible entries in Green’s almanac of Western weirdness, yet his preface goes on to catalog and define the Weird Menace Western genre (popular in the 1930s), Science Fiction Westerns, Space Westerns, Steampunk Westerns, and even Weird Western Romance. Over the course of about 250 pages, Green attempts to catalog 0ver a 100 years of Weird Western stories, novels, pulps, radio shows, films, TV shows, RPGs and video games. And comic books. Lots and lots of comic books.
You probably know more Weird Westerns than might immediately come to mind. Green hits on examples that have had great mainstream success like Stephen King’s Gunslinger series, the old Kung Fu TV series, and Westworld. He also extends his entries to cover the many forays TV shows and comic books take into the Western Genre, from Star Trek: The Next Generation to MacGyver. Green even contends that Star Wars is a Space Western.
There’s mention of some of our favorite Westerns, like Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man, and Alejandro Jodorowsky’s El Topo, as well as the salient recognition that William Burroughs is a writer of Westerns. But for every comic or film or movie or TV show we’ve heard of, like Jonah Hex or The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr., there seem to be at least a dozen bizarre counterparts. How did we not know of the late-nineteenth century steampunk dime novels featuring hero Frank Reade (and either his Steam Man or Steam Horse)? Reade is such an oddity because it’s steampunk contemporaneous with its own setting–which sorta kinda makes it not steampunk but maybe kinda imaginative fiction. Or something. In any case, it’s intriguing.
If we hadn’t read Green’s Encyclopedia, we also wouldn’t have any knowledge of Gene Autry’s 1935 space opera film serial, The Phantom Empire. The twelve-parter apparently features Autry as a singing cowboy who has to save his Radio Ranch when speculators want to buy up the supply of Muranian radium under his property. Did we forget to add that the ancient civilization of Mu lives under Radio Ranch?
We also, somehow, were previously unaware of the Djustine comics before Green sought to correct this oversight by including two whole pages of images of the buxom lass. His description: “The sexually graphic adventures of the large-breasted female gunslinger Djustine and her fight with the supernatural, including zombies, vampires, and Diabla, daughter of Satan.” You had us at sexually graphic.
Okay, so we’re probably not going to go stock up on back issues of Djustine (it’s in Italian anyway . . . we swear we’re only interested in the tight-plotting!) . . . But most of the fun of Encyclopedia of Weird Western is simply in all the bizarre descriptions and images, of which there are plenty. I’m not an aficionado, so I can’t testify to the depth or analytic penetration of Green’s catalog, but I do know that I enjoy browsing through the book’s welcome weirdness. It’s a great entry point to any number of strange Google searches. And it’s also got me hunting for a torrent of the 1977 film, Welcome to Blood City.
You probably know by now whether or not any of this is up your alley. We’re digging it. Encyclopedia of Weird Westerns is now available from McFarland.
Twenty years after its release, Rowdy Herring’s neo-western Road House holds up better than ever. The film stars an iconic Patrick Swayze as a philosophical cooler named Dalton hired to clean up a road house bar. In this process, Swayze’s Dalton discovers that the small town is under the thumb of the bullying gangster Brad Wesley (played with zealous malice by Ben Gazzara). Dalton cleans up, kicking ass without bothering to take names, and leaving a not-unsubstantial body count. This short plot review in no way conveys the brilliance of this film, which can’t really be captured in words–Road House must be witnessed. You have to see the rampant brawling, hear the awesome dialog (sample: “Pain don’t hurt), experience the spectacle that is Road House. That said, not everyone can appreciate what’s going on here: it merits a 5.7 out of 10 at IMDB and a 42% at Rotten Tomatoes. In short, the film is divisive. In his original review of the film, Roger Ebert wrote, “Road House exists right on the edge between the “good-bad movie” and the merely bad. I hesitate to recommend it, because so much depends on the ironic vision of the viewer.” A careful reading of Ebert’s review reveals that he really enjoyed the film. “Was it intended as a parody?” he asks. “I have no idea, but I laughed more during this movie than during any of the so-called comedies I saw during the same week.”
Ebert’s question of intentionality is instructive (if not ultimately that important). Any savvy viewer–especially those with a fine-tuned sense of “ironic vision”–will have to ask herself whether director Rowdy Herring and his crew meant to create such a sublime parody, or if the resulting masterpiece is just a happy accident. The simple answer to the question is that it doesn’t really matter, of course, but I still find it a curious issue of aesthetics, especially in light of a new breed of action films that are particularly self-aware. These include Jason Statham’s Crank films (2006 and 2009), movies that ask the viewer to suspend any rudimentary understanding of physics in exchange for ninety-minute doses of adrenaline overdrive. I’ve actually just described most Statham vehicles, but it’s the knowingness of the Crank movies that make them such a joy: part of the joke is that the film recognizes its ludicrousness. The Cranks want to make sure that the audience gets that they get that the audience is getting what the films are getting at. 2007’s Shoot ‘Em Up, starring Clive Owen and Paul Giamatti operates on the same principle. Shoot ‘Em Up is a series of action set pieces so ridiculous that the phrase “over the top” doesn’t even begin to function as a critique (during one of the film’s many, many gun battles, Owen’s character delivers a baby and then cuts the umbilical cord by shooting it). In a sense, films like Shoot ‘Em Up and Crank operate outside of any normal critique, including not just visual cues but also dialog to announce their parodic intent (Giamatti’s villain exclaims that “Violence is one of the most fun things to watch,” at one point). This isn’t to say that it’s impossible to be critical of such films (it’s very, very possible, actually), just that the films incorporate a sort of generational “ironic vision” of their audience as part of the viewing experience.
Indeed, these films count their success on the audience’s ability to “get”–and appreciate–the irony being conveyed. While action films have long used irony and meta-fictional devices as part of their vocabulary, those devices have usually been an invitation to the viewer to deepen his or her fantastical identification with the film. 1993’s Schwarzenegger vehicle The Last Action Hero is a consummate example here; in this dreadful film an action hero comes to life at the behest of a young boy who becomes a surrogate for the audience. The meta-troping here isn’t so much ironic; rather, it’s just another reification of hero-spectacle-audience dynamics. Films like Shoot ‘Em Up and Crank, in contrast, ultimately disconnect the heroic-identification most traditional action movies strive for. This isn’t to say that the audience member’s ironic vision prevents him or her from living vicariously for 90 minutes through the hero (or, more accurately, anti-hero)–it’s just that the vicarious, distorted nature of the identification is always on display. Put another way, Shoot ‘Em Up, Crank, and other movies that fit this mold (these might include Tony Scott’s unfairly maligned 2005 film Domino, 2008’s Death Race, 2007’s Smokin’ Aces, and even Robert Rodriguez’s Planet Terror (although surely that particular film is a separate discussion)) invite their audiences to both revel in and mock the conventions of heroic narrative filmmaking. These films take place entirely within scare quotes; there’s no danger that their irony might be misinterpreted. Only the most callow of viewers will not “get” the intentionality of parodic irony here (contrast Ebert’s unconfused review of Shoot ‘Em Up with his questioning of Road House; there’s not a hint of nervousness that the silliness of the latter might be unintentional). These films wink so often at the viewer that the gesture becomes a distracting nervous tic.
While I have a certain fondness for the parodic, ironic action films I’ve mentioned, I have to admit that their greatest failure is, ironically, their defining characteristic. They announce their parodic content at all times, squashing any of the anxieties about intention that a viewing of Road House engenders, and, in doing so, they lose an unqualifiable, unquantifiable joy. The greatest parodies never announce themselves as such, and thus create a contradictory balance of trust and anxiety from savvy viewers. In my estimation, no one does this better than director Paul Verhoeven, auteur behind Robocop, Starship Troopers, and Showgirls. Verhoeven’s films are doubly generous: on one hand, they function beautifully as straightforward Hollywood fare; on the other hand, with the assistance of a particular ironic vision, they are brilliant satires of not just culture and politics, but also of the very art of filmmaking and the implicit contract between film and audience. In contrast with the studied irony of certain latter day action movies, the films of Verhoeven don’t blink, let alone wink at their audience, making the irony that much more delicious. Road House, without the benefit of a director with the oeuvre of Verhoeven, is certainly one of the most quizzical documents of the late eighties. Is the film self-aware? Swayze’s winning performance gives nothing away, allowing the audience to fully identify with his rampant bad-assery. There is no simple answer to the question the film must prompt to any contemporary viewer, just as it did to Ebert in 1989: “Is this for real?” It’s that anxiety of indulgence, of undecidability, this central ambiguity that makes Road House such a joy to watch. The film does not force you to watch it through any particular ideological lens. Celebrate Road House‘s 20th anniversary by giving it a proper re-viewing; whether you bring your ironic vision is up to you.
First thing’s first: if you’re looking for Harry Potter slash fiction, you’ll have to check out our original Harry Potter Sex Romp post for links, you dirty dawg (you’re weird but you’re welcome). Just like that post a few years ago, this post’s title is really kinda sorta mostly irrelevant to what this post is about. What is it about? I want to take a look at some of the homoerotic tension in the new Harry Potter movie, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. If you want to find a proper review of the film, with plot summary and insight, shop around. That’s not gonna happen here.
Also, there will be SPOILERS, okay? Fair warning.
Okay. So, I saw the new film last night (henceforth HP6). And it was pretty good or whatever. But I noticed a subtext that cracked me up quite a bit, an underlying motif that might be lost on most summer blockbuster audiences. I’m talking about the implicit love between men and boys in this film.
At the beginning of the film, in an apparently insignificant scene, young Harry makes a date with an attractive young girl. However, old man Dumbledore shows up and dashes any hopes for a late sumer romance. Instead of meeting up with this lithe young thing, Harry has to grip hard to Dumbledore’s stiff arm to be apparated away to meet Horace Slughorn, an old potions master. Dumbledore uses Harry as fresh young bait for Slughorn, who has something the old wizard needs–a key memory about the development of Tom Riddle–Voldemort–a former protégé of Horace’s (lots of mentors and mentees here). Much of the narrative’s conflict revolves around the task Dumbledore has given Harry; it’s almost as if Dumbledore is pimping out the young wizard. These multiple man-boy relationships are doubled darkly in the failing bond between Snape and emo Draco.
In contrast, heterosexual relationships between the teens are treated with a lightness and even frivolity that codes such romances as ephemeral, or perhaps even inessential. Although the film solidifies the groundwork for the long-term relationships between the series’ principals (Harry-Ginny/Ron-Hermione), the real love story here is between older men and their young apprentices. HP6 depicts teen romance as silly without coloring any of its fragility with pathos. What the film really argues for is a sort of Greek or Platonic ideal of love; that love exists as a conduit for wisdom, passed from an older, experienced man to a younger boy in exchange for some of that youth’s beauty and vitality. Although moments of teenage adventure punctuate the film, the real scope of heroic encounters are shared between older men and their attendant lads (particularly Dumbledore and Harry, although even Snape, through the annotations of his old textbook, manages to plant part of himself into Harry).
The film reaches its climax with a lot of phallic wand waving and a bit of indecision over who gets to shoot off at whom. The climactic scene encodes the strange aggressions and series of shifting allegiances between the male wizards present. Dumbledore becomes the tragic figure; his death allows for Harry’s maturation, enacting a definitive arc in Harry’s Oedipal complex, where Dumbledore is both father figure and secret sex object. The weight of this tragedy initiates Harry into the adult world and adult responsibilities.
So why bother to write about this? No reason really, and I’m sure plenty of readers will find my analysis insupportable, silly, offensive, or just plain wrong. That’s fine. I guess I mostly find it remarkable that this motif should prevail so heavily in a summer blockbuster. There was also a whole drug motif going on–so many of the film’s plot development hinge on the ingestion of mind-altering substances–so maybe I just like the idea that the film is kinda sorta subversive.
Even if Coraline didn’t have an engaging plot, well-developed characters an audience can really care about, and an especially singular sense of setting, rhythm, and movement, it would still be worth seeing in the theater for its astounding 3D visuals. Director Henry Selick (The Nightmare Before Christmas), working from Neil Gaiman‘s short novel of the same name, has created an endearing, imaginative, and often disturbing fairytale in meticulous stop-motion animation, dramatically enhanced in 3D. Selick doesn’t rest simply on the film’s amazing optical effects; rather, Coraline‘s plot and characterization are seamlessly, often dreamily (or nightmarishly) crafted through those marvelous visuals. Even when a scene veers into outright spectacle, it is always purposeful, cohesive, and forwards the logic of the plot, the story of young Coraline and her strange adventures in an alternate universe.
Bored and largely ignored by her parents who have just moved her to a country boarding house, Coraline discovers a tunnel to a world that doubles her own, replete with an “other mother” who cooks all sorts of delicious foods and loves to play games, and an “other father” who dotes on his little girl. This alternate universe also contains more glamorous versions of the boarding house’s other tenants, a circus performer who works with musical mice, and two aging actresses with a predilection for salt water taffy. The alternate world becomes a site of spectacle and wonder for Coraline, as well as the setting for some pretty mind-bending 3D set-pieces for the audience–however, like all fairy tales, Coraline always toes the line between fantasy and nightmare, joy and shocking horror. Savvy audience members will pick up on a sinister thread underlying the early scenes with Coraline’s “other mother,” a creepiness artfully balanced with the notion that this woman represents Coraline’s wish-fulfillment to be loved, adored, and entertained at all times. The reality of this fantasy world soon becomes painfully apparent to Coraline, who must go on a hero’s quest–in her own home–to save her “real” parents.
Coraline thrills at all the right moments, and at times is downright scary (although the seven year old behind me seemed unafraid; he just kept saying “Awesome!” every five minutes). The plot is rich with allusions to Alice and Wonderland and the Brothers Grimm fairy tales, and, in keeping with these sources, Coraline often exposes its dark side with little or no buffer. From frightening birthing tropes to threats of infanticidal cannibalism, Coraline always purchases its spectacular fantasy with reminders of grim, almost cruel reality. One scene in particular lays this cost literally bare; the aging actresses perform a high-wire trapeze act half-naked, their clumsy, inept bodies overexposed to every kind of peril–including the potential mockery of the audience. In an act of fantastic wish-fulfillment, the old women strip their fat, wrinkled bodies away like the husks of fruit; they emerge young women, their impossible rejuvenation the climax of a fantasy involving an intricate clash of sexuality and death. And yet Coraline repeatedly makes clear the costs of these fantasies, working its way toward a satisfying conclusion that doesn’t attempt to gloss over the erosion, corrosion, and mundane deathliness of life, but rather reconciles how a person might live happily in the “real world.” Very highly recommended.
Gus Van Sant’s great little short film from 1978, based on William Burroughs’s essay, explains the art of DE, or “Do Easy.” Our clumsy ass has been trying too hard, apparently. The film is quite funny but also useful, and well worth watching in full. It’s also included in the latest issue of Wholphin, if thou art so moved.
“Having your book turned into a movie is like seeing your oxen turned into bouillon cubes” — John LeCarre
Movies rarely compare favorably to the books from which they are adapted and almost never surpass them. Still, film adaptations of books can be fantastic if handled by the right director–take Mexican director Alfonso Cuarón for example, whose brilliant films Children of Men and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (adaptations of books by P.D James and J.K. Rowling, respectively) convey richly imagined, engrossing worlds. Cuarón’s films join a small stable of adaptations that live up to–if not surpass–the books on which they are based. Most great film adaptations turn good genre fiction into great art. However, great literature doesn’t usually fare so well. Geniuses like Kubrick and Coppola have reconfigured airport reading like Stephen King’s The Shining and Mario Puzo’s The Godfather into cinematic masterpieces, but has anyone ever done justice to Melville or Hemingway or Hawthorne or Fitzgerald (of the four attempts at translating Gatsby to the screen, the 1974 Coppola-produced effort is arguably the best, but consider how short it falls of capturing Fitzgerald’s vision)? Which brings up the question: just how good, bad, or indifferent will the upcoming movie adaptation of Cormac McCarhy’s Pulitzer Prize winner The Road be? We thought we’d navigate the pros and cons here.
What The Road film adaptation has going for it:
The director: Australian director John Hillcoat’s 2005 feature film debut The Proposition captured the bloody violence and moral ambiguity of a world alienated from civilization. We loved the movie, and not enough people have seen it. The tone Hillcoat achieved in The Proposition seems well matched to McCarthy’s grim vision.
The producer: Nick Wechsler’s list of films includes Sex, Lies, and Videotape, The Player, Requiem for a Dream, 25th Hour, and Drugstore Cowboy–so it seems like he knows how to sit back and let a filmmaker create art without trying to, you know, have a massive Hollywood hit.
The leading man: Viggo Mortensen as the father seems like a great choice. Mortensen brought depth to the role he’s most famous for–Aragorn in The Lord of the Rings trilogy–something of a feat when you consider most of his screen time was devoted to scowling, brooding, or chopping up orcs. He was fantastic in the films he did with David Cronenberg, A History of Violence and Eastern Promises (his bathhouse fight scene is unbelievable). Mortensen’s a published author who started his own publishing house, Perceval Press, so he probably understands the literary gravity of The Road.
The story: Anyone who’s read The Road knows that it’s a sad and moving and strangely beautiful take on one of the most hackneyed devices of science fiction: the post-apocalyptic wasteland.
No Country for Old Men: The Coen brothers did a great job with No Country for Old Men.
Potential problem spots for The Road film adaptation:
The cast: We don’t know much about twelve year old Kodi Smit-McPhee who plays the son, but we do know that that is a major role. Let’s hope Kodi is more Jodie, less Jake Lloyd or (shiver) Dakota Fanning. However, Viggo’s had pretty positive things to say about him. Ringers Robert Duvall and Guy Pearce are also in there, but there aren’t too many other speaking parts in the book besides the father and the son, so it’s hard to predict what they’ll be doing–hopefully Hillcoat hasn’t fiddled with the story too much. Charlize Theron is also in the movie. The wife character showed up in a few dreamy flashbacks, but was more of a shadow than a fleshed out character; again, hopefully Hillcoat hasn’t chosen to expand the role to appease a wider demographic.
The story: Some of the best moments of The Road consist of the father’s inner monologues on memory and loss and very few directors can pull off a voice-over successfully (Terrence Malick is the only one who comes to mind right now). Of course, this problem of language is always the problem of movie adaptation.
All the Pretty Horses: Billy Bob Thornton’s leaden 2000 adaptation of the first of McCarthy’s “border trilogy” is pretty boring. I’ll admit that I’ve never finished the book, despite three attempts [ed. note: I finished the “border trilogy” in spring of ’09. Books are far, far, far superior to the film].
No Country for Old Men: Even though the Coens did a great job with No Country for Old Men, the book was still better than the movie–and No Country is, in some ways, McCarthy’s take on a genre novel, the crime procedural. In this sense, the Coens made a smart move, but they still couldn’t convey the depth and meaning of the book–again, much of it delivered via Sheriff Ed Tom Bell’s inner monologues. Although The Road may appear to have genre fiction elements–namely, the tropes of post-apocalyptic sci-fi–to describe it as such would be a severe limitation, as would be to film it in such a manner.
The advance stills: Sure, they’re grim and bleak, but are they grim and bleak enough?
Also, why the stylized cart? If you’ve read the novel, you know what I mean–the cart needs to be a grocery store cart, homeless style! Hang on–
–that’s better! (NB: images link to a gallery of advance images)
Does it seem worth seeing in the theater?
Yes. We’ll be carrying the fire on or around November 26th (and just in time for Thanksgiving!)
Biblioklept 