Note: Two out of Three Falls

I was recently asked to comment on the question, "What is best and/or worst book-to-movie spec fic translation project ever?" Here is my response to the "best" part of the question:
I can think of three approaches to this question. The first and simplest is to identify the best (or worst) film that happens to be based on a work that we define as "spec fic," which I take to refer to the sf/fantasy/horror continuum. Consulting my top 100 movies of all time list, I see that that happens to be The Shining. The second, more nuanced, approach is to identify the film that adds to and/or reimagines something inherent in the source material, but elevates or transcends the source material. Using this "value-added" approach, the answer is, again, The Shining, though, look--poor blood-soaked Carrie is right behind. The third, and most nerdly, approach would be an appeal to faithfulness to the source material. So... Lord of the Rings? Watchmen? Since this method points in the direction of Zach Snyder, I prefer not to pursue it.

STL #100: Objects of Fascination and Agents of Revelation

It has taken 8 years to complete 100 posts; that's only a little more than a post a month. With my rededication to daily writing, I hope that I can return a bit closer to my weekly rate. In any case, I have decided to mark the occasion by writing in my favorite form: the list. Following is a varied list of things, mostly works of art but a few ideas or lifestyle accoutrements,  I've become familiar with during the life span of STL.  Some of these things I've written about, but most I haven't. The most significant thing I've noticed in compiling this list is that the books are all of my own choosing: I haven't been assigned a reading list this whole time. This list might be seen as a memoir of the last 8 years of my life, but then again that might be pushing it. I'll add a bit more commentary after the list.

1. Absu, "Ye Uttuku Spells"
2. Belgian ales
3. Charles Olson, Maximus Poems
4. William Gaddis, The Recognitions
5. Jack Green's Fire the Bastards
6. Kill Bill
7. Graham Greene, The Comedians
8. Guy Davenport, Tatlin!
9. Albert Ayler, Spiritual Unity
10. Reality-based politics
11. Jens Lekman, “A Postcard to Nina”
12. Eddie Campbell, How to be an Artist
13. "Lying In Bed On A Summer Morning," by Carl Rakosi
14. Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things
15. Deep Red
16. Halloween
17. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
18. Millennium Actress
19. Lost in Translation
20. Etre et Avoir
21. The Sopranos
22. The Wire
23. William Bronk
24. Watchmen, reluctantly
25. Seven Soldiers of Victory
26. Hendrick’s Gin
27. In the American Tree
28. Cy Twombly, Untitled (Say Goodbye Catullus, to the Shores of Asia Minor)
29. Bread crumb eggs
30. George Simenon
31. Django Reinhardt
32. Freaks and Geeks
33. My So-Called Life
34. Carson, NOX
35. Lee Ann Brown, Polyverse
36. Fiery Furnaces, Rehearsing My Choir
37. Tori Amos, From the Choirgirl Hotel
38. Something Said
39. Beth Gibbons and Rustin Man, Out of Season
40. Joanna Newsom, Milk Eyed Mender
41. Sleater Kinney, One Beat
42. His Dark Materials
43. Battle Royale
44. John Cheever's Collected Short Stories
45. American Elf
46. Black Riders
47. Robert Duncan, "Opening of the Field"
48. Gilbert Godfery in The Aristocrats [2005]
49. Goodbye Dragon Inn
50. Female Convict Scorpion: Jailhouse 41
51. Team America
52. The singularity
53. Tender Buttons
54. The Pound Era
55. Three Places in New England
56. Alban Berg, Violin Concerto
57. Matt Fraction, Casanova
58. The New American Poetry 1945-1960
59. The Hold Steady, Separation Sunday
60. Immortal All Shall Fall
61. Deathspell Omega Chaining the Katcheon
62. Wardruna
63. Girl Talk, All Night
64. Lair of the Minotaur, "Let's Kill These Motherfuckers"
65. Dope throne
66. Modern Life Is War “D.E.A.D.R.A.M.O.N.E.S.”
67. Mountain Goats “This Year”
68. Benji Hughes Love Extreme
69. Heartless Bastards, The Mountain
70. Opeth, Blackwater Park
71. Josephine Foster, Hazel Eyes I Will Follow
72. Cat Power The Greatest
73. No Thanks! Anthology
74. Haydn, Symphony 88
75. Robyn “Be Mine”
76. Spoon “Back to the Life"
77. Arcade Fire, Funeral
78. Dirty Weekend 
79. Old Boy
80. The Rothko Chapel
81. “Appalachian Spring”
82. Audition
83. Enter the Void
84. Y The Last Man
85. Marcel Dzama
86. Battlestar Galactica
87. John Porcellino, King Cat
88. Can These Bones Live?
89. Wicker Man
90. Blow Up
91. King Lear (Russian film)
92. Mozart, Symphony 40
93. Brandenberg Concertos
94. Garth Merenghi's Dark Place
95. The Grey Album
96. Community
97. Song of Ice and Fire
98. Siraccha and Earl Grey Ice Cream
99. O Paon

A few explanations are in order. With the exception of a few pieces of classical music, everything on this list is from the second half of the twentieth century or later. That is where my interests drive me, but as I was drawing up the list I made a conscious decision to make it this way to relieve me of the obligation to include things because I felt I should. Tom Jones, some Shakespeare plays, Milton, and other things I read for the first time in the last eight years might otherwise be on here. I felt that by keeping them off would cut away pretense and help me perhaps discover more of my true inclinations.  

Each work of art on this list was chosen because it keeps drawing me back in one way or another, offering more each time I revisit it. Some of the films (namely, Audition and Enter the Void) keep their claim on my psyche, but I doubt I will ever summon up the resolve to watch them again. What the works offer is different is each case: the goofy comedy of Garth Marenghi sounds different chords than Ed Dahlberg's jeremiad Can These Bones Live?. Dahlberg I'm sure would be mortified to be keeping company with much of this list--I notice that I trend lowbrow in much of my tastes. Looking over the list, I don't feel I can make any grand pronouncements, nor do I even understand why I include half a dozen foodstuffs and only two works of visual art. As with everything I write, this turns up more questions. Here's to the next 100 opportunities to figure out the answers.

(In case you are interested, here's a census of the list: 35 items can be classified as music, 18 as movies, 9 as poetry, 9 as fiction (therefore 18 as literature), 7 as comics, 7 as TV, 5 as criticism, 4 as comestibles, 3 as visual art, and 2 as concepts. The music breaks down as follows: 7 as metal, 6 as classical (including modern), 6 as folk (I can't bring myself to type "freak folk," but everything in this category is moody and eccentric, and with mostly acoustic instruments), 6 pop, 6 rock, 2 jazz, and 2 dj mashups.

Curio: Best Films of 2005

Jotted on a piece of paper I've had in my files for a while (since winter of 2006, I'd suppose).

1. 2046
2. Brokeback Mountain
3. Crash (?)
4. Sin City
5. The Squid and the Whale
6. King Kong (??)
7. Broken Flowers
8. Skeleton Key
9. Aristocrats
10. Match Point

The backlash against Crash has changed my mind about it, and I have no idea what I was thinking about King Kong. Probably just being contrary. I'm glad to see Skeleton Key, but I clearly remember seeing both that and Red Eye on the same night, and think I like Red Eye better.

STL #93: Films of the Decade.

Top 25 movies of the decade: The first ten are ranked; the rest are roughly ranked but with the combinations there's some obvious slippage. All told I mention 35 movies: 22 date from 2000-2004, 13 from the second half of the decade. The top four years are 2001 (6), 2000, 2003, and 2009. The number from 2009 is probably due to recency inflation, and only Rachel Getting Married is a top 25 film overall. So was the first part of the decade better, am I seeing fewer movies, or does the retrospective nature of such a list privilege the earlier material? Another option is that I wrote more regularly about movies in 2003-4, and perhaps those movies have an advantage.

1. In the Mood for Love (2000). The most beautiful movie I ever saw, in depth and on surface.
2. Kill Bill (2003-4). Part 1 reviewed previously in STL #16.
3. Lost In Translation (2003). Reviewed in STL #14
4. Royal Tenenbaums (2001). I would like, sooner or later, to take on Anderson's work. This to me is not only the best of the decade but better than Rushmore. At face value, it seems to be an ambitiosly art-directed adaptation of Salinger's Glass family, but every time I watch it I get a little bit more out of it.
5. Almost Famous (2000). Pure charm.
6. WALL-E (2008). Completely unexpected--I simply had not liked the big animated movies of the preceding 10 years. In retrospect, Ratatouille's solidity was the beginning of a now 3 movie streak for Pixar.
7. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) Reviewed (poorly) in STL #38.
8. Etre et Avoir (2002) In STL #35 , my top 10 films of 2003, I said of this and Spellbound "some of the best movies of the last 10 years have been documentaries, because real life has a way of bucking against cliche and histrionics. Note the vivid personalities in these movies are achieved without actors."
9. Children of Men (2006). Has the gravity and composition comparable to any canonical classic. I would like to see this again.
10. The Wrestler (2008). Just like I lauded Lost In Translation's use of music, the music here is heartbreaking for its faded glitzy fragility: "Round and Round" in the bar, and the final entrance to "Sweet Child O' Mine" as a valediction/elegy.

Volver (2006)/Talk to Her (2002). Two Almodovars linger like dreams.

Amelie (2001): Its cuteness, which draws you to it at first, might be a liability.

Team America World Police (2004)/Borat (2006). They bring the funny, and they question the whole notion of taste. Team America might want to be in the top 10, but I couldn't quite get it there. Borat is fine with the lower 20's.

Momento (2000)/JCVD (2008): Two action-movies with fascinating formal features. Both cause us to question what we're seeing: Momento through the structure, JCVD by enlisting our own capacity for illusion.

Rachel Getting Married (2009)/Monsoon Wedding (2001). Both have great ensembles. Both are smart enough to let the intricacies of the occasion generate the action.

Up (2009)/ Waking Life (2001): Up gets it for the first 10 minutes, while Waking Life unfolds over the length of the movie, and even beyond a bit.

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000)/Goodbye Dragon Inn (2003). Two Asian movies with "Dragon" in the title. One is beautiful and orchestrated and rapid, the other beautiful in its glacial slowness.

Ocean's 11 (2001): In terms of attitude alone it makes the list.

A Christmas Tale (2008) The last of these that I watched so I'm a little wary of it. Seems like it might want to gravitate up the list in time.

Honorable Mention: Lord of the Rings and Napoleon Dynamite. In there different ways, both are two "big" to be ignored. Certainly impressive in their own ways, but neither are standing up for themselves and making a pitch in the way that the listed movies are.

Sundry lists:

Top 5 comedies

Team America

Borat! Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (2006)

Napoleon Dynamite (2004)

The Aristocrats

Zach and Miri Make a Porno

Action/Thriller

Kill Bill

Children of Men

Memento

Torque

Borne Identity

Documentaries

1.Etre et Avoir

2. Waltz with Bashir

3. Man on a Wire

4. Anvil:The Story of Anvil

5. Spellbound

Animated

1. WALL E

2. The Fantastic Mr. Fox

3. Up

4. Triplets of Bellevue

5. Spirited Away

6. Waking Life

7. Millennium Actress

8. Waltz with Bashir

9. Chicken Run

10. Kill Bill

Romance

1. In the Mood for Love (2000)***

2. Eternal Sunshine

3. WALL-E

4. Almost Famous

5. Before Sunset

Top 5 Performances of the Decade

1. Bill Murray in Lost in Translation

2. Heath Ledger in Dark Knight and Broke Back

3. Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler

4. Anne Hathaway in Rachel and Brokeback

5. Sasha Baron-Cohen in Borat

STL #76 Summer's End

I had thought of writing posts on both summer movies and summer reading, but since summer ended suddenly (it's the first full week of classes), I might not get to both. So instead I'll roll both into a cumbersome omnibus (cumnibus).

I. 3 Super Hero movies: Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, The Dark Knight: 2008 will certainly mark the apex of the "comic book movie"--Wanted and the second Hell Boy movie also came out, and next year's Watchmen adaptation is provoking buzz and booksales with its trailer. Watchmen might well be the Heaven's Gate that ends the comic book (actually superhero) movie motherlode by exceeding its grasp, but this summer, the genre has offered a range of spectacle and even aesthetic satisfaction. Iron Man was maybe the most satisfying as spectacle--though I enjoyed the fun performances of Downey and Bridges (the Dude turns evil), what sticks with me is the coolness of armor. My favorite scene was an action set piece. Iron Man sets down in the middle of a hostage situation--terrorists have guns close on a number of innocents. We switch to the Iron Man internal display--like a high tech security camera, with digitized information of some sort floating around the figures of the scene. Abruptly, guns built into the armor pop up and take out the terrorists in one precise instant. As a display of technology and force, which is after all the appeal of this movie as a techno-thriller, it's pleasing in its mastery and abruptness. The situation goes from impossible to solved in the blink of an eye.

As spectacle, the Hulk movie leaves a lot to be desired. The animated title character is offensively fake--not that I want the 7 foot tall green monster to look "real," but I don't want it to look like a video game demo, which is what the last third of the movie is. I like the first third quite a bit. The backstory is dealt with quickly in an old fashioned montage of news reports and headlines, and the movie becomes a tense and human fugitive movie for a while. The Rio shanty town is a captivating setting, and Ed Norton's performance brings out the desperation and sorrow of his character, along with one unexpected joke, when he warms some bullies in his broken Portugese that they "wouldn't like him when he's... hungry."

The Dark Knight is really the one that demonstrates the potential of the super hero movie to succeed as a serious work. It's a probing psychological piece that transcends the apparent silliness of its costumed protagonist. He's simply a driven man with some unusual methods. Heath Ledger's performance as the Joker is of course getting a lot of attention, but it's well-deserved. While Nicholson's performance was also ballyhooed, the contrast between that and Ledger's reveals the ham-handed clumsiness that it is. Every choice Ledger makes is toward the understated. His Joker looks down at the ground, mumbles, demonstrates a deep protectiveness of his interiority. It's a shockingly good and immensely scary portrait of real evil. I'd like to watch it again, to think about how Bale's Batman follows and departs from this model. The Batman voice is extraordinarily grating on the ear, but I think that's the point--on one level it's a mask for hiding his identity, but on another it's his true mad and wounded self.

II. Summer Reading

I had some time for reading this summer, which is nice. I reacquainted myself with some of the sf/fantasy writers I liked in my early teens. I read books by Michael Moorcock, Urusla K. LeGuin, and Philip Jose Farmer. I read 2 of Moorcock's "Von Bek" books--The Warhound and the World's Pain (which I had read before) and City of the Autumn Stars (which I had not read). I liked the former--the protagonist and Lucifer were enjoyably presented, and the magical "Mittelmarch"--a counter-Europe hidden in strands across the continent--was a lot of fun too. One of the most provocative bits is a passing reference to an adventure in the alternate Europe where Carthage destroyed Rome and, centuries later, an order of Rabbinic Knights had arisen as a sort of counterpart to the Knights of Malta. The latter book didn't captured my fancy. It had more of Moorcock's multiverse philosophy of a strugle between order and chaos. Moorcock's ideas seem to have been vastly influential on Dungeons and Dragons, and is actually a simple but powerful tool for thinking about ethics, but can make for tedious writing. It's a problem in the Elric novels I also read through. I had fond memories of Elric, and while I still like the idea of the character--the effette end of a long line of emperors, a weak albino kept alive by drugs, spells, and an evil, soul-eating sword--the novels read little better than role-playing scenarios.

I'm unlikely to go back to Moorcock, but was very excited by Le Guin's work. I loved her Earthsea trilogy when I was younger, and while they hold up (I have two of the later second trilogy to read yet), I'm very excited by her science fiction. SF of the seventies, reflecting a range of foment from radical collectivism to libertarianism, produced some of my favorite genre novels. Her short stories that I read in The Wind's Twelve Quarters inspired me to read The Left Hand of Darkness and especially her anarchist novel The Dispossessed.

The seventies also produced Philip Jose Farmer's Riverworld. The first book, To Your Scattered Bodies Go is short and readable, but the real triumph is, as so often in this genre, the idea. The entire population of the world's history is clustered near a river with no known beginning or end. Courageous individuals are able to navigate this river, though they don't know where they're going. This is really a lovely metaphor for the human condition, though I'm not sure if that's enough to keep me reading through three more novels.

So summer's over, like I said. I'm off today, trapped in the house by torrential rain. The last movie I saw was early Fall fare--Woody Allen's Vicky Christina Barcelona. I'm reading Adam Bede. People are deceptive but not costumed. The have secret identities but are not heroes. They fight but with paltry power, with words and negligence, and not laser beams or swords. I guess I'm back in the real world now.

Favorite Movies, 1999 edition

Found a print out of the following in my files. Recorded for posterity's sake. Strikethroughs made at some later date.
Noslen 100 (sic=99)
11/24/1999

8 1/2
A Nous la Liberte
Across 110th Street
Amateur
The Apartment
Apu Trilogy
The Bad and the Beautiful
The Bad Lieutenant
Badlands
Barry Lyndon
Bicycle Thief
The Big Lebowski
Breathless
Bleu
Bonnie & Clyde
Bride with White Hair
Bring me the Head of Alfred Garcia
Bringing Up Baby
Broadway Melody of 1935
Casablanca
Children of Paradise
Citizen Kane
City Lights
The Conversation
Cries and Whispers
Crimes and Misdemeanors
Days of Heaven
Dr. Jeckel
La Dolce Vita
Don't Look Now
Double Indemnity\
Drowning By Numbers
Dumbo
Easy Street
Elevator to the Gallows
Everybody Says I Love You
Fallen Angels
Fanny and Alexander
Flirt
The 400 Blows
Frankenstein
Freaks
The Godfather Trilogy
Goodfellas
Grand Hotel
Intolerance
Irma Vep
Hard Boiled
High Noon
His Girl Friday
Hoop Dreams
Jules and Jim
King Kong
King of Comedy
Last Days of Disco
The Letter
Lone Star
The Man Who Knew Too Much
Manhattan
McCabe and Mrs. Miller
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
The Naked Kiss
Night of the Hunter
Nights of Cabiria
Nosferatu
Out of the Past
Out of Sight
Pat and Mike
Paths of Glory
Picnic at Hanging Rock
Philadelphia Story
The Player
Psycho
Pulp Fiction
Ran
Rear Window
Roaring 20s
Rope
Rules of the Game
Safe
Scarlet Empress
Seventh Seal
The Shining
Smoke
Stagecoach
Stranger than Paradise
Stop Making Sense
The Sweet Hereafter
The Thin Man
The Third Man
The 39 Steps
To Have and Have Not
Touch of Evil
Tristiana
Vertigo
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf
The Wild Bunch
Woman Under the Influence
Yojimbo

Final Cuts: Annie Hall, The Big Sleep, Discreet Charm, English Patient, Kiss Me Deadly, Lolita, Once a Cop, Rashomon, Reservoir Dogs

Written Down Later: Hud, Chinatown, Duck Soup, Raging Bull
I am a Fugitive...
Sunset Boulevard, Aguirre, Sweet Smell of Success
Singing in the Rain
My Best Friend's Wedding

300 (STL 60)

I can't say I actually hated 300, the official action film of the Balco entertainment complex, but it disturbed, or maybe just annoyed, me on several levels. The first is it's shitty CGI-ness. Who exactly is this fooling? I guess the wheat fields outside of Sparta kind of looks like wheat, but the composition and texture distract from any real/"real" connection between actors. Speaking of "connection," the 'extreme intimacy' of Leonidas and Queen Independent Woman made me laugh out loud. Just like the violence, the sex was strictly for display. The violence as such didn't bother me, but as a purely aesthetic experience it imitates but falls short of the standards of John Woo. In its segmentation, it seemed to evoke the key combinations you would need to master in the video game version. Historical inaccuracy doesn't bother me, but the transplanting of contemporary mores and values on the past has the apparent good intentions of representing women and minority characters in positive light, but actually has insidious effects. By smoothing over and trivializing past conditions, present ideologies now seem more natural--that they easily extend over millenia. Lucky for us, that only applied to the portrayal of Queen Independent Woman, since the Persians were treated as racial stereotypes and King Xerxes as a nancy boy. American conceptions of Freedom, as a form of capital (yeah, the Queen did actually say "Freedom isn't free") to be hoarded is at very least ironic in considering it applied to the militaristic, slave-holding Spartans.

Yeah, so, anyway. I now get to prepend a stentorian "Spartans!" to any simple statement, such as "Spartans! Pass me the milk." Or "Spartans! I'm going to the store now."

Archives Project: STL #42 (Hitting to All Fields)

Title: Hitting to all fields Description: Date: 15 July 2004 I sign off of this July post with "Till next time," which turned out to be November. [I had posted this as STL #41, but it was corrected to #42. The archives fo #42-44 add edition numbers that were missing in the original publication.

Last week I started and abandoned a defense of difficulty in literature (too hard). I had several things in mind this week, but since I couldn't pick just one I thought I'd do them all. In honor of the recent All-Star game, I'll call this "hitting to all fields" (if music, film, and literature make a totality, and for me they just about do), as if this installment of Simplest demonstrates my versatility. The fact is, I forgot to turn the game on until after 6 runs had been scored and fell asleep between the 6th and 7th innings, so expect this likewise to be sloppy and inattentive.

First, let me pull into right for two albums I downloaded from iTunes. Generally I still buy CDs and only download singles, but I was trying to win a contest, dad-gum, and thought the albums would give me a better chance. I bought Appetite for Destruction, Nothing's Shocking, and part the Cult's Electric, three albums released in 1987 (according to Top of my Head research) which defined that summer. I'm not sure why I cling to hard rock and metal: they're completely declasse, unimaginative, and a little offensive. Oh wait, that's why I've returned to this music--it's mine. I know every note on these three records, even though I probably haven't heard them for 10 years. Jane's Addiction, despite their alt-rock credentials, don't do much for me anymore. While unveiling hypocrisy with arty "poetic" lyrics once strongly appealed to me, "The news is just another show" is so obvious as to be embarrassing. The music alternates between RHCP slack funk and proto-grunge and also sounds played out. The Cult, in their invocations to hippie philosophy and arm whirling guitar heroics, made no claims to originality, and "Peace Dog" sounds just as good as ever. I was most worried about Guns N Roses. I'm sure I listened to Appetite every day for over a year, and I'm just as sure I made sophomoric claims like 'Axl Rose is a poet of the streets.' They became huge of course; Axl spouted nonsense on stage and the band produced some bloated music. But for a moment they towered above the abject LA metal scene--the riffs were tight, funky even, the attitude sharp and exactly right. And it turns out I still love the record--I've listened to it every day since I bought it.

Next, the mainstream smash Spider-Man II. We are, of course, living in the golden age of the super-hero movie. Many factors of brought this about, including the emergence of CG effects (which are fine in this movie, though I'm generally unimpressed), the rise of the geek as a culture hero (including the entrance of the comics fan into the film industry), and the content wars (I mean, what intellectual property isn't being turned into a movie?). But most important of all is the fact that Marvel Comics, the one-time "House of Ideas," finally figured out how to market their characters to the film industry. I mean, Batman's cool and all, but most DC comics characters are hold-overs from the WWII era. The nice thing about Marvel movies is that they import the basic mythos of the characters from the comics. The savvy viewer can have a deeper experience by meditating on the relationship between the film and the canonical comics, while the uninitiated viewer can just have a good time. The question of identity is central to most super-heroes, none more than Spidey (one long(ish) running title was actually "Peter Parker, the Spectacular Spider-Man"). It's carried over into the movies in his loss of powers, his repeated maskless appearance, and the relationship between not Peter but Spidey and the ever-dewy Mary Jane. Hopefully, I do another summer movie round up in a few weeks.

Finally: a blooper to left.* A few weeks ago I blurbed Gilbert Sorrentino's collected stories. It was fairly weak I know, and I think I referred to his "craft." I'm pretty embarrassed about this, seeing as how GS savages "fine writing" usually associated with that term (I just meant I liked the way he wrote sentences). In his great novel, Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things he proudly renders his characters as cardboard cutouts (from some Art World comic book maybe), saying at one point something like: 'If you want to know what kind of bag she carried ask John O'Hara.' IQAT (heh) far outpaces the short fiction and deserves to be read, not talked about in trite reviewer short hand.

*Hey, look at me dept: Notice, dear reader, the witty structure I've created. As a left-handed batter (an affectation I've abandoned actually) I 'pull' into the conservative, regressive 'field' of hard rock. The "mainstream smash" naturally resides in center, and my flair to left is a defensive swing to the off field. I'm so tickled with myself that I must be done. Till next time.

Horrorfest 2007 (STL 58)

Every year around Hallowe'en, wifey and I curl up on the couch and watch a few horror movies. I kind of like horror movies--they can be exquisitely crafted, beautifully composed, and, thanks to creative scoring and sound design, incomparably moody. Nevertheless, we don't see that many during the course of a year. Aside from our seasonal viewing, we might only see one or two other horror movies a year, or none. Unless you count Snakes on a mf plane or Pan's labyrinth, I doubt if we saw any last year, aside from our Hallwe'en goodies, The Wicker Man (original British version, please) and the Dario Argento movie Deep Red. This year's batch was a Hammer film starring Christopher Lee and Donald Pleasance called The Satanic Rites of Dracula. It was rather dull, and the plot was somewhat like a middling episode of Angel in the way it mixes vampirism, corporate intrigue, and science fiction. The hired heavies in this movie are hilarious. They are typical mustachioed 70's dudes in sheepskin vests, that look like they were made out of their Trans-Am seat covers. Much better was Suspira and Halloween. Suspira is not as good as the Dario Argento film we saw last year (Deep Red), which relied more on suspense than the supernatural elements and gore of Suspira. (There's an evil witch, and a close up of a heart getting stabbed, if you want the specifics.) Wife puts her finger on Argento when she calls him the Italian DePalma (which only now sounds funny and redundant). They're both Hitchcockian (with a dash of Fellini), with deliberate and vivid imagery and a tightly controlled camera. By far the best of the three was John Carpenter's Halloween. All three of the qualities I mentioned earlier--craft, composition, and mood--are abundant in this movie. The horror comes from the background--of course it does, always--which remains still and empty most of the time, but is several times subtly violated by the affectless mask of Michael Myers, an inexplicable and incomprehensible evil. My favorite scenes are of the house across the way, observable by Jamie Lee Curtis. It's dark out but the porch is well lit. Several times Michael Myers comes around the corner, slowly and malevolently, but often it's just a still and horrible suburban night.

Archives Project: STL #38

Title: "Other Dreams My Erring Soul Employ"
Description: A Note on Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Date: 2 April 2004

I admit being drunk (droonk) when I wrote this, and it shows. This shames the previous candidate from worst post ever! It was also the last post before a temporary hiatus that then gave way to a longer hiatus. Ergo, my drinking ruined my blogging career.

This is the briefest of notes, written on a Friday night after inventing a ratio for making boiler makers out of "Gentleman Jack" sub-trademark and Shiner, left all alone after my hard day a-reading. It was edited thereafter when I remembered that some drunk guy left a post on me blog.

I saw Charlie Kaufman's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. My first nota bene leads to the next: no other screen writer gets benighted with the project. Yeah, some guy named Michel Gondry directed this, but it's a Charlie K. "film." Secondly, note the way that the writer's process, his "inventio" gets captured in the plot of the movie. At the crucial juncture between the clinical treatment and 'reality' (also between the mental projections of Joel and Clementine and the 'real' clinic staff), Kirsten Dunst recites two quotes she gleaned from Bartlett's, one of which gives the movie its name. When I saw this wonderful movie, I thought to myself "hey, I bet that Charlie wuz paging thru Bartlett's one day, and these two quotes starting knocking together, until the sparks led to the script." But later I start thinkin' to myself: what if it's a little harder than that? What is CK is only pretending to be like the clinic receptionist, reading quote books for conversation topics. And so I checked my sixteenth edition: four quotes from 'Pope, Alexander's' "Eloisa to Abelard," not including "The world forgetting, by the world forgot/ Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind"! I bet the Nee-Chee aint there neither, but I is too droonk to look it up. My point? There's a lot of work happening here, a lot of deep thinking and reading of the old school that's getting disguised in an entertaining movie. The bottom line is that this movie isn't as simple as it looks.

In fact, it doesn't seem that simple compared to other movies: it respects your intelligence to let you juggle temporal lines based on the color cues of Kate Winslet's hair. But I think as I see this movie again and again, as I hope to, I'll keep thinking about the significance of this movie, of the intertwining of the subject and object, of the inseparability of moment and history. The saddest part of the movie only comes to you in retrospect: by removing Clementine from his life, he's sacrificed Huckleberry Hound, who obviously threaded in with his life earlier. You can try to separate emotional entanglements from your life, but like Alexander Pope says in the Big Alexander Pope Book and not Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, there are always "other dreams" that "my erring soul employ."

Archives Project: STL #35

Because I was hasty in my last archival post, and misnumbered the last post of March 2004 as the first, I'm going to do all three March posts today. Silly me.

Title: Roll Out the Red Carpet
Description: Oscar fallout/Top 10 films of the year.
Date: 2 March 2004

I may never again be in the position to issue a top 10 list. Sad.

Every year I watch part of the Oscars, and every year I reflect on how much I hate actors. Not just there shmoozing and rampant insincerity, but what they do onscreen. There are exceptions of course, and the big money and superficial standards of Hollywood doesn't promote devotion to craft. Some seek it on their own: Bill Murray has emerged as our greatest actor, by way of sketch comedy and continental philosophy, and his head is actually screwed on straight. Sean Penn has finally been honored, and perhaps all the shouting about Mystic River is warranted. But how do you reward Rene Zellwigger's pinched-face and small-minded performance? I didn't see Mystic River or Monster, so can't comment on Charlize Theron or Tim Robbins, though nothing I've seen from either of them could be called good. I'm not likely to watch either film, because they both seemed geared to emotional grandstanding that elicits Oscar noms, rather than the subtlety of out best actors.

Not that I care too much about them either. Hitchcock called actors cattle, and he should know. Directing, writing, editing, set design, even special effects-- these are the qualities I like in movies. You know how I feel about lists, so here's my top 10 films for 2003.

1. (tie) Kill Bill and Lost in Translation. I've written about both before, but putting them together illuminates their very different notions of what a director is-- QT's authoritarian autuership vs. Coppolla 2.0's smartmob collaboration. I'm glad Sofia won for her script, too.
3. (tie) Spellbound and Etre et Avoir. Some of the best movies of the last 10 years have been documentaries, because real life has a way of bucking against cliche and histrionics. Note the vivid personalities in these movies are achieved without actors.
5. 21 Grams Ok, here's where I give in. Both this and the next are "acting clinic" type movies I generally dislike, but Benicio Del Torro, Naomi Watts, and Sean Penn actually earn the emotion in the former (and the non-linear structure rewards intelligent attention).
6. In America. This movie goes for the pathos, and in retrospect I don't like it as much as I did sitting in the theatre. The little girls, though, especially the elder, give stellar performances.
7. Bad Santa. Wicked funny, in the Bostonian and Satanic senses of the word. Finally, a movie that captures the true meaning of Christmas.
8. Raising Victor Vargas. The director has found the post-Terrence Malick visual grammar that David Gordon Green has been flailing after. The performances are naive and moving.
9. The Company. Altman lets a kind of corny, sorta obvious plot just kind of drift in and out of the background. It has the controlled chaos of Nashville, which I never really liked but maybe should reconsider.
10. The Return of the King. Which deserves all its honor. Really a triumph of the imagination, though I'd love if they cut the hobbits out. (No really, I would).

I might revise this after seeing a few more '03 movies, like Fog of War. Even writing the few words on Vargas and Company, I felt that maybe my pleasant surprise caused me to over-value them. Until next time.

/other/
reading: Clan Apis, Firework-Maker's Daughter (Pullman), The Profession of English (Berube), Fanny by Edmund White
listening: Will Oldham projects
viewing: Northfork, Thirteen

Archives Project: STL #21

Title: One Bad Movie
Description: A prayer against Matrix: Resurrection
Date: 22 November 2003

I stand by my prediction that soon you won't be able to tell the difference between Matrix movies and Tron. I also hate computer-generated animation, but that's the tale of another day.

So I've been working like a dog, well a dog-of-letters anyway, for the past seven days. My research has taken up virtually all my time, with breaks to eat and to teach. So what do I willingly do when I have some leisure time at last? I pay money to see a movie I expect to suck. And wouldn't you know, it did suck, even far beyond my capacity to believe it.

The Matrix was a cultural phenomenon. I, too, was fascinated with the look and feel, the technique, and the unspoken fear that information technology has mediated our lives so much we can no longer see the real. I never took the philosophical pretensions seriously, but why would you with so much stylish spectacle? The Matrix Reloaded, as I mentioned way back in STL #2, seemed totally stale, and a little icky too. But Matrix Revolutions is so bad it staggers the mind. In the first fifteen minutes, three of the primary characters storm a Marilyn-Manson-inflected night club to confront, uh, "The Merovingian." There's some now familiar Matrix-issue combat, with lots of guns and walking on walls and such. It seemed to me as I was watching it that it might serve as good demo for one of those first-person-shooter games. Little did I know that the shootout in the coat room would be the best scene in the movie. After a half hour or so of stilted dialogue full of Capital Letters about people with Ridiculous Names, we have to suffer through what seems like an hour of men in absurdly inefficient and cumbersome suits of armor fighting mechanical insects. As least this section of the movie gave me something to laugh at: first at the 'inspirational' speech the general (well, some general--we're asked to keep track of too many people in this part) gives to his mechano- warriors, who pump their ridiculous mechanical fists in the sky. It was kind of like Mel Gibson from Braveheart addressing the Transformers. The special effects of this battle were chuckle-inducing too: I doubt if in twenty years we'll be able to see a qualitative difference between this movie and Tron.*

The original Matrix had some cultural significance, as I indicated above. Now, it's a weapon that the Robots from Mars use to oppress The Last Free People. The best thing about the matrix was always that you got to wear sunglasses at night and were a kung-fu superstar in it. But when you start think about the matrix too much, (like for instance if you sit through three movies about it) you start to wonder things like, why you can stand on the ceiling but not stop bullets? And if these supersoldiers are so powerful, why do they have to fight at all? I remember one time Superman punched a hole in time--now that's strong. But the big final showdown of Neo and Agent Smith seemed like a conventional fight between two dudes who can fly. The whole "One" versus an army of Smiths is supposed to be some kind of individualism over group thing, but that has no connection with the matrix per se and is about as current as Ayn Rand (or Robots from Mars).

Revolutions was far worse than any of those movies I complained about last summer. The only recent movie I can compare it too in scope of dreadfulness is the Kate Beckinsale vehicle Underword. Sometime I'm going to have to learn that beautiful people running around in leather suits firing guns from each hand does not a good film make. But why you would ruin such a simple and beautiful thing I'll never understand.

*And while on the subject, I think the best way of describing this whole underground militaristic world is as "Tron meets Das Boot."

Archives Project: STL #19 (Kinda Dumb (But I Like It))

Title: Kinda Dumb (But I like It) Description: Let us lift our goblets to The School of Rock Date: 6 November 2003

Soon after we got home from seeing “The School of Rock,” my wife put an AC/DC record on the turntable. “That’s obvious,” I said, because the movie had ended with Jack Black in an Angus Young style schoolboy uniform (let out considerably), fronting a band of 10 year olds playing “It’s a Long Way To the Top (If you Wanna Rock and Roll). “I know,” she replied with pride.

Because the movie was directed by Richard Linklater and written by Mike White (Chuck and Buck, Freaks and Geeks), I thought it might be more than the big dumb comedy it appeared to be. Not that I particularly like either Linklater or White, but I at least expected them to play with the expected formulas a little more. But this movie plays out pretty much exactly as you’d expect. The unlikely outsider insinuates himself into a position of responsibility, does it his way, succeeds until exposed. Precocious but uptight kids encounter zany teacher, learn there’s more to life (namely, the perfect rock show that can change the world); even more uptight parents see there children in new way; and so on. When the teacher tells the kids to ‘stick it to the man’ by playing rock music, we arrive at the movie’s paradox: rock and roll has become institutional rebellion. Even the stuffy principal likes Stevie Nicks. Black’s character momentarily observes this paradox, but the larger issue, that rock only exists in quotation marks these days*, is glossed over, as is the sex and drugs part of the trinity.

I don’t want to give the impression I didn’t enjoy the movie. Jack Black screws up his face with typical fervor, and its often funny, but nothing you don’t expect from him. The first time I ever saw Black was a “showcase” of Tenacious D which didn’t divulge J.B. and K.G.’s comic intent immediately. Black’s imbibing of heavy rock mannerisms is so complete (“I see a lot of potential Back Stage Bettys in the audience tonight”) that I couldn’t tell if these two chubby middle aged dudes strumming acoustic guitars was a ‘real’ band or not. That uncertainty—wondering if he’s really joking or not—is the key to Black’s success. Likewise, a parody needs an element of loving what it’s lambasting. A detailed knowledge and appreciation of hard rock always comes through in this movie, mostly through Black, the True Believer, who may be sincerely quoting “For Those About to Rock (We Salute You) (“We roll tonight...to the guitar bite”) to ten-year olds, who might really mean it when he prays to the God of Rock for the power to blow people's minds with our high voltage rock.”

“High Voltage” brings us, of course, back to AC/DC. It wasn’t their first album (High Voltage) that Niffy put on, but the Holy Grail of Heavy, Back in Black (the one that starts tch tch tch tch). The story is familiar: the singer dies from choking on his own vomit so his mates recruit a singer who sounds like him or close enough and record the party record of the decade. That I think is the best that this particular school of rock can give us.

So when I say that “School of Rock” is stupid and obvious, I mean it in the same way as if I was describing an AC/DC song, or religious devotion; I mean it in a good way. So let’s all raise our goblets to rock and keep praying for the gig that changes the world.

*stolen from Simon Reynolds’s blog blissout.blogspot.com

Archives Project: STL #16 (unnumbered)

Title: "I love you Bill and I always will"
Description: None. The topic is Kill Bill Part One
Publication Date: 15 October 2003


This one is less pretentious than I remember, but still a very mixed bag. I excised some factual errors, but left in the misidentification of the klaxon-y hospital theme as an original. I later discovered this theme in Female Convict Scorpion, a cited influence. Note the crucial role of the horizontal rule in this piece.

I should do a new piece on Death Proof. I actually sought out and watched two source, Vanishing Point (really good) and Crazy Larry and Dirty Mary (good performances by Vic Morrow and Adam Roarke, but gratingly annoying turns by the title characters played by Peter Fonda and Susan George.)


Genius may have its limitations, but stupidity is not thus handicapped.

Kill. The Verb. Imperative. The highest degree of brutality. Bride's reason to live. Slamming a rapist's head in a door until he is dead. Blood spouting from the stump of a neck. Stone Cold Revenge.

Bill The Direct Object. A twist, a rhyme, a tiny deviation. A name sketched on a window pane. A wry smile. A love that extends from metaphysics to typeface. The #29 song of 1969 ("Bill, I love you so, I always will/I look at you and see the passion eyes of May/Oh, but am I ever gonna see my wedding day/I was on your side Bill when you were loosin'/I never scheme or lie Bill, there's been no foolin'/But kisses and love won't carry me till you marry me Bill")

There's a fine line between silly and perfect.

---

Quentin Tarantino is a major force behind the ascendency of the geek's cultural status in the 90's, along with comics geeks working in film and television like Joss Wheedon and Kevin Smith. Actually, a more significant force would probably be the scads of money that ran after computer geeks, and the cultural fetishes like comics and genre films of the 70s jumped to prominence incidentally. If that's what we have to thank for QT's ability to make movies, that's fine. But it seems there's a more intricate connections between commercial and cultural strands of geekdom: both feature obsessive attention to detail (computer code simply won't work if you mis-strike a key; if you don't know "Switchblade Sisters" you won't appreciate Darryl Hannah's eyepatch), both are concerned with protocols and procedures. On the other hand, both have the tendency to live in sealed-off world, whether it's dreaming in Perl (I actually overheard someone say this once) or handicapping fights between the Hulk and the Thing (pick 'em).

At this point I could proclaim myself a film geek and take rightful possession of Kill Bill as my own. But I can't quite do it. I don't know about Darryl Hannah's eye patch first hand, and even worse I can't remember if it was "Switchblade Sisters" or something else. Instead of endlessly replaying Shaw brothers' kung-fu movies I do things like my job and be married. Sure, I recognize some conventions, like the subtitles using the common thick yellow type favoured by vintage Hong Kong movies, and the unnecessarily thick lines dividing split screens as a similar nod to 70s film technology. I also get the devotion to the rituals of taking out the Crazy 88 killers one by one, or the ceremonial importance of acquiring your weapon. But these things are almost archetypes by now; Tarantino I'm sure has done a lot more in mining the dross of 70's exploitation cinemas for its gold. You get the impression the this film is a distillation of the best of a whole hidden culture. If it meant that I could enjoy this movie more, I wish I had become a full-fledged film geek.

What I do love about Kill Bill is Tarantino's love of artifice: we see it in the shuffled chronology of the narrative, in a striking animated sequence, in a rogue answering machine that disguises the Bride's name (to preserve her mythological status), in the switching to b&w, in the absolutely beautiful use of color in the House of Blue Leaves chapter (including the pool that turns from blue to red, the silhouetted fight against blue screen, and the Bride's bright red and yellow entry into the icy garden to duel O-Ren Ishii).

There's also a dark humour at work here; what's more it's a real humor that doesn't require recognizing the Bride's track suit as identical to Bruce Lee's, but is based on pacing and human interaction, like the fight with Vernita Green. Remember, Tarantino isn't only the obsessive video clerk who translated City on Fire into Reservior Dogs, he's also the only director who's ever got the patterns of Elmore Leonard's snappy exchanges onto film, in Jackie Brown. But, then again, he's also the guy who got us to laugh at Thurman sitting up stock straight with a giant hypo sticking out of her chest. As you'd expect, some of the humor comes from the absurdity of the carnage, but this is where QT encounters his strongest criticism: is all this stylized violence, this savvy collage of pop culture, this snappy dialogue just to quicken the pulse of a generation sunk a quagmire of pop culture, delighting in their recognition of minutiae? I don't really have a problem with that. If he can compete with the artless violence of Jerry Bruckheimer, for instance, he might teach a jaded audience something about pattern, about knowing a tradition, about, gulp, the rewards of loving art.

I wrote about Sofia Copolla's divergence from auteur-ness two weeks ago. While Tarantino remains firmly in that camp, he has at the same time reached out to assemble some admirable talent. I enjoyed all the perfomances, particularly Uma Thurman's, which might be the most rugged woman in film history. Sonny Chiba goes from clown to grave warrior at the drop of a sake cup. Behind the scenes, Yuen Wo Ping's fight choreography is of course beautiful (and beautifully framed by QT), and the music lingers in the memory: in the hospital, in the tea house, and what I think is a RZA (who else but the leader of the Wu-Tang Clan could score this film?) original, the burst of klaxon-like notes signifying the church (it reminds me somewhat of RZA's score of Ghost Dog in its minimalism).

Since Kill Bill is only half over, maybe I'm being too hasty with my praise. Maybe being the distillation of the best of grindhouse cinema ain't that great. But I'm more than half-willing to start training as a black-belt film geek to be able to judge.